Abstract
Between 1860 and 1880, the years which hold the richest collection of log books at the Maritime History Archive in St. John’s, NL, an average of 4,400 seafarers died per year working in the British merchant marine. Each of these deaths potentially produced an inventory of effects showing the material wealth of working people at sea. These inventories reveal the material possessions of late nineteenth-century seafarers, particularly young working-class men who exposed themselves most to danger but also were the most numerous demographic. By analyzing both what these inventories contain, but also what inventories are missing, it is possible to understand material factors stemming from changing dynamics in a workforce undergoing technological and demographical change.
William Anderson, the first mate of the sailing vessel Malacca, fell overboard and was drowned off the coast of Chile on 2 June 1879.
1
The master, Thomas Dickenson, wrote a detailed note to the Registrar General of Shipping and Seamen (RGSS), explaining that he and the crew had made every effort to save Anderson:
A line was thrown to him, which went within a foot of his head (but he was unable to raise his hands out of the water, I fancy, on account of his oilskin coat sleves [sic] being full of water) … We came to the conclusion that there was no hopes whatever of him being picked up, as he could not have kept up [above the water] but a very few minutes even if he could swim, as he had his oilskins & sea boots on.
2
According to Dickenson, Anderson’s drowning was hastened on account of what he was wearing: his heavy oil clothing and sea boots. Dickenson wanted the RGSS to understand that he had no chance of saving Anderson’s life and, elaborating well beyond what was officially required, he used the clothing to explain the rapidity of the first mate’s disappearance below the waves. However, Anderson’s oil coat and boots represent more than the impossibility of saving his life—they are a glimpse of working people’s possessions at sea, possessions that made brief and important appearances when seafarers died.
At his death, Anderson’s existence as a documented working man aboard a British foreign-going vessel ceased – his life and labour were distilled into a list of wages, debts, and possessions, which were recorded in official government shipping records. This intersection of the maritime world with material culture is significant but not entirely surprising. Seafarers in the late-nineteenth century British merchant marine were exceptionally well-documented workers. But further, the two fields of maritime history and of material culture have significant parallels. They are fundamentally networks – one of production and consumption, the other of transportation – and are concerned with the distribution of commodities, dealing with a wide range of people and places. Linking material culture with maritime history reveals exciting possibilities for historians: objects moved around the world by sea, whether as bulk commodities, intimate personal possessions, or the ships themselves. The material objects which seafarers bought on land and took with them to sea give insights into the lives of seafarers and working men in the late-nineteenth century more broadly.
My research considers 171 inventories from the years 1860 to 1937. They were collected over two years between 2008 and 2010 when I was a graduate student at Memorial University of Newfoundland. 3 Initially these records were found as observations in the Atlantic Canada Shipping Project Crew Agreement database, but the bulk were obtained by archival happenstance, meaning that they were collected when a death in an Agreement pulled at the MHA for other reasons caused it to be noted. This article will focus on a shorter period, from 1860 to 1880, which contains the most numerous and fullest inventories; 134 inventories were taken in those decades (see Table 1). The diminished number of inventories after 1880 – only 37 inventories between 1881 and 1937 – reflects the purposeful destruction of the log books by the RGSS after 1875. 4
Inventories used for this study showing capacity, vessel type and year recorded, 1860–1937.
Source: Inventories held at the MHA, St. John’s NL, Canada.
‘Other’ crewmembers were service crew and tradesmen who were neither deck crew nor officers.
Except for a handful of destitute men, inventories reveal the vast majority of nineteenth-century merchant seafarers took at least a sea bag stuffed with a change of clothes when they went to sea, in addition to one or two extra comforts. Many men owned a variety of goods. Officers, petty officers, service crew, and engineers with their larger berths and more substantial wages, could afford to bring the occasional article of furniture, a few larger possessions, and some additional bedding. Due to the limited storage space, however, men at sea often had to select their material baggage with an understanding of the spacial confines of their berths, but also in the knowledge that their possessions would be stored in a communal workspace at risk of damage from the sea and theft from colleagues. Clothing was the most numerous kind of possession which seafarers took with them to sea; as evidenced by Table 2, which shows all the objects from 1858 to 1937 that appear over one hundred times. Except for books and towels, the components of a man’s three-piece suit – trousers, waistcoat, shirt and jacket – with headgear and undergarments, appear most commonly. Seafarers did not always wear these items together; as seen in photographs of crews from the period, individuals went on deck only in their shirtsleeves or they replaced the jacket and waistcoat for a Guernsey sweater. 5 These clothes were little different from the clothing that was worn on shore by working men and in some cases they were intended for shore wear.
All objects totalling cumulatively over 100, 1860–1937.
Source: Inventories held at the MHA, St. John’s NL, Canada.
Items owned by only one person were removed. Non-clothing items are shown in italics.
