Mariner’s Art in International Perspective

Although we think of our own age as the one of “globalization,” in fact, as historians are now demonstrating, early Americans were connected with the Atlantic world as well as with global trade and information networks in a variety of ways. The “global turn” in early American studies has worn down the barriers that formerly existed between the history of the U.S. and the rest of the world. As an interpretive model for historians and art historians, globalization remains controversial. In the case of art history, while many scholars want to recognize the international exchange of objects and aesthetic concepts in the past—themes often overlooked in the earlier literature—many also remain skeptical of the applicability of a twentieth-century notion to the understanding of works from the past.

Folk art studies have been largely impervious to the advent of the Atlantic and the global as methodological frameworks, probably because the association between folk art and American national identity has been so strong since the moment that folk art was “discovered” in the early twentieth century. Historians Eugene W. Metcalf Jr. and Claudine Weatherford have written of Holger Cahill, who promoted folk art as early as the 1920s, that “self-conscious chauvinism expressed itself boldly in […his] definition of American folk art. And there is some/much truth to this. Said by Cahill to give ‘a living quality to the story of American beginnings,’ folk art was glorified as representative of an indigenous artistic heritage of a great democratic nation.” The connections Cahill drew between folk art and national identity typified scholarship and criticism in the field from its infancy onward: The first gift in 1962 to the collection of the fledgling institution that would eventually become the American Folk Art Museum in New York City was, tellingly, a gate in the form of an American flag.

Such objects suggest the complex cultural and political identifications of folk art producers. They undoubtedly drew on local, vernacular traditions, but that did not preclude their familiarity with national imagery which would in turn imply that they possessed some sense of belonging to the nation. The affiliations of folk artists moved even further outward, however, from their local communities to the broader world in which they lived and worked. The objects they made must thus be interpreted in relation to a continuum of identifications that range from the local to the global. Seen in this light, the works themselves, as well as their makers, take on a new complexity.

Take the work of sailors, who were among the most prolific makers of folk art—from scrimshaw to decorated trunks to ditty bags. A good (but late) example of the latter is a sea bag decorated by Maine native and seaman Jack Gardner during a voyage around the world in 1920-21. Now in the collection of the Maine Maritime Museum, it depicts people, places, and monuments that Gardner encountered during his time abroad. In general, the objects sailors produced or decorated evidence the long idle hours they spent on lengthy sea voyages. At the same time, those trips took them around the world and put them in contact with the cultures of Europe and Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Many seem to have possessed the “unsettled subjectivity” that literary critic Patricia Fumerton ascribes to early modern seafarers and other workers who lived their lives without maintaining strong ties to family and friends. Being “unsettled” meant that these folk artists were cut off from their families, friends and other associates at home during long stretches of time at sea, yet they formed bonds with shipmates, and were also introduced to people around the world whom they would otherwise never have known. Thus, even if seamen were isolated from their communities of origin, and sometimes only loosely integrated into port life, they nonetheless profited from an exposure to foreign cultures that more rooted people did not enjoy. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even in more recent times, international trade by sea simultaneously created conditions of intense isolation and exhilarating social interaction.

 

The effects of this kind of global exposure on folk art becomes clear when we look at a small selection of works included in the Maine Folk Art Trail, a series of exhibitions held in ten Maine museums in 2008. Because the state was economically dependent on maritime trade both before and after its political separation in 1820 from Massachusetts (of which it had been a “District”), and because folk art associated with seafaring is prevalent as well as exemplary of global connections, the Maine-related objects provide useful examples. The objects produced by two men—the lighthouse keeper Eliphalet Grover (1778-1855) and his son Samuel Grover (1816-1898)—offer a point of departure. The Grovers are credited with having made several objects now in the collection of the Museums of Old York in York, Maine, including a violin (1821) and a wooden box (ca. 1832) by Eliphalet and a child’s violin (1834) by Samuel. Their biographies and the objects they fashioned reveal the dynamic relationship between social isolation and integration that characterized globalized seafaring life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Although he was not a mariner himself, Eliphalet Grover’s job was a direct outgrowth of maritime commerce and it entailed some of the same hardships and frustrations seamen faced. After the American Revolution, both maritime trade and related industries like ship-building expanded in Maine, although trade disruptions were caused by the Embargo Act of 1807 and the War of 1812. During the thirteen years prior to the embargo, for instance, shipping registered in the District of Maine nearly tripled, from 50,000 tons to 148,000 tons. Coastal trade depended upon the ability of vessels to avoid the hazards of Maine’s jagged coastline. One such hazard was Boon Island, located nine miles off of York Beach in the open waters of the Gulf of Maine. At its widest it is about a third of a mile, although to call it an “island” is perhaps to overstate the case: It is a rock outcropping only fourteen feet above sea level and can support no vegetation. The wife of one twentieth-century lighthouse keeper recalled that “there was not a blade of grass or a weed on the island.” In the eighteenth century, coastal vessels had wrecked on Boon Island numerous times and the first beacon was installed there, at a time of increasing maritime activity, in 1799. It was forty feet in height and its construction was funded through the office of Benjamin Lincoln, the Boston Customs Inspector. During the first half of the nineteenth century, four different towers were swept away by the sea. On May 31, 1831, Eliphalet Grover noted the laying of the first stone for a new lighthouse on Boon Island, but despite its construction of masonry, it was carried away some time after its completion in July of the same year. The granite tower built in 1852, however, was substantial enough to withstand punishing surf and still stands. During the period that the Grover family was on Boon Island, the lighthouse was seventy feet tall and a residence was located adjacent to it, although in the latter part of his tenure they also had a house on the mainland.

Eliphalet Grover, who became the Boon Island lighthouse keeper in 1816, was born in 1778. With his wife, Susanna (1780-1858), he had three children, one of whom was Samuel, born the year his father received his appointment. Eliphalet had a long career as keeper, which lasted until 1839 when he was dismissed for somewhat mysterious reasons, probably because such positions had become by then the objects of political patronage. A variety of alleged infractions, including selling portions of the whale oil shipments that were supposed to keep the light burning, had been made against the lighthouse keeper to justify his dismissal, but he denied them. Grover soon became keeper of Whaleback Lighthouse in nearby Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which seems to suggest that his behavior on Boon Island had not been criminal. Samuel apparently moved after his father’s dismissal, if not earlier, to North Berwick and eventually married Olive Jane Grant (c. 1837-1872) of Acton, Maine.

 

The objects the Grovers made reflect their most immediate surroundings, the harsh, isolated island on which they spent much of their lives, as well as their identification with the nation and their connections to a global economy. The men’s offshore lives were expressed in the objects they made: small, portable pieces, fashioned from the meager materials at their disposal. Although the family went back and forth from Boon Island to the mainland, inscriptions on the objects the Grovers crafted underscored the paradoxical fact of their production on such a tiny island with so few natural resources from which to make anything. The inscription on the violin made by the elder Grover reads, “Made on Boon Island by Capt. Eliphalet Grover 1821” and the smaller violin made by his son (who likely learned instrument-making from his father) is labeled on the interior “Made by Samuel Grover Boon Island, Maine, 1834.” The extremely limited physical space the Grovers had available to them on Boon Island meant that they had to express their creativity on a very small scale. They even made use of scrap materials available on the island: Eliphalet Grover recorded in his log that in a bad storm, the wind would tear the shingles off of the buildings on Boon Island, so it is not surprising he had a good supply on hand to repair the intermittent damage. Eliphalet used split-wood roof shingles, likely from his repair supply, to make the top and back of his 1821 fiddle. The musical instrument demonstrated Grover’s skills as both a joiner and a carver, for he shaped and fitted together the shingles to make the body of the instrument, and then carved its head with a human likeness. The project was well adapted to an island since it required only minimal space and small handtools; moreover, it could be worked on over an extended period of time, taken out and put away as the daily schedule of maintaining the light permitted. The portable violin, which could be easily taken back and forth to the mainlaind, was typical of the objects the Grovers made. The box Eliphalet fashioned—primarily from locally plentiful pine wood—was well suited to his restricted surroundings. It measures just 5 ½ by 7 ⅝ by 6 ½ inches and could have been useful for transporting valuables between the island and the mainland.

The imagery, with its repetition of human faces around the exterior, may well have reflected Eliphalet’s isolation. These images are profile silhouettes which have been cut out and then affixed to the box. This emphasis on the human face runs through the Grovers’s work: Both of their violins are distinctive for having carved and painted heads incorporated into the scrolls, perhaps reflecting a desire for human contact. The Grovers apparently longed for their time ashore, as an anecdote recounted by the poet Celia Thaxter in Among the Isles of Shoals (1873) attests. Thaxter’s father was a New Hampshire lighthouse keeper from 1838 onward, so she was well aware of what life on a small Atlantic island was like. In her book, she recounted traveling on a boat bound for Bangor, Maine, where she met an unnamed man who had grown up on Boon Island and who was likely one of Eliphalet Grover’s sons. Thaxter recalled that “He spoke with bitterness of his life in that terrible solitude, and of ‘loneliness which had pursued him ever since.’ […] He ended by anathematizing all islands, and, vanishing into the darkness, was not to be found again.”

Making and decorating objects filled some of the hours Eliphalet and Samuel Grover spent on their lonely outpost, and they surrounded themselves with likenesses. These objects would also have been useful in the context of island living. The violin, for example, could have been very useful on Boon Island, the year round. In the summer, when the surf is generally subdued, music from the violin would have melded with the sounds of swells rising against the rock outcropping. In the more severe weather typical of fall and winter, the violin would have helped drown out the relentless sound of crashing surf and filled the empty days, weeks and months when the waves made it difficult for a boat to land on Boon Island. A twentieth-century resident recalled how very nearly inescapable the sound of pounding surf could be: “One day there was a terrible storm so terrible that we went to the top of the lighthouse and sat with our heads almost in our laps so we wouldn’t hear the storm.” When the Grovers went ashore, they could have taken their musical instruments with them and joined in the social life of York and other nearby villages and cities. The musical instruments then wove together the Grovers’ solitary lives on Boon Island and their intermittent social connections with the community on the mainland. The forms, materials, and decorative aspects of the objects all attest to the dual character of these folk artists’ lives: at once circumscribed by their island home and also connected to national and even international economic and social networks.

 

We can see the Grovers’ identification with the nation and with nationalism on the same objects that testified to the world immediately surrounding them. The faces on Eliphalet’s box are enhanced with military uniforms and drawn swords. In the corners of the top of the box are painted eagles and shields on maple veneer. Together, the military themes and eagles and shields suggest an association with battle and ultimately with national history. These motifs reflect Grover’s interest in the iconography of the American nation, which he could have encountered through a variety of means, but most likely through popular print. Newspapers, almanacs, and cheap prints all would have served as sources of such imagery; Grover would have seen such printed materials while on shore or have obtained them from visitors to Boon Island. Indeed, the box is lined with pages from a contemporary New York newspaper. He creatively interpreted the visual aspects of the world of popular print in his own original works.

These motifs also echoed the national imagery that appeared on a variety of objects made by mariner folk artists, including what has been probably the most highly sought-after category of seamen’s art: scrimshaw. To take just two examples, in the collection of the Mystic Seaport Museum are two whale’s teeth with scrimshaw scenes (c. 1848), the Battle of Lake Erie and the Battle of Lake Champlain, attributed to Nathaniel Sylvester Finney. Simon Newman has also shown that the most personal of sailors’ works, tattoos, also employed symbols of the nation, such as eagles, alongside initials and other motifs that related both to their shipboard relationships and to their connections to loved ones on shore. In the 500 records of sailors’ tattoos found in the Seamen’s Protection Certificate Applications (1798-1816) studied by Newman, he identified seventy-one that featured either “eagles, American flags, the date 1776, [or] representations of liberty,” with eagles being the most popular. Newman connects this body of imagery to sailors’ interests in early national politics, to their patriotism, and to their advantageous positions as witnesses to the age of revolution throughout the Atlantic world. This interpretation of the tattoo imagery provides a way of understanding the eagles and armed figures that appear on Grover’s box. However obliquely, these motifs reference the international conflicts that somebody at sea would have witnessed—or learned about from mariners who had direct experience of the American, French, or Haitian revolutions and other events—in the early national period, conflicts that took their tolls on the very maritime trade that the lighthouse was supposed to facilitate. The eagle may also signal Grover’s allegiance to the patriotism of sailors who would have passed by Boon Island and occasionally landed on the rock, as well as to his interest in politics on the mainland.

Eliphalet Grover’s box decoration is not an anomaly among the motifs that appear on maritime folk art from Maine, as a ship’s figurehead of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry makes clear. Newman points out that many seamen were staunchly anti-British and for them Perry would indeed have been the “Hero of Lake Erie.” He led the United States naval forces in a successful battle against the British navy on Lake Erie on Sept. 10, 1813, despite serious damage to his ship, the USS Lawrence, whose battle flag bore the famous slogan, “Don’t give up the ship.” Although who was responsible for the naming of the ship on which this figurehead appeared, and the selection of Commodore Perry as the motif for the figurehead, is unclear in both cases, the ship’s owners as well as its crew could have appreciated the patriotism of the gesture.

Figurehead carving was intimately tied to the shipbuilding (particularly in wood) and shipping trades. As those industries declined in Maine from the end of the nineteenth century onward, the production of figureheads, and indeed maritime carving in general, came to be thought of as a dying art and examples were sought out to document its heyday earlier in the nineteenth century. As art historian Samuel M. Green remarked, “I have seen figureheads and other carvings in deserted corners, lofts, and barns throughout the state [of Maine], all of which will inevitably disappear without a trace unless recorded, just as hundreds of their kind have disappeared before now.” In fact, the Index of American Design, a WPA project that produced some 22,000 watercolors and photographs of “various arts and crafts in the field of Design in the United States from before 1700 until about 1900,” included examples of Maine maritime carving. (The work of Edbury Hatch, “the last of the figurehead carvers in the towns of Newcastle and Damariscotta,” was especially highly valued. ) The Index of American Design positioned such carving alongside a wide variety of “folk” objects, all of which were valued for the high quality of their design and execution. Figureheads and other decorative elements from ships were also obviously associated with Maine’s earlier maritime history. At the same time, however, these artifacts were connected to a larger American cultural history, even if the first generation of folk art scholars could not have recognized the full political, social, and economic contexts of seafarers’ lives.

 

Nor would any early folk art critic, dealer, or collector have spoken of the works as evidence of a particularly international, or even global, mentality on the parts of the makers. But in fact some examples of folk art might be said to signify in just that way. For instance, a ship model known as “A Sailor’s Dream” in the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, provides some evidence of how distant continents appeared in the American sailor’s imaginary. The museum notes that “this ship model is imbued with the romance and exoticism that was often attached to seafaring life.” It features a three-masted sailing ship at sea “on which are numerous carvings of oversized fish, birds, sea-serpents, and smaller rigged sailing and fishing vessels.” The ship sails towards a lighthouse (reminding us of how important those structures were in maritime life) and above the ship hangs a carved eagle (recalling some sailors’ favored motifs). On the portside quarterboard is inscribed the word “Japanese” and on the opposite side is written “Souvenir.” Near the port side on the bow is written “Sterndorfer” and on the stern is inscribed “Maine,” perhaps indicating both the ship’s place of origin and the model’s since it was found in a boat shed in Rockland in the 1950s.

The ship model can appropriately be considered a “dream” to the extent that it distorts the scales of various elements—the ship that dwarfs the lighthouse, for instance—and combines things (some of them fantastic) that could not ordinarily be found together, like the varieties of carved sea life and the eagle in the sky. The model may have been called a dream because it also brings together two distant lands: Maine and Japan. However, given the long history of New England’s maritime relationships with Asia, this work can also be understood as a window onto how some seamen thought of their places in the world, assuming that a mariner made, commissioned or owned the model. The dream of shipboard life was then not so much “romantic” or “exotic” as it was filled simultaneously with excitement and peril, limited and unbounded.

The many ways in which Maine’s folk art evidenced the district’s and later the state’s vigorous participation in international trade from the colonial period forward was barely acknowledged during the period when folk art was being established as a field of collecting and scholarship. True, scrimshaw, ships’ figureheads, ship models, and other objects fashioned at sea or produced in response to maritime trade were the subjects of considerable interest in the early decades of the twentieth century, but a countervailing tendency to associate them with local culture worked against their being understood in relation to global networks of trade and otherwise. The conceptual affiliation of folk art with American identity, addressed at the outset of this essay, provides part of the explanation for this failure to see folk art as part of a larger, more cosmopolitan culture. The other reason is that by the early twentieth century, when artists, curators, and collectors—particularly from New York City—began to buy and exhibit Maine folk art, the state had changed. By the twentieth century, Maine’s ports had been outstripped by others as places of economic activity, and its shipbuilding had become less important as wooden vessels were increasingly limited to pleasure boats. The urbanites who came to Maine after 1900 did so specifically because many parts of the state had become sleepy backwaters by then. They had become isolated, to some extent, as maritime travel and shipping decreased in favor of railroads, and later, highways. And so the slow pace of life in such enclaves suited the purposes of city-dwellers looking to escape frenetic urban life.

 

The consequence of the early collecting of Maine folk art was its conceptual disassociation from the global economic activity that originally brought it into being. As historians have raised awareness of how deeply interconnected was the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is appropriate to reinsert the “folk” objects produced during the period into that context. Doing so, we will see makers like Eliphalet and Samuel Grover less as isolated artists whose very separateness from cultural centers and urban institutions was responsible for their creativity, and more as makers whose embeddedness in international economic and cultural networks provided the time, opportunity, and aesthetic impulse to create works that provide a perspective on their own period’s “globalization.” The danger here is that just as early twentieth-century conceptions of folk art supported present-day concepts of the nation, so this repositioning of folk art in relation to a broader geographic horizon will only go to underwrite—in an uncritical way—our own notions of twenty-first century globalism. Brian Connolly has addressed the conceptual and political pitfalls entailed in rewriting early American history from a global perspective. He urges us “to consider how invocations of the Atlantic and other extra-national scales might simultaneously displace the nation and secure other relationships of power, especially those of present-day global capitalism,” and concludes that “we should feel a great deal of anxiety to be writing at the same scale and deploying the same terms as global capitalism.”

In the case of folk art studies, adopting a global perspective can be potentially as limiting as were the pioneering but nationalistic interpretations of the objects that came about in the early twentieth century. Thus we should consider, before we inscribe folk art (or at least some of it) within a global framework, the skepticism that has been expressed vis-à-vis globalization with regard to art history. Art historians, like other sorts of historians, have been leery of projecting a twenty-first century notion of globalization back onto earlier periods for fear of inadvertently legitimating contemporary economic structures and political regimes, and misrepresenting the historical situation. As a way of side-stepping these potential limitations, but at the same time recognizing the ways that art makers around the world were interconnected—however fragilely, intermittently, discontinuously—in the pre-modern period, Alessandra Russo has suggested that we “work on the tension between distance and proximity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This tension had a crucial role in the production of objects.” Indeed, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the relationship between distance and proximity provides a valuable lens for thinking about the production and consumption of folk art. Avoiding the ideological consequences of “globalization,” by bringing these terms to the fore in our thinking about art made by non-professionals, we are able to capture, at least to some degree, the mentalities and the horizons of experience that their makers possessed.

