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 *From the Introduction, page 9:
"In reconstructing the social and cultural life of the early
eighteenth-century common seaman, I have sought both to tell a story and to
write a history. I hope that general readers as well as specialists will find
the effort of interest. Following Tobias Smollett, one of the earliest writers
concerned with the plight of the seaman, I have also sought to inspire 'that
generous indignation which ought to animate the reader against the sordid and
vicious disposition of the world.' As we shall see in abundant, sometimes
gruesome detail, the jolly tar did indeed live in a world fully possessed of a
'sordid and vicious' side. His creative survival in it is the subject of this
book ."
*From Chapter Five, "The Seaman as the 'Spirit of Rebellion': Authority,
Violence, and Labor Discipline," pages 234-5:
"The collective logic of mutiny and, I would argue, all of social life among
common seamen is fully illustrated in the sailors' creation of a cultural form,
the instrument of protest known as the Round Robin. This 'Mutinous and Seditious
paper' was essentially a means of organizing resistance. Nathaniel Uring
provided a detailed description:
'They take a large Sheet of Paper, and strike two Circles, one a good distance
without the other; in the inner Circle they will write what they have a mind to
have done; and between the two Circular Lines, they write their names, in and
out, against the Circles; beginning like the four Cardinal points of the Compass,
right opposite to each other, and so continue till the paper is filled; which
appears in a Circle, and no one can be said to be first, so that they are all
equally guilty: Which I believe to be contrived to keep 'em all firm to their
purpose, when once they have signed it; and if discovered, no one can be
excused, by saying, he was the last that signed it, and he had not done it
without great Persuasion.' |
Seamen used the Round Robin 'to engage one another' in a plot, 'to try ye
Strength of their party,' while guaranteeing that 'it might not be known who
were the beginners or Ringleaders.' The sailor had to select his forms of
protest carefully, lest his complaints be 'returned upon his back with a
Vengeance.' The Round Robin was a cultural innovation from below, an effort at
collective self-defense in the face of nearly unlimited and arbitrary authority.
The Round Robin eloquently expressed the collectivistic ethos of the seaman's
oppositional culture, demonstrating how the equal distribution of risks was
often essential to survival."
*From the "Conclusion: The Seaman as Worker of the World," page 291:
"The tars' collectivism, as we have seen, took many forms. The hands,
dispossessed and limp, that were assembled on board the ship slowly began to
curl their fingers into a collective fist. The hand that turned the handspike in
the windlass also downed it in a work stoppage. The hand that signed a wage
contract drew up a mutinous Round Robin. The hand that mended white canvas sail
emblazoned a black flag with the skull and crossbones. Seamen thus signaled in
their actions a new dialectic whose power extended far beyond the world of
maritime labor. As swelling numbers of men and women were reduced to the labor
of their hands, they began to see the potential, even the necessity, of joining
those hands in collective action and resistance."
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