While such a statement might seem inconsistent with the striking representations of Jack Tar in prints, paintings, pamphlets, and later in novels and autobiographies, it is important to recognize that the representation of sailors in mass-culture was largely created by shore-bound men. They ‘saw’ countless Jacks at their most rowdy and visible – newly in port, flush with cash, seafarers were ready to pursue in a few days what they had missed for months and years at sea. 6 The ship and port imbued working men and their clothes with maritime associations not necessarily apparent outside that context. Once these working men became divorced from a seafaring milieu, they became, as Danny Vickers noted, ‘simply faces in the crowd’ 7 with nothing to distinguish them as atypical working men. Indeed, David Alexander famously mused in 1980 that sailors might be no more, or no less than ‘working men who got wet’, 8 meaning that seafarers were not some exceptional category of working people but simply had a unique workplace. Indeed, while seafarers seemed to challenge typical understandings of labour, they were modern workers and their remarkable value is instead that they were unusually well-documented nineteenth- and twentieth-century working men.
The stereotyped wardrobe of Jack Tar did not spring from whole cloth, of course. William Morris Barnes wrote in 1930 of his seafaring days that the first visit in port for discharged seamen was to the tailors to buy a new suit of clothes – sailors, he recalled were ‘navy blue boys’. 9 Sea salt was hard on clothing, and even without its corrosive effects, clothing at sea was worn through by heavy labour. Long periods of tedium between their work, however, allowed sailors trained in needlework for sailmaking to repair clothing, and even to embroider and embellish it to mark important voyages or to create a spectacle of dress to show-off in port. 10 In addition, the burgeoning ready-made clothing market had for over a century been providing goods for naval sailors and furnishing clothing shops in port with mass-produced, seemingly standardised clothing articles for seafarers and, increasingly, for working men generally. 11 Still, Jack’s body required a maritime milieu in addition to clichéd clothing to fully mark him a sailor. 12 Therefore, while Vickers lamented sailors disappearing into a crowd of like-dressed landsmen as a ‘daunting problem of evidence’ 13 , the close relationship of maritime dress to working menswear might actually be an opportunity for a broader understanding of men’s working apparel and possessions.
This is because historians have an entry into the chests and bags of merchant seafarers through the Crew Agreements and Official Log Books of the British imperial merchant marine. These are two distinct types of documents and they are primarily held by the Maritime History Archive in St. John’s, NL, but are also available in smaller collections from several archives in Britain. 14 The Agreements were state-created contracts and detail an ‘agreement’ between shipowners and the crew, including further personal information like date and place of birth, alongside such important labour details as wages, provisions, and a description of the length and geography of the voyage. 15 Eric Sager notes that these documents were government produced, meaning in his view that the information they contain more closely reflects the concerns of the British government and the shipowners than of the workers themselves. 16
The inventories of merchant seafarers are not without precedent – British pauper inventories were taken when the male head of household was prematurely unable to support his family, whether from death, injury or abandonment, but pauper and probate inventories had ceased being recorded in Britain by 1850. 17 In the 1970s and 80s large quantitative studies were made possible by the assistance of early computers – European probate inventories were a favoured subject before cultural historians came to dominate clothing studies. 18 The inventories of British merchant seafarers were, however, passed over. By the 1960s, the bulk of the records were to be destroyed; the Agreements were saved by a last-minute appeal by a group of prominent British maritime historians and the willingness of Memorial University to house about 80 per cent of the records with the intention that the Agreements would be well suited for quantitative study. 19 After arriving at Memorial in the 1970s, the Atlantic Canada Shipping Project sampled the Agreement data of Atlantic Canadian registered vessels. The Project was interested primarily in the quantitative information apparent in the Agreement forms, such as wages, age, and previous experience. 20 The logs were also saved, but it was believed they might at best contribute brief anecdotes for biographers to flesh out the lives of important seafaring men or for quantitative historians to provide some life to their data.
This second component of the Agreement bundle, the Official Log Book, is the document in which most inventories were recorded and is therefore significant for this study. 21 These government booklets were not captain’s logs, but instead were meant to record crew behavior for statutory purposes – infractions of discipline such as fights, drunkenness, desertion, as well as deaths appeared in the log. They were the means for masters to self-report their compliance with regulations as required by law. Reporting deaths was a solemn duty, but also a time when masters had to explicitly describe their own actions. They were required by law to heave-to, launch a boat, and search for the lost seaman – in the case of William Anderson, who drowned in his oilskin coat and boots, the master’s graphic description of his mate’s death served to excuse why he had decided that it was not necessary to launch a boat. 22
Seafarers died at a rate of around 4,400 workers a year between 1860 and 1880, and when they did the master was legally required to record the cause of death and the seafarer’s wages and debts in the log. 23 This makes the log an important source for information about the possessions of working men at sea, especially in the years 1860 to 1880 – after which the RGSS began culling the logs to maximize archival storage space for the Agreements. 24 I entered personal and work data from the Agreements, for example the deceased seafarer’s wages, his age, his capacity, and his signature, into a database alongside the details of his death found in the log. The latter includes the cause of death, the location, the seafarer’s wages and debts, and the inventory of his possessions. I aimed to transfer as much detail from the inventories as possible by adding objects to the database with all their qualifying information. To make the information more useful, however, I grouped items by common use – for instance various types of shoes and boots were kept together as footwear.
