By the time a ship had made the run between New York and Liverpool, every sailor aboard had a month’s wages to burn—and a month’s tensions to work off. He did both with reckless abandon and stubborn indifference to consequences. “After a long, hard passage the pleasures of one night's spree became magnified out of all proportion,’’ wrote a journalist in 1897.
The inhabitants of Sailortown—or Fiddler’s Green, as waterfronts were sometimes known—were all too eager to oblige. Even before a packet was moored, crimps were swarming all over her, importuning the crewmen to desert that ship for easier berths in another—and promising them orgiastic delights ashore in the meantime. Unscrupulous shipmasters looked the other way when their sailors went over the side; fewer mouths to feed and wages to pay while the ship was detained in port meant higher profits.
To pent-up seamen, the waterfront was a maze of beckoning pleasures— “dance houses, doxies and tapsters,” wrote novelist Herman Melville, using 19th Century euphemisms for broth
Els, prostitutes and barkeeps. Within an easy walk of the dock stood scores of taverns whose signboards were emblazoned with crossed harpoons, capstans and anchors, indicating that sailors were welcome within. Theaters nearby offered crewmen a variety of dubious entertainments.
A music hall in Liverpool reportedly specialized in passing around containers of something called oxide gas— probably nitrous oxide, or laughing gas—for the audience to sniff. A few deep breaths of the stuff made the patrons so euphoric that they provided their own floor show.
Cannily placed amid the establishments for roistering were pawnshops, identified by three gilded spheres near the door. Here, when his money ran out, the seaman might offer his pantaloons for the price of a drink.
Should the pleasures of the taproom pall, tattoo parlors offered something more permanent; their artists did a brisk business decorating torsos and limbs with all manner of declarations. One popular design was a large crucifix, touted with the promise that it would assure the seaman a Christian burial should his body wash up on some pagan beach.
The people who embraced the seaman in their eagerness to take his money proved fickle friends. When he grew rambunctious, they were quick to summon the law. And when he had no more possessions to pawn for cash, barkeeps instantly grew grim and distant—and often turned the seaman over to a crimp. In no time at all, the hapless sailor found himself aboard an outgoing ship that was in need of a crew; in the meantime barkeep and crimp made off with a fee that was paid by the captain—and deducted from the seaman’s prospective wages.
To landlubbers, the spectacle of sailors ashore eternally drunk, broke or jailed was a source of some amusement, as reflected in the lighthearted series of lithographs shown here (with their original titles in capitals). First published in London in 1825, they were copied by a Philadelphia lithographer 20 years later, so well did they fit the image of Jack Tar in Sailortown on either side of the Atlantic.
IN SIGHT OF PORT. A quartet of sailors in search of a caper raise hats and kerchiefs as they head far the road that leads to a hilltop tavern.
CASTING ANCHOR. The/our tors find a tavern promisingly named “The Ship,” ivhere the proprietress greets them with a knawing smile.
HALFSEASOVER. Loosened with grog, seamen dance a hornpipe while the tavern keeper, pleased with the fun, quiets a dour-Jooking bystander.
HUN AGROUND WITH A STIFF BREEZE. The tars show' empty pockets to
The proprietress—scowling now—as her husband peers from a window.
AN ENGAGEMENT WITH A STORM. As the tors become truculent, fists and furniture fly and a peg-legged customer hobbles out of the way.
THE viCTORV. Leaving “The Ship" a shambles, the jubilant seamen make off with the spoils of war: a couple of kegs of grog for the road.
A DEAD CALM. The tovem keeper—now bandaged—and the constable find the sailors sprawled in drunken oblivion beneath the tavern sign.
PERFORMING QUARANTINE. A n officer of the law' locks the rowdies in the brig as the crew of "The Ship” and the peg-legged veteran look on.
Remaining two thirds—if they had not made it by the age of 35—were apt to linger on in the job, becoming harsh disciplinarians of the sort known to crewmen as “bucko mates.”
Few professions in the 19th Century world held more glamor—or promised more wealth—than that of packet captain. On both sides of the Atlantic, the captain enjoyed an elevated social status, mixing with wealthy businessmen, diplomats and other notables; William Brown, one of the most important bankers in Liverpool, made a regular habit of entertaining packet captains at dinner in one of the city’s posh oyster-houses. The headlines of New York and Liverpool newspapers hailed the completion of a swift crossing, usually giving the captain equal billing with the ship. Bons vivants cultivated him, and small boys followed him on the street—keeping a respectful distance from the mighty man. Passengers frequently arranged their travel plans to coincide with the sailings of their favorite shipmasters.
Ashore in their own ports, the packet captains lived exceedingly well. Those who resided in New York owned opulent residences along the Battery and in Brooklyn Heights, on the opposite bank of the East River. Visiting captains stayed at such establishments as the elegant City Hotel.