That word—”horizon”—has particular resonance for the Grovers and for seamen who must have spent hours staring at it. On the one hand, folk artists working within the context of the maritime economy, the Grovers among them, made objects from materials that were proximate and they represented landscapes, people, and objects that were also present in their local setting. On the other hand, that did not mean that their perspectives were narrow. The unknown maker of “The Sailor’s Dream,” for instance, gave material form to his vision of the world which encompassed not only the ship to which he may have been confined for long periods of time, but also the distant lands which he may have visited but certainly had heard of from other mariners whose horizons were similarly wide. For the producers of folk art who were involved in a variety of ways with long-distance commerce by sea, lands and cultures beyond their immediate horizons may indeed have been the subjects of romantic attachment or exotic associations. But they were also distant places woven into the fabrics of their daily lives.

 

Further Reading:

Although the literature on folk art, its history, and issues with defining it is large, especially relevant here are: Eugene W. Metcalf, Jr. and Claudine Weatherford, “Modernism, Edith Halpert, Holger Cahill, and the Fine Art Meaning of American Folk Art,” in Jane S. Becker and Barbara Franco, Folk Roots, New Roots; Folklore in American Life (Lexington, Mass., 1988); and Kevin D. Murphy, ed., Folk Art in Maine: Uncommon Treasures, 1750-1825 (Camden, Maine, 2008). On the Atlantic world, globalization and their implications for American studies and art history, see: Rosemarie Zagarri, “The Significance of the ‘Global Turn’ for the Early American Republic: Globalization in the Age of Nation-Building,” Journal of the Early Republic 31 (Spring 2011): 1-37; Brian Connolly, “Intimate Atlantics: Toward a critical history of transnational early America,” Common-Place Vol. II, no. 2 (Jan. 2011); “Roundtable: The Global before Globalization,” October 133 (Summer, 2010): 3-19; Katherine Manthorne, “Remapping American Art,” American Art 22 (Fall 2008): 112-117; Wendy Bellion and Mónica Domíguez Torres, “Editors’ Introduction,” Winterthur Portfolio 45 (Summer/Autumn 2011): 101-106 (Special issue on “Objects in Motion”); and Felicity A. Nussbaum, ed., The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 2003). In considering the lives of mariners I have relied on Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2006) and Simon Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 2003).

Eliphalet Grover’s log book is in the collection of the Museums of Old York along with a typescript by Sue Tolle. Further information about the Grovers and their period in Maine history is to be found in Charles E. Clark, James S. Leamon, and Karen Bowden, eds., Maine in the Early Republic, From Revolution to Statehood (Hanover and London, 1988), Laura Fecych Sprague, ed., Agreeable Situations: Society, Commerce, and Art in Southern Maine, 1780-1830 (Kennebunk, Maine, 1987), and Steven C. Mallory, “Capt. Eliphalet Grover’s ‘Boon Island Fiddle’: The Folk Violin in New England, 1750-1850,” in New England Music: The Public Sphere, 1600-1900, The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings, Vol. 21, 1996 (Boston, 1998).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 12.4 (July, 2012).

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Kevin D. Murphy is professor and executive officer in the PhD program in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. He is the author of Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine: Commerce, Culture and Community on the Eastern Frontier (2010), and a previous contributor to Common-Place.org.

In September of 1776, the Continental Navy became the first American military branch to designate an official uniform. In March of 1777 it became the first to alter it. The change originated from John Paul Jones and a small group of naval officers dissatisfied with the mandated ensemble consisting of a red-lapelled blue coat, a gold-laced waistcoat, and blue breeches. An unofficial agreement allowed American naval men to substitute a white-lined, red-lapelled blue coat and white waistcoat for the official model, and to forego blue breeches for white. The alterations, ornamented with an epaulet inscribed with a rattlesnake and “Don’t Tread on me,” Samuel Eliot Morison observes, resulted in “a much smarter uniform than the blue and red.” Perhaps the “smartest” quality of the new uniform, however, derived from the confusion it caused during engagements with the enemy. From a distance, ships populated by officers dressed in the new uniform resembled captains of the British fleet, leading John Adams to describe the uniform as “English.” Lowering the ensign, at least temporarily, added to the deception. This masquerade, embraced by Captain Jones, created a tactical advantage while at sea: the enemy saw the unmarked ship as familiar and relaxed its defenses, only to find itself unexpectedly engaged, and quite often over-matched, by a smaller, scrappier opponent.

John Paul Jones was a figure who would have been familiar to most American readers in the first half of the nineteenth century as the greatest naval hero of the Revolutionary War. Lauded as the first officer to raise the Grand Union flag aboard an American warship (the Alfred, in 1775), the victor of ferocious sea battles against the British frigate Serapis and the man-of-war Drake, Jones is best known today as the originator of the oft-quoted American mantra “I have not yet begun to fight.” John Paul Jones enjoyed popular acclaim throughout the nineteenth century. No fewer than twenty-three biographies featured Jones as the subject; three editions of his writings and letters became available to the public; and fiction writers, poets, and dramatists on both sides of the Atlantic claimed Jones as their title character. In iconography Jones cut his most dashing figure—a figure he personally constructed and adorned with that costume he himself had carefully designed in 1776. After Charles Willson Peale painted his portrait four years later, and Jean-Antoine Houdon sculpted his bust in 1780-1, these depictions set the pattern for pictures of Jones for at least seventy years thereafter—with precisely the kind of commanding appearance he favored for himself. But the duplicity he had stitched into the navy’s uniform—what you saw was not what you actually got—became a motif that worked its way into an entire series of representations of Jones after his death in 1792.

Was the hero actually a bloodthirsty pirate? A rake and seducer of ladies? Indeed, a robber, a murderer, a political opportunist?

Of course, in patriotic histories of the Revolution Jones stood in for the courageous patriot, the tireless warrior in the battle for Independence. Still, Jones had lived a highly eventful life before (and after) joining the American cause, and his nineteenth-century commentators seized upon those adventures to depict certain unsavory aspects of the hero’s character. Although crewman Nathaniel Fanning understood Jones to be “a great lover of the ladies” for his practice of “carrying off” women, many nineteenth-century authors indicted Jones as a “libertine” and a “rapist,” even while they commended his patriotic service to their audience of young men. George Sinclair, as early as 1807, published a biography of Jones modeled after the 1803 London-based original with the omnibus title: The Interesting Life, Travels, Voyages, and Daring Engagements of the Celebrated and Justly Notorious Pirate, Paul Jones: Containing Numerous Anecdotes of Undaunted Courage, in the Prosecution of his Nefarious Undertakings. So was the hero actually a bloodthirsty pirate? A rake and seducer of ladies? Indeed, a robber, a murderer, a political opportunist?

 

For many readers (and publishers), it may have been so much the better that tales of John Paul Jones presented him as a ruthless pirate. In much of popular literature, the pirate was the “romantic outlier” rather than the feared terrorist plundering ships and port cities. Versions of pirates attractive to popular audiences emerged through such works as Byron’sCorsair; numerous popular ballads about Captain Kidd, notably, “The Dying Words of Captain Robert Kidd”; Alexandre Exquemelin’s popular history The History of the Bucaniers of America(first published in Dutch in 1678, this book offered influential accounts of the lives of seventeenth-century pirates); Charles Ellms’ frequently reprinted collection of pirate biographies, The Pirates Own Book (1837); and numerous popular songs about the piratical life.From a political standpoint, in some quarters piracy even became synonymous not with greedy banditry but with independence and the struggle against injustice. American pirate-types, like those characterized in The Florida Pirate (1823) and later in Herman Melville’s novella “Benito Cereno,” often flew the skull and crossbones only after being “denied the general consent of nations.” Moreover, in early nineteenth-century British and American novels, John Paul Jones (or men based upon the late captain) frequently dropped in on tales of mismatched love, maritime adventure, and epic romance. Among the best known examples are James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot, Walter Scott’s The Pirate, and Alexandre Dumas’s Captain Paul. For the inheritors of the Revolution, to use Joyce Appleby’s phrase, at least to the book-buying public, the static portrait of the stalwart patriot was often shelved in favor of the excitement of the rakish marauder.

When William Borradaile reissued Sinclair’s edition of Life and Remarkable Adventures … of John Paul Jones twenty years after its first publication, he included a frontispiece illustration of Jones shooting one of his officers point-blank, even as he advertised Jones as the “celebrated” hero rather than the “celebrated and justly notorious pirate” as originally promoted by Sinclair’s title. “Paul Jones Shooting Lieutenant Grub”, Borradaile’s choice for his edition’s frontispiece, echoes the spirit of the image titled “Paul Jones shooting a sailor who had attempted to strike his colors in an engagement” (1779) found in the British original and, as a result, raised old concerns over the increasingly storied figure. While “Paul Jones Shooting Lieutenant Grub” cloaks the captain in national legitimacy as Jones and his combatants announce their shared cause through their similar uniforms, the illustration exposes the captain’s barbarism in his actions. The print not only indicts Jones of summarily executing one of his crew, but the range of the shot and the bodies below it also suggest the action to be both murderous and habitual. Jones may be remembered for raising the American colors aboard the Alfred and refusing quarter with “I have not yet begun to fight”; however, the Grub image illustrates a dark side of Jones’s fiery will and the bloodshed that sometimes ensued, in the process questioning his legitimacy as a hero.

This frontispiece illustration therefore revealed the flexibility of cultural memory and encouraged some writers to try to rehabilitate Jones’s reputation by publishing official accounts of his life authorized by the Jones estate. For although The Life and Remarkable Adventures… was sold as a sensational novel, the impression of Jones as a piratical murderer made the leap from fictional illustration to widely accepted fact, according to newspaper articles and biographical accounts, and Jones’s family wanted to “correct” that image. Historian Robert Sands, armed with a more complete set of Jones’s papers and determined to “circulate an unvarnished and full account of the rear admiral’s life,” credits the ubiquity of both the Grub print and the false testimony incited by it as his motivation for publishing the corrective Life and Correspondence of John Paul Jones (1830). Sands, dissatisfied with the ever-evolving “juvenile” version of Jones’s story, producedLife and Correspondence to tidy the chronological disorder of the captain’s life found in previously circulated versions, what he calls the “inextricable confusion” created by some “capricious demon”; rectify the “fabulous” and “monstrous legends” encouraged by the popular press; and correct the biographical misrepresentation constructed by a “decidedly” British gloss.

 

The protagonists that emerge through the pages of antebellum fiction, however, illustrate the public’s appetite for the “active and enterprising” miscreant rather than the cleaner and perhaps more accurate version of the American hero provided by authorized biographies like Sands’. American authors working in the genre of popular romance in this period often disguised their heroes as misunderstood beggars, thieves, and pirates in order to muddle the distinction between hero and villain. Herman Melville further complicates the distinction by characterizing Jones as the “model rogue” in his novel Israel Potter, the lone “crimson thread” flitting through the “blue-jean” travails of Israel R. Potter.

Serialized in 1854-55, Israel Potter is loosely based on a pamphlet autobiography written by a Rhode Island-born veteran of the Revolutionary War who had been taken prisoner by the British and lived much of his life in exile in England. The novel appears, at first glance, to be a bad-luck story of an American boy always caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Although Israel Potter shares the field-to-battle story popularized by Israel Putnam, Potter’s Bunker Hill experience leads to capture rather than to celebrity and sends him to England in chains. Melville recounts the clumsy happenings described in the original autobiography, including Potter’s chance meetings with King George III and Benjamin Franklin (in his role as the American ambassador to France), yet the novel eventually veers away from authenticity, in both style and content, and links the fate of Potter to the various enterprises of John Paul Jones. Melville, for example, positions Israel within earshot of Jones’s famous “I have not yet begun to fight” speech, and credits him with sparking Jones’s fiery retaliation upon the port of Whitehaven, the city the captain first sailed from at age twelve. Yet Israel’s fame is short lived. His fictional service to Jones—much like his “real” life—eventually lands him aboard another British ship and keeps him on the wrong side of the Atlantic for the better part of fifty years.

Melville advertised his Revolutionary tale as an “adventure” in a letter to his editors at Putnam’s, yet the intention of the autobiographical pamphlet Life and remarkable adventures of Israel R. Potter (1824) was to secure remuneration for Potter’s military service rather than to spin a thrilling tale of intrigue. In his motley characterization, however, Melville does more than transform Potter’s story from one of hapless exile to one of unlikely celebrity as it riffs on autobiography to produce fiction. Israel Potter presents Jones, as well as the country he serves, as more rogue than Revolutionary. Melville’s Jones looks like the pirates in Exquemelin’s Bucaniers of America,dresses like the pirate suggested by the lurid frontispieces of sensational novels, and acts like the pirates cum revolutionaries of nineteenth-century American fiction, all the while advertised as the emblem of a maturing nation—as Melville writes, “America is, or may yet be, the Paul Jones of nations.” Like the confusion Jones fashioned at sea, the narrative portrait offered in Israel Potteralternates between patriot and pirate, and therefore refuses to advance a single version of the nation’s complicated history.

Of course, Melville allows neither his narrator nor Israel to actually call Jones a pirate. Israel may describe Jones’s “jaunty barbarism” and “savage” markings under his European finery, but he never truly interprets what he sees. Assumptions and hearsay, however, provoke incidental characters to associate Jones with piracy. An oddly placed maritime “quack-doctress” calls Jones a “reprobate pirate”; English sailors assume the Ranger to be “some bloodthirsty pirate” when they fail to recognize her nationality; and a British ship unknowingly solicits information from Jones about “that bloody pirate, Paul Jones.” In the last instance, Melville shows Jones, when confronted by his reputation, as a light-hearted Robin Hood rather than a despotic Captain Kidd. He encourages his enemies to arm themselves with money rather than ammunition: “So, away with ye; ye don’t want any powder and ball to give him. He wants contributions of silver, not lead. Prepare yourselves with silver, I say”—and offers a keg of pickles rather than one of powder demanded by his enemies.

 

Melville’s use of the term “pirate” as a charge leveled at Jones only by his enemies did revive this earlier cultural mythology of Jones in the 1850s, as most subtitles of American publications about Jones by this point had stopped using the word “pirate,” and most accounts had done away with inflammatory frontispiece illustrations. Yet not all Americans succumbed to the intoxicating memory of Paul Jones. The 1846 edition of Life and Adventures of John Paul Jones may lack a frontispiece illustration, but its preface decries the character of Jones and other revolutionary leaders even as it reprints the partially disreputable version of Jones within, announcing that “the whole race of magnificent barbarians, gorgeous tyrants, unparalleled cutthroats, and gigantic robbers … have never been able to fix our devotion.”

Melville reinforces the roguish designation of Jones as “outlaw,” as well as Israel’s initial impression of the captain, by fashioning him as more Continental aristocrat than stalwart George Washington, while at the same time marking him as recklessly uncivilized. Never does the reader of Israel Potter see the Jones of Peale’s 1781 portrait, nor do we witness the proud dignity illustrated by the many Jones prints and publications of the nineteenth century. Instead, we are given “pagan” tattoos covered by a “laced coat sleeve” and hands covered in rings and “muffled in ruffles.” The novel’s references to clothing and appearance, rather than offering a sense of period authenticity, reinforce Melville’s editorial position suggested by his tongue-in-cheek introduction, contradict the popular understanding of “homespun” through uncomplimentary characterizations of Potter and Benjamin Franklin, and certainly complicate the understanding of Jones in the nineteenth-century imagination.

Jones as the emblem of America as created though Melville’s paradoxical layering (“à-la-mode [but not] altogether civilized…”) criticizes the American practice of myth-making even as it creates a maritime frontiersman as its “Representative Man,” to use Emerson’s term. Although Melville’s Jones resembles the lonely backwoodsman of much of the frontier literature of the period, the Jones of Israel Potter appears as Indian rather than as an “Indian-fighter” like other frontiersmen. Of course, Melville’s representative American displaces Native Americans even as he assumes so-called “Indian” characteristics. By comparing Jones’s manner to “a look as of a parading Sioux demanding homage to his gewgaws” and determining the captain’s seated posture to be “like an Iroquois,” Melville prompts the reader to rely on stereotypical “stock” poses for Native Americans created by literature and then directs the reader to assign these characteristics to Paul Jones. These descriptions co-opt familiar notions of indigenous peoples to disguise the Scottish Jones in “native” legitimacy while dressed as the very English enemy he sought to destroy.

 

Coupled with the cultural resurrection of colonial homespun fabric, evidenced through the emergence of spinning wheels as parlor ornaments and historical decor at public events—such as Fourth of July celebrations—in the mid-nineteenth century, initiated in part by Horace Bushnell’s 1851 tribute to the “simply worthy” men and women of America’s pre-Revolutionary “Age of Homespun,” it would seem that Melville might have wanted the lasting image of Jones that readers took from his novel to emphasize Jones’s humbler attributes rather than his interest in fashionable apparel. Yet, clothing—and Jones’s interest in it—is a frequent topic of conversation. Upon their reunion aboard theRanger, Potter and Jones almost immediately digress into discussions of apparel. Paul Jones even solicits Israel’s opinion of his hat—”What do you think of my Scotch bonnet?”—overtly calling attention to Jones’s national origin, but also signaling the captain’s concern for his appearance and his alteration of the naval uniform. The sartorial packaging of Jones in Israel Potter begs the question of authorial intent. Namely, why did Melville clothe his self-professed national emblem—”the Paul Jones of nations”—in European fashion rather than joining his contemporaries and idealizing the homespun and “linsey-woolsey” of the heroes that fought the Revolution?

Melville, it would seem, uses clothing to critique the United States’ emerging national mythology through the “homespun” of Israel and the “linsey-woolsey” of Franklin, and punctuates the argument through the fashionable “savagery” of John Paul Jones. The raw portrait of the swarthy, daring Jones, therefore, becomes an ideal rather than an embarrassment for Melville’s America, a model of transparency and honesty. In Israel Potter Jones can no sooner hide his “savage” tattoos than camouflage the absence of rings from his hand. Try as he might, Melville’s Jones can never transcend his true identity by dressing in European finery. In spite of his sartorial extravagance, or rather because of it, Jones becomes the icon of America which—like Jones, Melville insists—must admit its failings despite the prevailing trends in national mythology. America in the mid-nineteenth century may have been trying to fashion an identity for itself based on the Yankee ideal popularized by Benjamin Franklin, and to identify itself as a pioneering nation rooted in characters ranging from Cooper’s frontiersman Natty Bumppo to the 1856 Whig candidate for president John C. Frémont, whose campaign identified him as “The Pathfinder.” From Melville’s more jaundiced perspective, however, such posturing in the 1850s was a ruse, and America (having just seized California and much of the Southwest from Mexico) was more a pirate than a pioneer.

John Paul Jones duped the British by disguising his identity in enemy colors. Melville’s counterfeit deceives the “skimmer of pages” who, in trusting the authenticity of the historical reprint, believes the character of Jones created in Israel Potter to be a “true blue” copy of the man lionized by American memory. It is not. The alternate “crimson thread” spun by Melville challenges the portrait of Captain Jones and, by extension, American identity. America in Israel Potter is no different from the gardener’s son who surreptitiously finds himself leading a navy. Rather than American Exceptionalism and the “city upon the hill” motif put forward by John Winthrop aboard the Arbella, Melville emphasizes the reliance upon chance for the nation’s success, and he refashions the accepted standard of the “pattern American” through his endorsement of the “unprincipled” and “reckless” John Paul Jones. Melville’s challenge to popular memory probably went unnoticed by the early readers of Israel Potter who, even when being complimentary, saw little in the text beyond a pleasurable diversion. Yet Melville’s single book-length offering of historical fiction, dedicated “TO HIS HIGHNESS THE Bunker-Hill Monument” topples gilded memorials to the past and American nostalgia with his collage of the pirate-patriot-indigenous-foppish John Paul Jones. In lieu of monuments, Melville—against the grain of most of his contemporaries—leaves a democratic marker more fitting to the ideology and cultural fabric of the antebellum United States at mid-century; a marker that prophetically foreshadows a civil war that would tear the fabric of the nation to shreds.

