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The image of the ordinary seaman in the 18th century
Geoff Quilley, Curator of Maritime Art, National Maritime Museum Introduction
The archetype of the 18th-century sailor is that of a figure veering between potential extremes of patriotism and treachery, obedience and subversiveness, as was acutely observed in an experienced mariner's advice to a new recruit: 'There is no justice or injustice on board ship, my lad. There are only two things: duty and mutiny – mind that. All that you are ordered to do is duty. All that you refuse to do is mutiny' (Weibust 1969 p.372; Rediker 1987 p.211). It is the unstable character of this binary construction of his identity in visual imagery that I examine in this essay. The tar's representation was not confined to graphic, painted or sculpted images, and, while I concentrate on prints and paintings, the ways in which they responded to other forms of culture, above all theatrical performance, is fundamental to understanding the sailor's conflictual image. Essential to this understanding also is the awareness that his principal occupation, that of active labourer, is very rarely displayed in the picturing of the tar. This carries its own ideological weight, and functions importantly as another, though negative, context in the determination of the aesthetic construction of the sailor, as a form of representational absence, which has a particular salience for the sailor's distinctive social circumstances and status. Jack Tar and representational absenceThe great paradox of the sailor's social identity was that, in his professional capacity as a productive labourer, he was of necessity removed from society and sent out to sea. In this sense, his cultural identity was located at some level in the imaginary. There was a certain incommensurability about the sailor, which necessitated his exclusion from society in order to be accommodated within it: 'Superficially familiar, the seaman remained to his contemporaries profoundly strange. They knew him only on land, out of his element.' (Rodger 1988 p.15) This 'familiar strangeness' had two major consequences. First, it provoked an ideological distancing in the social attitude to seamen, typified by Daniel Defoe's early 18th-century description of their antisocial nature:
Second, the sailor's 'foreignness' was often the actuality. The lower deck community was transnational, multilingual and ethnically heterogeneous, though this is rarely, if ever, acknowledged in visual imagery. Hence his interiorization – that is, in Foucault's terms, the function of reducing his otherness – relied heavily on representation: he was 'shut away' in the pervasive stereotypes popularized in theatre, novels and images. This was particularly true of the theatre. Nautical plays, ballads, and afterpieces were an increasingly spectacular part of the repertoire during the late 18th century, for which sailors ashore comprised a distinctive and vocal audience. The institution of the theatre involved the seagoing spectators in a joint social performance with their stage counterparts of mutually self-validating representation, in a space which mimicked the social structures and spaces of the ship (Russell 1995 pp.95–115). Similarly, shipboard hierarchy was reproduced pictorially. The numerous maritime portraits by Reynolds, Hoppner, Beechey and others are, needless to say, all of officers. Moreover, as has been observed repeatedly in histories of 18th-century British art, Reynolds' 1753 portrait of Augustus Keppel (fig. 1 The aesthetic reproduction of social hierarchy in portraiture has a more acute political significance in the maritime context. Marcus Rediker has identified two fundamental confrontations in seafaring culture: that between man and the natural forces of the sea, and
Though contemporary notices of Reynolds portrait of Keppel related it to the recent shipwreck of the Maidstone, of which Keppel had been in command, the picture represents him as a singular masculine, heroic figure, not the leader of a community of seamen, each labouring to bring the ship safe to port. There is no indication of the fate of the crew, and instead all the visual rhetoric evokes Rediker's first confrontation, between man and sea, eclipsing that between man and man. Keppel is cast as a modern Apollo (his pose being directly based on the Apollo Belvedere) of superhuman stature (note the picture's eye level), and implicitly detached from the mundane squalor of the lower deck. Unsurprisingly, there are no such depictions at the same period of the common tar. The only rare approximations occur in popular prints (for example, The British Hercules, 1737). But in this image the sailor's Herculean prowess is redundant: he is ashore, 'awaiting orders'. Largely, the sailor tends to remain as invisible in painting as he does in voyage narratives, where his presence is felt generally only insofar as it is disruptive. There is, therefore, little or no self-generated aesthetic representation of the ordinary seaman in the 18th century. In this respect he is similar to the other land-based labouring classes, depicted in numerous contemporary landscapes and conversation pieces: labour does not represent itself aesthetically, but is represented. But there is an important distinction