And the shipmasters dressed as well as they lived. According to the boyhood memories of Julian Hawthorne—son of the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who served as American consul in Liverpool from 1853 to 1857—the captains shared “a disposition to wear a high-colored necktie and a broad, gold watch-chain, and to observe a certain smartness in their boots and their general shore rigging.”
A packet captain could afford to live and dress in style—not because of his salary (a mere $40 a month), but because he commanded a hefty share of the packet’s profits. He took primage, or about 5 per cent of the income from the cargo; he also received 25 per cent of the passengers’ fares; and he frequently got the whole fee for carrying mail. Altogether such proceeds could fetch him an enviable $5,000 a year—almost 30 times the earnings of a seaman.
Still, the captain earned every penny. No matter how much authority he might delegate to his mates, in the last analysis it was he who was responsible for judging how much punishment his ship could take and still sail safely at top speed. In racing other captains and his own record, he had to dare to leave every possible inch of canvas flying—and sometimes a sail might rip in two, or blow away altogether. A captain could not, however, risk serious damage to the ship, so he had to make hairbreadth decisions with a daring that would have amounted to recklessness had he not made them on the basis of unrelenting vigilance and profound knowledge.
No captain displayed greater skill or diligence than Nathaniel Brown Palmer, a product of the port town of Stonington, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound. Young Nat first shipped out to sea when he was 14 years old. The War of 1812 was then raging, and lively young New Englanders like Palmer found adventure in running a British blockade that extended from the east end of Long Island to within sight of Stonington.
After this rousing introduction to the sea. Palmer went on to sail
J
An anchorage for weary sea dogs
Snug Harbor’s original buildings, sited to overlook New York’s busy shipping channels, accommodated 200 sailors.
“They took me in because I was crippled, and washed and shaved me, and gave me a room as clean as the captain’s cabin of a man-o-war, and said, ‘There, you’re safe an’ sound forever!’ ’’ So say the memoirs of a retired sailor who might have died penniless on the streets—like thousands before him—had it not been for an institution called Sailors’ Snug Harbor. Dedicated to the care of “aged, decrepit and worn-out sailors,” it was founded on Staten Island in 1833 with funds bequeathed by shipowner John Randall.
Inside Snug Harbor, the destitute sailor—usually a veteran of Atlantic service—traded his life of hardships for one of unaccustomed leisure. The “Snugs,” as the men were called, enjoyed hefty meals and slept on soft beds in cozy rooms. The retirement home had a full-time doctor, nurses, game rooms, and a library with all the latest newspapers. Its residents could earn spending money—sometimes as much as $75 per year—by weaving hammocks or carving ship models. The Snugs were even allowed to ferry into Manhattan, despite the likelihood that they would go on forbidden drinking sprees there.
For drinking on or off the premises, sailors were “tabooed”—denied such privileges as their tobacco ration, the use of the library or the chance to earn money—and not permitted to leave the grounds for days. Similar penalties were meted out to those who failed to attend church. But most seamen were only too happy to accept such mild discipline as the price of shelter and support in their declining years. When novelist Theodore Dreiser visited an 83-year-old resident of Snug Harbor and asked him to tell of his adventures at sea. the former sailor replied. “I could, but I would rather tell you of 13 peaceful years here.”
U
Aboard sealers that voyaged to Arctic waters and on cotton packets that sped between New York and New Orleans. By the age of 38, he was commander of the transatlantic packet Garrick—and part owner of the Dramatic Line to which she belonged.
In this role, he regularly exploited his seamanly talents with a bit of showmanship in New York harbor. By that time, the steam tugboat had already been invented, making the job of entering and exiting from a crowded harbor easier. But Palmer insisted on retaining the old ways and refused to make use of a tug to help him to and from a berth. While the ship was still tied up, he would come to the starboard side of the quarter-deck and bellow into a trumpet, ordering the topsails and jibs hoisted and the spanker loosened. The sails would catch the wind and then, just as the lines began to strain, he would order them cast off. The packet would back into the river, where her stern was turned upstream by nimble shifting of the jibs and the topsails. When the vessel was clear of the pier, she was headed toward the sea. All the lighter sails spread quickly, and as the crowds on the waterfront shouted hoarse farewells. Captain Nat—as he was known—took his ship down the bay. On his return to port he repeated the process in reverse.
Palmer’s stamina matched his seamanship. One admirer, describing him on a typical passage from New York to Liverpool, wrote that Palmer paced the quarter-deck day and night, giving commands, support and encouragement to the helmsman and to the crewmen in the rigging. Only occasionally did he sit down—and then in an armchair secured under the weather rail—to take coffee and food when the steward pressed them on him, or to catch a few moments of rest now and then. Hardly ever going below, he kept in physical contact with his ship and the sea throughout the voyage.