The inventories found in the logs are unique records. They represent the accumulated personal baggage of individual men who died working and living at sea, those men largely between the age of 15 and 60. 25 The confines of the ship as both a space in which seafarers worked and lived changes the context of these maritime inventories. While landward workers had limited space and means to accumulate possessions, seafarers, and especially sailors, lived in spaces which were both constricted and shared with colleagues. Seafarers were officially allotted 72 cubic feet of living space; an allowance required to comfortably hang a hammock and additionally store a sea chest with one or two bags. 26 While Judith Fingard states that ‘for most sailors the contents of the sea chest represented the sum total of their worldly possessions’ 27 , it is likely that seafarers did leave some possessions on land, whether in their own homes, or by making other arrangements. Peter King, in his 1997 study of pauper inventories in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century, remarked that the ‘suggestion that wage-earners were not acquiring a wide range of household items almost certainly no longer applies’. Even so he qualifies his positive portrayal of living standards; ‘the picture that emerges is by no means an optimistic one.’ 28
It is also important to understand why these inventories were created. When a seafarer died, his remaining possessions were liquidated, both to redistribute the physical objects among the crew to free up his berth, but also to allow the easy reunion of his wealth with his next of kin. Auctions or redistribution of post-mortem possessions occurred before the mast as informal ritual aboard vessels. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Merchant Shipping Act recognised these auctions as more than informal gatherings of a merchant ship’s company; they were officially mandated procedures which were carefully recorded. 29 The possessions were inventoried in the log with the profits of the sale, sometimes even an itemized pricing of individual objects or auction lots. The cash made from the sale of a seafarer’s possessions was added to their total wages outstanding at time of death. In theory, the deceased’s wages and the profits from the auction were supposed to be returned to the next of kin. 30 Sometimes, however, amassed debts caused the shipping company to make first claim to a portion or all of these liquidated assets. 31
The inventories themselves vary slightly in their information because they were recorded by many different people, though the information the RGSS requested was standard. 32 Cause of death introduced contingencies; there might be no inventory or only a partial one. Possessions were destroyed when men with contagious diseases died or their items were simply considered worthless, leading to a terse note that the unnamed possessions were discarded. 33 They might not be dead at all: men who deserted sometimes left some of their possessions behind, along with their debts. Masters inventoried and sold these abandoned possessions to make good the deserter’s debts, though usually seafarers were sure to secure their effects before they left. The wages and debts of the deceased were sometimes omitted. Occasionally, even the entire death record was missing, and though the RGSS usually sent a polite but firm letter requesting the information, it was not inserted into the Agreement after the fact.
It is important to remember that the inventories are a translation by the ship’s officers of a crewmember’s physical possessions to a paper record, thus how possessions were recorded differs both by the perceptiveness and care of the record-keeper and by the circumstances of the deceased. For example, officers, as opposed to the deck crew, were more likely to own objects qualified with an adjective by the record-keeper since there was greater variety in fabric and colour in their possessions. While the adjective could be explained by the need to discriminate between generic items in the often larger quantity of an officer’s possessions, it is also possible that officers were more careful when documenting the inventories of their colleagues or superiors. Indeed, the master of the Veronica had his large amount of possessions so carefully recorded that his inventory indicated what was dirty laundry and identified the clothing in which he was buried. 34 For the most part, however, the clothes of men drowned or what they were buried in were probably not recorded because they could not be liquidated into cash. While these omissions make it harder to compare effects, the MHA contains a wealth of inventories that together give an idea of working men’s maritime possessions between 1860 and 1880.
The majority of the deceased seafarers in this study were European working men. According to the parliamentary records, of the seafarers who died at sea in 1866, half were Able-bodied Seamen 35 , seafarers with enough experience at sea to be sufficiently qualified to perform their appropriate shipboard duties. By the late-nineteenth century the shipboard workplace was rapidly becoming stratified by class. Mid-century legislation established a certification system which required that seafarers undergo examinations in order to be qualified for an officer capacity. 36 Simply working aboard a ship was not enough to pass the examinations; a prospective officer had to be knowledgeable of maritime law and navigation. School and examinations required literacy and a source of financial support while out of work. The professionalization of the officer class barred a significant portion of working-class men from becoming officers and the late-nineteenth century saw the top positions aboard merchant vessels, especially steamships, become dominated by middle-class men. The shift of seafaring labour to a workforce which mirrored class divisions on land meant that working men were commanded and under surveillance by middle-class officers whose access to wealth and education allowed them to advance into positions of power and relative safety aboard ship. 37 The inventories reflect both a concern to record wealth, but also are inexorably tied up with the main purpose of the Agreement as a record of labour, meaning that working men – even the poorest who died with almost nothing – had their inventories recorded. The high number of deaths were in the deck crew as compared with every other capacity on aboard; this means that working men were particularly well represented in the Agreement inventories.
