-,rJ 1i: \1 I THE FRAGILE MASCULINITY OF JACK TAR: GENDER AND ENGLISH-SPEAKING SAILORS, 1750-1850 A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN HISTORY AUGUST 2005 By Kealani R. Cook Thesis Committee: Louise McReynolds, Chairperson Jerry Bentley Matthew Lauzon © Copyright 2005 By iii Kealani Robinson Cook Abstract This thesis analyses how English-speaking sailors constructed masculinity during the period between 1750 and 1850. Building off of Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical work on gender, the paper theorizes that sailors, as a community and as individuals, based their conceptions of masculinity on their ability to respond to domination through "physical masculinity." This type of masculinity is largely based on the ability to project and defend against interpersonal violence, valuing strength, aggression, and "toughness" the ability and proclivity to withstand pain and discomfort in the effort to withstand domination. This thesis will explore why such a masculinity took hold among sailors, with an emphasis on their place in society and the homo-social nature of their world. Furthermore, this thesis will examine how such masculinity was understood and interpreted by landsmen as reflected in literature, pictorials, and other sources. Finally this thesis will show that the physical masculinity of sailors further entrenched seamen in a cycle of domination, both through the self-destructive behaviors they undertook in order to portray a masculine persona, and through landsmen's cultural interpretations of their masculinity that portrayed them as unsuitable for public life. iv Table ofContents Abstract iv Table Of Contents v Introduction: 1 Gender Confusion 4 Sailor History , 9 The Work at Hand , , 24 Chapter 1. Boundaries 29 Room of Their Own.................................................................... 33 If it Looks Like a Sailor and Quacks Like a Sailor , 45 Crossing the Lines of Race, Nationality and Class 49 Conclusion 59 Chapter 2. Cowards in Only One Sense 61 Why Physical Masculinity? 64 Violence 72 Tough Act 75 Sex and Money 86 Work, Gender and Race , 92 Conclusion "An Overstrained Sense of Manliness" 97 Chapter 3. Jack and the Lubbers 100 Jack Tar's Body 103 Jack the Patriot 110 Casanova Jack 115 Jack the Martyr 122 Gentleman Jack 127 Conclusion: Jack Runnymede 133 Chapter 4. A Failure of Masculinity 136 Rum, Silver, and Sailor's Women 139 Impressment and the Law 149 African-American Sailors 157 Conclusion: Sailors' Never Read Connell 171 Conclusion: A Successful Masculinity 161 The Death of John Nicol 168 Bibliography 170 v - Introduction- In the navy, you can sail the seven seas, In the navy, you can put your mind at ease, In the navy, come on now people make a stand, In the navy, can't you see we need a hand? In the navy, come protect the motherland, In the navy, come on andjoin yourfellow man, In the navy, come on people make a stand, In the navy, in the navy! -"In the Navy," Performed by The Village People When John Nicol died in 1824, there were only two things he wanted people to remember him as, a sailor and a man of pride. In 1769, when Nicol was fourteen, two incidents occurred that would change the course of his life. His father, a cooper by trade, had obtained work in London and took his young son with him on the sea voyage from Edinburgh. The first incident occurred on the trip down the coast, when an immense storm hit the Yorkshire coast, wrecking, by Nicol's recollection, some thirty merchant vessels. In 1822, when he was dictating his life story to printer/author John Howell, Nicol recalled that though "All the passengers were sea-sick; I never was." Whether the strength of the storm was an accurate memory or the product of an old sailor's artistic license will never be known, but the event left an obvious impression on Nicol. During the storm, he decided once and for all to become a sailor, a decision influenced by his youthful love of Robinson Crusoe and the excitement of the storm. The second incident involved a fight in London, when an English boy tried to bully Nicol out of a dead monkey he found floating in the Thames. Nicol swam into the 1 river to retrieve the monkey, while the English boy, who was unable to swim, waited by the shore for Nicol to return. When Nicol returned, the other boy challenged him to a fight with the monkey as a prize. What a dead monkey was doing floating in the Thames is, unfortunately lost to history, as was the intent of Nicol or his southern nemesis upon obtaining this waterlogged prize. Nicol did record who the victor in this monkey business was, and, of course, it was a hard-won victory for the Scotsman. Upon returning home, his father beat him for getting into a fight, but Nicol felt he