Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail

by Stephen Taylor Yale, 416 pages, £20

In an age when few working-class men travelled outside their home county, deep-water sailors traversed the globe, encountering new and strange worlds, exotic flora and fauna, and endless opportunities for a ‘run ashore’ to the local bars, brothels and markets at the end of a voyage.

Most of these men left no written record of their experience, but they generated a rich seam of evidence in muster books, medical journals, punishment records, logbooks and official reports. Individuals can be traced across time and space, and those that did commit their thoughts to paper can be cross-examined, to make sure they really were at the great events of history.

The most literate, or those who found someone willing to help them tell their stories in later life, were more reflective and curious about their world than old stereotypes would suggest. Some could conjure a line of poetry to capture their experiences. They accepted the cruel necessity of naval service in wartime, and found solace in dreams of homes they might never return to.

In Sons of the Waves, Stephen Taylor has assembled a rich haul of seafarer’s words, linking published texts, archives and new discoveries that illuminate the age of British naval glory, from Lord Anson’s circumnavigation in the 1740s to the downfall of Napoleon. Working these words into the wider story of naval history provides a finely drawn context of shipboard life, voyaging, shipwreck, disease and combat.

These were men with unique skills – they could work aloft handling sails in a gale, mend ropes and sails, steer the ship, and perform all the specialist tasks that separated the seafarer from the landlubber, itself a seaman’s term of abuse. Sailors were rated and paid on ability, pure and simple. Men unable to work aloft were rated landsmen, and paid less.

Although many of them served in the Royal Navy during wartime, that was not an exclusive employment. In peacetime, skilled men joined the ships of the East India Company, sailing to China. Others worked on the convict transportation ships that began the colonisation of Australia, manned the slave ships of Atlantic trade, and later the anti-slavery patrols that stamped out the vile business. Sailors were free agents until war broke out, when the monarch had a right to their services. The sailors in British service

In telling their stories, these sailors were more curious, literate and TGʚGEVKXG VJCP UVGTGQV[RGU would suggest came from many countries: Americans, former slaves, and skilled men from across Europe and Asia were equally at home in ships where race, religion and even language mattered far less than skill.

Many of these men were drawn to the sea by Britain’s dynamic maritime culture, in which Crusoe and Blackbeard rubbed shoulders with Drake, and ultimately Nelson, whose coxswain provided an intimate picture of the hero in action and in repose. Every seafarer’s experience adds something to the whole, enlarging our understanding of these uncommon Britons.

Taylor’s research, skilful exposition, and elegant integration of text, archive and image has produced a compelling account of the men who made modern Britain, one that supplants all those that has gone before. Essential reading for sailors of the open ocean and the armchair.

Andrew Lambert is professor of naval history at King’s College London