Therefore, Able-bodied Seamen in sail between the ages of 20 and 30 are often represented in the inventory sample because they were the largest proportion of workers at sea before 1880. 38 Sailors spent the most time aloft in the masts where they might fall onto the deck or into the sea, and wooden vessels with smaller crews were pushed to their speed limits in order to compete with steam power. Other risk factors, however, such as disease, accidental death, violence, and prolonged hard work killed seafarers notwithstanding capacity, age, or ship technology. Despite poor wages and greater risk, Able-bodied Seamen and Petty Officers stayed in the merchant marine well past their twenties. William Tait, the oldest man in the sample, was still an Able-bodied Seaman when he died at the age of 54 of an unspecified illness. 39 Teenagers also went to sea. Apprentices and Boys made up the bulk of the 10 to 19-year cohort, but among them there were also Able-bodied and Ordinary Seamen.
As shown in Figure 1, the age demographic between 20 and 29 years of age provided almost 40 per cent of the inventory records, a proportion indicating that dangerous jobs called for relatively young workers, though youth was no guarantee of survival. The average number of possessions owned by this group, however, tells a different story. Young adult men only owned about an average of 12 per cent of the possessions recorded. Only 30 per cent of the inventories were of possessions left by men between the age of 30 and 39, but they owned 40 per cent of the objects inventoried. This age group also commanded the highest wages. While men in their twenties were paid an average of about £3 5s per month; men in their thirties were receiving an average of £4 10s, earning about £1 5s per month more. Almost all the Officers in the sample fall into the 30 to 39-year cohort, with a few younger fellows in their twenties being petty officers and mates. David Alexander shows that young men were joining colonial vessels in fewer numbers, causing the average age of seafarers in the late-nineteenth century to become older. 40 And indeed, the careers of the seafarers used in this study suggest that young men in the British imperial merchant marine were waiting longer to rise into more advanced capacities – only one third of mates died under the age of 30. 41
A comparison of the average inventory size at death and the average wage as indicated at the signing of the Agreement, by age cohort, 1860–1880.
Thus, with a few exceptions, men in their thirties had accrued more possessions. They also worked for higher wages. These men owned a plethora of professional items – navigational equipment, charts, and paperwork – which marks them as a successful group both in terms of their accumulation of objects and their promotion to the higher levels of maritime service as officers. 42 Table 3 shows that an important division between officers and deck crew was in the types of tools they owned. Officers possessed a range of professional equipment like sextants, chronometers, and barometers, while the deck crew were more likely to own maritime tools, like needles and sewing kits, hammers, and hatchets. In a grey zone between the two, rulers were important for carpentry but parallel rulers were also used for navigation. Deck crew in possession of navigational equipment or manuals when they died were probably studying in preparation for examinations. In addition, many books in the inventories were instructional manuals, and those which were identified by title were more often owned by officers. They and apprentices owned books like the very popular A Complete Epitome of Practical Navigation by John Norrie, The True Principal of the Law of Storms by James Sedgwick, sailing directories, medical manuals, and prep books for marine exams. These types of professional books and tools show either an interest in undertaking examination or their continued usefulness as officers brought their training with them to sea.
Equipment and tools in the inventories of the officers and deck crew, 1860–1880.
Source: Inventories held at the MHA, St. John’s NL, Canada.
Rulers were grouped with both tools and navigational equipment in inventories.
Again, Figure 1 shows that in later cohorts age alone did not guarantee many possessions. Most men who were 40 or older were of a professional capacity, but they had fewer possessions than 30 year-olds. This may be an example of the cohort effect; older seafarers were perhaps more judicious consumers than their younger peers. Indeed, those older than 40 owned less but they were more likely to own useful items. They were, in short, better kitted with oilskins, tools, utensils, full-body underwear, and bedding. While the discrimination of a consumer seems likely, we might also consider that because older men had more time at sea, it could be that the bulk of their possessions remained in homes ashore with family. Moreoever, despite their experience, men over 40 were no longer able to command the high wages of men in their thirties. On average, they earned about £3 3s per month, an average wage closer to that earned by men in their twenties. There is no way of knowing, however, what proportion of their wages went towards clothing and possessions compared to 30 year-olds or even 20 year-olds. Whatever the case, they certainly took less to sea, and they seemed to know what to expect of the seafaring workplace.