 

Further reading:

For information on John Paul Jones, see Samuel Eliot Morison’s John Paul Jones: A Sailor‘s Biography (Boston, 1959) and the more recent Evan Thomas, John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, and Father of the American Navy (New York, 2003). For information on American identity and national mythology, see D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1923); Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn., 1973.) For information on homespun and its connection to the national imagination of the nineteenth century, see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York, 2001).

For the primary sources quoted here, see Henry Brooke, Book of Pirates. (Philadelphia, 1841); Carrington Bowles, Paul Jones shooting a sailor who had attempted to strike his colours in an engagement (1779); Nathaniel Fanning, Narrative of the adventures of an American navy officer, who served during part of the American Revolution under the command of Com. John Paul Jones, Esq. (New-York, 1806); Florida pirate, or, An account of a cruise in the schooner Esparanza(New York, 1823); John Paul Jones, The interesting life, travels, voyages, and daring engagements, of that celebrated and justly renowned commander, Paul Jones. : Containing numerous anecdotes of undaunted courage, in the prosecution of his various enterprises. / Written by himself (Philadelphia, 1817); Life and Adventures of John Paul Jones (New York, 1846); Herman Melville, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (1857) and Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855); Charles Willson Peale, John Paul Jones, oil on canvas (1781); Israel R. Potter,Life and remarkable adventures of Israel R. Potter (Providence, 1824); Robert Sands, Life and Correspondence of John Paul Jones (New York, 1830); “The Sea Captain, or Tit for Tat” (Boston, 1811).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 14.4 (Summer, 2014).

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Anne Roth-Reinhardt is a lecturer at the University of Minnesota and a former Jay T. Last Fellow (2010) at the American Antiquarian Society.

Developing a database of mariners in the Black Atlantic

Many people assume that mariners in the age of sail were rambunctious tars. Weathered seamen are often depicted quickly spending their hard-earned pay ashore drinking and whoring. Contemporary illustrations such as the frontispiece for Nautical Songster or Seaman’s Companion helped cement this image. Movies continue to reinforce this perception of footloose sailors. Nautical adventurers, be they Russell Crowe as Captain Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander or Johnny Depp as the swashbuckling Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean, appeal to many individuals who, like the cartoon character Dilbert, find little excitement in their daily routines working in cubicles. While I admit to having watched these movies, for seven years much of my time has been spent in archival reading rooms on both sides of the Atlantic in a venture far more prosaic. Unlike Jack Aubrey, I did not chase a forty-four-gun French warship around the Cape of Horn. Instead, my task involved a more elusive goal: to find evidence of the lives of colored—that is African American, Native American, or mixed-race—mariners, individuals who rarely make it onto the big screen today and who were often depicted as servants in eighteenth-century illustrations.

Last year I completed a dissertation concerning how fugitive slaves used the maritime industries in eighteenth-century Philadelphia, New York, and Newport to achieve freedom. My research resulted in the development of a database of more than 9,100 colored mariners—the Colored Mariner Database (CMD).In an era when researchers increasingly rely upon Web-based sources, one may ask why I would choose to travel to more than thirty archives on both sides of the Atlantic and spend seven years creating the CMD to identify and trace the lives of eighteenth-century colored mariners. The answer to the question lies in the very nature of the Black Atlantic.

Moving frequently, leading short lives, and owning little property, mariners rarely left traces of their lives. Colored mariners, particularly those who sought to escape assorted forms of bondage via the sea, left only scattered remnants of their lives in the historical record. These men often carried forged passes, changed clothes, and in other creative ways concealed their identities. To find freedom, many of them traversed national, ethnic, and religious borders. In short, colored mariners’ success in obtaining freedom or remaining free depended on being elusive. So how to identify colored sailors and detail their lives? The answer to this question was not a simple one. Few blacks, mulattos, mezitos, or Native Americans in the eighteenth century were literate. North American vessels of the era were not required to maintain crew lists. And few slave runaways were so foolhardy as to leave evidence indicating their intended destination. The fluid, transitory nature of life in the Black Atlantic made my intended task seem a bit daunting.

 

Two groups of people deeply concerned with slaves who sought freedom at sea, slave masters and ship captains, provided me with an initial window into colored mariners’ lives. As many historians have noted, the language of fugitive slave advertisements is richly descriptive. The thousands of fugitive-slave and slave-sale advertisements published in Philadelphia, New York City, and Rhode Island newspapers contained considerable evidence of colored men working or seeking to work at sea. Scipio Congo and hundreds of other runaway slaves were described by their masters as having been “used to the sea,” “bred a sailor,” or having threatened to go to sea. In these advertisements slave masters repeatedly admonished ship captains not to “harbour or conceal” runaways. Whites’ laments over slaves who fled via the sea were widespread. Just as Samuel Johnson discovered his Negro servant wished to go to sea, slave masters from diverse social strata in North America—including Newport farmers, New York merchants, South Carolinian rice planters, Philadelphia artisans, and Maryland’s governor—suffered the indignity of bondsmen escaping to the sea. Slave owners offered rewards for the capture of maritime fugitives and hoped that “no gentleman” would stoop so low as to hire runaway slaves. Yet masters such as New York’s Donald McClean repeatedly found their slaves hired by ship captains. And at the same time that some slave masters bemoaned their slaves’ flight via the sea, others were quite willing to send their bondsmen on privateer ships hoping to enrich themselves from prize monies their slave mariners earned them.

If fugitive-slave and slave-sale advertisements provide a valuable starting point, they offer only a small window into colored mariners’ lives. They do not tell us which maritime fugitives successfully escaped to the sea, how many colored mariners sailed the Atlantic, or where maritime fugitives ultimately ended up. They do not tell us about the nature of their lives at sea or how most colored mariners’ lives may have compared to that of the iconic eighteenth-century colored mariner, Oladauh Equiano. Like Equiano, did they experience slavery in the West Indies, North America, and England? How many served in the Royal Navy and faced enemy guns, as did the young Oladauh? Was Equiano’s extended maritime career—during which he traveled across the globe in slave, naval, and merchant ships—unusual? And were significant numbers of these men able to obtain freedom, whether through purchasing themselves, as had Equiano, or running away? To answer those questions, I combined my review of advertisements with painstaking archival research.

Advertisements indicated colored mariners sought berths on ships sailing to ports throughout the Atlantic and that a number of maritime fugitives and slave mariners came from non-English colonies. Given the diverse backgrounds of colored mariners, it made no sense to limit my research to archives in the three study ports. At the same time, I did not wish to engage in an overly ambitious project, which might have tested the patience of my advisor and my wife. To make the project manageable, I headed to England to take full advantage of the Royal Navy’s mania for records.

As maritime historians have demonstrated, Royal Navy musters, pay books, and pension records are a treasure trove of information. Providing names, ages, positions, and places of birth for every seaman who came aboard a naval vessel, these records are a social historian’s dream. Unfortunately for my purposes the data was incomplete. My first task was to determine the race of each mariner on a warship. With the race of seamen not being noted in musters and payrolls such identification was difficult. The Admiralty’s 1764 requirement that seamen’s places of birth be entered into musters greatly assisted in identifying and tracking colored mariners. But for seamen who served prior to 1764, the lack of places of birth meant numerous colored mariners often could not be identified as surnames alone rarely revealed a sailor’s race. For example, I would have never included John Henry on HMS Brune in the CMD except that when he died the Burne‘s log referred to him as “one of our Negroes.” Thus, my identification of a mariner as colored was often predicated on the tar having a classical name, like Scipio; an African name, like Quash; or a place name, like Bristol.

 

Using ship pay records, I set out to answer two questions about colored mariners. First, did fugitive slaves find haven on naval ships? And second, could I trace the lives of some of the colored mariners I had identified from other sources? For the first question, I conducted a random sampling of Royal Navy ships on the North America station during my study period, 1713 to 1783. For the second I matched ship logs with fugitive advertisements to identify ships that maritime fugitives may have fled onto. Making good use of the National Archives’ friendly staff and the archives’ bulk order procedures, I set myself up in the Map Room next to a trolley stacked high with ship records. With at least one archive staff member referring to me as the “muster guy,” I spent long hours scanning musters and payrolls. On many days, I headed back to the Kew tube station with little more than blurry eyes and dirty hands: an average day’s work might yield only three or four additions to the CMD.What kept me going back after a day of limited success was the knowledge that naval records could yield details to lives for which I previously only had a line or two of information. In many ways, my days at the National Archives resembled the proverbial search for the needle in a haystack. But that work ultimately resulted in the productive melding of social and Atlantic history. Two of my discoveries illustrate this well.

A compilation of naval records had provided me with the story of four slave sailors on a ship from St. Thomas who found themselves in Portsmouth during the American Revolution due to a broken ship rudder. The seamen convinced naval officials of their rights under the English law not to be forced to continue to work as slaves on the ship. The case was particularly interesting because it involved slave sailors from throughout the Atlantic: North America, the British West Indies, Calabar, and St. Thomas. But what happened to these men once they left the ship in Portsmouth was unknown. A review of court, tax, land, and church records in the Portsmouth City Records Office provided no information on the men. However, a search of records for warships in Portsmouth at the time the men landed there yielded a significant discovery: one of the men had been subsequently impressed onto a naval ship! While we might not know the details of these men’s lives after they gained their freedom, the fate of this unfortunate sailor reminds us that in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American maritime world, freedom from enslavement did not always mean freedom from coerced labor.

The second story was even more descriptive of the limits of freedom for colored mariners and sadder for being so. When reviewing the muster for HMS Garlands, I noticed an entry indicating that twenty-eight-year-old able-bodied seaman John Incobs had been discharged on October 19, 1764, for “being a slave.” Incobs had entered the Garlands at Sheerness in May 1763 with the ship sailing to Canada. Apparently he was unaware that the warship would subsequently sail to New York where it arrived on October 3, 1764. What the muster did not indicate was that Incobs had been either a New York slave sail maker or mariner who years earlier had escaped and made his way to England. Unfortunately for Incobs, the two weeks HMS Garlands had been in New York was sufficient time for his former owner to reclaim him.

 

With such discoveries, I slowly, incrementally began to develop a picture of a maritime world in which colored seamen played a not insignificant role. My random review of musters demonstrated that colored mariners were on almost every naval vessel in North America. However, contrary to some historians’ view that “roughly a quarter of the Royal Navy was black,” my sampling showed that the number of identifiable colored mariners never exceeded 6 percent of the Royal Navy’s North American crews. Naval musters also reflected that opportunities for advancement were available to colored tars, as some advanced from ordinary to able-bodied seamen to boatswain. By expanding my archival explorations to include baptismal and marriage records, tax and census rolls, Vice-Admiralty and High Court of Admiralty cases, log books, ship captains’ and seamen’s journals, newspaper dispatches, Seamen Sixpence records, English merchant crew lists, naval pension records, and correspondence from Admiralty and consulting secondary sources, both the CMD and my knowledge of the Black Atlantic expanded considerably.

Who can be found in the CMD? The range of individuals is diverse, both in terms of their maritime experiences, their nationality, and their race. North American maritime fugitives, Isle of Royale Negro fishermen, South Carolina slave pilots, Bermudian blue-water sailors, Royal Navy able-bodied seamen, cooks on merchant vessels, members of privateer boarding parties, slave-ship sailors, free Spanish Negro mariners captured by American privateers and sold into slavery in North America, Kru canoe men, Native American whalers, and many other colored seamen have all made their way into the CMD.

Did these colored seamen have maritime experiences similar to those of Equiano? The CMD demonstrates that eighteenth-century colored mariners shared many of Equiano’s experiences. Almost all were young healthy men. Like Equiano, scores of colored mariners traveled across the Atlantic. And those who did not travel long distances still often worked on a variety of different vessels. However, although mobile, relatively few colored mariners appear to have had as extended a maritime career as did Equiano. Instead, most used ships not as a way to establish careers but as either short-term employment or a means to escape bondage. The most striking characteristic of these men was their continued vulnerability to re-enslavement. Equiano’s story of his fellow mariner John Annis, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the West Indies, was not an isolated event. Twenty-five years after the Somerset decision in 1772 prohibiting the forcible removal of bondsmen from England, Harry Harper and other colored mariners were still being shipped against their wishes from England to the West Indies. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, colored mariners from Madeira, Newport, and other Atlantic ports found themselves kidnapped. The enslavement of colored sailors was not simply the work of a few evil-minded individuals. Throughout the eighteenth century, British ship captains enriched themselves through the sale of captured enemy mariners. French and Spanish ship captains, while many times employing larger numbers of colored mariners than their British and American counterparts, also sold captured enemy colored mariners into slavery. And during the American Revolution, while patriot ship captains often hired colored seamen, they also proved quite willing to enslave colored mariners, with American Vice-Admiralty courts approving the sale of hundreds of colored mariners captured on British vessels, regardless of their legal status. In short, colored mariners led lives in which freedom, however obtained, often proved fleeting.

The next stage in the development of the CMD will be to create a secure Website where scholars can access the database and add to it, a project for which I have just obtained seed money. Doing so will permit the CMD to serve as the foundation for other Black Atlantic projects. Although I can imagine the CMD contributing to histories of black female sailors or explorations of the cultural connections between Kru canoe men and West Indian mariners, I cannot predict what other scholars will do with it. What I can say with certainty is that the database will have benefits beyond having allowed me to obtain my doctorate. It will open up the world of colored mariners to family historians and genealogists. The CMD will also provide academic and nonacademic readers a more complete understanding of the opportunities and limits in the Black Atlantic. Most importantly, the CMD will help to recapture the details of maritime fugitives’ lives. The very elusiveness that enabled some enslaved peoples to escape via the sea has kept their lives in shadows. I hope that the combination of old-fashioned archival detective work and a modern-day Web presence can finally give these individuals’ stories the attention they so richly deserve.

 

Further Reading:

The best survey of black maritime life during the age of sail is W. Jeffrey Bolster’s Black Jacks: African American Seaman in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass, 1997). Philip D. Morgan’s essay, “Black Experiences in Britain’s Maritime World,” in Empire, the Sea and Global History: Britain’s Maritime World, c.1763-c.1840 (New York, 2007) provides a well-balanced depiction of Anglo-American black tars’ lives. Cassandra Pybus’s works—including Black Founders: The unknown story of Australia’s first black settlers (Sydney, 2006); Epic journeys of freedom: runaway slaves of the American Revolution and their global quest for liberty (Boston, 2006); and “Billy Blue: An African American Journey through Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 5:2 (Fall 2007): 258-287—describe in great detail the global migration of many black mariners in the revolutionary era. Michael Jarvis’s article, “Maritime Masters and Seafaring Slaves in Bermuda, 1680-1783,” William & Mary Quarterly 59:3 (July 2001): 585-622, is the best study of a single colony’s black maritime economy. My “Seeking Freedom in the Atlantic World, 1713-1783,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4:1 (Spring 2006): 46-77, describes how fugitive slaves used New York City’s maritime industry to obtain freedom.

Practical research guides to learning about colored mariners in the age of sail include Vincent Carretta, “Black Sailors in the British Navy,” Journal of Maritime Research (Nov. 2003) and Bruno Pappalardo, Tracing Your Naval Ancestors (Kew, UK, 2003). Many of the colored mariners in the CMD can be found in advertisements and news dispatches accessible via the Early American Imprints, Series I, 1693-1800.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 9.2 (January, 2009).

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Charles R. Foy, a former civil-rights and land-use attorney in New York City, is an assistant professor of early American and Atlantic history at Eastern Illinois University. His articles on freedom in the Black Atlantic have appeared or will be published shortly in Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal; Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Power in Maritime America (Mystic Seaport, Mass., 2009); and New Interpretations in Naval History: Selected Papers from the 2007 Naval History Symposium (Annapolis, Md., 2009).

“Now, men, I run a man’s ship. I will run it in a manful and masculine way! I will tolerate no men under my command who act in such a way so as to discredit their manhood and manliness!” So it was that John Belushi, as “Captain Ned,” introduced his ship in a Saturday Night Live sketch from 1979. The sketch had its Dickensian protagonist, Miles Cowperthwaite (a wide-eyed Michael Palin), encounter a bawdy world of sex, homosexuality, and masochism aboard the Raging Queen, a ship so wholly linked to a gay world at sea that the writers did not bother to let us know whether it was British Navy or merchant marine. Moreover, in the cheap homophobic tradition of television writing (which was, sadly, not unique to the 1970s), they have Cowperthwaite discover that the crew dedicates so much of its time to suntanning, enforcing corporal punishments, and searching, wistfully, for pirates that they make little forward progress.

Successful the sketch was not. The over-the-top gay cracks couldn’t make up for a fizzling conclusion. Nevertheless, Miles and Captain Ned earned a fond place in the hearts of many viewers because the skit’s founding gag relies on some of the obviously gendered and highly sexualized elements of the “man’s life at sea” that have become stock conventions in representing seafaring and piracy. Whether we think of Johnny Depp’s gender-bending Jack Sparrow or the courtship antics of The Pirates of Penzance, gender and sexuality play primary roles in popular portrayals of piracy.

Ubiquitous as they are now, these conventions have a long history, one that is rooted as much in the history of the book trade as it is in the history of seafaring. Familiar representations of pirates, in particular, were born during the “golden age of piracy” (from roughly 1670 to 1730) and were reworked and codified in numerous illustrated books published in Europe and circulated throughout the Atlantic. These volumes developed, reiterated, and augmented stereotypes about pirates to attract and titillate middling to elite European and American readers who could afford illustrated books and whose lives adhered to far more staid standards of behavior than the ones exhibited by the fictional pirates. Early modern readers encountered pirates as a series of literary and pictorial conventions that emerged in the late seventeenth century—books like Alexandre Exquemelin’s Bucaniers of America (1678) and Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724), which earned immense popularity by combining mesmerizing narration with vivid, full-page illustrations of pirates. The pirates they depicted radiated a hyper masculinity, at once morally ambiguous and socially transgressive. Were these men admirable and manly rogues or cowardly, vicious villains? Books did not say. But whatever readers decided, their conclusions rested on texts, images, and the interplay between the two.

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the pirates who disrupted trade in the Caribbean, West Africa, North America, and all points in between seemed to exemplify the dynamism made possible by maritime movement across the Atlantic Ocean. These men (and, famously, some women) formed international crews so fearsome that they proved to be major impediments to orderly European economic exchange. Just as European nations sought to create reliable and predictable means of drawing goods from the New World to enrich the Old, pirate ships became more numerous and audacious in their attacks, looting twenty-five hundred merchant vessels in the ten years between 1716 and 1726 alone. In fact, it’s surprising we hear so little about their devastating effects on European trade; one eighteenth-century commentator estimated that England lost as much to pirates during the early eighteenth century as it did to Spain and France during the catastrophic War of the Spanish Succession fought between 1701 and 1714. By the 1720s Parliament began to enact harsh new laws against piracy and to conduct well-publicized criminal trials to hang pirates for their misdeeds, seeking with this display of juridical force to discourage what had clearly become a highly lucrative line of work.

