This is for anyone with a love of maritime history: a fabulous round-up, in Aeon, of some of the early accounts of life as a seafarer during the golden age of sail.
The lives (and loves) of maritime celebrities such as Admiral Nelson, Ferdinand Magellan and Captain Cook are well known; the early coughs of globalisation via the buccaneering and brutal British and Dutch East India companies have been equally well charted, but who were the thousands of men (and often women) whose work on high seas made it all happen?
“His name proclaimed him a man of the people – Jack being a generic term for the common man. (The term ‘Tar’ was added because of that substance’s common use in aspects of seafaring, from sealing sailors’ jackets to binding rope.) Yet, among them, he was an outsider, almost another species, who excited profound suspicion ashore.
“At a time when others of his class might never stir beyond their native valley, he roamed the world like one of the exotic creatures he encountered on his travels, returning home bearing fabulous tales (some of them actually true), curious objects and even stranger beasts. Although while at sea he was as poor as any rustic labourer, ashore he knew brief spells of wealth. Then, fired up with back pay and prize money, he would eat, drink, cavort and fornicate like a lord.”