Prior to the advent of the packet ship and the compulsion for speed, sailing ships had tended to idle at night, shortening sail and keeping the number of crewmen on watch to a minimum. Not so the packets. “Night is the time to try the nerve and make quick passages,” one captain remembered. “The best ship-masters that I had sailed with were those who were most on deck after dark, and relied upon nobody but themselves to carry canvas.” In speed as in so much else. Palmer was the paragon; sailing from Liverpool to New York in 1840, he brought the Siddons into port in 15 days, a record for the westward crossing that was never broken by another packet.
Pushing a ship hard—even if not so relentlessly as Nat Palmer did— was such a strain that the average packet captain lasted only five years on the transatlantic run. If a captain showed signs of slowing down—missing schedules or even failing to match records—the shipowners fired him. But many captains came ashore voluntarily and either retired on their savings or took up such occupations as inspecting ships for marine insurance companies or serving as consultants to shipbuilders.
One long-lived exception to the general rule was Captain Charles H. Marshall, a gruff, square-jawed, aggressive master who put in a total of 27 years at sea, 12 of them as a packet captain. Marshall came from* a line of Nantucket whaling men. But the Revolutionary War had interrupted the whaling industry, and when Marshall was born in a 15-by-18-foot log cabin in 1792, his father was farming 100 acres in the village of Easton in upstate New York. At the age of 15, with a borrowed $13, a sea chest, a ham, a loaf of bread, a pie and some crackers, young Marshall reasserted the family tradition by shipping out on a Nantucket whaler.
Nine years later, at the age of 24, he became captain of the Julius Caesar, a 350-ton merchantman with a crew of 12. Carrying a cargo of cotton from Charleston to Liverpool, he challenged himself to race the merchantman Martha, which had left port a full day ahead of him under the command of Captain Beau Glover, a social lion ashore and a hard driver at sea. This was prior to the advent of the scheduled packet with her need for speed, but even then Marshall could not resist an opportunity to demonstrate how fast he could make a ship go.
It was March, and the Atlantic was surly. Captain Marshall nevertheless commanded his 12 crewmen to hoist every sail in the ship’s locker, and he managed to reach the head of St. George’s Channel between Ireland and England in just 18 days. The channel was closed in with fog, but still Marshall left on as much sail as he dared, and made the mouth of the Mersey River on the 22nd day—18 hours ahead of the Martha. The owners of the Julius Caesar—who were bound to benefit from their ship’s reputation for speed—rewarded their captain with a new suit tailored in London.
Six years later, in 1822, Marshall joined the Black Ball Line as a packet captain, and he sailed the Atlantic in that capacity until 1834, when he bought control of the line and took up residence in New York to run it. Marshall had four seafaring brothers, and they were just as durable; when all five met for a reunion in Easton, in 1851, they calculated that among them they had spent 97 years at sea and had made more than 300 Atlantic crossings. Charles alone earned a fortune of $150,000, demonstrating the heights to which a packet captain could rise.
Once in a while a captain might find himself battling not the elements, but his own crewmen. Not even a popular captain was immune; tough crews sometimes liked to see just how far they could press a resolute commander. When faced with mutiny, the captain had to use every resource at his command—humor, persuasion, insistence, threats— and, as a last resort, force. The odds were that he would win, but a mutinous crew, or even a crew soured by a single troublesome member, could make the struggle close.
The year 1832 saw a mutiny that, in the manner of its resolution, surely stands alone in the annals of seafaring. It occurred aboard the
The 895-ton Dramatic liner Garrick reduces sail at the entrance to Liverpool harbor. Nicknamed Speedy Garrick, she once completed the ivestbound passage in an astonishing 18 days. During a fierce storm in 1841, she ran aground off Deal, New jersey, and was almost totally wrecked, but she was restored in a few months and sailed the Atlantic for another 12 years.
Packet Sheffield when she was anchored in the Mersey River, just about ready to sail. As a result of some brouhaha whose details are tantalizingly obscure, the crew grew rough and terrorized the passengers, who fled to their cabins and locked themselves inside. As it happened, the captain was ashore on last-minute business. But luckily for him and the ship, he got aid from the least likely person aboard: his 20-year-old bride. The only person to keep a cool head, she helped herself to a pair of pistols from his quarters and, with one in each hand, strode on deck, threatening to shoot the first crewman who made another move. Doubtless stunned by the sight of this floating Annie Oakley, they stood as they were—and the captain conveniently arrived moments later to take charge. He sent the mutineers ashore and rounded up another crew.
A much more prolonged ordeal took place in 1859 aboard the packet Dreadnought, a palatial 1,400-tonner that was the cynosure of her day. She was captained by Samuel Samuels, a man so engaging that cabin passengers had to make their reservations an entire season in advance to be assured a place on board his ship. Sailors liked him too, but they quickly dubbed the Dreadnought the “Wild Ship of the Atlantic” for the headlong passages she made under his command. Samuels
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