If the older cohorts contained more officers, the youngest cohort of men under 20 worked in training capacities as apprentices, boys, and ordinary seamen. These men were on the lowest end of the pay scale, earning a stark average of £1 2s per month. The average was brought down because apprentices earned a yearly allowance of about £2 rather than a monthly wage. 43 Ordinary Seamen and Boys similarly received lower wages compared to Able-bodied Seamen and took less to sea. In addition, unless they were supplied by wealthy or knowledgeable parents or caretakers, young seafarers could not afford to take much to sea. The youngest seafarer in this collection was 12; Hugh Pierce died of yellow fever in Maceió, Brazil in 1873. This demographic of teenagers from 12 to 19 includes five ordinary seamen, nine apprentices, four boys, and able-bodied seaman James Hull, who was 19. 44
The most significant capacities at this age were the apprentices and boys. The young workers were a mixture of extremely poor working-class boys who laboured alongside very wealthy middle-class sons who were probably looking forward to a career as an officer aboard a steamship. There are nine apprentices, and four of them owned between six and 22 items. The remaining five owned between 47 and 127 items. One look at their inventories confirms their affluence. Their books, whose titles include A Hero, A Young Man Setting Out in Life, Biography of a Self Taught Man, and The Strong Road, are indicative of nineteenth-century middle-class parental anxiety about how young teenaged men leaving home for the first time will make their way in the world. Alfred Edward Keeler, a 15-year-old apprentice, was the owner of Frank Russell: Or, Living for an Object, for which an 1866 advertisement declared ‘[we] could wish that it were in the hands of every boy at the age when he exchanges the school-room for the shop, or is proceeding to quit his home and go into the world.’ 45
The apprentices were also more likely to own furniture and bedding. Keeler, of the Palm Tree, owned a bed, a double blanket, a single blanket, a comforter, two pillows and slips and two sheets. John Whidden, an autobiographer, remembered distinctly that he was ridiculed by an Able-bodied Seaman for taking them with him to sea: ‘If the begger ain’t got sheets!’ 46 Only two sheets were owned by men of the deck crew, both by the 34 year-old George Phillips who worked as an Able-bodied Seaman aboard the steamer Sappho. 47 In a profession where living space was at a premium, 17-year-old John George Webb of the Eastern Belle took a writing desk with him to sea. 48
Being an apprentice was not a certain indicator of affluence, however, because parishes often paid the indenture to send young orphans and wards to sea if a suitable landward apprenticeship could not be found. 49 These poorer apprentices were more akin to the Boys of sailing ships. A ‘Boy’ was a teenager too young, too inexperienced, and too physically unprepared to enter the merchant marine as Ordinary Seamen. The position was somewhat similar to that of the apprentices, in that it was a capacity exclusively for young seafarers and it therefore implied training. Unlike apprentices, Boys did not pay for indentures and they therefore signed the Agreement as regular crew. By reference to the inventories, Boys owned between 14 and 45 items, which suggests they were slightly better provided for than the poorest apprentices, who owned about five to 22 items.
Able-bodied seamen apprear in different proportions in every age demographic, but they dominate the 20-year-old cohort. It quickly becomes apparent that they did not have many things. Able-bodied Seamen owned an average of 33 objects, mostly clothing. Though they owned little, however, it is significant that only one man, Frederick Brown who drowned in the North Sea in 1867, died with nothing but the clothes on his back. 50 The remaining men were reasonably kitted out – certainly not as well provided for as the officers or the more experienced men, but they were not often lacking necessary articles of clothing, like trousers, shirts, or underwear. The average Able-bodied Seaman’s kit included one or two of the basic articles of clothing each: shirts, pants, coats, socks, underwear, and footwear, usually a pair of shoes or boots. These things were, of course, above and beyond the clothing men were wearing when they were buried or lost at sea, so while an inventory with no shirts and underwear recorded might indicate extreme want or unpreparedness, an inventory without a pair of shoes or a coat might mean that those items were worn at the point of death. Non-clothes items like tools, decorative items, equipment, jewellery, books, and papers were not extensively owned. Tobacco does not often appear, though pipes and, increasingly in the twentieth century, cigarettes are listed from time to time. Grooming items like combs, straight razors, and strops also appear, and later so do safety razors.
Various containers were also an important object for Able-bodied Seamen. Sea chests, small boxes, ditty bags, and housewifes (a type of catchall for sewing tools and notions) were frequently owned and had symbolic value along with their practical importance, especially for sailors who lived in confined berths. Elizabeth Linklater, in her memoirs of sailing with her shipmaster father as a child, recalled seafarer’s chests as ‘much valued possessions, [that] during a voyage would be painted and repainted, often in anything but sombre colours.’ 51 Chests and bags became sites of a seafarer’s creativity and pride, often painted with scenes of ships under sail, carved with a jack knife, or vividly embroidered like Warren Opie’s sea bag. 52 On Sundays, Linklater remembered, the seafarers would spend an hour or two removing and rearranging their possessions – photographs, mementos, and books. Large wooden chests also did double duty as furniture, acting as tables and benches in a pinch. Officers were less likely to own chests as their quarters contained built-in cabinetry to hold their possessions.
The inventories of Able-bodied Seamen particularly suffer from a lack of item qualification – the fabric and colour of clothing and other like details are often missing. With this, the preferences of seafarers are largely lost. And they certainly had preferences. In the foreword of his autobiography, Barnes gave minute attention to how he dressed himself, describing how he tied his ten cent Woolworth’s necktie, the various places he hid safety pins on his person, that he sewed down his collars, ripped the linings out of the sleeves of his coats, poked ventilation holes in his black felt hats and added two to three inch wedges into his trouser legs, a modification which he did not entrust to a tailor. 53
The inventories in the official logs also do not represent all seafarers. Two significant capacities, masters and apprentices, did not require formal inventories even though the inventories of both occasionally appear. Masters largely remained outside the purview of the Agreements, which required very little information besides their name and certificate number. Masters’ privileged relationship with shipowners, their powerful role as commander and lawmaker of vessels at sea, and their role as recorders for the state meant that they personally received less governmental oversight than regular crewmembers. Certainly, they were allowed a kind of bureaucratic privacy, and this extended to the treatment of their inventories. Very few inventories of masters were recorded, and when they were they did not disclose the master’s wage, or the value of their possessions. 54 Masters’ possessions were not sold because their work contract with shipowners did not require the immediate satisfaction of their debts.
