tem and navigational rigging of the vessel. Small crews served the short-range trading vessels of the wider Caribbean, for instance, “four to eight men were gen-erally sufficient to man a [Bermuda] sloop” (Jarvis 2010: 123) and only ten men were needed to man the 20-ton 3-gun PinnaceBlack Dog listed for Royal hire and registered in London (Bicheno 2012: 352). Comparatively, the largest crews of the warships could exceed 500 enlisted men, e.g., the 340 crew and 160 troops (500 total) aboard the 760-ton 42-gun Royal CarrackTriumph()Bicheno2012 the evidence of one testimony of a ship of “70 gunns and abt 600 or 700 men” [HCA 1/53/18], and the note in the Boatswain’s log of the St Andrew to have “ham-mocks delivered to the men […] five hundred” [ADM 52/2/3]. However, even given these large crew numbers, the estimated numbers of people aboard any vessel are likely to be extremely conservative in light of the assumption that slaves, servants, women, and non-enlisted children were not counted as they en-tered the ships through means other than official enlistment and did not appear on wage registers or crew manifests.
3.13 Summary
This chapter re-defines the word “sailor” to refer to all sea-going workers of the early colonial period under study and presents sections on demographics with full acknowledgement of the limitations and complexities of data collection and analysis. Recruitment of sailors included voluntary enrollment; conscription; and the assignment of impressed, indentured, enslaved, and detained populations.
Most sailors in lower ranks would have been enlisted via methods involving some degree of coercion, manipulation, or outright force and were routinely kept at sea for long periods without shore leave for fear of desertion. Although popu-lar stereotype assumes that all sailors were male, a minority of women worked on ships as crew, collaborators, and service providers. Most sailors were young, going to sea in their early teens and serving typically until the age of around fifty with an average crew age of around thirty. Poor hygiene, putrid food, over-crowding, and lack of clean water, as well as hard labor, exposure to environmen-tal risks, and wounds caused by disciplinary action or military conflict, resulted in high sickness and mortality rates. Sailors had strong family ties and many served alongside fathers, uncles and sons at sea. Furthermore, and contrary to popular stereotypes, sailors commonly married and had children, and their wives were active in maritime communities, sometimes accompanying their husbands to sea. Ranks determined social status at sea and composed a rigid hierarchy: the privileged upper class, the trade and military middle class, and the seamen of
the largest lower class, potentially supplemented by a sub-category of undocu-mented, unpaid, or forced workers. Theoretically, wages were paid and could be supplemented by various means, but in reality, sailors’ wages were perpetually in arrears and paid intermittently and insufficiently if at all, a situation that com-monly led to conflict, mutiny, and thus potential imprisonment and death. Most sailors born in the geographical British Isles were English, followed by the Irish, Scots and Welsh. London-born sailors were most heavily represented in naval vessels, coastal northerners in the merchant service and coastal southerners and westerners in privateering and piracy. The Commonwealth’s extended interpre-tation of what it meant to be British meant that sailors were often recruited from British territories, including the Caribbean and the 13 colonies of North America but were also heavily recruited from the sea-going nations of Europe. English was the default language aboard British ships and so some sailors may have been monolingual. However, more commonly, English-speaking sailors had for-eign language abilities that were acquired directly from language contact in their maritime communities and were essential in the context of the transatlantic trade.
On the other hand, plurilingualism may have been an occupational hazard as it exposed common sailors to capture for the purposes of interpreting and also sug-gested they were guilty of piracy considering that language contact and therefore language acquisition was perceived as more profuse aboard such vessels. The ma-jority of sailors were illiterate; yet certain positions would have required some degree of functional literacy. Moreover, officers were likely to have had compara-tively high levels of literacy and numeracy, and some common seamen may have learned basic literacy among crewmates in leisure hours for purposes of personal communication. Relating to numbers of men on the ships, there was a conserva-tive average of 115 men in a 21-gun 239-ton vessel comparable to the sixteenth century optimum of one man per two tons of ship’s weight for long voyages.
However, crew sizes were increasing throughout the period under study due to the use of larger ships and piracy.