 

As important as piracy was to European and American political, economic, and maritime history, early modern print media developed modes of describing and representing pirates that sparked readers’ imaginations and that continue to shape pirate conventions today. The urtext is Alexandre Exquemelin’s De Americaensche Zee-Rovers(translated as Bucaniers of America shortly thereafter), an octavo volume with twelve full-page copperplate illustrations, or “cuts,” which emerged from Jan ten Hoorn’s Amsterdam press in 1678. Exquemelin’s own experience as a buccaneer in the Caribbean made his breathless narrative all the more authoritative. His first-hand reports of terrifying pirate leaders and his description of their lair on the tiny island of Tortuga provided European readers with new information about criminals as well as the Caribbean. But Exquemelin also supplied a narrative of action and adventure that went far beyond the more sober descriptions of travel common in the era. Bucaniersoffered an insider’s view of dramatic sieges, torture of Spanish leaders, and freewheeling pirate life.

Sales of the initial edition were so strong that the book shortly thereafter appeared in German (Nuremberg, 1679), Spanish (two editions printed in Cologne, 1681 and 1682), English (at least eight London editions between 1682 and 1704), and French (at least six Paris and Brussels editions between 1686 and 1713), as well as a second Dutch edition in 1700; it would be revived in the 1740s for publication through the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth by presses on both sides of the Atlantic. The book appeared in the libraries of Robert “King” Carter of Virginia and other wealthy American colonists as well as in the Social Library of Salem, Massachusetts, indicating that it had appeal far beyond the confines of England and northern Europe. The fact that the Dutch printer included twelve cuts in the book—four portraits, six action scenes, a map of Panama, and a fully illustrated title page—indicates his faith in the book’s success, for the cost of such work would have been considerable. Given the book’s octavo size, the engravers likely took several weeks or more to cut each plate; once completed, printing the images for a five-hundred-copy edition would have taken three laborers at least twenty-four days; altogether, each print would have cost the printer as much in labor and supplies as his own printing of twenty-four pages of text in letterpress. Clearly, the investment of time and money was rewarded: by any standard for the day, Bucaniers was a bestseller.

Printers were the first to puff the book as a novel and a thrilling read. A London printer confessed in the preface to his 1684 edition that he had never even heard the term “buccaneer” until this volume, nor had he been aware of the extent of Caribbean piracy. In recommending it, he stressed most of all that the book “informeth us (with huge novelty), of as great and bold attempts, in point of Military conduct and valour, as ever were performed by mankind; without excepting, here, either Alexander the Great, or Julius Caesar, or the rest of the Nine Worthy’s of Fame.” He went so far as to describe Exquemelin’s pirates as English national heroes because they so frequently outwitted the Spanish, who were cast as heavies in the London edition. (This was a stretch, for these men were so thoroughly non-national figures that one of them, “Rock. Brasiliano,” who apparently hailed from the Low Countries, obtained his name by means of a residence in Brazil.)

 

Even without the puffery, the book was an easy sell. Exquemelin used a breezy narrative style and light humor to describe his subjects. “After a fight of almost three hours, wherein they behaved themselves with desperate Courage, … they became Masters [of the city of Maracaibo, in Venezuela] having made use of no other Arms than their Swords and Pistols,” he explained of François Lolonois’s dramatic defeat of the Spanish. Invariably outmanned and outgunned, his pirates managed to take Spanish ships and entire towns; they escaped from custody no matter how tight the security. Sustained by an insatiable appetite for riches, Exquemelin’s pirates were alarmingly careless with treasure once they had gained it: they invariably gambled away vast sums or pissed it away on trifles. This occasioned no bitterness on the part of the pirates, who seemed to view such drastic reversals as incidental to their way of life. Lolonois and his men provide a case in point. After capturing Maracaibo, they stole “twenty thousand Peices of Eight, several Mules laden with Houshold-goods and Merchandize, and twenty Prisoners, between men, women, and children. Some of these Prisoners were put to the Rack, onely to make them confess where they had hidden the rest of their Goods.” Within weeks, the pirates threatened again to burn the town unless they received an additional ten thousand pieces of eight; this threat was followed up by yet another demand for thirty thousand lest the Spaniards’ homes “be entirely sack’d anew and burnt.” Yet upon their triumphal return to their home on the island of Tortuga, “they made shift to lose and spend the Riches they had gotten, in much less time than they were purchased by robbing.” How was the wealth redistributed? “The Taverns and Stews, according to the custom of Pirats, got the greatest part,” Exquemelin remarks wryly.

Although Exquemelin never paused to describe his antiheroes, he liked to include extensive depictions of the grisly tortures they inflicted on unlucky victims. Physical cruelty of all kinds threads through the pages of Bucaniers of America, marking a departure from narrative conventions of the day. Exquemelin explained that when the sadistic Henry Morgan and his men refrained from putting men to the rack, they liked “to stretch their limbs with Cords, and at the same time beat them with Sticks and other Instruments. Others had burning Matches placed betwixt their fingers, which were thus burnt alive. Others had slender Cords or Matches twisted about their heads, till their eyes bursted out of the skull.” In a rare moralizing moment he added, “Thus all sort of inhumane Cruelties were executed upon those innocent people.” He described sexual viciousness like the “insolent actions of Rape and Adultery” of “very honest women” to evoke the corporal horrors of Caribbean piracy. Indeed, Exquemelin’s descriptions of somatic cruelty veered close to a certain vein of late seventeenth-century pornographic writing that emphasized the erotic nature of flogging and the brutal ravishing of women, among other perversions.

 

Impulsive and volatile, brave and rapacious, the pirates who came to life on the pages of Bucaniers of America served up an alternative model of manliness. Readers didn’t have to venture far into Exquemelin’s chapters to figure this out. Editors made sure to underscore the pirates’ manliness and bravery when they composed prefaces advertising the book’s pleasures. They invariably highlighted the buccaneers’ “unparallel’d, if not unimitable, adventures and Heroick exploits,” as the 1684 edition put it. By 1704, the London printer heralded the book’s “wondrous Actions, and daring Adventures,” claiming that all but “the most stupid minds” could not help but admire them. Here the editor finessed the question of the pirates’ sexual license and propensity for rape, conceding half-heartedly that these men lacked the “Justness and Regularity” that marked a Christian man and even the “tolerable morals” of more run-of-the-mill citizens. Yet even taking their moral failings into account, the editor assured readers that “a bolder Race of Men both as to personal Valour and Conduct, certainly never yet appear’d” on land or sea. London and Dublin printers reiterated these themes (and even lifted some of the same sentences) when the book reappeared in print in 1741, reminding readers again that they ought to admire and even emulate the buccaneers for their courage and daring, particularly because so many of them were English. This seemingly contradictory group of repeated themes in the prefaces of various editions—the pirates’ admirable courage and alleged Englishness, on the one hand, and their rejection of conventional morality and hierarchy on the other—combined to depict a dangerous, exciting mode of masculine action and behavior. In none of these ways did pirates conform to prescribed models of European manliness of the time (and particularly of the middling and wealthy men who likely purchased the book)—ideals of masculinity that tended to stress fiscal responsibility, sexual control, and judicious understanding of one’s social place. Buccaneers did more than merely ignore such advice: they repudiated it.

If Exquemelin took a certain glee in recounting pirate adventures, the book’s images underscored the pirates’ ferocity and masculine brazenness. The original 1678 Amsterdam edition presented dark, vivid portraits and “action” images of fights, battles, and torture. These portraits particularly established a visual repertoire that influenced all subsequent representations of pirates. The first of these provides us with a key to the images’ success. Bartholomeus de Portugees (fig. 1) is an iconoclastic figure, encompassing everything from menace to heroism. The anonymous engraver has rendered him with an immediacy that builds on but ultimately goes beyond the text’s breezy clip. He glowers at the viewer as if annoyed, distracted from his real purpose of watching his crew destroy a harbor full of Spanish ships. His drawn sword suggests his imminent participation in the attack; his dispassionate expression and the resolute set of his jaw signals an utter disdain for the panicked men glimpsed drowning in the foreground. Indeed, the image even hints at a smile on his face, although the viewer senses that one’s eyes might be fooled by the turn of his tidy mustache. His appearance is a mix of contradictions: his lack of a wig, matted hair, and crudely heavy brow assure the viewer that this is no gentleman, yet he wears a rich, billowing damask coat with a generous sleeve. His posture is reminiscent of Titian’s influential Man With a Blue Sleeve(ca. 1510), an image that had already inspired Rembrandt’s 1640 Self-Portrait at the Age of 34, among others. But Bartholomeus’s facial expression is radically different from that of either Titian’s or Rembrandt’s figures, granting new meaning to the posture. If Titian used it to convey his subject’s beguiling self-assurance and stability, Exquemelin’s anonymous engraver evoked his thoroughgoing malice and twitchy energy.

 

Despite the fact that most of the sheath of Bartholomeus’s drawn sword is concealed by his body, numerous details remind the viewer of its presence. All of the print’s movement directs the viewer’s gaze up the blade—beginning with the angle of the subject’s elbow and shoulders and mirrored in the shape of his nose, the shadow of his cheekbone, and the set of his jaw. Even the clouds of smoke from the burning Spanish ships in the distance become darkest and most ominous near the sword’s tip. Portugees’s exposed blade epitomizes danger, ruthlessness, prowess. Contemporary military portraiture often featured armed men but virtually never men whose swords were drawn and erect. The Dutch artist Van Dyck’s 1624 painting,Portrait of a Young General and his Portrait of a Commander in Armor, With a Red Scarf (ca. 1625)—again, images likely in circulation in Amsterdam in 1678—both evoke masculine power but not the brutal volatility of Bucaniers‘s illustrations. Each of the book’s subsequent portraits, including those of Rock. Brasiliano and François Lolonois (figs. 2 and 3), returned to similar themes: the scowl and heavy brow, the drawn sword (here the bright silver of Lolonois’s blade seems to shimmer against the image’s action), and a detached perspective on their victims’ suffering.

The images must have been potent: the same copper plates were recycled and reused for nearly thirty years after their initial use. Shortly after the book’s 1678 appearance in Amsterdam, the text was translated into German and issued by a Nuremberg press in 1679. The German printer paid to purchase the original engraved copperplates and transport them approximately 670 kilometers inland—potentially a very expensive undertaking since transportation and escort costs, tolls, and border levies increased an item’s cost considerably. Transport overland between Frankfurt and Nuremberg, for example—less than half the distance from Amsterdam—ballooned a book’s cost by an average of about 25 percent. The German printer had to worry that the plates would be damaged in transit, for even the smallest scratch in the copper would appear in subsequent prints; then he had to contract with an engraver’s workshop to find someone with the skills and equipment to print the images, as copperplates required a special press with extraordinary weight to coax the ink out of the plates’ tiny, subtle cuts. In addition, the pressure imposed by a copperplate press was so extreme that plates wore out; depending on the quality of the copper and the particular pressure of the press, this could occur as quickly as after only 125 impressions. In such cases, printers hired engravers to recut the plates by using a tool to carefully trace over and deepen the plates’ worn lines and restore their ability to produce sharp images.

 

 

The move to Nuremberg did not mark the end of the plates’ travels. By 1681, they had been sold yet again to appear in a Spanish-language edition of the text produced by Lorenzo Struikman, a Cologne printer (located some four hundred kilometers back en route to Amsterdam from Nuremberg), who sought to take advantage of eager Spanish reading audiences willing to pay for high-quality books imported from Northern Europe. Struikman had the copperplate printer rub out the original Dutch text and retool the pirates’ names below—with mixed success, for we can still see the shadow of the original writing (fig. 4). He also used the Dutch plates for his second edition, issued a year later when the first quickly sold out.

 

 

It was the popularity of the Spanish-language edition that gained the attention of London printers. When William Crooke produced his own edition (translated from one of Struikman’s Spanish copies), he too decided that the original engravings were so superior that he purchased them. Yet again, the plates traveled nearly six hundred kilometers from Cologne across the Channel to London. This time the printer did a poor job reproducing the engravings, which appear decidedly worn (fig. 5) and display the shadow of the rubbed-out Dutch caption even more clearly. But the quality of its prints did not prevent the book from selling out; within two years Crooke produced two more illustrated editions of much higher quality, indicating that he had either found someone to retool the plates or located a more experienced copperplate printer to produce the prints (or both). By 1704, the plates had changed hands twice more to appear in four more London editions. Considering that the Dutch plates were ultimately used to produce nine separate editions of a consistently popular book, we might conservatively guess that at least five thousand copies of the book appeared with these images inside—and, more liberally, perhaps as many as thirteen thousand—radically testing the ability of copper plates to produce legible images.

It was highly unusual for a single set of plates to appear in so many editions produced in so many different cities: later in the eighteenth century, printers would save themselves the costs and risks of purchasing worn plates by hiring local engravers to copy a book’s images. Why didn’t these printers do the same? I suspect the answer lay as much in the high quality of the original plates and the superior reputation of Dutch engraving as in English engravers’ poor reputations and the excessive time it took to produce a single engraving. When a different London printer, Thomas Malthus, produced his own, revisionist version of Exquemelin’s Bucaniers in 1684—a volume that described the recently knighted Henry Morgan in far more flattering terms than as the sadistic antihero of Exquemelin’s telling—he hired F. H. Van Hout (possibly a Dutch émigré) to copy the portraits. To help buttress Morgan’s reputation, Van Hout produced a heroic frontispiece portrait (fig. 6) that copied the Dutch version but eliminated the background view of a dramatic sea battle in order to festoon Morgan’s bust with elaborate curlicues and a heavy oval frame. Likewise, his version of “Bartholomew Portugues” (fig. 7) removed Portugues from the midst of battle. To be sure, such stripped-down images would have been easier and speedier for Van Hout to produce, the better to compete with the other editions of the book circulating in London. Whether Malthus’s flattering account of Henry Morgan proved unconvincing or his indifferent images simply failed to compete with the Dutch originals, his version of Exquemelin’s Bucaniers appeared in one edition alone; meanwhile, the Dutch plates continued to accompany the original text until 1704.

As Bucaniers of America circulated through Europe, one engraver after the next embroidered on the same themes of ominous danger and masculine bravado that originated with the 1678 illustrations. Take the Paris printer, Jacques Le Febvre, who produced four editions of Exquemelin between 1686 and 1705. With only three images (none of which were portraits) in the book, the French printer did not attempt to reproduce the visual richness of the original; but the images he commissioned nevertheless built on the themes laid out in the Dutch plates. His engraver, Bouttals, incorporated aspects of the original pirate portraits into a new title page. Where the Dutch title page relegated the theme of violence primarily to the tiny scenes that circle the central images (fig. 8), Bouttals opted for less peripheral detail in favor of a more focused center of action and vivid figures on either side of the calligraphed title. His buccaneers are hidden by shadows, avoiding the viewer’s gaze (fig. 9). He seems to have borrowed from earlier portraits of Portuguees and Lolonois to depict one pirate with shabby clothing signaling his subjects’ low origins (as in the images developed for the 1741 London edition [figs. 10 and 11]). In Bouttals’s interpretation, the pirates’ physical threats appear far more menacing than in the Dutch title page, with swords ready to slash throats and pierce breasts and the pirates’ visages intent on inflicting harm and less inclined to ineffective posturing. The European who looks hopelessly to the viewer for help in Bouttals’s version is about to suffer more than death, for the pirate appears prepared to level a far more serious kick to the groin than did his counterpart in the Dutch title page.

 

Kicking a man in the crotch while slashing his throat might seem gratuitous—adding insult to fatal injury. In fact, these kicks were emblematic of the kind of violence pirates inflicted. After all, a Lolonois or a Brasiliano challenged their victims’ manliness not merely by rendering them prostrate but by stealing their goods. Buccaneers’ rise from obscurity and the lowest social orders to possess terrific riches, their strict loyalty to one another, and the rough equality they cultivated depended on the fact that they targeted the wealthiest ships and cities for attack. These class inversions did not pose an open threat to the English social order (as paeans to the pirates’ Englishness attest). But the comparatively ragged clothing of the pirate and his conquest over the elegant European would have stood out to readers as a sign of the inverted hierarchies and alternative masculinities that could exist in the imagined locale of such exotic Caribbean islands as Jamaica and Tortuga. It signaled that not all men needed to follow the same path.

 

 

The fact that Bouttals had them lay their riches at the feet of the symbolic figure of America, the Indian princess, rendered these men even more dangerously capricious by suggesting that they robbed Europe to give to no one in particular—or worse, to savages. The image conveyed the extent to which they had stepped outside the norms of European manhood. Unlike the figure of Britannia, who represented the justice and law of England, the “naked” Indian princess evoked a cruder form of order. This image figured America as a place where riches could not be utilized in the rational fashion Europeans idealized. Exquemelin’s descriptions of pirates’ propensity to steal and then lose vast riches signaled their separation from the ideal of financial moderation as well as manly self-control.

The central motifs in the Dutch images had a staying power that extended beyond the many editions of Exquemelin’s Bucaniers. By the time Captain Charles Johnson’s immensely popular General History of the Pyrates appeared in 1724, the London engraver B. Cole drew from a ready supply of pictorial conventions, including scowls, drawn weapons, and dramatic action. Even though Johnson’s text adopted a sternly moralistic tone almost entirely lacking in Exquemelin’s account, Cole’s illustrations—particularly the one of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, the female pirates who earned such infamy during the 1720s—evoked prurient delight with pirates’ sexual and violent transgressions. The portraits highlighted the pirates’ caches of weapons, depicting Blackbeard with not just an erect, drawn sword but six holstered pistols and a second sword seen hanging in its sheath between his legs; the women pirates hold both hatchets and swords (figs. 12 and 13). In fact, when another London printer issued a cheap reprint of the book the following year, he replaced the three copperplate engravings with ten woodcuts depicting each of the pirates in successively more provocative poses displaying their manly bravado and cocky virility (fig. 14). By midcentury and later, dozens of cheap woodcut-illustrated editions almost identical to the London original emerged from presses in Glasgow, Birmingham, Worcester, and elsewhere (fig 15). Pirates had become synonymous with ferocity, weaponry, action, and, more obliquely, sexual danger.

 

 

Although erect swords and angled hatchets might appear phallic to twenty-first century viewers, not all eighteenth-century readers would have granted the images such connotations. In fact, considering the overriding subject of physical violence in Johnson’s text, we might see such images as primarily emphasizing the pirates’ capacity to torture innocent bystanders as well as armed opponents. And yet considering that the books’ illustrations were partnered with a heightened interest in the pirates’ sex lives in the text, perhaps readers would see the images as phallic after all. Johnson lavished attention on the pirates’ marriages, interracial sexual liaisons, multiple children, and most of all their perverse or barbaric sexual violence against women. He left little doubt that a good number of the pirates’ outrageous acts had been sexual in nature. Captain Edward England and his crew, for example, often combined rape with pillage: they forced women “in a barbarous manner to their lusts, and to requite them, destroyed their cocoa trees and fired several of their houses and churches,” while Edward “Blackbeard” Teach forced his “fourteenth wife” to “prostitute herself” to members of his crew as he watched. Blackbeard was not the only pirate who refused to limit himself to a single wife in Johnson’s account; nor was he the only one to mistreat his wives to confirm his power over them. Captain Henry Avery and his crew “married the most beautiful of the Negro women, not one or two, but as many as they liked” in Madagascar, “so that every one of them had as great a Seraglio as the Grand Seignior at Constantinople.” Less sedentary pirates settled for perpetual “whoring” with women throughout the Caribbean and elsewhere. If Johnson had intended to debunk romanticized pirate myths that had circulated in London during the prior decade (as he promised in the book’s early pages), he went on to establish a new mythic canon revolving around the pirates’ sexuality and malevolent fearlessness, which would remain in print for over a century.

