SONS OF THE WAVES

THE COMMON SEAMAN IN THE HEROIC AGE OF SAIL

STEPHEN TAYLOR

Yale University Press, 416pp, £20

The men of the Royal or Merchant Navy – commonly referred to as Jack Tar because of his habit of covering his jacket with tar to keep out the elements – were a distinct and noticeable type on dry land. Stephen Taylor’s purpose, wrote Ian GarrickMason in the Spectator, was ‘to convey what such men were like, and what they experienced’. The trade ‘set its practitioners apart from their ground-based countrymen: in how they dressed, walked, spoke and behaved, British sailors were as distinct as Catholic priests’. The author ‘uses memoirs, diaries and letters to let seamen and officers speak, as far as possible, for themselves. Usually plain, though sometimes literary and poetic, their words conjure visions for us.’

Drunkenness, actively encouraged with generous daily rations, accounted for the largest number of floggings. During the wars with revolutionary and Napoleonic France, disease and accidents accounted for 84,440 out of 103,660 deaths of naval personnel, while combat accounted for a mere 1,483. ‘In this absorbing and original book, Taylor seeks to reveal Jack Tar as an individual,’ wrote Ben Wilson in the Times. ‘The sailor that emerges in

Sons of the Waves is spirited, assertive, articulate and independent. He is much like the Jack of folklore, familiar from the novels of Patrick O’brian and others... The unpredictability of what lay beyond the horizon, he argues, shaped the sailor’s character, including his traits of insouciance, impulsiveness and improvidence. The strains placed on the human condition gave sailors a code of tolerance and obedience that made coexistence possible.’