simply had no other options, for he "was not of a temper to be easily wronged." No other specific events are recorded about Nicol's life until he skipped out on a comfortable career as a cooper and, against his father's wishes, joined the Royal Navy. The only possible exception was the death of his mother, and even this was mentioned in passing. Only these two incidents were deemed worthy of any detail in his memoir, and as such they provide an insight into how Nicol saw himself. He envisioned himself as a sailor and a man, though in his mind the two were one and the same. From this early account, it would seem that Nicol's masculinity was based on several intertwined attributes. Foremost was his physical strength, which gave him the ability to swim out into the Thames, retrieve the monkey, and violently reject attempts to dominate him. Second was his "pluck" or "toughness," which allowed him to face both the storm and his would-be oppressor bravely and with little mind toward his own safety. Third was Nicol's lack of obedience toward his father, who Nicol remembers as a "strict parent," who he "dared not disobey." This seemingly contradictory passage is actually an extension of the toughness mentioned above, a willingness to cut away the patriarchal ties that bound him to a life of obedience to his 2 father, the government, the church, and to any other individual deemed higher than him within British societies social, economic, and cultural order. 1 In order to distinguish it from other conceptions of male gender, this masculinity will be categorized as "physical masculinity," since it is largely based on the individual's ability and proclivity to project, defend against and withstand physical violence. This physical masculinity has had a long association with sailors, dating back at least to the time of Chaucer and his "hardy" mariner in The Canterbury Tales. Because of the deep historical roots that the concept of sailors' masculinity has in the European and American psyche, it makes a perfect subject for an exploration of how this particular brand of masculinity functions, its role in society and the effects of this conception of masculinity on those associated with it. In this thesis it will be shown that British and American sailors adopted an identity based largely on physical masculinity as a response to their low status on land and oppression at the hands of the government and employers. In doing so, they attempted to make use of symbolic ties between masculinity and dominance to form a psychological and cultural defense mechanism against their near absolute domination by elites on land and at sea. It will explore how sailors projected the imagery of this masculinity and how it was received and interpreted by landsmen. Special attention will be paid to the somewhat chimerical nature of masculinity and the way that it was and is more of a display than a reality, that masculinity was simply a fa<;ade put up in an attempt to deal with seamen's forced submission to the upper echelons of society. The somewhat shallow and artificial nature of sailors' masculinity, indeed of all gender roles, 1 John Nicol, The Life and Adventures ofJohn Nicol, Mariner (London: Cassell & Company Ltd. 1937), 36-38. 3 resulted in a fragile masculinity whose illusion was constantly at risk of being ruined by sailors' continual power. Furthermore, sailors' dependence on physical masculinity only perpetuated their own domination, both through direct effects on their health and economic well-being, as well as indirectly through landsmen's exploitations of the sailors' masculine identity. Gender Confusion A number of previous works, both in the field of gender studies and maritime history, have been used to form the theoretical and historiographic foundation of this thesis. Of greatest influence has been the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's Masculine Domination, a work that applied Bourdieu's theories on societal and cultural capital to the field of gender studies. These types of capital, which were largely ignored by historians and other academics before the last twenty years, are presented as important counterparts to economic capital in the maintenance of the hierarchies found in most societies. In Masculine Domination, Bourdieu claims that all societies, but particularly those based in the Mediterranean world, are based on the domination of women through literal and symbolic violence. Masculinity is seen as the signifier of domination; in other words, to be masculine is seen as to be dominant, while to be feminine is seen as being submissive. All hierarchies within society are based on this duality and are constructed in such a way as to always privilege the masculine over the feminine.