4 Speech communities
This is the second of two chapters with a focus on socio-historical data that re-spond to research questions about the sailors and their speech communities. This chapter on the speech communities specifically attempts to characterize the im-mediate and extended contexts in which sailors were likely to work and socialize.
The data presented support the claim that the speech communities of English-speaking sailors were extensive and robust enough to develop distinct features of speech likely to have been recognized by those outside the community as a distinct sailors’ variety. The data also speak to how language transfer and change may have been affected by the social networks that bound these communities and maintained their distinct language variety. After a discussion of General Consid-erations, the chapter continues with two main sections in which data is presented.
The section on Insular Ship Communities presents data on sailors’ duration at sea, autonomy and violence, social order and disorder, subgroups and social cohesion, the role of alcohol, and shared ideologies and leisure activities. The subsequent section, dealing with Wider Maritime Communities, presents data on profuse maritime activity, convoys and communication, the maritime economy, corrup-tion and theft, sailors on land, and contact with port communities.
4.1 General considerations
The fact that most linguists have neglected to address the nature or importance of maritime speech communities is perhaps not surprising. Not only do these speech communities fail to fit into a traditionally defined geographical region or single social stratum, but their composition has also been obscured by centuries of non-existent, falsified, and fragmentary record-keeping. Even in the context of managing the records of a single nation’s trade activity and using only one lan-guage, records are often woefully inadequate to reflect the real nature of trade and communication, e.g., Cook’s investigation into seventeenth century litiga-tion against a captain in the English coastal shipping trade indicates, “almost one third of the working runs escaped the official records in the normal pattern of trading” (2005: 15, emphasis added). Even in consideration of specific ports, record-keeping was typically unofficial and subject to private publication. For
example, London shipping was unofficially reported in local pamphlets like the Lloyd’s List (first published c. 1764) circulated among clients of the Lloyd’s cof-fee house that served as a center of maritime information and insurance. These lists contained selected commercial information and details of vessels arriving at ports in England and Ireland. It was not until 1760 that the underwriters who frequented Lloyd’s of London combined to form an association with the aim of producing a more complete Register Book of Shipping, circulated since 1734.1 Likewise, although Liverpool’s shipping was subject to a series of Acts of Par-liament requiring that details of vessels be registered, such record-keeping was haphazard up until the Registry Act of 1786.2 Thus, the sources of information on shipping movements and crew composition that might inform research on maritime speech communities, if they existed at all before 1750, were localized, selective, privately published, and almost invariably lost to the archival record.
The problem of insufficient data is magnified exponentially in the context of in-consistent record-keeping in transatlantic commerce that was conducted in var-ious languages and ranged across multiple ports operated by different European nations on four continents. Jarvis’ detailed study of Bermudan maritime activity concludes: “London missed much of what happened in the colony” (Jarvis 2010:
461). And this could be said of most of the colonies of the time, given that im-perial record-keeping primarily targeted large bulk shipments of goods and was silent on the abundant maritime activity in local trade and the logging, salvage, turtling, and salt-raking trades of the Atlantic commons that sailors actively con-cealed from the Board of Trade’s custom officials. As a result, Jarvis claims that
“much of the North American coast and virtually the entire Caribbean had perme-able and blurry maritime borders” (Jarvis 2010: 462). In addition to these blurry areas of imperial oversight, even when records were kept, there was often little verification of their accuracy. For example, one letter from a Virginia court trial details how easy it was to evade port charges with falsification of docking reg-isters: “they give her [the ship] the name of the Alexander […] at other times they will change her name, and call her the providente-galley” [CO 5/1411/631].
In short, I acknowledge that empirical data is limited on this subject. Therefore, the following sections on the common characteristics of maritime communities are based largely on qualitative data, in an attempt to characterize the real com-munities that were often absent from the quantifiable data of the official records.
1Merseyside Maritime Museum Archives & Library. (2010).Lloyds Marine Insurance Records (In-formation Sheet: 52). Retrieved from http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime/archive/
sheet/52.
2Merseyside Maritime Museum Archives & Library. (2010).Liverpool Ship Registers(Information Sheet: 50). Retrieved from http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime/archive/sheet/50.