between the seaman and other types of labourer here. While field-workers and agricultural labourers are frequently shown as just that – working in the fields – in their proper place within the grand overall scheme of agrarian economy (consider, for example George Stubbs' depictions of reapers and haymakers), the sailor, prior to the early decades of the 19th century, is almost never shown performing his labour at sea. Instead, the seamen is typically shown on land and at leisure, in pursuit of (physical) pleasure, though, implicitly, without the independent means or refinement of mind to put such leisure to public benefit, for instance by cultivating taste through a knowledge of the arts. Instead, the seaman's leisure is typically (and comically) associated with the lowest forms of sensual gratification, as in Hayman's The Wapping Landlady (1743), itself an image produced for that emporium of desire and pleasure, Vauxhall Gardens. Not only did ordinary seamen not represent themselves, they were represented, in general, by and for a society which regarded them alternately with blind admiration and profound suspicion. Stereotypes of the tarIn his ideal evocation, apparent particularly at times of war, the sailor was the 'pillar of the nation' and a national hero (The British Hercules, 1737). By contrast, his more vulgar stereotype was that of an over-sexed drunkard, blasphemer, reveller and brawler (Hogarth, Election: Chairing the Member, circa 1754). This conforms more closely perhaps with his documented historical persona. Seamen were notoriously irreligious, anti-authoritarian, filthy-tongued, drunken, riotous and propertyless (Rediker 1987). This proletarian character of the tar has been related to his role as labourer in an increasingly international and rationalized 18th-century shipping world, in which the total social environment of the ship may be seen as a microcosm of early capitalism (Linebaugh and Rediker 2001). Here, the seaman's bodily labour, epitomized by his tools, 'but a pair of good Hands, and a Stout Heart' (Slush 1709, p.16), became a commodity to be bought and sold in the same manner as the cargo it loaded: transferable between ships and paid for in cash or by credit, it was a unit in the universalizing system of political economy. In economic terms, the character of the seaman was reducible to a 'pair of good Hands', entailing the disappearance of the human being into a unit of labour, a disappearance that conforms with the popular conception of the jolly Jack Tar. The common idea, first given literary currency by Garrick during the Seven Years' War (1756–63), of the sailor as a 'heart of oak', does not simply envisage him as a figure seamlessly integrated into the organization and purpose of the ship, but notionally transforms his very body, the supposed seat of the soul, into the material of the ship. Of course the metaphor operates on a complex level, the oak being a symbol of the nation as well as the fabric of ship-building. This only compounds it further, that the identity of the sailor, in this jingoistic image of him, as a loyal servant of the state, is one in which he is both figuratively and symbolically subsumed into the composition of the ship. The 'heart of oak' metaphor therefore forms a bridge between the functional role of the seaman and his symbolic persona as an icon of the blessed maritime nation, an icon which, as shown in St George for England (1781), could, at a popular level, develop into secular canonization. Furthermore, in this remarkable image the stereotype of the tar as national icon is reinforced by his positive contrast with pejorative representations of other national saints, particularly St Denis of France, thus annexing the identity of the tar to the wider articulation of English national identity in the 18th century through recourse to a virulent francophobia (Colley, Wilson, Newman). In the same series of prints are highly derogatory images of not just St Denis, but also St Andrew, St David and St Patrick. Though published in 1781, the prints clearly refer to a series of works exhibited in 1761 at the Society of Sign-Painters exhibition, at the victorious height of the Seven Years' War, and were presumably re-issued 20 years later as a patriotic comment on the progress of the American Revolutionary War. The 'heart of oak' metaphor, therefore, replaces the gap created by the commodification of the seaman within political economy, with the populist patriotic vision of the tough, rollicking, hard-drinking, womanizing, but unfailingly honest Jack Tar, which became so prevalent in literature, drama, songs and the visual arts during the second half of the 18th century. At a popular level this stereotype was frequently articulated not only by jingoistic antigallicanism and chauvinistic nationalism, but also through an internal class opposition to an effete, not to say effeminate, aristocracy and officer class, whereby the tar was cast as a John Bull figure, embodying the virtues of plain-dealing Englishness, and was thus elided with the wider politics of popular patriotism, conceived in terms of an opposition between the honest, hard-working 'middling sort' and a rarefied, dandy-ish patriciate. In The Infernal Sloop Chasing the Good Ship Britannia, a straightforward allegory of the American crisis, in