Such representations of male pirates are particularly thrown into relief when considered alongside Johnson’s portrayals of female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, depictions that placed even stronger emphasis on the women’s gendered identities and sexual lives. Johnson introduced the women dramatically: before informing his readers of the existence of female pirates, he described a scene in the Court of Admiralty that was trying and convicting a large number of men for piracy in Jamaica in 1721. Two of these were “asked if either of them had any thing to say” to mitigate the death sentences they faced. They stunned the court by revealing themselves to be women and announcing that “their bellies, being quick with child” should make them eligible for stays of execution—which they received. As it turned out, the women’s cross-dressing went beyond pirate costumes. Both had been born illegitimately and had found, throughout their lives, a degree of economic freedom in an array of male disguises. Still, Johnson focuses not on the material benefits of cross-dressing but on titillating (and almost Shakespearean) moments of sexual confusion. As a young recruit in the army, Read fell in love with one of her officers, continually risking life and limb to be near him—behavior that her peers found “mad” and perplexing. She was so distracted by her love that she neglected her duty: “it seems Mars and Venus could not be served at the same time,” Johnson comments philosophically. Read eventually contrived to let her officer “discover her sex” one night as they lay together in a tent. Even more risqué was the moment when Bonny and Read met aboard a pirate ship, each in full disguise. Taking Read “for a handsome young fellow,” Bonny took “a particular liking to her” and secretly revealed that she was a woman—presumably to solicit sex. Johnson allows the sexual confusion of the scene to play out for his readers’ enjoyment, delaying its resolution. He even indicates that Read at least considered the possibility of playing the paramour to prolong her ruse. But “knowing what she would be at” if she did not come clean “and being very sensible for her own incapacity” to play the man for Bonny’s sake, she revealed the truth to Bonny’s “great disappointment.” Eventually the two women confided in Bonny’s “gallant” Captain Jack Rackham as well, as he had threatened to “cut her new lover’s throat.” Replete with cross-dressing, sex (consummated and otherwise), and a disdain for gender propriety, these biographical vignettes emphasize exceptional choices and behavior and, in doing so, closely resemble those of male pirate characters. Narratives of both men and women cast pirates as outsiders who reject gender conventions and flout sexual propriety.

The book’s images of Bonny and Read reflect engravers’ struggle to portray the mix of conflicting gender codes and disguise represented in Johnson’s volume. In the original 1724 edition they are portrayed with flowing hair crowned with feminine caps and dressed in improbable loose-fitting culottes that suggest wide hips and possibly even the “big bellies” that saved these women from the gallows (fig. 13). Of course, if they had truly worn such outfits, they would have fooled no one as to their sex; the costumes help readers imagine the women’s disguise while confirming their sex. Yet the engraver did not hesitate to represent them as prone to the same ferocious violence as their male counterparts. Armed with swords, hatchets, and pistols, and angry facial scowls, Bonny and Read bear little resemblance to the women commonly idealized in contemporary English culture and literature. Cole’s images were so evocative that they were copied in virtually every one of the dozens of English reprints of the book, even those that featured only a small number of cuts.

 

 

When the book was translated and published in Amsterdam in 1725, the new Dutch engraver borrowed from Cole’s images and improved on them. He portrayed them in breeches, heavily armed, and striking jaunty and mildly threatening poses. Most striking, he sexualized them. The women’s long tresses, open shirts, and full breasts confirm their sexual appeal and availability. They have become Venuses with muscle and an almost pugilistic readiness for action (figs. 16 and 17).

How did readers make sense of the female pirates who fought and fornicated their way across the pages of Johnson’s Pyrates? It is tempting to imagine that readers might have seen them as strong rebels and volatile romantics, prototypes of a form of active female agency in matters of economics, sex, and self-protection that would contrast sharply with the passive women of domestic fiction. From another vantage point, Read’s and Bonny’s cross-dressing may have signaled that transvestism (which appeared in many forms in early modern Europe and America) offered promises of a more inchoate and far-reaching personal transformation and liberation. Yet again, perhaps vivid illustrations of erect swords and tales of nearly egalitarian comradery produced homoerotic fantasy, at least by some.

But our interpretations change if we focus on the full range of probable readers—not only the female or same-sex oriented male readers who sought out tales of gender or sexual transgression but also the middling and elite men who used their disposable income to purchase expensive illustrated books and patronize social libraries. Men who enjoyed comfort, wealth, and position had little need for liberation per se, as they were, by any measure, already the most “free” in society. Escapism was different: reading these tales might have helped men imagine escaping from their social, economic, and sexual responsibilities to live far more freewheeling lives and express their basest instincts. Of course male readers might well have found representations of pirates appealing. But liberating? If we consider the full range of probable readers, as well as the spectrum of subjects covered in books like A General History of the Pyrates—which included female pirates and hints of homoeroticism but focused most of all on gleefully brutal depictions of men unbound by gender expectations of sexual self-control and obligations to dependents—we come closer to understanding why hyper-gendered portrayals of pirates had such lasting appeal from the eighteenth century to the present and why specific conventions for representing them have become so ubiquitous.

If Exquemelin’s Bucaniers of America had been less popular, we might be skeptical of its role in establishing lasting conventions for representing pirates. But books from Captain Charles Johnson’s General History of the Pyrates to twentieth-century films continued to build on motifs established in the late seventeenth century. The themes of manly adventure, gender transgression, erotic violence, and moral ambivalence have recurred with such regularity over these centuries by successive writers and illustrators that we can’t help but see how early modern print culture came to rely on such conventions for selling books.

 

A counterexample from our own era underscores this point. Perhaps the best testament to our unwillingness to break from conventional views of pirates came during the spring of 2009 when, due to a series of impressively successful attacks, the subject of piracy off the coast of Somalia moved from newspapers’ back pages to the fore. In April, we were presented with a series of photographs of improbably small motorboats filled with skinny Somali men in t-shirts with mischievous grins on their faces. But for those photographs and film footage, it might have been easy to develop news stories that conformed to long-established responses to piracy. Surely we might have admired the audacity of men who used tiny boats, limited manpower, and very big guns to capture and ransom off ships belonging to the most powerful nations in the world. The story had all the elements necessary to tie the Somali pirates to a long history of daring attacks. The fact that they hailed from one of the poorest and least powerful nations on earth might only have elicited more wonder. But the photographs displayed men whose appearance ran counter to expectations conditioned by a long tradition of images. Journalists seemed almost audibly disconcerted as they sought a gratifying narrative for the story; in the end, they merely decried the Somalis’ thievery and made weak allusions to international terrorism.

What would it have taken for us to identify with the Somali pirates, as readers of Exquemelin and Johnson identified with the pirates they described? What kind of narrative would have enabled us to incorporate the Somalis into the pirate stories we have inherited? One can’t help but lament their lack of a good publicist. We have not yet seen the author who will characterize them as would-be Robin Hoods up against intractable Western powers or perhaps play up their heroic roles against the backdrop of Somalia’s lack of social and governmental order. At the very least new narratives will require a costume change. If tricornered hats would appear over the top, we need to see them in clothing other than the t-shirts that only exaggerated the Somalis’ slight frames and third-world poverty. That new narrative may be coming. Already photographs have appeared depicting them with machine guns held erect; visual representations featuring cocky poses and dramatic clothing will not be far behind, inviting newly enticing tales to captivate readers. This pirate story isn’t over yet. We can look forward to its gradual incorporation into a tradition of representing pirates as seductive antiheroes—men and women who have evoked that powerful combination of fantasy, revulsion, and identification so successfully for three hundred years.

 

Further Reading:

Some illustrations and pages from the original edition of Alexandre Exquemelin’s Bucaniers of America (Amsterdam, 1678) are available online by the Library of Congress; meanwhile, Captain Charles Johnson’s General History of the Robberies & Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (originally published London, 1724) is still in print.

For recent histories of real-life pirates, see Marcus Rediker’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge, 1987) and his Villains of All Nations: Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston, 2004), as well as Virginia Lunsford’s Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age Netherlands (New York, 2005). To accompany his review of Peter T. Leeson’s new economic history of piracy, The Invisible Hook, in the September 7, 2009, issue of the New Yorker, Caleb Crain offers a list his sources on pirates. On gender and sexuality in seafaring, see Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling, eds., Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World (Baltimore, 1996) and Hans Turley, Rum, Sodomy and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (New York, 1999).

On the history of books and reading, see Adrian Johns’s The Nature of the Book (Chicago, 1998). See also Roger Gaskell’s “Printing House and Engraving Shop: A Mysterious Collaboration,” in The Book Collector 53 (Summer 2004): 221-24; Sheila O’Connell’s Popular Print in England (London, 1999); and Joseph Monteyne’s The Printed Image in Early Modern London (London, 2007).

Finally, the full transcript of Saturday Night Live‘s 1979 skit, “The Adventures of Miles Cowperthwaite,” is available online.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 10.1 (October, 2009).

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Carolyn Eastman is assistant professor of history at the University of Texas, Austin, and the author of A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution (2009) as well as essays in the William and Mary Quarterly, Gender and History, and American Nineteenth-Century History.

 

 

One of the frustrations, but also one of the delights, of early American and Atlantic world history is that the fields are so elastically defined. When do they begin? When do they end? What regions and civilizations do they encompass? With a little imagination, all sorts of unlikely topics and peoples can be shoehorned into the rubric of early American history. In this essay, I argue that the Vikings—Scandinavian adventurers who expanded, as far east as the Ukraine and as far west as Greenland and coastal Newfoundland, between the eighth and eleventh centuries C.E.—deserve a more prominent place in early American history than they have yet garnered.

 

I argue this not because the story of Europe’s expansion throughout the Atlantic Ocean and into the Americas began, in any substantial and lasting way, with the Vikings. The Viking settlements in Greenland were longer lived than scholars once believed; founded around the year 1000, they lasted at least 500 years. Nor were they quite so marginal as scholars once assumed; Greenlanders kept up with European fashions until at least the early fifteenth century, and some historians, notably Kirsten Seaver, speculate that far from succumbing to environmental catastrophe, the most able-bodied Greenland settlers were lured away to work in the burgeoning cod industry or possibly even to settle somewhere on the mainland. But still, the Greenland settlements were always small, with a peak population of only 5,000 to 6,000, and geographically confined. Their impact was negligible compared to that of the massive enterprise that began in 1492.

Why introduce students of early American history to the Vikings, then? Because the Viking settlements in Greenland make an excellent case study, in miniature, of how colonization projects begin, how they keep going, and why they might fail. In my Atlantic World course, I begin with a week of lectures on late medieval and Renaissance Europe and then wrap up the preliminary unit with two “prequels” to European colonization: the Norman/English conquest of Ireland, spanning from 1169 to the seventeenth century, and the Viking colonization of Iceland and Greenland. For the first topic, I follow Nicholas Canny’s classic article “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” published in The William & Mary Quarterly in 1973. The students readily grasp Canny’s argument that English colonizers’ remarks about Native Americans echoed their derogatory remarks about the Irish; if anything, this idea works even better in a course in which one is teaching Spanish as well as English colonization, because early Spanish colonizers’ estimate of Native Americans’ level of civilization so obviously mingled considerations of race, class, and religion. Yet it is always the curious, still shadowy model of Viking colonization that excites the students most.

My students marvel, simultaneously, at how much we know about the Viking settlements in Greenland and how much we don’t. Histories of Viking expansion depend heavily on historical archeology, and sometimes on analogies to what was happening among similar populations in the more remote regions of Scandinavia at the same time. Addressing the Viking settlements in Greenland at the outset of an early American history course can awaken students to the role that archeological research plays in historical scholarship. This, in turn, may make them more open to considering archeological evidence from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries—not as a last resort but as an integral element in the historian’s toolkit. This is a useful methodological discussion to have at the beginning of a history course; I find it useful, too, to impress on students as early as possible that there are limits to our knowledge and there are some things about the history of the Atlantic world that we just don’t know.

But although the story of Viking Greenland is incompletely known to us, it is nonetheless provocative. One of the basic questions it raises for students is, why colonize at all? The Vikings were not impelled by the religious fervor and geopolitical competition that propelled later European colonizers across the Atlantic; instead, the story of the Viking expansion toward North America highlights the roles of individual enterprise, adventure seeking, and contingency in colonization. It was apparently banishment, on a murder or manslaughter charge, that propelled Erik the Red westward; what, other than a need for timber, propelled Erik’s sons to the coast of Newfoundland is even less certain. It is a little astonishing to realize that it was apparently the luxury trade in falcons, walrus ivory, and furs that kept Norse settlers in Greenland for five centuries. But this may be a useful corrective—we are so prone to focus on early modern colonization as national policy that we forget how ad hoc much of it was, especially in the first few generations, and how autonomous the leaders of early colonial ventures, in an era of tenuous communication, perforce had to be. Discussing Viking colonization as a precursor to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonizations opens students up to understanding the tenuousness of many of the early modern ventures.

Another basic question that studying the Viking colonization of Greenland raises for students is what the “success” or “failure” of a colonial enterprise actually means. We call the Viking settlements a failure because they eventually disappeared—but they lasted 500 years, and for much of that time the colonists enjoyed, by medieval standards, a very comfortable living. Would the colonists themselves, at any point before the fifteenth century, have deemed their settlements to be failures? What we seem to mean, when we call the Greenland settlements a failure, is that they did not become permanent—probably due to their small scale and the parent power’s waning interest in them. And that, in turn, illuminates what colonial powers had to do to ensure the survival of their overseas ventures: establishing a colony was not the same as keeping one.

Scholarship on the Viking settlements in Greenland, such as Kirsten Seaver’s The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America, ca. A.D. 1000-1500 (1996), emphasizes the ways in which the Greenland settlements became to some extent the beneficiaries, but chiefly the victims, of shifting political dynamics in medieval Scandinavia. Greenland was from the outset a colony of a colony—an offshoot of the Viking settlement in Iceland, itself established only in the late ninth century. Much of Greenland’s trade was with, or at any rate through, Iceland, and most of its settlers came from there and had family ties there. Communication with the mother country, Norway, tended to be slow and faltering, and Norwegian authority was tenuous. In fact, the Greenland settlements, which started as an entrepreneurial venture, were at first essentially independent; the settlers formally accepted the overlordship of the Norwegian monarchy only in 1261. Around 1325, the Greenlanders stopped paying their taxes; once taken as evidence of poverty, this shift has now been reinterpreted as a sign that the Greenlanders did not feel they were getting value for their money from the Norwegian government. After Norway was absorbed into the Danish monarchy in 1380, Greenland seems to have been all but forgotten by its putative rulers. While there is no need to cover this material in depth, sharing the basic sequence of events with students sensitizes them to why they need, in an Atlantic world or early American history course, to pay close attention to shifting political dynamics back in Europe: a colonial power’s loss of independence—such as, for example, Portugal’s loss of independence in the Iberian Union of 1580—might spell neglect for its overseas colonies, and very weak communications links, such as those between Madrid and Lima in the sixteenth century, might foster exceptionally (from the mother country’s point of view, problematically) independent colonies.

If the Greenlanders’ story highlights the problems of weak or neglectful mother countries, it also highlights the cosmopolitan nature of many colonial enterprises and the failure, right from the beginning, of many of the restrictions on trade that mother countries tried to impose. In theory, the Norwegian monarchy had a monopoly on European trade with Greenland; in practice, the distances involved and the fragility of Norwegian authority made this hard to enforce. When Norwegian kings neglected to send ships to Greenland, Icelandic merchants sailed illegally—and Scottish and English merchants were sufficiently interested in and knowledgeable about the colony that they sometimes let their ships stray to the coast of Greenland “accidentally.” Indeed, there may have been more northern European trade with Greenland than we know of in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; unauthorized traders had good reasons for letting their voyages go undocumented. According to Seaver, Norse Greenland’s last trading partners, in the mid-fifteenth century, seem to have been British rather than Icelandic. Apparently, colonial commerce took on a life of its own, complex and secretive, long before the golden age of piracy erupted in the Caribbean.

Even as the story of the Norse colonization of Greenland raises questions about how colonization works in the abstract, it can also point students toward considering the differences between the medieval Viking colonization of Greenland and the early modern European colonial ventures in North and South America. This discussion may yield some false starts before it yields telling ones. Navigation, mapmaking, and literacy rates certainly improved between the tenth century and the end of the fifteenth, but not, perhaps, enough to make much difference, given the distances involved. Nor was the scale of the later settlements—at first—much different from that of the earlier ones; students may need to be reminded that Columbus sailed with a crew of about ninety men and Pizarro toppled the Inca Empire with a force of about 200. These expeditions were more overtly military than the Vikings’ expeditions were; still, the Vikings appear more far-sighted in bringing with them wives and children and the wherewithal to found permanent settlements.

A more significant change lay in the nature of the colonists’ home governments and in European rulers’ clearer motives for colonizing and greater commitment to being involved in the process. The Viking settlements were essentially freelance ventures; the settlers’ motives are hard to discern, and the home governments seem barely to have been aware that their nominal subjects were engaged in settling remote outposts of the known world. Most of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century settlements were also entrepreneurial, under the aegis of individual proprietors, joint-stock companies, adelantados, or donatarios, but the home governments licensed their existence and supervised them—if remotely—with a keen eye to their future uses. It is hard to imagine an early modern European state allowing an overseas settlement as long-lived as the medieval Greenlandic settlements to fade away.

Another huge difference between the medieval Viking colonization of the north Atlantic and the European colonization of America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is that the Vikings settled only in uninhabited places, such as Iceland, and very sparsely inhabited places, such as Greenland. Certainly, the Viking settlers had some contact with the people who already lived in Greenland and Newfoundland—some conflict, and probably some commercial contact too—but for the most part, for better or for worse, they were on their own in these new lands. They wrought no demographic catastrophe; they benefited from no indigenous labor; they conceived no hybrid race. Did this affect the viability—or at least the value—of the Viking settlements in the long run? If the Vikings had made sustained contact with a previously unknown people, would either their home government or their commercial partners have allowed the Greenland settlements to wither?

Medieval Europe was not Renaissance Europe; the Vikings were neither Puritans, buccaneers, nor conquistadores; and in the end, any comparison of this type must be somewhat impressionistic. Yet I have found it to be an enormously provocative comparison to propose at the outset of an Atlantic world history course, and well worth the investment of a teaching day or two. The Greenland settlements may have been, on some level, a failure—by virtue of their small size and slender impact, even in the centuries before they disappeared—but the Greenland settlers were also in some respects prescient. Their story suggests that the European colonization of America could very easily have happened earlier, but did not happen until an era arrived in which such colonization would be valued and sustained by societies and governments at home.

 

Further Reading

Kirsten Seaver’s The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America, ca. A.D. 1000-1500 (Stanford, 1996) is the ideal place to begin learning about the Viking settlements in Greenland. Her briefer book The Last Vikings: The Epic Story of the Great Norse Voyages (London, 2010) updates and extends the analysis. For a concise, authoritative overview of the Vikings, see Anders Winroth, The Age of the Vikings (Princeton, 2014); for a chattier, more personal take on the subject, see archeologist Neil Oliver’s The Vikings: A New History (New York, 2014).