Though masters’ inventories are rare because they were entitled to remain invisible, some maritime workers are invisible in Agreement records because they were even more disenfranchised than working-class male seafarers. Married women who worked on the same vessels with their husbands did not have their inventories taken or their credits tallied: their things were simply transferred to their spouses. 55 Effects could be transferred to a family member on board when men died too, though it was extremely rare. 56 Some single women worked at sea, but though the contingent of working women grew to fill service positions such as stewardesses and nurses on passenger liners, their relatively small number compared to the largely male workforce and their less-risky work has made finding their deaths and recovering their inventories very difficult.
Non-European crewmembers, mostly from Yemen, India, and China, were important and numerous seafarers in the British merchant marine, but European Officers were not required to record their inventories. One cause was that these workers were signed onto so-called Asiatic Agreements. These documents were designed to keep colonial labour under a different regulatory framework than European labour and they did not require post-mortem inventories to be taken. American and Caribbean descendants of the African diaspora also laboured in the British merchant marine, but due to colonial naming conventions their presence is largely elided in the record. Finally, apprentices were not required to sign the Agreement; though they were recorded on the document, their labour was not regulated in the same way as regular crewmembers. 57
Still, the inventories held by the MHA render significant information about the professional, financial, and material limitations placed on working men at sea. Limited by space, by privacy, by literacy, and by wage, these men still brought with them a small amount of material possessions, giving them the luxury of a change of clothes, allowing participation in communal clothes washing sessions, or decorating their sea chests in bright, cheerful colours for all the men of the forecastle to see. These records give a hint of the consumer habits of seafarers, suggesting what they were buying – or at least what they were taking with them – with an eye on what they would need for the coming weeks, months, even years at sea. This study is limited to 134 inventories from the years between 1860 and 1880, but according to the statistics submitted to Parliament, an approximate average of 4,400 men died each year.
The description of William Anderson’s death, drowned because of the weight of his oilskins and sea boots, was remarkable because his shipmaster described what was no doubt considered a mundane detail: that his possessions played an important role in the cause of his death. Seafarers went to sea with sea bags and chests of clothing, personal possessions, work tools, and other sundry objects which helped their work, protected them from weather, and made their lives more comfortable. By taking into consideration this further element of material wealth, inventories can be used to show a seafarer’s means with more nuance than his wage allows because goods are accumulated over time and therefore reflect wealth accrued before the voyage. Combined with information about wages, inventories can suggest both past and future spending power, though of course the seafarers of this study did not live to enjoy their wages. The rich working lives of seafarers in the late-nineteenth century were distilled into inventories of objects and lists of wages and debts – their final contributions to the world of the living.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the faculty and staff at the Department of History at Memorial University of Newfoundland and the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta. Special thanks to Dr. Valerie Burton for her guidance with this article and to the assistance of the staff at the MHA and my colleagues on the SSHRCC-funded MTLC project, including Heather Wareham, David Bradley, Kory Penney, Tanya MacDonald, Vince Walsh, Peter Hogan, Mike Heffernan, Simon Babineau and Sarah Farewell. Finally, a heartfelt thanks to family history researcher Mary Hassey.
1.
2.
Malacca, Official Number [ON] 60082, 1879, MHA.
3.
See Meaghan Walker, ‘Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Inventories of British Merchant Seafarers, 1863–1879,’ (MA dissertation, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2011).
4.
While the RGSS started to thin the logs by 1875, the good representation in this study of inventories between 1875 and 1879 is due to family history researcher Mary Hassey, who was searching through large swaths of Crew Agreements (hereafter Agreements) from that period and who kindly flagged inventories for me. These inventories were recorded in the Agreement, in the ‘particulars relating to wages and effects’ section. Masters who filled in this box presumably also recorded the inventory in the destroyed log. A significant portion of these Agreement inventories were not complete; most flagged only significant possessions such as jewellery and noted the wages and debts of the seafarer instead of itemizing the entire inventory. At some point after 1880 this box was removed from the Agreements, meaning that between 1880 and 1914 there was no place on the Agreement for inventories to appear. In 1914 the RGSS decided to retain about 30 per cent of the logs, increasing the odds of an inventory’s survival.
5.
For a detailed breakdown of seafaring clothing with reference to a contemporary image, see ‘A Sailor’s Kit’, MTLC website, 2011, 
[accessed 21 July 2018]. The lack of more than 100 articles of footwear is because seafarers, especially deck crew, rarely owned more than one pair; when they died, the shoes were either lost at sea or buried with the body.
6.
