ABSTRACT
The primary concern of merchant seafarers in going to sea was to make a living, but the labour historian who treats seafaring only in its potential for wage-earning misses much which is important about the activity. 2 The societies which have seen many hundreds of thousands of individuals regularly departing to sea have rarely done so without placing larger meanings in their comings and goings.3 Throughout history few women have worked on ships and the sea has been known as a place to which men ventured.4 Images and narratives of sea-going have afforded powerful ways of representing maleness. They have entered into the world which men shared with women ashore in ways which reflect upon its social arrangements. If maritime historians have rarely stopped to consider these things what is more surprising is that the authors of two, more ambitious, studies of seafaring published in recent years did not incorporate any of this into their understandings. 5 It is true that in the 1980s gender mobilized fewer analytical claims in respect of labour and working-class history than it was to do in the 1990s. Gender was relatively contained so long as the point of its reference was women, but making men the subject of gender analysis confirmed what gender-advocates had always suspected: that joining work and the workplace only through class perspectives was a failure of the historian's political understanding.6