Viking expansion is best understood within the larger context of early medieval Europe. Happily, Dark Ages scholarship is in the midst of a Renaissance. Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 (New York, 2009) offers a detailed introduction to the period. Anders Winroth, The Conversion of Scandinavia: Vikings, Merchants, and Missionaries in the Remaking of Northern Europe (New Haven, 2012), which examines the political and religious context of the Vikings’ mother countries, is a thought-provoking read for early Americanists who wish to use the Vikings as an early example of how colonization projects interacted with political, social, and religious change on the home front.

Many of the famous Norse travel sagas are available online, in English translation, in the Icelandic Saga Database, maintained by Sveinbjörn Þórðarson. The site is sufficiently easy to navigate that a student of mine was able to use it as the basis for a research paper.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3 (Summer, 2016).

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Darcy R. Fryer teaches history at the Brearley School and edits the Common School column.

“Call me Ishmael.” Ask students to identify that line and most will tell you with certainty that it is the first sentence of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. So will many scholars and teachers of antebellum U.S. literature. However, the first character to appear in Moby-Dick is not Ishmael but a grammar-school usher offering an etymology for the word “whale.” The first sentence describes him: “The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, and brain; I see him now.” By the time Hester Blum offers a reading of Moby-Dick in The View from the Masthead, she has taught her readers how to see with a mariner’s eye. She directs us back to the novel to look more closely at “Etymology” and “Extracts,” the puzzling miscellany of cetacean language and lore that precedes Ishmael’s famous declaration. Blum suggests we read these early pages as we would entries in a common-place book, one dedicated to passages about whales and whaling that also offers its readers a literary archive. Here in the novel’s early pages is a veritable trove of writing about the sea, from the Bible to popular nineteenth-century sea narratives.

Blum is the first to pay particular attention to the genre of American sailor narratives as literary texts and artifacts. The View from the Masthead analyzes seamen’s libraries, Barbary captivity narratives, sailor writing, naval memoirs, Melville’s sea vision, writings about the Galapagos Islands, and the crisis of death and burial at sea. Her deep familiarity with the genre of sailor narratives enables Blum to offer many acute and innovative readings of texts by James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Dana, and Melville, writers who have long made up the canon of maritime literature. However, Blum’s most significant contributions come in the form of the critical attention she gives to writing by and about sailors and the account she provides of their rich participation in print culture as consumers, disseminators, and producers of texts. This is a body of works Blum not only uncovers or recovers but also makes vibrantly visible.

Blum initiates her readers into the literary culture available to seamen by offering a description of the types of libraries found aboard ships and on shore, examples of reading lists, and an anatomy of the literary conventions of nonfiction sea narratives. Blum persuasively argues that the level of literacy among common sailors was high, certainly above average for laborers in antebellum America. The extent of that literacy, the wide range of their reading along with the collective experience provided by a library of shared and limited texts on any given voyage, leads to numerous scenes, wonderfully recounted by Blum, of debate among sailors on deck about literary and aesthetic value. Sailors consumed and discussed novels, travel narratives, conduct books, pamphlets, and reform tracts, along with technical treatises about seamanship and navigation. This array of texts demonstrates, as Blum does throughout her book, that manual, intellectual, and imaginative labors are intertwined and interdependent in sea narratives. What she calls a “materialist epistemology” insists that the practices of labor become the basis for knowledge; it is “a recognition of the physical work that enables moments of reflection and speculation” (109). Coming at the beginning of the second part of The View from the Masthead, this formulation makes evident the ways in which Blum’s text extends work begun in Marcus Rediker’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1987), which first sketched the contours of American maritime culture. Blum considers the literary aspects of maritime culture in a way that compellingly demonstrates the extent to which the contributions of maritime culture to U.S. politics, the antebellum economy, and the project of national formation are predicated on this culture’s very literariness. 

The concept of the “sea eye” (3), a phrase that originates in sailor writing, emerges in Blum’s writing as a way to describe the particular perspective of the sailor on the maritime world, the literal view from the masthead. Descriptive and analytical, the sea eye serves also as a metaphor and a theory of representation, making legible the reciprocal and symbiotic relationship of contemplation and physical labor. Like the producers of scientific knowledge in Helen Rozwadowski’s Fathoming the Ocean (2005), who come to that knowledge by working in the ocean (and likewise disseminate their findings in nonfictional texts about the sea), Blum’s mariners imagine precisely because they work. The sea eye, grounded in labor and in the material, opens up multiple opportunities for further scholarship for those interested in literary and print culture more generally, as well as in maritime culture, literature, and history. 

Blum tells us that her thinking about maritime literature traverses the fields of Atlantic and Black Atlantic studies, globalism, transatlantic print culture, and Pacific studies (12). Sailors emerge in Blum’s text as international, the crews of ships as multinational. It is curious then that their narratives stubbornly remain “American,” or rather that Blum introduces the body of texts she examines in The View from the Masthead collectively as “Antebellum American Sea Narratives.” At the intersection of the American and the oceanic, the sea narratives herein so brilliantly contextualized and interpreted by Blum exemplify the larger difficulty of unmooring categories of analysis from national structures as an increasing number of American studies scholars embrace the transnational turn.

Thanks to this fascinating and informative study, it is as difficult to conceive of maritime literature without sailor narratives as it is to remember that the contributions of sailors to literary culture have until this moment gone unrecognized in literary history. No less remarkable is the fact that, by offering us an archive of neglected texts, Blum also provides us sea eyes with which to read texts like Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym or Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, texts we thought we knew as well as that first sentence in Moby-Dick.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 9.3 (April, 2009).

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Martha Elena Rojas is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Rhode Island where she codirects the Edmund S. and Nathalie Rumowicz Program in Literature and the Sea. She is revising a book manuscript entitled “Diplomatic Letters: Sovereignty and Foreign Relations in the Early Republic.”

Recent controversy over the memorialization of Confederates and demands that we remove statues and change street and building names has prompted considerable discussion of how we remember and reflect on the past, and not just that of the Civil War. Protestors recently splattered red paint on the statue of Theodore Roosevelt that stands outside New York’s Museum of Natural History, castigating the former president as a symbol of “patriarchy, white supremacy, and settler-colonialism.” The debate has come to include figures from our colonial past. In September the Portland, Maine, City Council voted to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. In New York City there is discussion of renaming Columbus Circle and removing the statue of the Italian explorer. In New Mexico protests continue over the commemoration of the conquistador Don Juan de Onate, while in California activists have repeatedly defaced statues of the Franciscan friar Junipero Serra. 

Thus far there has been little questioning of memorials dealing with seventeenth-century New England, though there has been some controversy in Connecticut, the scene of the Pequot War. The statue of John Mason, the leader of the colonial forces against the Natives, once seated atop the site of the Mystic Fort massacre in the Pequot War, was removed from that perch in the 1990s following Indian protest. In Massachusetts the National Day of Mourning, a Native counterpoint to the celebration of Thanksgiving, has been an annual event since 1970. But for the most part, New Englanders’ historical attention has focused on Revolutionary War history, and the seventeenth century has faded from public cultural consciousness. That is likely to change over the next decade and more as we record the 400th anniversary of key events in the settlement of the region. It is highly likely that this will prompt debates about how those events were memorialized in the past and how we should remember them moving forward. As we prepare for such discussions, those of us who are interested in the colonial past might remind ourselves of the American Historical Association’s recent statement on the topic: 

Historians and others will continue to disagree about the meanings and implications of events and the appropriate commemoration of those events. The AHA encourages such discussions in publications, in other venues of scholarship and teaching, and more broadly in popular culture; historical scholarship itself is a conversation rooted in evidence and disciplinary standards.  

To plan for the observation of the events central to the history of seventeenth-century New England, a partnership of organizations and individuals was formed as New England Beginnings in 2015. In contrast to efforts to promote tourism through birthday celebrations loosely linked to the past, the goals of New England Beginnings are to encourage and promote activities that mark the various cultures that shaped early New England. Two words in the stated goals are critical. The partnership, which includes Native spokespeople, intends to commemorate rather than celebrate, and to address the various cultures that played a role in shaping the region. The activities the partners are focused on are designed to 1) tell the stories of the region in the seventeenth century to a wide, general public audience, and 2) enhance accessibility of resources for future scholarship in the field. As currently constituted, the group consists of twenty-six American institutions and programs, six international partners, six ancestry institutions, and forty-one individuals, a list of which follows this essay. 

 

New England Beginnings is not financed by any group. It is a cooperative partnership largely consisting of institutions that are under-staffed and under-funded but that have a commitment to recognizing the good and bad in our past—to paint a portrait that includes, as the English puritan Oliver Cromwell put it, “warts and all.” The members seek to prompt discussion of possible programs, to bring together members that can produce programs, and to promote those efforts. The results of such efforts are respected by the full range of partners while not being seen as representative of the views of all the partners. 

With over two years to go before the arrival of the Pilgrims is commemorated, New England Beginnings has already begun to see some results. In order to enhance resources for further scholarship, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts and the New England Historic Genealogical Society have assembled a team of Ken Minkema, Jeremy Bangs, Paula Peters, and me to produce a new, online edition of William Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation, with annotation including Native perspectives. The Massachusetts Historical Society has placed the early volumes of the Winthrop Papers online in a searchable form. The Congregational Library and Archives is continuing to add New England church records to its successful “Hidden Histories” project. 

There have also been a variety of partner efforts to bring the latest understanding of early New England to a non-scholarly audience. The Congregational Library and Archives took the lead in producing a phone and tablet app, “Puritan Boston Tests Democracy,” with information on the people, places, and events central to the history of seventeenth-century Boston and a map that can allow the app to serve as a tour guide. New England Beginnings‘ most ambitious activity is its “Guest Scholars Program.” Twenty-five experts on the cultures of early New England have offered to provide video-conferenced lectures to high school classes for $100 an “appearance” and to other groups for $200. The experts include David D. Hall, Ashley Bissonnette, Linford Fisher, Adrian Weimer, Paula Peters, David Silverman, and Abram Van Engen, and they are prepared to speak on topics including religion, Native life, and society and politics. Full details on these and other programs of interest can be found on the partnership’s website. 

 

As we get closer to the events to be commemorated, exhibits are planned to illustrate the story of seventeenth-century New England. Jeremy Bangs, the director of the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum, is developing an exhibit on the intellectual world of the Pilgrims in conjunction with the Leiden Municipal Museum, De Lakenhal. The exhibit will open in the Netherlands and then come to the States. Called “Intellectual Baggage,” it will examine the Pilgrims’ world of ideas as represented by the books in the library lists found in their probate inventories. The plan is to consider the ways ideas influenced the form of their society, their concept of interaction with the Natives, and particularly any influences their exile period in Leiden might have had on their colony. At least fifty books will be part of the exhibit, covering the broad range of topics that the inventories reveal—history, geography, exegesis, sermons, news reports, military tactics, botany, etc. There will also be several Leiden still-life paintings, maps, and engravings relevant to the topic. Some other objects mentioned in the inventories, such as tools, clothing, and household objects, will also be part of the exhibit. 

Plans are underway for the partnership to host a panel discussion next fall on how we reflect on, remember, and memorialize the past, particularly the early history of New England. The panel will include public and academic historians, and Native and non-Native members. Details will be available on the partnership website as we get closer to the event. Other panels and presentations are anticipated to engage interested individuals in discussion of the centrality of various Native peoples to the history of New England, aspects of the colonial social order, the role of puritanism, the influence of early New England on the region’s Revolutionary leadership, and other topics. It will be important to work with educators to examine how a nuanced understanding of the cultures of the region in the seventeenth century can be incorporated into crowded secondary school curricula. 

The challenges facing those of us revisiting the seventeenth century are considerable. One of these is to provide a balanced and accurate understanding of the colonists and their legacy. A little less than 100 years ago, in the aftermath of the tercentenary of the founding of Massachusetts, Samuel Eliot Morison lamented that despite his efforts and those of his Harvard colleague Kenneth Murdock, New England’s puritan settlers were still misunderstood. Outside the academy, the stereotypes that had developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries still predominated. Early New England continued to be viewed as a land of narrow-minded, steeple-hatted religious bigots with poor fashion sense who persecuted dissenters and executed innocents as witches.  

Within academia, in the mid-twentieth century Perry Miller, followed by Edmund S. Morgan and a host of scholars influenced by them such as Timothy H. Breen, Stephen Foster, David D. Hall, Robert Middlekauff, and Michael McGiffert sought to understand the puritans in terms of what they said about themselves. These scholars demonstrated an understanding of the religious beliefs central to the puritans. More recently, a younger generation of scholars (many represented in New England Beginnings) have transformed how early New England and its people are understood within academic circles. Abram Van Engen, Adrian Weimer, and Michael Winship have enriched our understanding of the puritan settlers. Kate Grandjean, Linford Fisher, Andrew Lipman, Sarah Rivett, David Silverman, and others have helped us understand how deeply colonizers were embedded in a dynamic world of Native as well as transatlantic politics and ideas.  

We no longer ignore the “warts.” But others make them the only story. Shaped by a political climate in which evangelicals push what I and many others see as an illiberal political and social agenda, and unable or unwilling to distinguish faith from fanaticism and religious belief from superstition, non-specialists have largely written puritanism out of America’s history except as an explanation for episodes such as persecution of dissent, the execution of witches, extreme hostility to Native peoples, and the practice of slavery. The partnership hopes the upcoming anniversaries can be an occasion for new and more nuanced dialogue in the field. 

The challenges facing historians are not limited to our discussions with one another. It is incumbent on us to convey our views to a general audience. And there we are challenged by popular views and the politicization of our past. Many, if not most, Americans accept the negative stereotypes of puritan New England as fact. I have been involved in public programs where the interest in the puritans is focused on learning how much more enlightened we are. Focusing only on ways in which the puritans did not live up to modern ideals can become the basis for attacks on any memorialization of them.  

 

On the other hand, there are those who still cling to the filio-pietistic embrace of the puritans and their values that were expressed by politicians at Plymouth’s Forefathers Day celebrations in the nineteenth century. Many of these individuals react strongly to any suggestion that their heroes were imperfect. If I had any doubts about the challenge for the New England Beginnings partnership, they were dispelled after publication of an Associated Press article in December 2016 that discussed the group, its goals, and its programs. The article or portions of it ran in well over 100 papers in this country and abroad. The responses it prompted in e-mails to the partnership website and comments on newspaper websites are instructive. They included  

• “Liberal army assault continues unabated. The only way to stop liberals from their agenda is to treat this as a war and they are the enemy.” 
•  “To conquer a people, it’s inherently important to help them forget where they came from by destroying their history. Plain, simple, globalization goal.” 
•  “These are not historians. These are leftist revisionists who boast about Greek, Mongol, Roman and Ottoman empire conquest while railing on American conquest. Their only goal is to throw fuel onto the fire of various grievance communities and put far-left politicians in power.” 
•  “The story will be, no doubt, shedding ‘new’ light on how White People screwed over everybody. It started with Columbus, and will no doubt end when liberals get tired of crapping on White People.” 

 

It should be possible to examine ways in which the puritan legacy was both positive and negative. But we also need to find a way to bring into the dialogue the extreme defenders and foes of the early colonists. 

Much of what I have been discussing has focused on the puritans, but they represented only one of the cultures that shaped New England. Equally important is an understanding of the region’s various Native peoples and traditions. The hope is that as the partnership grows, it will include more Indigenous voices. Just as puritan New England should not be understood as Boston writ large, so the Wampanoag are not representative of all regional Native Americans. Just as we should tell a broad story of puritan New England, we should seek to identify the variations within the broader themes. And I hope that the Indigenous partners in New England Beginnings will develop programs that discuss the beliefs and practices of their ancestors that have been passed down to the present and that tell the story of how they were victimized by the European expansion into the Americas and New England. This is the mission of the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine, where the history and culture of Maine’s Native people, the Wabanaki, are showcased through changing exhibitions, special events, teacher workshops, archaeology field schools and craft workshops for children and adults. Similar programs are provided by the Tomaquag Museum, a New England Beginnings partner that is dedicated to promoting dialogue on Indigenous history, culture, arts, and Mother Earth as well as Native issues of today. An excellent example of this type of program is the traveling exhibit “Our Story: 400 Years of Wampanoag History.” Initiated before the formation of New England Beginnings and not a project of our partnership, the exhibit was produced by Wampanoag tribal member Paula Peters through her company SmokeSygnals and with the support of the Indian Spiritual and Cultural Training Council and the Plymouth 400, Inc.  

Discussion of how we remember and memorialize the past will certainly not fade in the coming years or decades. While it provides a challenge to all of us who study the colonial period, it also offers us an opportunity to tell the stories we are committed to studying and teaching. 

 

 

 

The New England Beginnings partnership: 

Coordinator 

Francis J. Bremer, professor emeritus of history, Millersville University of Pennsylvania 

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Partner Institutions 

Abbe Museum

American Antiquarian Society 

Boston Public Library 

Colonial Society of Massachusetts 

Commonwealth of Massachusetts Commission on Indian Affairs 

Congregational Library and Archives 

Fairbanks House Museum 

Harvard University Libraries Colonial North American Project 

Historic Burying Grounds Initiative

Jonathan Edwards Center, Yale University 

Marblehead Architectural Heritage 

Massachusetts Archives and Commonwealth Museum 

New England Historic Genealogical Society 

New England Quarterly 

Old South Meeting House 

Partnership of Historic Bostons 

Paul Revere Memorial Association

Peabody Essex Museum 

Pilgrim Hall Museum 

Pilgrim Society 

Plymouth Antiquarian Society 

Salem in 1630: Pioneer Village 

The Massachuset-Ponkapoag Tribal Council 

The Yale Indian Papers Project 

Tomaquag Museum 

Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum

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Ancestry Organizations 

General Society of Mayflower Descendants 

The Winthrop Society 

Endecott-Endicott Family Association 

National Society of Colonial Dames-Massachusetts 

The Alden Kindred of America 

Pilgrim John Howland Society 

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International Partners 

Dissenting Experience 

Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons 

History of Independence Project 

Leiden American Pilgrim Museum 

National Museum of Bermuda 

University of East Anglia History Department 

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​Participating Scholars 

Kimberly Alexander, University of New Hampshire 

Sue Allan, official historian of Scrooby Manor 

Robert Allison, Suffolk University 

Robert Charles Anderson, independent scholar 

Emerson Baker, Salem State University 

James Baker, independent scholar 

Peggy Baker, independent scholar 

John R. D. Coffey, University of Leicester 

James F. Cooper, Congregational Library & Archives 

Michelle Marchetti Coughlin, independent scholar 

Stephen Curley, tribal archivist, Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe 

Linford Fisher, Brown University 

Scott Douglas Gerber, Ohio Northern University 

Katherine Grandjean, Wellesley College 

Kathryn Gray, Plymouth University, UK 

Crawford Gribben, Queens University, Belfast 

David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School 

Timothy D. Hall, Howard College of Arts and Sciences 

Heather Miyano Kopelson, University of Alabama 

Eve LaPlante, independent scholar 

Andrew Lipman, Barnard College

David Lupher, University of Puget Sound 

Kevin McBride, Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center 

Alice Nash, University of Massachusetts at Amherst 

Jean M. O’Brien, University of Minnesota

Paula Peters, Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe 

Mark Peterson, University of California, Berkeley 

Lynn Rhoads, editor emeritus, New England Quarterly 

Sarah Rivett, Princeton University 

David Silverman, George Washington University 

Lori Stokes, independent scholar 

Baird Tipson, Gettysburg College 

Len Travers, University of Massachusetts 

Mark Valeri, Washington University of St. Louis 

Abram Van Engen, Washington University in St. Louis 

Alden T. Vaughan, Columbia University emeritus 

Adrian C. Weimer, Providence College 

Ted Widmer, Brown University

Michael P. Winship, University of Georgia 

Cedric Woods, Native American Indigenous Studies Center, University of Massachusetts Boston 

Walter W. Woodward, University of Connecticut 

 

 

This article originally appeared in issue 18.1 (Winter, 2018).

