ABSTRACT
Universally described as tarry, marked by a humble yet indelible tactile and olfactory presence that is at once cultural and material, familiar and foreign, early modern sailors became tars. In much the same way as John Bull later became a familiar cartoon caricature of the generic Englishman in eighteenth-century broadsides and newspapers, Jack Tar came to denominate the English blue-water mariner. Written to challenge the Portuguese monopoly on trade with the Far East, Hugo Grotius’ legal broadside was translated by Richard Hakluyt into English shortly before his death in 1616. The captain of an English pinnace in the 1590s, when the play first went up, might well be a man of the world, or he might be a ruthless, bloodthirsty world-beater like Francis Drake or John Hawkins. Drake was a mariner-hero who, having ‘singed the Spaniard’s beard’ by destroying the fleet at Cadiz, later went on to defeat the mighty Armada.
