1D Constituting and Contesting Authority on the 18th and 19th Century Atlantic

Date:	24 June 2008
Time:	11:30 - 13:00
Location:

Papers

1D-01 Gender, Class and Shipboard Authority on the 18th Century Atlantic Crossing from the Passengers' Perspective

It was with much trepidation that Martha Routh boarded the merchant ship Barclay in July of 1794. Bound for Boston, the Quaker minister was following a divine call to leave her native Ireland, cross the Atlantic, and preach throughout the United States. Her journal recorded a fourteen-week voyage filled with physical and spiritual trials: a leaky vessel, poor provisions, crowding and unavoidable stench, irreligious sailors, menacing privateers. Yet despite the trying conditions, Routh was grateful that “tho we are many in the Cabbin…I think it may be safely said, we are a family of love, and desirous to accommodate one another.” This paper will explore the complex and contradictory interaction of gender and class hierarchies to which Routh delicately referred as “accommodation,” on 18th-century Atlantic voyages.

Much significant scholarship has focused on the movements of people, things, and ideas (including ideas about race, class and gender) around the Atlantic world, but little historical work has critically examined the physical embodiment of movement at sea and its meaning for different historical actors on shipboard. Based on my preliminary study of the travel accounts of fifteen English, Irish, and Anglo-American travelers – eight women and seven men – who crossed the North Atlantic as paying passengers on merchant vessels between 1742 and 1803, I examine the strenuous efforts by these passengers to reconstitute their identities and reassert familiar status hierarchies in the radically decontextualized shipboard environment. Gender and class, like other elements of identity, are constituted and enacted through performance, contextual reference, and location, including movement through space. The passengers found themselves figuratively as well as literally at sea: disoriented and challenged by the unfamiliar social organization and disciplinary regime of seafaring; the restrictiveness, instability, and discomforts of their accommodations; and the alien seascape lacking in reassuring geographic reference points.

The male passengers experienced sea travel as sometimes discomfiting, sometimes liberating, but unusually malleable as they explored much of the vessel at will, sometimes fraternized with the seamen, and were occasionally called into service during emergencies. The women onboard, however, experienced no such flexibility; rather, their experiences were characterized by increased restrictions and deprivations. Men (sailors as well as passengers) repeatedly expressed surprise at the presence of women on shipboard, continually reinforcing the definition of women’s sea travel as dislocation. Drawing on geographer Tim Cresswell’s insight that “bodily movement…is one of the key ways in which power is constituted,” I argue that the ways in which identity and authority were defined and deployed by 18th-century men at sea fundamentally relied on the reification and reinforcement of emergent concepts of sexual difference emphasizing women’s presumed delicacy, sensibility, and dependency in contrast to men’s assumed strength, rationality, and individualism.

Speaker:	Dr Lisa Norling
Organization:	University Of Minnesota
Biography:	Lisa Norling received her Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University in 1992, and has since been on the faculty at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where she is currently Associate Professor of History. She teaches courses in U.S. social history, U.S. and comparative women’s history, local history, women’s studies and U.S. maritime history. She also teaches in the Munson Institute of American Maritime Studies at Mystic Seaport (Connecticut) every summer, and serves as a consultant to the USS Constitution Museum in Boston and other museums in coastal New England. Professor Norling’s most important publications include her two books, the co-edited anthology Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1920, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) and her prizewinning monograph, Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery 1740-1870 (University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

1D-02 The Transatlantic Logic of British Naval Impressment

British naval impressment enjoyed a remarkable career in the early modern Atlantic world. A medieval invention, impressment—or forced naval service—flourished in the Age of Enlightenment. Beginning in the 1690s the Royal Navy expanded impressment from a seasonal, limited operation to a continual practice in wartime that took place across England’s growing Atlantic empire, claiming tens of thousands of sailors who remained in the navy until they did, they escaped, or a war ended—whichever came first.

Previous studies of impressment have centered narrowly on its impact on a national scale, usually focusing on either Britain or the early United States. Scholars have therefore missed how audacious the institution was as a system of redirecting human movement throughout the Atlantic and across the globe. Through impressment the British state attempted nothing less than to harness one its most precious resources, seamen, from the world of economic choice and opportunity presented by overseas commerce and force them into naval service. Impressment was not the state’s only attempt to control its seamen’s work patterns. The seventeenth-century Navigation Acts also attempted to nationalize the world’s waterways by directing English sailors to serve on English merchant ships. But impressment was far more restrictive. Where the Navigation Acts attempted to guide seamen’s free movements in the Atlantic world, press gangs suppressed their freedom of movement altogether.

However, far from the arbitrary system usually depicted in the historiography, impressment functioned according to a clear transatlantic logic. The institution operated with legal and customary variations in England, Scotland, Ireland, the West Indies, Canada, and America. These differences produced unique cultures of impressment in various Atlantic ports and at sea. At the same time, naval service signified a shared experience that helped to knit together disparate maritime communities in the early British empire. Impressment shaped the fundamental decisions Atlantic seafarers made during wartime, including where to live, how to dress, and what work to pursue. A coherent, albeit contested, legal rationale for impressment also worked to define the responsibility of belonging to Britain’s early empire. The monarch held the prerogative by virtue of immemorial usage to demand the service of his or her subjects in times of public necessity. The press gang, therefore, served both tangible and symbolic imperial functions in the eighteenth century.

Speaker:	Dr Denver Brunsman
Organization:	Wayne State University
Biography:	Denver Brunsman is an Assistant Professor of History at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. During the 2007-2008 academic year, he is also a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois. In 2004 he received his PhD from Princeton University. He is currently completing a book published by the University of Virginia Press titled, The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.

1D-03 When I get you to the United States I'll make you pay: Litigious Mariners and American Identity, 1835-1861

American courts at home and consuls abroad saw an explosion in the number of cases, both civil and criminal brought against officers of U.S. vessels after 1835. That year, Congress passed a law devised to clarify what both officers and seafarers could and could not do at sea legally: “An act in amendment of the acts for the punishment of offences against the United States” (23rd Cong., Sess. II, Ch. 40, March 3, 1835). However, rather than reinforcing officers’ authority, the 1835 act opened up an opportunity for regular tars to renegotiate the terms of their employment by using the federal courts and consulates.
A cyclical dialogue from the decks to the courts and back again developed, with seamen and officers becoming increasingly nuanced and savvy in their understanding of their legal status. In turn, they laid their increasingly sophisticated claims for participation in the nation before the courts for adjudication and redress.
This paper examines the aftermath of the 1835 act, charting the ways seafarers used the new statute to press for specific rights in the workplace. More broadly, however, it explores the new American identity that seafarers forged out of this discourse with the federal government. Seamen seized the opportunity to turn to the federal government as the protector and champion. In doing so, seafarers articulated a new national identity and forced the federal government to acknowledge their rights and citizenship.

Speaker:	Dr Matthew Raffety
Organization:	Gonzaga University
Biography:	Matthew Raffety is an Assistant Professor of Early American History at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, where he teaches U.S. and Public History. Prior to joining the Gonzaga faculty, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Dr. Raffety received his doctorate from Columbia University in 2003. His work focuses on seafarers' cases in U.S. federal aourts before 1861, and the ways the interaction between seamen and the courts helped shape American national identiy. His book project, "The Republic Afloat" is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.