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Francis J. Bremer, emeritus professor of history at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, is coordinator of New England Beginnings and author of numerous books on puritanism in the Atlantic World, most recently Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism (2015). 

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Classroom Collaborations, Public Engagement and Adventure

This past September, the commemorations of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001, served as an opportunity to introduce my students to the subject of Civil War memory. High school juniors and seniors in my Civil War and Reconstruction course were asked to imagine what a seventeen-year-old student in 1877 would think caused the Civil War. The majority of students suggested that their nineteenth-century peers would have pointed to slavery as the primary cause of the war. One student reasoned that “the drawn-out racial violence of Reconstruction” would have sufficed as evidence. Another student commented, fortuitously for my lesson plan, that “the war was so recent by 1877, and how could someone not know why the war was fought?”

I then asked them to explain the events of September 11, 2001: which group hijacked the airplanes, and why? The responses to the first question ranged from Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gaddafi to the Taliban, Hezbollah, and al-Qaida. I responded that perhaps the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan clouded society’s recollection and thus their own memory of 9/11. The why part of my question was more telling, as no one had a definitive answer as to why al-Qaida attacked the United States. I provided a brief historical timeline of the events leading to 9/11 that included the regional impacts of Operation Desert Storm, post-Cold War geopolitics, cultural and religious influences, and the effects of the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate on the Middle East. Based on student responses, we concluded that there is not one clear answer to my questions regarding 9/11—this one event is too complicated for that. Students were asked to go back and consider the seventeen-year-old in 1877 and the hypothetical response regarding the coming of the Civil War. Would the causes be more easily explained than their own memories of 9/11? Could a post-Civil War teenager make sense of the pre-Civil War decades of political compromises, judicial decisions, and acts of violence that spiraled out of control during the 1850s, leading ultimately to secession and war? Most likely he could not. Perhaps the Reconstruction era would only have confused the way he viewed and remembered the war.

This activity illustrates how little students understand pivotal events in their own lifetime, a characteristic perhaps shared by Americans in 1877. To frame this argument, the students read parts of David Blight’s “‘For Something beyond the Battlefield:’ Frederick Douglass and the Struggle for the Memory of the Civil War.” In this essay, Blight states that memories of the Civil War were “out of date” to most Americans by the Gilded Age. Students were intrigued by Blight’s discussion of Douglass’s frustrated efforts to remind the nation about slavery’s role in causing the Civil War. Further, when they compared Blight’s explanation of the war’s lost memory with their own lack of understanding of 9/11, they were captivated.

At one point, a Georgia teacher asked, “You don’t have a problem that the University of Wisconsin plays football games where Confederate prisoners were once held and died?”

Introducing students to the concept of historical memory has advanced a number of my pedagogical goals. The topic allows students to explore the ways in which the present influences how we understand our past, and it is suited to using both traditional historical documents as well as classroom technology to better gauge how Americans currently remember and commemorate the past. Civil War memory provides excellent opportunities for experiential learning, an essential component of this analysis, and allows teachers an opportunity to introduce students to the practice of historical study. Students increase their self-awareness and understanding by engaging other students and historians. Through the framework of historical memory, students can present their own work and solicit the opinions of other audiences. This type of public engagement—occurring in a museum or on a road trip—enhances student commitment and comprehension of history.

Striking Conversations Between Northern and Southern Classrooms

Although teachers often assume that students have the world at their fingertips, few of my students interact with and learn from students in other places with any regularity. After our discussion about the conflicting Civil War memories of nineteenth-century Americans, I put my students (from the Upper Midwest) in contact with students in Columbus, Georgia, and Newport News, Virginia. I contacted a teacher in Georgia through an education Website, and I met an instructor in Virginia during an online History of Slavery Education seminar. My fellow teachers and I therefore planned out separate week-long units and created a Wikispace site to host all daily online interactions between our students. We collaborated first with the students in Virginia.

 

Both classes posted images of war remembrance in their respective communities on the Wiki. In my classes, the discussion about what images to present to our Southern colleagues was an unanticipated challenge, and we had very good discussions about what best represents “our” history. Some students were unaware of any examples of how the war is remembered in Milwaukee or Wisconsin. Our class decided to focus on monuments that acknowledge local ties to abolitionism and its military role in the war. A few students, however, thought that a mural depicting the capture and incarceration of a fugitive slave, and of the slave’s subsequent liberation by Milwaukee abolitionists in defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act, would antagonize Southern students. “Perhaps Southerners would feel offended,” stated one student, “by the appearance of the slave catcher and his dogs.” Another student was concerned that a monument called “The Victorious Charge,” which depicts Wisconsin Civil War soldiers in combat, may “rub in” the fact that the North won. Despite these concerns, the majority of students believed we needed to present the way the war is remembered as it stands, and hoped these examples would provide a more lively interaction. Other memorials we presented were an Abraham Lincoln statue, the Milwaukee Soldiers’ Home buildings, and the University of Wisconsin’s Camp Randall football stadium, whose grounds were used as a training ground and Confederate prisoner-of-war camp.

The Virginia students posted a furlough and a pardon slip that belonged to ancestors of one of their teachers: one a Yankee and the other a Confederate. But it was a photograph they shared that prompted one of my students to come into class and ask enthusiastically, “Did you see what the Southern class posted yesterday?” The photo depicts a local park’s Christmas light display that reads, “Once Divided, Forever United” with the Monitor and Merrimackfiring at one another from either end of the phrase. Students were surprised at the openness of this community to its history of secession. When I asked why, a group of students said they thought Southerners would be more defiant and not openly support the concept of reunion through public memorials. Another group of students assumed the South—and especially Virginia, which was the center of the war’s fighting—would be embarrassed by their attempts at secession and not want to publicize that effort and failure.

During the week’s online exchanges, many Virginia students made it clear that they held a memory of the war that is similar to that held by northern teenagers. Others stated that, although some in their community do fly the Confederate flag, they do not support it. One student, for example, posted on the Wiki, “What do you all think about the fact that we have a highway nearby called Jefferson Davis highway? I believe it makes Virginia look bad and we shouldn’t be remembering him.” Another stated in response to my student’s question whether European intervention on the Confederacy’s behalf would have led to a Confederate victory: “I’d like to think the outcome today wouldn’t be different. It might have taken much longer to get to where we are now but I think we would eventually get there.” These comments online and others during a Skype conversation contradicted our initial concerns and assumptions. Although they encountered more battlefield monuments—due to their location on the Peninsula—the Virginians remembered the war in a similar manner to Wisconsin students. To further illustrate this similarity, an online Wiki poll designed by our class asked both classrooms what caused the war: seventy-six percent clicked “slavery,” nineteen percent clicked “states’ rights,” and five percent clicked “a lack of respect for southern way of life.” Not one student clicked “Lincoln and his Republican party policies.”

When we collaborated with students in Georgia, we followed the same basic methodology but changed two aspects of our interaction. First, we added the preface to Gary Gallagher’s The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History as a joint reading exercise; both classes responded to the reading in a Wiki page comment box. And rather than videoconferencing with the entire class, students split up into small groups of four or five and used an iPad to view one another. My students wanted the ability to speak face to face with their counterparts in an attempt to experience a personal connection. For most of my students, Southerners and their history seemed almost foreign, and the students hoped to gain an understanding that their text could not provide.

The difference between our collaborations was striking. The smaller group size provided more students the opportunity for direct experiential learning. I also believe the stronger defense of Southern heritage presented by some of the participants in Georgia allowed for clearer distinctions regarding the war’s memory. At one point, a Georgia teacher asked, “You don’t have a problem that the University of Wisconsin plays football games where Confederate prisoners were once held and died?” The question left this young group of Wisconsin football fans speechless. Although my students knew the stadium’s history as a prison camp, they had not even considered that Southerners could find fault in how their state remembers the Civil War in that space. Many saw the stadium’s use as a prison camp as so far in the past as to be irrelevant today. That question was a perfect example of how my students’ perceptions of the past were challenged by a Georgian interpretation of their history. In a later follow-up discussion, I asked my class how they would feel if the University of Georgia played football on the grounds of Andersonville. Many admitted they would be uncomfortable with that scenario. My students stated that this one exchange increased their awareness of conflicting memories of this shared national event. The Georgia class had a similar response to our conversations: a member of their classroom wrote on the Wiki, “My class enjoyed it a great deal and benefited from the paradigm shift that resulted from seeing the differences in culture and views about the Civil War.”

Through these collaborations, my students’ hypothesis—that since the majority of the war was fought on Virginia soil, the Virginians’ memory would be the strongest, or more “Southern”—was proven incorrect. They also were surprised that the linguistic differences between the two southern schools proved that a perceived “Southern-ness” varies from one region to another. For example, in addition to its stronger overall sense of pride in Southern heritage, the class in Georgia had a very distinct Southern accent and used the term “y’all” much more than the Virginia students. Most of my students assumed that the two southern schools would sound and think the same. The poll numbers from our Georgia interaction further exemplify the differences between these southern states. Fifty-eight percent of Georgia participants believed slavery caused the Civil War, and twenty percent thought it was states’ rights; eleven percent selected “lack of respect for southern way of life,” and ten percent chose “Lincoln and Republican party policies.” My students concluded from these disparities with the Virginia students’ answers that the farther south you go, the stronger the Southern memory of the war will be.

The videoconferences added faces and voices to a Southern outlook on history; this was a perspective my Northern students were previously not able to understand. Thus, these classroom interactions helped make sense of the diversity in Southern opinions and convictions, today and in the 1860s. For example, my students often assume a united front in the effort to uphold slavery in the South. But President Jefferson Davis quickly learned that support for the Confederate war effort was far from unified. My class interpreted the differences in our collaborations with the Virginia and Georgia classrooms as a modern-day explanation of this flaw in the Southern war effort.

These online technologies are essential to teaching about Civil War memory. Social media tools promote meaningful connections that extend beyond the physical classroom. Through them, students were able to share and compare assumptions about how the war is being studied and remembered online with distant partners who may or may not share their beliefs. Students were challenged to face stereotypes of other people and listen to differing points of view of their own history.

Written in Stone or Scanned in a Phone?

Online conversations about Civil War memory can broaden student communities. These and other experiential learning projects can also spur students to dig deeper into historical questions and engage the public over their complexity. Due to curricular demands that limit class time, I created a Public History Club to help students undertake more in-depth historical memory projects. The club has the support of the school administration, which has helped foster collaboration between students and local historical institutions. Currently, a group of six club members are working to call attention to an Iron Brigade veteran and his memorial in a Milwaukee Park.

 

Two summers ago, I stumbled upon an online reference to the Jerome Watrous Memorial Plaque in Milwaukee’s Whitnall Park. I was surprised to learn that, other than local heritage organizations, there was a lack of general public awareness or interest in this memorial. I brought this “forgotten” memorial to my Public History Club’s attention, and the students raised several questions: Who was Jerome Watrous? Why did the National Daughters of the Grand Army of the Republic decide to commemorate him with a plaque and memorial grove? Who were the Daughters? Why did the Daughters choose Whitnall Park? And why did the memorial grove disappear?

The students decided the best way to explain this memorial to the public was with a tin-plated QR code, which is a computer-generated barcode that displays information when scanned with a smartphone. Students received permission from park officials to place this QR marker, which will display a video, atop a wood 6-by-6 post near the original memorial. They then had to determine what to include in their short video, which visitors would see after scanning the bar code. What historical questions should be answered? How long should the video run to keep a park visitor’s attention? In attempting to answer these questions, the students gained valuable insights into the challenges public historians face regarding what to include and highlight from their research in an exhibition.

 

In order to determine when and why the memorial was placed in Whitnall Park, we looked to local archives and professional historians to provide guidance. After school, a student and I searched through microfilm rolls of old newspapers at the Milwaukee Public Library and found an article that described a tree dedication at the site in September 1939. The newspapers did not, however, reveal why the memorial was there. After a few e-mail exchanges with local historian and Marquette University High School alumnus John Gurda, the students learned that by 1939 Whitnall Park had become the county’s largest park. Perhaps, Gurda surmised, “The Daughters of GAR may have noticed the existing Civil War monuments in the city’s older parks and wanted to be involved in the newer park development.” Another student did the math and reasoned that perhaps the Daughters may have also been caught up in the seventy-fifth commemoration of the Civil War. Research also showed that the use of plaques and living memorials in the form of tree groves were popular after World War I. In addition, a park official told the students that because Whitnall Park was a former farm, memorial groves encouraged civic involvement to help forest this new community landscape. Used for decades as a place for picnics and veterans’ commemorations, the memorial grove was likely devastated by the Dutch elm beetle in the 1960s. With the death of the trees, interest in this site likely waned.

 

With this background information in hand, the group of students reached out to Civil War historian Kevin Levin, who Skyped with the group and discussed the value of telling the memorial’s history and the story of the surrounding public space. This discussion helped to focus my students’ vision of what narrative they wanted to share with the public. They chose not to focus on Watrous’ heroics at Gettysburg or his well-known career as a Milwaukee newspaper editor and advocate for Civil War veterans’ benefits. Rather, they decided to tell the story of the memorial plaque itself, the women who dedicated it, and the history of the park.

This past April, the Kenosha Civil War Museum invited the Public History Club to speak to a public audience as a part of the museum’s monthly lecture series. Through its “Fiery Trial” exhibit the museum tells the stories of those individuals from the Midwest, including Watrous, who played important roles in the Civil War. The students presented a slide show detailing their research on Watrous, the Daughters, and the role of this memorial in Whitnall Park. It was, however, the twenty-minute question and answer session that provided unexpected and lasting lessons. Students were asked why the memorial was located in Whitnall Park. The audience also inquired into students’ impressions of Watrous, and their perceptions of Civil War history and memory. When asked what the students enjoyed most about this project, a student replied, “I like being asked tough questions, to make connections and be challenged. It made it much more interesting than a textbook.” When asked how important technology was to shaping this project, a student commented, “Technology is everything to us, it is very important.” Not only does the use of technology draw students into public history projects, it can provide an effective means to interpret memory for a public audience. At one point the museum’s curator asked, “What can the museum do to attract your generation’s attention and interest?” Quickly, a student responded, “Use more technology, use as little text as possible, and more stimulation.” The others nodded their heads in approval.

From these questions, it was clear that there was a genuine concern from the older members of the audience about whether future generations will continue to remember the Civil War’s legacy. One person was almost in tears, moved to hear that these students took on this project; some raised their hands only to offer words of thanks. Needless to say, these students did not expect this response. One student summed up the experience as follows: “I suppose you could say we are returning the favor to Watrous for doing all he did for his fellow veterans.” Watching and listening to this interaction was a poignant lesson for me as a teacher. These students were surprised and honored that adults asked so many questions and listened to their answers. Their engagement with Civil War memory and public history created a forum in which their ideas mattered. They owned the podium and for forty-five minutes they were acknowledged as the experts. Like the classroom videoconferences, these experiential learning projects pushed students to explore tough questions, and the engagement outside of the classroom generated a deeper interest in and understanding of Civil War memory than if this project had been confined to the classroom. If future generations are to remember Civil War history, we need to provide these opportunities to create true meaning and genuine interest in young learners. Textbooks and isolated classrooms alone cannot and will not facilitate these connections.

Engaging Memory on Historic Landscapes

Nothing illustrates this point about experiential learning more than our school’s annual Civil War Summer Adventure. Tony Horwitz’s book, Confederates in the Attic, inspired me thirteen years ago to develop a Civil War excursion for students that highlighted places where the memory of the war is still alive. Last summer that dream came to fruition. Eleven students, three teachers, and I crowded into two vans for a nine-day tour of the war’s history. We followed the paths of two Northern veterans, Jerome Watrous and Barton Mitchell, whose role in the discovery of Lost Order 191 during the Antietam Campaign is disputed. (Order 191 was issued by Robert E. Lee regarding the movement of the Army of Northern Virginia during the Maryland Campaign. Its discovery by Union troops provided crucial intelligence at the Battle of Antietam.) Several of Mitchell’s comrades from the 27th Indiana provided contradictory recollections of his involvement with the Lost Order. One soldier, for example, questioned whether Mitchell actually picked up the papers, while another comrade suggested Mitchell was illiterate and could not have comprehended the order’s significance. My own blog recorded student reflections that focused on daily themes during the evenings, which were spent either in college dormitories or National Park Battlefield campsites.

The trip began with a Memorial Day commemoration in Hartsville, Indiana, where Mitchell is buried. A local Hartsville newspaper editor and I had arranged the commemoration event, and it was truly an extraordinary way to begin the trip. While Marquette High students laid a bouquet of flowers and three cigars wrapped in a copy of Lost Order 191 at Mitchell’s grave, their classmate performed “Echo Taps” with a bugler from the local Indiana chapter of the Sons of Union Veterans in attendance. One of the Sons passionately told the audience that Mitchell was indeed literate and would have understood the significance of those orders. He proved Mitchell’s literacy by noting Mitchell’s prewar occupation of town postmaster, which required the ability to read and write. Our students noted that the brief speech sounded more like a courtroom closing argument than a brief history. This experience sparked curiosity about why residents of this small town would be so passionate about this particular individual. The students were intrigued to learn how Watrous’s connection to the Lost Order is interpreted in other places. Several of the Hartsville residents in attendance offered warm-hearted thanks to the students for participating in the event and for keeping Mitchell’s memory alive by following in his footsteps. The local newspaper wrote a story about the students, who subsequently felt like rock stars. Most important, our group realized how meaningful this particular memory of Mitchell is to the dozens of people who ventured to his grave for this commemoration. Books provide the facts on historical events, but students learned here that memories of the war are still vivid and still debated.

Eastward bound, we ventured to Kentucky to ride a car ferry across the Ohio River, which had served as freedom’s gateway to many fugitive slaves. I felt it was important to cross this river from Kentucky over to Ohio for two reasons: to recreate the departure from slave to free territory and to experience the physical space of the Ohio River itself. In the middle of the river, one student marveled at how difficult it is to understand how one shore was free and the other slave just 150 years ago. Once ashore in Ohio, a guide provided a tour of the Rankin National Historic Site. Students walked the stone steps that countless slaves used to reach safety within and beyond the Rankin residence. Several students reflected on whether the slaves felt fear, hope, or some combination of the two emotions as they ascended the cliff. This visit led the students to place a historic site and its surrounding geography into the larger context of the history of slavery they had studied in the classroom. As a result, its complexities became more apparent.

 

Along the way the group stopped at the 9/11 memorial sites at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Students acknowledged a close connection between Shanksville and Gettysburg, both of which endured horrific violence that forever changed their communities. We spoke to a National Park Service volunteer at the Flight 93 site who was a first responder to the scene twelve years ago. He commented that many local residents do not care for the tour buses that now roll through their streets. A student’s eyes widened and he wondered aloud “whether Gettysburg’s residents felt a similar reaction” in the years following that battle. By this point in the trip, we had learned of the hard times local residents faced in the aftermath of the battles of Antietam and Gettysburg: their homes and barns were confiscated for a plethora of military uses, and their fields were destroyed with little compensation. In the long term, however, these places thrive because of tourism, and the group hypothesized that attitudes in Shanksville will follow the same progression and local residents will eventually accept their role in history.

