ABSTRACT

The inability of the landsman to comprehend the maritime world is a deeprooted conviction among sailors. Underpinning this strong belief is the undeniable fact that to go to sea is to enter another element, unpredictable and dangerous, and that to sail the seas requires special skills and knowledge. The working world of the seaman is largely unknown to and unseen by the landsman, whose encounters with the sailor ashore are rarely conducive to mutual understanding or sympathy. Speaking ‘the thick, imperfect language of the seamen’ and stinking of pitch and poor-john (dried fish), according to the playwrights Beaumont and Fletcher, they were easily persuaded to part with their earnings once they stepped ashore, as the seventeenth-century Dutch verse complained: Als sy komen te lande syn, Soo is haer eerste werck, Te drincken Tobak en Brandewijn; Gaen wenigh in de Kerck … 1 The obstacles to comprehension of the seaman’s world were summed up by Sir William Monson, a writer on naval matters in the late sixteenth century:

The sea language is not so soon learned, and much less understood, being only proper to him that hath served his apprenticeship. Besides that, a boisterous sea and stormy weather will make a man not bred on it so queasy sick that it bereaves him of legs, stomach, and courage, so much as to fight with his meat. And in such weather, when he hears the seaman cry, starboard, or port, or to bide a loof, or flat a sheet, or haul home a clue line, he thinks he hears a barbarous speech which he conceives not the meaning of. 2

The prevalent view from the land is that sailors constitute a highly distinctive community, with its own language, dress, customs and habits. It is an oft-repeated cliché that the sea is ‘in their blood’. Nineteenth-century novels are fully stocked with mariners, active and retired, and many of the stereotypical images of the seaman are derived from such characters. The common sailor is perhaps less in evidence than the sea-captain, but Dickens’ pithy description of him as ‘ill-lodged, ill-fed, ill-used, hocussed, entrapped, anticipated, cleaned out’ encapsulates a pretty general view of the hapless mariner ashore, exploited and despised, before the philanthropists and the missions to seamen began their work. 3