which the disabled ship-of-state Britannia is under fire from hell's own vessel, it is the crew that labour manfully to tow the ship to port and safety. The fictional tarThe stereotype of the tar as national symbol is substantially mediated by his representation in plays and novels, in which his character is overwhelmingly distinguished by a constant, and usually comic, application of vernacular nautical language to every situation in which he finds himself. Tom Bowling and Captain Crowe in Tobias Smollett's Roderick Random and Sir Launcelot Greaves respectively, are two of numerous examples. But the comic effect achieved by the sailor's application of his vernacular even in the most inappropriate circumstances also extrapolates the basic point of the 'heart of oak' metaphor. He is presented as incapable of adjusting his personality to the norms of landed society, which, particularly in the etiquette of courtship, he adapts to a maritime analogy. So his mythical free spirit is typically concentrated on his attitudes to love and marriage, which are snares by which he should avoid being 'made prize'. On the other hand, unconditional female beauty is conventionally compared to the form of a ship. The plain-dealing Durzo, for example, in Ravenscroft's Restoration comedy The Canterbury Guests, sees three young ladies as 'Three very snug frigates, well Rigg'd; twere pity too but they were as well Mann'd. . . . Why, a woman's the finest thing I ever saw, except a Cannon Mounted, and a Ship under Sail'. It is worth noting the ironies here. On the one hand, the sailor's roving spirit and amorous nature are expressed as an antipathy to the 'enslavement' of marriage. On the other, sexual liberty and the freedom of casual sex, for which the sailor was notorious, is expressed by a metaphorical interchange between the female body and the ship, an interchange that was conventional in visual representation also. An English Man of War Taking a French Privateer, one of numerous similar prints published by Carington Bowles in the 1770s and 1780s, plays upon this translation of sexuality and courtship into a maritime analogy, but also registers an anxiety at its 'otherness', in acknowledging the exoticism of nautical language, and in associating the tar with the transgressive (im)morality of prostitution. In the mythological construction of the sailor, therefore, the value of liberty, by being transposed into the localized politics of sexual relations, becomes at one remove (and paradoxically) associated with the ship, a 'total institution', which was rigidly authoritarian. It is ironic, therefore, that the sailor's reputed sexual appetite, which could in one sense be understood as the ultimate assertion of his bodily physicality, in contrast to its effacement into a commodity of labour, is routinely constructed within the moneyed exchange of prostitution. Hayman's The Wapping Landlady illustrates the proverbial notion that the sailor, like the fool, is soon parted from his money. Just come ashore, Jack drinks, dances and carouses in the quayside tavern, while the landlady in the background chalks up his already sizeable tally. The fact that the verb 'to wap' meant 'to copulate, to beat' makes it clear to what lengths she will go to separate the tar from his hard-earned wages (Grose 1811). She is, presumably, a 'wapping landlady' who lives and works in Wapping, a district notorious for theft and prostitution. Such a translation of the sailor's most corporeal presence into a form of commodity exchange dominates the ordinary seaman's literary and artistic amorous liaisons. The sailor's returnThe ambiguous morality of the tar's sexuality surfaces in one of the most prevalent and consistent iconographies relating to the common sailor in the 18th century, that of 'the sailor's return'. This was the subject not just of ballads and songs, frequently performed in the theatre, but was also reproduced in a wide variety of pictorial forms, from catch-penny prints and transfer-printed pottery to oil paintings for exhibition, such as Francis Wheatley's version (fig. 2 Mosley's version of the 1750s (fig. 3 The accompanying verse clarifies whatever might be obscure in the image. On the one hand Jack recognizes and is in turn recognized by his Molly, who, in her surprise, 'then drops the brittle Goods she sells for Bread', which happen to be eggs. One of these breaks on the ground, a symbolic event which emphasizes, along with her status as a street-seller, that she is unlikely to have awaited Jack's return uncomforted, broken eggs being a familiar symbol for loss of virtue (see, for example, Greuze, Les Oeufs Casses, 1767). Meanwhile her mother, characterized by broad shoulders and heavy, rough features, 'more sagacious opes The wealthy Chest, on which she plac'd her hopes, And for the Richest Prizes careful Gropes.' The honest tar's genteel pretensions are contrasted with figures of rapacity and promiscuity, heightened by the similarity of the aged, ugly mother to the traditional type of the procuress in Dutch genre painting, or closer to home the madam who picks up the innocent country girl in plate one of Hogarth's The Harlot's Progress. On the other hand, interrupting the amorous mutual recognition of Jack and Molly, his 'Messmate Ned . . . points where flows the Bowl & Gen'rous Red', like a nautical inversion of the traditional figure of Virtue. The building he indicates in the background recalls the brothel in The March to Finchley, and, to judge from the activities taking place inside and out, it clearly serves the same purpose. The verse again leaves no room for doubt:
This refers to the top right corner where a woman vomits out of the window over the figures below. The visual juxtaposition of the alehouse's whoring and drinking with the mother rummaging through Jack's chest for money reinforces the central axis of currency exchange within this culture of consumption, shown here in uncontrolled excess, and within which the seaman was a pivotal figure. The contrasting sides of consumption and the cash economy meet in his figure, fitting to the aesthetic and cultural contrast of his base and heroic personality. The resulting tensions are well illustrated here. Behind Jack is the open sea, the ship at anchor, and on the shore the cask and bale, all standard constituents of an emblem for maritime commerce. Jack, dressed in his low-class seaman's rig, but in a theatrical attitude, is placed between the excesses of commercial consumption, lust, avarice and boozing, which the seaman was supposed to personify; and on the left, the extensive plan of commerce which constituted the notional object of his labour and of his consumption. There is an uneasy aesthetic compromise between nobility and crudity, between consumption and licentiousness, a duality which Bernard Mandeville, in his notorious early 18th-century political treatise The Fable of the Bees, recognized as central to any commercial system, one symptom of which he identified as sailors' use of brothels:
The implication here is that Jack's only proper territorial habitat is the environment of the quayside tavern and brothel. The mutual recognition between Jack and Molly marks the social confinement of his potential for the passions of love, sensibility and commerce itself. The only virtuous solution to the conundrum for the versifier is to take Jack back to sea, the realm of the imaginary, and elide him once more with the mechanics and utility of the ship by finding in his profligacy a somehow admirable disdain for wealth:
A more conventionally genteel – though no less problematic – image of the tar in this iconography is given by William Redmore Bigg's The Sailor Boy's Return from a Prosperous Voyage. It and a companion piece, the earlier A Shipwreck'd Sailor Boy telling his Story at a Cottage Door, were both engraved, suggestive of the popularity and marketability of this conventional subject; and it is the mezzotints by Thomas Gaugain of 1791 and 1792 respectively which I shall dwell on here. The pair of images represents contrasting sentimental narratives of the fortunes of the sea, a visual opposition conventional at least since Hogarth's Gin Lane and Beer Street, and more recently, George Morland's The Comforts of Industry played against The Miseries of Idleness. Yet, it is at once noticeable that the fortunes are economic, mercantile ones: the returning sailor boy's prosperity is represented by cloth and hard currency, while the shipwrecked sailor's catastrophe has stripped him of all assets to reduce him to the status of itinerant beggar, seeking to elicit the sympathy and charity of the cottagers, to whom he is, in contrast to his successful counterpart, a stranger. Both images, far from giving a view of the sailor in his element, show him as distant from it as possible: on the one hand returned to the bosom of his family in idyllic rusticity; on the other relocated very obviously within the twilit, wooded environment of Gainsborough's cottage door pictures, which Bigg is clearly imitating. Only the boy's gesture to the distant cliffs alerts us to his identity. Likewise, the only sign of the prosperous sailor's vocation appears to be his uniform. In the light of the issue of the sailor's invisibility, it is striking that he is made visible here by reclaiming him for the land in an extreme form; by placing him within the aesthetic familiarity of a genre scene set in Georgic countryside. The pictorial aesthetic thereby serves to extract the sailor from the unpredictable and ideologically unstable realm of the imaginary, away from the cultural negativity of the sea, and reintegrate him within the fixity of the established norms of landed society. Here the familiar values are those of industry and property (denoted by the house, chairs and spinning wheel, which in turn appeals to another nostalgically-valued tradition, that of the cottage labourer and artisan, who, unlike the waged seaman, possesses the tools of her/his trade), and of the Georgic aesthetic itself. This contrasts pointedly with the culturally-stripped and thereby unfixed identity of the shipwrecked sailor, who refers to himself and his story by gesturing away from the secure, familiar values of the cottage (noticeably similar, of course, to that in the companion picture) and towards the uncontained otherness of the sea, and all that it connotes. Importantly, in The Sailor Boy's Return the amorous licentiousness of the sailor is transformed, via an overt symbolic reference to the three ages of woman, into a properly decorous regard for the opposite sex, echoing the tar's relationship of filial devotion to