Valerie Burton, ‘The Myth of Bachelor Jack: Masculinity, Patriarchy and Seafaring Labour’, in Colin Howell and Richard Twomey, eds. Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour (Fredericton, NB, 1991); 179–198.
7.
Daniel Vickers, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (New Haven, 2005), 2.
8.
David Alexander, ‘Literacy Among Canadian and Foreign Seamen, 1863–1899’, in Rosemary Ommer and Gerald Panting, eds. Working Men Who Got Wet: Proceedings of the Fourth Conference of the Atlantic Canada Shipping Project, July 24–July 26, 1980 (St. John’s, 1980), 31.
9.
In his autobiography, the Newfoundlander William Morris Barnes, who worked deep-sea trades between 1870 and 1925, recalled the allure of navy blue, ventriloquizing a girl bringing a sailor to a clothes shop: ‘Whoever heard of a sailor wearing light clothes, Jack? A navy blue, boy.’ William Morris Barnes, When Ships Were Ships and Not Tin Pots: The Seafaring Adventures of Captain William Morris Barnes, ed. Hilda Renbold Wortman (New York, 1930), 150.
10.
Warren Opie’s suit of clothes and sea bag were embroidered to commemorate his service on the United States naval vessel Susquehanna, which in 1853 arrived in Japan as the flagship of Commodore Perry’s squadron, in addition to remembering his family and home in New Jersey. See Harold D. Langley, ‘From the Collection: Warren Opie’s Sailor’s Uniform at Winterthur’, Winterthur Portfolio, 38, No. 2/3 (2003), 131–141.
11.
While Beverly Lemire has explored the development of the sweated slop-production industry in London in the eighteenth century, there is no equivalent nineteenth century study. See Beverly Lemire, Dress, Culture, and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade Before the Factory, 1660-1800 (New York, 1997), 9–41.
12.
Indeed Burton notes that even a milieu like ‘sailortown’ was mythologized. Burton, ‘Boundaries and Identities in the Nineteenth-century English Port: Sailortown Narratives and Urban Space’, in Simon Gunn and Robert J. Morris, eds. Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City since 1850 (Aldershot, 2001), 138. See also Sam Smiles, ‘Defying Comprehension: Resistance to Uniform Appearance in Depicting the Poor, 1770s to 1830s’, Textile History 33, No. 1 (2002), 22–36. Smiles looks at the depiction of the urban-industrial poor, a category that it could be argued includes sailors.
13.
Vickers, Young Men and the Sea, 2.
14.
15.
16.
Eric W. Sager, ‘Employment Contracts in Merchant Shipping: An Argument for Social Science History’, in Franca Iacovetta and Wendy Mitchinson, eds., On the Case: Explorations in Social History (Toronto, 1998), 49–64. Seafarers were not as bound by Agreements as Sager suggests; they used informal methods to manipulate the terms of their labour, most commonly by deserting in foreign ports to re-sign on to vessels at a higher wage. However, while the desertion of crewmembers was indicated in the Agreement, the actual written record of the desertion’s circumstances was written in the Official Log, where the official voice was less hegemonic.
17.
Peter King, ‘Pauper Inventories and the Material Loves of the Poor in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, in Tim Hitchcock, Peter King, and Pamela Sharpe, eds. Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840 (London, 1997), 157–158.
18.
As apparent in the proceedings of the Leeuwenborch Conference in 1980. See Ad Van der Woude and Anton Schuurman, eds., Probate Inventories: A New Source for the Historical Study of Wealth, Material Culture and Agricultural Development: Papers Presented at the Leeuwenborch Conference, Wageningen, 5–7 May 1980 (Utrecht, 1980).
19.
20.
For the research parameters of the project, see ‘Atlantic Canada Shipping Project’, Maritime History Archive, https://www.mun.ca/mha/holdings/acsp.php [accessed 17 July 2018]; for their role in the Maritime History Archive, see ‘Archiving the Agreements: 6. What Happened to the Transferred Agreements when they arrived at Memorial University of Newfoundland?’, MTLC website, [accessed 21 July 2018].
21.
It is a rare study that sees the official logs as more significant than the information heavy Agreements. The Atlantic Canada Shipping Project almost entirely ignored the logs, except as curiosities. Judith Fingard’s Jack in Port (1982) did heavily draw from events in the logs but did not give the inventories serious consideration. The logs are a somewhat uneven source – some masters recorded almost nothing in them, and there is evidence some logs were completed at a later date. However, recording the death of a crew member was an entry required by law and therefore deaths and the records surrounding them exist with consistency. For an in-depth look at inventories in the logs, see ‘Dead Men Do Tell Tales,’ MTLC website, 2011, [accessed 21 July 2018].
22.
Malacca, ON 60082, 1876, MHA.
23.
This average is based on the total number of deaths as recorded in fifteen statistical reports submitted to Parliament by the RGSS between 1865 and 1880. It should be noted that around one third of deaths involved shipwreck and these rarely produced inventories. In addition, no data exists for 1865. See ‘Return Showing the Number, Ages, Ratings, and Causes of Death of Seamen reported to the Board of Trade as having Died in the British Merchant Service,’ Years 1866 to 1880, ProQuest U. K. Parliamentary Papers Online; and ‘Deaths of Seamen, 1852-1864’, House of Commons Papers, Proquest U.K. Parliamentary Papers Online.
