People, Place and Power on the Nineteenth-Century Waterfront

Sailortown

Graeme J. Milne

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9783319331584
• eBook ISBN: 9783319331591
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This book explores the tenuous existence of seafarers, divided between their time on the ocean and their residence in sailortown economies geared to exploit them. Particular attention is given both to the contribution of seafarers as a global workforce into the nineteenth century, and to their help in creating vibrant multicultural enclaves in port cities worldwide. In addition, research explores the scandalized opinions of outside observers, challenging ideas about public behavior and relationships. Sailortown myths persisted far into the twentieth century, to the detriment of older waterfront districts and their residents, and readers will find this book is invaluable in casting new light on forgotten communities, whose lives bridged urban, maritime and global histories.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Graeme J. MilnePeople, Place and Power on the Nineteenth-Century Waterfront10.1007/978-3-319-33159-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Graeme J. Milne¹

(1)

University of Liverpool, Liverpool, Merseyside, UK

End Abstract

Sailortown was the place where the seafarer came on shore, where the maritime and urban worlds collided. It was shocking and thrilling, dangerous and liberating. To the seafarer, it offered freedom from the hardships of work at sea, but posed all manner of threats to his body, wages and soul. To shipowners and ships’ captains, it was a corrupting influence that damaged their workforce, while also providing cheap and easy ways of recruiting seamen, no questions or obligation asked. Boarding-house keepers, bar-owners, outfitters, prostitutes and petty crooks all made money in sailortown, if they could avoid the criminality they helped create. Government officials knew that an effective seafaring labour force was crucial to globalising economies, and a strategic necessity in time of war; they struggled, however, to regulate such transient populations in sailortown. Missionaries and philanthropists saw a pit of depravity to be cleansed, but were unsure if the seafarer was a perpetrator or a victim.

Sailortown was a phenomenon rooted in a particular time. It rose and fell with the age of sail, and especially with the expansion of the world’s trading systems to a global reach in the second half of the nineteenth century. For a few decades, from the 1840s to the 1910s, sailortown districts with similar (and already partly mythic) characteristics could be found in major ports worldwide. The impact of merchant seafarers on the economy, culture and society of seaport towns was profound, as was the mark made by that shore-based society on the seafarer as he came and went. Much commentary then and since stresses separation and exclusion, with seafarers seen as men apart from the rest of society, and waterfront communities as adrift from the urban mainstream. But sailortown is better understood as a frontier zone rather than a rigid border, defined by crossings, not by barriers.¹ In addition, because so many different interests had a stake in it, sailortown was a constructed and invented place, selectively pictured, mapped and represented to carry the weight of its critics’ political and cultural arguments.

Just as it was debatable territory in its own time, sailortown now offers us a laboratory for studying important historical tensions and transformations. We are increasingly familiar with the nineteenth century as an era of trade, migration, information flows and networks, but also of persistent locality on many levels. The intense particularity of trans-national connections is a seeming contradiction, but actually essential to understanding how people built wider perspectives from everyday concerns. Sailortown’s complex relationships offer human angles on social and cultural patterns that are often discussed at a more aggregate level in the economic histories of the period.

This chapter sets out the questions and themes of the book, explaining its structure and suggesting ways in which the history of sailortown can test some recent thinking about the globalising and urbanising world of the nineteenth century. It is also important to introduce the voices of sailortown, considering how difficult it can be to find the views of seafarers and their associates amid the polemical noise. The final section takes a brief tour of the world’s sailortowns, establishing the key locations in which the events and processes discussed throughout the book took place, and which provide the empirical evidence for its arguments.

Literatures, Entanglements and Spaces

Stan Hugill’s Sailortown, published in 1967, is still the starting point for anyone approaching this topic. One of the last mariners to work on British deep-water sailing ships, Hugill was also an authority on sea songs and a gifted painter.² At first glance, his book is a collection of tall tales, romanticising the riotous waterfronts of the nineteenth century, but closer reading reveals a perceptive text with a solid evidence base. Hugill gathered seafarers’ remembrances, mostly from older men he corresponded with, and mined published memoirs for references to time on shore. He set out a convincing periodisation of sailortown’s development, from the booming waterfronts of the sailing-ship era, through marginalisation in the age of steam, to the obsolescence and sanitisation of the dockland zone in the mid-twentieth century. Hugill also identified important tensions and paradoxes, stressing local diversity while recognising that sailortowns everywhere had similarities because of British dominance of the shipping industry. He understood the seaman’s dilemma in confronting a threatening, dangerous and controlling place that nonetheless offered liberty from the privations of work at sea.