Britannia. In the case of the young lady, presumably his sweetheart, who stares out at the viewer, she is quite literally the 'fairer' sex. Thus he is simultaneously dutiful son and devoted lover. The relocation of the sailor, and the concomitant fusion of the ideas of land and sea, is echoed elsewhere in the picture, notably in the embrace of the humble cot by the spreading branches of the oak tree, and in the sub-narrative 'conversation' between the child's two birds. The native chaffinch (as it appears from the original painting in Bournemouth) held by the child engages the exotic parrot so thoroughly that the latter (no doubt a gift from the sailor), unless it has been nailed to the chair on which it is perched, displays no inclination to fly away, suggesting the episode as a parable for the relationship of Britain to its transoceanic empire, but more pointedly a commentary on the relation of the roving tar to his home. The uncertain identity of the tar represented in Mosley's The Sailor's Return is, however, echoed in Bigg's images in the narrative opposition between them, produced through semantic closure and non-closure. The formal plenitude of The Sailor Boy's Return points up the uncertainty of the outcome in the companion piece, where the shipwrecked sailor is pictured in the act of his own narration, but without having yet gained acceptance into the home to which he appeals. Pivoted equally between the cottage and the distant shipwreck, he remains both at sea and at home, half-entered and half-turned away. The feminization of the tarBigg's images oscillate between two registers, between homely and unhomely, closure and openness, and confer upon the sailor problematically polarized and unstable identities. The instability is reinforced by the feminization of the scenes, dominated by women, and of the sailor's appearance within them. In the Sailor Boy's Return, his hat doubles as a halo, which complements his posture echoing the figure of the blessing Christ. His hands, however, are curiously slender and pale, and his face is preternaturally youthful and delicate in complexion. His gentle features and his envelopment by the signs of feminine domesticity contradict the nature of the work by which he is presumed to have earned his money. It points to the theatricality of the scene discernible in the staged grouping and backdrop, and suggests how closely such pictures as this reciprocate and are mediated by the stage representation of the tar, rather than offering a redaction of some perceived reality of sailors' circumstances. The theatricality operates on an internal pictorial level also, in the painting's compositional similarity to depictions of stage productions, such as Zoffany's 'Garrick . . . in The Farmer's Return'(1762). And it invites comparison with popular plays such as the similarly-titled Thomas and Sally; or, The Sailor's Return, which ran regularly from its opening in 1760 to the end of the century, and no doubt beyond, or A Pill for the Doctor (1790), which tells the story of sailor Ben 'coming back with "six hats full of money" just in time to save his love Polly from being forced by her parents to marry rich Dr. Lotion, 63 years old.' More specifically, Bigg's feminization of the sailor parallels the common theatrical practice of women playing the part of the tar. As Gillian Russell states:
Bigg's portrayal of a theatrical, feminized tar doubly removes him from his actual political circumstances as a maritime labourer, a removal even further enforced by the transformation of his appearance from the rough, scarred and weather-beaten visage with its 'deep . . . hue of tarpaulin' which was the inevitable consequence of life at sea (Rediker 1987 pp.11–12). It therefore misrepresents the tar in virtually every respect, but self-reflexively points to its own aesthetic dilemma, induced by the sailor's unfixed social status, in the referral of his (mis)representation to an already ambiguous theatrical mediation. The revolutionary tarIn the 1790s, in the wake of the French Revolution and the ensuing war with France, the tar's visual representation changed markedly, his image itself becoming a site of contestation between his stereotypes of proletarian subversive, brutish lower class labourer (both highly problematic and dangerous identities given recent events across the Channel), and loyal 'heart of oak'. During this period he becomes much more visible in maritime pictorial representations, particularly of battle scenes (Loutherbourg, The Battle of the First of June, 1794 (fig. 4 This conforms with the re-estimation of the tar in other areas of popular consciousness, paralleled by the concomitant aesthetic elevation of the maritime generally that was most conspicuous in the monuments to naval heroes erected in St Paul's and Westminster after 1798. J. S. Clarke's thanksgiving sermon for naval victories of 19 December, 1797, is explicit. While victory at Camperdown, he asserts, was ultimately due to national faith in God, it was also brought about by the bravery of ordinary seamen. This entailed a revision of the conventional view of the common tar, highlighting his heroic instead of his dissolute nature:
A similar idealization of naval action also occurs in the sublime, deluge-like effects of de Loutherbourg's The Battle of Camperdown |