24.
Agreements were probably understood to be the more significant documents by the RGSS because they contained valuable information about the crew’s wages and discharge, as well as the ship’s details and destinations. They also were generally less bulky than logs (unless the vessel was a large commercial passenger liner), a problem which the RGSS initially solved by ripping the empty pages off the backs of logs and stamping them with official marks indicating that this had been done on purpose.
25.
The RGSS produced impressive statistical charts using the information provided by the Agreements and logs. The Returns of Deaths at Sea, which were submitted to Parliament yearly after 1867 (though a more limited analysis was completed in 1865 for the years 1852-1864), show the breakdown of deaths at sea by cause, age, and capacity (except for masters). These statistics recorded deaths from ‘below 20’ to ‘above 60’. In 1866, for example, 741 seafarers under 20 died at sea, while only 11 men died over the age of 60. For this example, see ‘Return of Number and Causes of Deaths of Seamen reported by Board of Trade in British Merchant Service, 1866’, House of Commons Papers, ProQuest U.K. Parliamentary Papers Online. [accessed 17 July 2018].
26.
James Lees, The Merchant Shipping Acts of 1854, 1855, 1862, & 1867 (Liverpool, 1867), 105.
27.
Judith Fingard, Jack in Port: Sailortowns of Eastern Canada (Toronto, 1982), 79.
28.
King, ‘Pauper Inventories,’ 183.
29.
Lees, The Merchant Shipping Acts, 82.
30.
Margaret Creighton suggests that seafarers aboard American whalers understood that the sale profits were going to their colleague’s family and that they overbid on the items for this reason. Naval regulations prohibited overbidding, but there was no equivalent regulations on merchant ships in the late-nineteenth century. See Margaret Creighton, Rites and Passages: The Experience of American Whaling, 1830–1870 (Cambridge, 1995), 137.
31.
Seafarers drew from their prospective wages to pay for items from the slop or tobacco chest, and additionally any advance of wages or liberty money was also deducted from their wages. Therefore, a seafarer could die still owning the shipping company labour.
33.
The possessions of Dominick McCuck were destroyed when he died of an unknown infection and the effects of Thomas McMann were thrown away. See Africana, ON 37160, 1863; and Plato, ON 78756, 1891, MHA.
34.
William Evans’ inventory contained 241 objects. See Veronica, 28192, 1872, MHA.
35.
36.
Examinations, and the studies needed to pass them, limited the mobility of working-class men in the ranks of the merchant marine. Middle-class youth destined for the officer class served for a period as apprentices aboard sailing ships before becoming officers. They did not have to serve in the deck crew. Working-class youth entered the service as Boys or Ordinary Seamen, then rose to be Able-bodied. Burton, ‘The Making of a Nineteenth-Century Profession: Shipmasters and the British Shipping Industry’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société Historique du Canada, 1 (1990), 97–118; and Eric Sager, Seafaring Labour: The Merchant Marine of Atlantic Canada, 1820–1914 (Kingston: 1989). The exception was the case of pauper boys, who were often placed with the merchant marine as apprentices. See Burton, ‘Apprenticeship Regulation and Maritime Labour in the Nineteenth Century British Merchant Marine’, International Journal of Maritime History, 1, No. 1 (1989): 29–50.
38.
Burton, ‘Counting Seafarers: The Published Records of the Registry of Merchant Seamen, 1849–1913’, Mariner’s Mirror 71, No. 3 (1985), 305–320.
39.
Constance, ON 102, 1863, MHA.
40.
Alexander, ‘Literacy Among Canadian and Foreign Seamen’, 11.
41.
This is perhaps due to the small sample size or perhaps these young Officers died less frequently.
42.
Due to the small number of deaths in the engineering department (three), very little can be extrapolated from these records, but these steamship workers were also highly professionalized.
43.
Burton, ‘Apprenticeship Regulations’, 29–50.
44.
Claredon, ON 23338, 1867, MHA.
45.
Advertisement in Richard Newton, Rillis from the Fountain (London, 1866), 123.
46.
John D. Whidden, Old Sailing Ship Days: From Forecastle to Quarter-deck (Boston, 1925), 9.
47.
Sappho, ON 47935, 1869, MHA.
48.
Eastern Belle, ON 48841, 1869, MHA.
49.
Burton, ‘Apprenticeship Regulation’, 29–50.
50.
Sir Henry Lawrence, ON 51496, 1867, MHA.
51.
Elizabeth Linklater, A Child Under Sail (London, 1949), 34–35.
52.
53.
Barnes, When Ships were Ships, ix–x.
54.
Barnes mentions that a master signing in Greenock could expect £10 in the late 1870s, but he does not elaborate on it. Barnes, When Ships were Ships, 119.
55.
Lyman Cann, ON 38241, 1869; and Birdie, ON 48213, 1866, MHA.
56.
Dennis Horton, ON 38187, 1866, MHA.