Sailortown historiography has gradually expanded since the 1980s. Judith Fingard’s Jack in Port focused on the experiences of merchant mariners in Canada’s eastern seaports, making particular use of local newspapers to explore the social history of the waterfront.³ Conrad Dixon’s article on crimping—the exploitation of mariners by boarding-house keepers and others—opened up that crucial aspect of the sailortown economy to proper scrutiny.⁴ Valerie Burton’s work discussed representations of masculinity in sailortown, an important part of seafarer identity when escaping from the (usually) all-male world of the ship, and a central element in public fears of sailors.⁵ There are also valuable articles about certain groups of seafarers in sailortown, often focusing on a single nationality.⁶ Historical geographers have published useful work on urban spaces near waterfronts, building on an earlier recognition that docks and wharves are only part of a seaport, and that the area slightly inland, ‘where land use clash is most likely to occur’, also offers key lessons.⁷ More generally, sailortown appears across the diverse literatures of waterfront life, such as maritime labour, philanthropy, crime, drink, architecture and prostitution. All that work has great value and is heavily used throughout this volume, although its authors can only engage with the sailortown phenomenon in passing. Finally, it needs to be stressed that this book focuses on commercial seafaring and the seaports that handled it. Naval ports, fishing ports, whaling stations and river ports all had their own patterns of transient labour and dangerous reputations, and have since inspired historical fields of their own.⁸ Nineteenth-century whaling may well have been the most multi-national of all industries, for example, and navy ports continue to experience aspects of sailortown to this day. Waterfront streets also played host to the millions of migrants who made this period one of extraordinary mobility and mixing, but whose temporary presence is often hard to find in the sources. Explaining any of these properly requires specialist studies, and this book cannot cover that ground.

A new look at sailortown offers valuable evidence for broader questions about the building of the modern world. Sitting at the frontier between maritime and urban histories, it can bridge disciplines and create new perspectives. Histories of oceans, travel and global connections have become common, partly because scholars are seeking the roots of current concerns about globalisation, migration and permeable borders.⁹ Such work builds on earlier traditions of writing about trade, mobility, labour and empire, often by geographers and economic historians.¹⁰ There is a desire to move beyond studying nation states, focusing instead on alternative frames of vision, not least maritime connections and the experiences of coastal societies. Powerful as such work has been, there is of course a danger that it simply replaces one artificial boundary with another, and that writing about ‘the Atlantic’, for example, creates another closed space and struggles to understand people who moved more widely still.¹¹

The most recent scholarship often adds a conceptual layer derived from the various ‘turns’ that historical research has taken in the last quarter-century or so. In particular, we can study the interactions of seafarers and their associates with a stronger toolkit of ideas about gender and race, while seeing their daily lives better through knowledge of how human societies operate in space and place, as well as over time. Not least, trans-national, post-imperial and cultural perspectives on maritime histories demonstrate the need to study how coastal societies are connected by the oceans, as well as human activity on the oceans themselves.¹² Historians, geographers and literature scholars have charted the lives of individuals who moved among nations and empires, at a time when the boundaries and definitions of those constructions were becoming more debatable.¹³ Culturally, some of the common features of sailortown districts worldwide point to a degree of convergence in waterfront society, which offers an alternative to the better-known integration of high culture at the fin de siècle.¹⁴

The presence of sailortowns in port cities worldwide tests ideas about Europe in Africa and Asia, and vice versa. It is no coincidence that sailortown’s ‘heyday’ in the nineteenth century was an era of shifting perspectives on race, nationality and ethnicity, not least because increased mobility challenged individual identities and allegiances. Much of this great collision of forces had to be played out in the daily work of seaport cities. Historians are becoming more interested in those interactions of people and societies rather than states and institutions. Such non-state actors can offer a trans-national, as opposed to international, version of global history.¹⁵ Strangely, though, the sizeable literature on port cities has made little use of seafarers and their associates. There is work on the planning and building of seaport cities, revealing the symbolic importance of the monumental waterfronts that face visitors coming from the sea, but the impact of that built environment on the seaman is hard to find.¹⁶ Historical demographers often neglect mariners, who for obvious reasons are even less visible than most people in the sources.¹⁷ Port cities are often assumed to be multi-cultural and cosmopolitan, but exactly how those ideas manifested themselves in a time of rapid change raises another set of issues for sailortown to cast light on. Although most urban history research into trans-national connections and mobility has focused on the twentieth century, the diversifying maritime labour force of earlier decades offers evidence to push those frameworks back in time, especially when seafarers’ experiences on shore are brought into sharper focus.

This book is structured around three threads in these wider literatures. First, it explains sailortown through a number of entanglements, all of which involved the seafarer, and the people and institutions he met on shore. ‘Entanglement’ is chosen deliberately here in place of ‘encounter’, which is perhaps the more familiar term for meetings at the boundaries of cultures and societies.¹⁸ Entanglement seems to better convey the ongoing patterns of these relationships, and their shifting mix of interconnection, mobility, conflict and compromise over time. Although the word can have negative connotations, that is not the assumption here, and some seafarer entanglements were voluntary and positive, often depending on the degree of agency that the sea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Seafarer in the Age of Sail
• 3. The Maritime-Urban Frontier
• 4. Crimps and Crimping
• 5. Visions of Home
• 6. The State in Sailortown
• 7. Legacies: Sailortown in the Twentieth Century
• Backmatter