 

We learned more about Watrous and Mitchell each day of the trip. For example, we discussed how Watrous’s brigade, made up of Midwestern regiments, were initially known as the “Black Hats” upon their arrival in the Army of Potomac due to their distinctive black Hardee hats. We walked the full distance along the firing line at Brawner’s Farm to stand where Watrous and his mates in the 6th Wisconsin Regiment traded blows with the Stonewall Brigade at Second Manassas. Even the Confederates took notice of these distinctive Yankees. A few days later we followed the Black Hats through Crampton’s Gap in Maryland to Antietam’s bloody Cornfield, where we could finally refer to Watrous and his comrades as members of the Iron Brigade. Here I read aloud Lance Herdegen’s various accounts of how the appellation “Iron” was given to these men. It was with uneasy hearts that we walked through the Cornfield where our battlefield guide pointed out approximately where both Watrous and Mitchell were wounded. By the time we stood just east of Reynold’s Woods at Gettysburg, students had a deeper understanding of the wartime experiences of Watrous and his comrades from the letters and battle reports they read and the fields they walked. When I explained Watrous’s Mule Train Charge, which helped resupply the Iron Brigade around Seminary Ridge, the students felt they were listening to a real comrade in arms. They smiled upon hearing the Confederate reaction to spotting the Midwesterners on July 1, 1863, at Gettysburg; “there are those damn black hatted fellows again.” Also at Gettysburg, near Culp’s Hill, our group stood in silence and some winced at the thought of Mitchell, still nursing his leg wound from Antietam, charging across an open field only to see his unit turned back with terrible losses.

It was our connection to Mitchell that was truly extraordinary. Students were surprised to learn of the extent of the debate over whether Mitchell in fact discovered the famous Lost Order. Once again, students were confronted by another situation in which historical inquiry and memory clash. I asked the group to study the roadside historical markers, the Library of Congress Civil War Sesquicentennial exhibits, and battlefields throughout the trip to determine the differences in how Mitchell is remembered. They found it an interesting contrast that an entire marker was dedicated to Mitchell in Indiana, but that he was simply referred to as “a Union private” in the Library of Congress’s display of the Lost Order. When one student suggested that this exhibit “slighted Mitchell” by not giving him personal credit, we questioned whether the breadth of a sesquicentennial exhibit would have limited the curator’s ability to name him, or perhaps the exhibit just did not want to participate in the Lost Order debate. During long van rides, students spent time on their smartphones researching Watrous and Mitchell, finding illuminating discrepancies in the historical record. For example, one student noticed that the Civil War Trust Website states that there were three cigars wrapped inside Lee’s orders, while the Monocacy National BattlefieldWebsite states that there were two. The students were intrigued, and at the Monocacy National Battlefield they learned why there were such discrepancies through an invaluable lesson of historical analysis, source interpretation, and memory.

The Monocacy Park rangers took the time to explain all sides of this historical controversy: who most likely found the orders, where they were found, and how many cigars were likely located in General Lee’s lost envelope. They also explained their rationale for deciding where the orders were located using letters, historical maps, and the “smoking gun”: an Indiana soldier’s letter written shortly after the battle of Antietam that names Mitchell as the discoverer of the orders and the two cigars. They also gave our group photocopied transcriptions of these historical sources and one of Mitchell’s original letters. I heard one student whisper to another, “I guess that answers the question whether he was literate back in Indiana.”

The park rangers and their museum displays explained how memory of the Civil War shifted in the 1880s and 1890s to the stories of campaigns and battles. After Mitchell passed away in 1868, it seems that some of his comrades may have looked for glory in the public’s newfound interest in the war’s campaigns and battles and began to take credit for the Lost Order’s discovery. Nothing is absolutely certain regarding the Lost Order, but the rangers provided an extraordinary lesson on the reliability of historical sources and how to make reasonable assessments of an event. I repeated their instruction using the same documents and materials in a classroom unit on historical research and analysis this past fall. Consequently, we are determined to head back to Mitchell’s grave in the future and place two cigars there, as a corrective gesture to the three cigars we placed during the Memorial Day commemoration. This future trip back to Hartsville will show students how commemorations can often shift in contrast and meaning as a result of historical research.

Without our knowledge, the Monocacy Park rangers took it upon themselves to call a descendent of Mitchell and let him know that a group of Milwaukee high school students was following the wartime route of his great-great grandfather. We eventually talked with this relative just outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on speakerphone. From him, we learned even more about Mitchell, including his family nickname and the fact that he was one of the few abolitionists in the 27th Indiana. The descendent, however, most of all wanted to thank the students for their interest and time dedicated to his family and the war’s memory. When we hung up, the students, who had been weary after nine days on the road, were fired up; they remarked that Mitchell came to life even more through that conversation. Over the course of the trip and through all of these experiences and interactions, the students created a personal connection to the past.

Harnessing an Academic Entrepreneurial Spirit

Where will my students go from here? In April 2014, the Public History Club will unveil its QR code memorial to Jerome Watrous. Students are organizing the event with a local Daughters Heritage group. One of the Southern teachers and I plan to co-teach a Civil War Memory lesson in the future that will expand the use of videoconference technology. I also hope to share a class blog with a classroom from another part of the country, through which students post articles about Civil War history and memory and comment on each other’s work. This summer’s Civil War Adventure will head south and follow the wartime paths of the Confederate soldier Sam Watkins, 54th Massachusetts soldier Shedrick Conaway (who is buried in Milwaukee), and diarist Mary Chesnut. A highlight of the trip will be to sleep inside slave quarters on a South Carolina plantation. The group will also pick up Barton Mitchell’s trail again, because his regiment was ordered west after Gettysburg, and his lingering wound from Antietam forced him to muster out near Atlanta.

In order to help ensure social studies maintains a meaningful place alongside STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) curricula, I believe social studies teachers in middle and high schools must continue to think outside the box and harness an academic entrepreneurial spirit. This spirit underlies the projects I have undertaken, whether it is the launch of online collaborations, the formation of a public history club, or the development of student relationships with public organizations. We must continue to provide for those students who crave historical knowledge but do not receive it in their schools. In 2014, to help achieve this goal, MUHS will host our first Summer Civil War Institute for Milwaukee middle and high school students. This four-day event will bring together like-minded teachers, who have agreed to collaborate, share teaching strategies, and provide learning experiences that incorporate technology, local and virtual site visits, and the expertise of professional historians.

Civil War memory projects can provide meaningful and powerful experiential learning opportunities through which students create emotional attachments to the subject matter and to other communities. When they develop these personal connections to the past, they are increasingly willing to dig deeper into the subject matter, and learn essential skills in research and writing. Highlighting the different ways that memory is produced in our culture will also encourage students to strive to be life-long learners of Civil War and American history.

Further Reading

For more about how to implement historical memory inside and outside the classroom, see James A. Percoco, “Monumental History: Commemorating America’s Civil War Sesquicentennial,” OAH Magazine of History 25:2 (2011); Kevin Levin, “Using Ken Burn’s The Civil War in the Classroom,” The History Teacher 44:1 (November 2010); James P. Whittenburg, “Teaching Civil War Mobilization with Historic Sites,” OAH Magazine of History26:2 (2012); and Barnaby Nemko, “Are we creating a generation of ‘historical tourists’?” Teaching History 137 (December 2009).

For studies of effective and meaningful strategies incorporating technology, field trips, public collaborations, and memorialization into social studies classrooms, see Elizabeth K. Wilson, et al, “Retooling the Social Studies Classroom for the Current Generation,” The Social Studies 102 (2011); Keith A. Erekson, “Putting History Teaching ‘In Its Place’,” The Journal of American History 97:4 (March 2011); K.S. Inglis, “War Memorials: Ten Questions for Historians,” Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains 167 (July 1992).

Useful arguments and perspectives regarding the debate over the Lost Order’s discovery and its importance to Civil War history are covered in Stephen W. Sears, “Last Words on the Lost Order,” Controversies and Commanders: Dispatches from the Army of the Potomac (New York, 1999) and Wilbur D. Jones Jr., The 27^th Indiana Infantry, Giants in the Cornfield (Shippensburg, Pa.,1997). For an argument on how all fields of Civil War history should work together to remain relevant today, see George Rable, “The Battlefield and Beyond,” Civil War History 53:3 (September 2007).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 14.2 (Winter, 2014).

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Chris Lese is a member of the Social Studies Department at Marquette University High School, a Jesuit college preparatory institution in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He worked as a public historian and operated his own architectural design company prior to teaching.

Like so many wars in the distant past, the American Revolution narrates beautifully. There is a beginning—the Shot Heard ‘Round the World, April 1775—in which a once-reluctant and economically diverse populace beats its ploughshares into swords. There is a set of progressive middles, unfolding against now-hallowed spaces: Independence is declared in Philadelphia; epic battles are fought at Bunker Hill, at Saratoga, at Trenton, at Cowpens, at Yorktown. Armies traverse the countryside; territory is claimed and reclaimed. Diplomatic overtures are made, revised, rebuffed. Heroes—George Washington, Ethan Allen, the Marquis de Lafayette, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, Casimir Pulaski—rise to their various occasions; villains—King George, Lord Cornwallis, Lord North, Benedict Arnold, Banastre Tarleton—fall victim to their various fates. Running through it all are thematic leitmotifs: “No taxation without representation”; “Give me liberty or give me death.” Everyone remembers the Boston Tea-Party, and no one fires until they see the whites of the enemy’s eyes. And then, finally, there is a clear ending: Lord Cornwallis surrenders to George Washington at Yorktown in October 1781. The Peace of Paris, negotiated by John Adams and Ben Franklin in the fall of 1783, puts a formal period to the war and establishes the United States of America as an independent nation. There are many ways to tell the story—different personnel, different motive forces, different perspectives on the ultimate outcomes—but the essential plot remains the same. The Revolution fits patterns that we recognize—the flows of conflict and resolution, of call and response, of change over time.

As devoted to such patterns as we are—they allow us to make sense of the past, to forge history from the unfathomable welter of time gone by—we must also recognize their essential artificiality; they are products of historiography, not intrinsic features of the events themselves. And they are not neutral or disinterested: different frames for events lead to different senses of the whole. They make the difference between “Revolution” and “Rebellion,” between “freedom fighting” and “terrorism.” In thinking about the familiar story of the American Revolution, then, we must follow the poet Amy Lowell and inquire seriously: “What are [these] patterns for?” One answer—increasingly clear in the recent advent of Glenn Beck’s Common Sense, Ron Paul’s anti-tax “Tea Parties” and other right-wing fever-dreams about the late eighteenth century—is that the narrative elegance of the Revolution slots neatly into (or emerges out of) persistent fantasies of American exceptionality. The origin-story works so well—how could it have gone otherwise? How could the existence of the United States not have been logically—if not divinely—ordained? It is a short, bright line from conventional narrative histories of the Revolution to the largely triumphalist foreign and domestic policy of most of the last two centuries; varieties of American exceptionalism have provided cover for everything from the continuation of racial slavery, Indian removal, and anti-immigrant riots to the Cold War and the Bush Doctrine.

But not every story of the Revolution fits so neatly into such providentialist and heroic-nationalist narratives of the Founding. Joseph Plumb Martin’s Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers, and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier, first published in Hallowell, Maine, in 1830, offers both a counter-record of the facts of the War and a counter-method for relating them. Born in the Berkshires, near the town of Becket, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1760, and raised largely by his grandparents in Milford, Connecticut, Martin enlisted as a private in the Continental Army at the age of 15. He was present for many of the Revolution’s significant events. He saw action in the Battle of Brooklyn, the Battle of White Plains, the Battle of Kip’s Bay; he encamped at Valley Forge during the winter of 1777. Promoted to sergeant in a sappers and miners regiment near the end of the War, he helped to lay siege to Yorktown. Martin left the Army upon its dissolution in 1783 and settled a farm in southern Maine. He did not prosper, but he married and lived long enough to apply for a government pension (in 1818) of $96 a year. He died, relatively poor and relatively obscure, in the spring of 1850.

If this version of Martin’s biography suggests a familiar arc of American heroism—the everyman who nobly sacrifices his youth for the sake of his country, his autobiography follows a rather less familiar one. As Martin says in his preface, this Narrative will

give a succinct account of some of my adventures, dangers and sufferings during my several campaigns in the revolutionary army. My readers, (who, by the by, will, I hope, none of them be beyond the pale of my own neighbourhood,) must not expect any great transactions to be exhibited to their notice. ‘No alpine wonders thunder through my tale,’ but they are here, once for all, requested to bear it in mind, that they are not the achievements of an officer of high grade which they are perusing, but the common transactions of one of the lowest in station in an army, a private soldier.

Offering a corrective to the endlessly circulating stories of soldiering that center on élite virtue (as in Mason Locke Weems’s biography of George Washington) and novel-ready derring-do (as in James Fenimore Cooper’s novel, The Spy), Martin’s Narrative recalls the real-life drudgery of an enlisted man. He finds heroism in the endurance of poverty, cold, hunger, boredom, confusion, and mismanagement; he shifts the terms and the burdens of American virtue from the gentry to the common folk.

But Martin’s memoir does not merely question the grand narratives of the Revolution by speaking only to his “own neighborhood” or by recalling in plain language the lives and times of persons without political or economic capital—elements continually obscured by the cult of celebrity around generals and statesmen, by republican ideas of the ennoblement of the citizen-soldier, and by ideologies of American progress. More than just different plots with different perspectives, Martin’s counter-stories work against the forms and conventions of story itself. For Martin, it seems that making sense of the war is a privilege accorded only to the higher-ups and to the historians: to tell a clear, sequential tale about the confusing, recursive, and unspeakable deprivations of soldiering would be to mischaracterize the soldier’s experience entirely. For the sake of candor and for the sake of representing the powerless, Martin abandons not only conventional history but also the conventions of historical writing.

Such resistance is most visible in Martin’s discussions of privation and plenty; the narrative, like Napoleon’s army, marches (or fails to march) on the private soldier’s stomach. In contrast to the breathless flows of other people’s (Mercy Otis Warren’s, David Ramsay’s, and others like them) accounts of the war, Martin repeatedly breaks from recording sequences of events to dwell on non-linear, not-very-progressive anecdotes and sense-memories, especially those arising from being hungry. Hardly a paragraph goes by without a long and wistful discussion of the acquisition of a particular chicken, or a reverie about a jug of wine, or a rueful meditation on what it means to starve to death in the service of a nation that does not yet exist. In leaving the sweep of chronological organization and linear cause-and-effect to focus so intently on timeless and cyclical matters of the belly, Martin urges his readers to think of war as a state absolutely incommensurable with coherent storytelling.

Martin begins his recollections of the War with his own entrance into it: intrigued by stories of adventure and heroism that far outstrip life on his grandfather’s farm in southwestern Connecticut (not unlike Stephen Crane’s Henry Fleming, in The Red Badge of Courage), the young Martin enlists in the Continental Army. His regiment departs for New York City, where it is to meet up with other troops for the purpose of defending the city from the gathering British armies. Martin’s first taste of conflict is not long in coming—though it takes a somewhat surprising form:

The soldiers at New-York had an idea that the enemy, when they took possession of the town, would make a general seizure of all property that could be of use to them as military or commissary stores, hence they imagined that it was no injury to supply themselves when they thought they could do so with impunity, which was the case of my having any hand in the transaction I am going to relate…I was stationed in Stone-street, near the southwest angle of the city; directly opposite to my quarters was a wine cellar, there were in the cellar at this time, several pipes of Madeira wine. By some means the soldiers had ‘smelt it out.’ Some of them had, at mid-day, taken the iron grating from a window in the back yard, and one had entered the cellar, and by means of a powder horn divested of its bottom, had supplied himself, with wine, and was helping his comrades, through the window, with a ‘delicious draught’….

There is more here than just the deep cynicism of ordinary soldiers imagining a battle already lost and acting accordingly. This scene sketches the relationship between personal appetite and political violence that runs through Martin’s story. Specifically, the big story of the British invasion gives way to the immediate problem of satisfying the immediate desires of the belly. The fear of armed occupation translates immediately into a fear of starvation. The presence of the British army is a problem both military and commissary in nature; Martin’s colleagues resist it the only way they can—by consuming whatever stores they come across. Notions of the sanctity of private property and liberal consent so often held up as central to the American cause are nowhere to be found; in the face of impending privation, the soldiers smell out wine and turn housebreakers. In a reversal of the swords-to-ploughshares image of the American soldier so dear to the Generals and the historians, the men even convert their tools for fighting into tools for gluttony: in a pinch, a decommissioned powder-horn makes a fine goblet or wine-funnel.

As Martin’s anecdote rambles on, the significance of this crowd action becomes clear: the War is, quite literally, out of control—its chaos cannot be managed in or through the settled rules and narratives of the marketplace or the military hierarchy. When the cellar’s owner catches on, he decides to make a virtue of the depredation; he opens the cellar doors and sells the wine to all comers at a dollar per gallon. The soldiers are far from impressed.

While the owner was drawing for his purchasers on one side of the cellar, behind him on the other side, another set of purchasers were drawing for themselves, filling…flasks. As it appeared to have a brisk sale, especially in the latter case, I concluded I would take a flask amongst the rest, which I accordingly did, and conveyed it in safety to my room, and went back into the street to see the end. The owner of the wine soon found out what was going forward on his premises, and began remonstrating, but he preached to the wind; finding that he could effect nothing, with them, he went to Gen. [Israel] Putnam’s quarters…; the general immediately repaired in person to the field of action; the soldiers getting wind of his approach hurried out into the street, when he, mounting himself upon the door-steps of my quarters, began ‘harangueing the multitude,’ threatening to hang every mother’s son of them.

Denying the relevance of the owner’s story about his right to sell his commodities, Martin and his friends take what they want without regard for long-held economic conventions. They act as “purchasers” while pointedly resisting the symbolic necessities of purchase (the consensual disbursement of money or letters of credit) and the stories (about the “value” of currency or reputation, about the alienability of property) that those symbols structure. The same sort of anti-narrative energy reveals itself in Martin’s characterization of the ransacked wine-cellar as a “field of action,” both for himself and his general. Applying the formal language of military theory and history to drunken riot, Martin sets new terms for success in battle—maximum wine, minimum payment—that no commanding officer could accept. His ironic report (just like his reported action) upsets the conventions of the historical record: heroism may be as simple as getting drunk without getting in trouble; military leadership may consist in threatening the rogues under one’s command. Martin’s reaction to his general officer’s diatribe mixes awe, contempt, and a strong sense of the inconsequentiality of it all:

Whether he was to be the hangman or not, he did not say; but I took every word he said for gospel, and expected nothing else but to be hanged before the morrow night. I sincerely wished him hanged and out of the way, for fixing himself upon the steps of our door; but he soon ended his discourse, and came down from his rostrum, and the soldiers dispersed, no doubt much edified. I got home as soon as the general had left the coast clear, took a draught of the wine, and then flung the flask and the remainder of the wine out of my window, from the third story, into the water cistern in the back yard, where it remains to this day for aught I know. However, I might have kept it, if I had not been in too much haste to free myself from being hanged by General Putnam, or by his order. I never heard anything further about the wine or being hanged about it; he doubtless forgot it.

Instead of the hero-exhorter of Bunker Hill, Martin presents Putnam as a loudmouth buffoon—complete with ironically edified troops. The private worries enough about the possibility of a kernel of truth in the General’s hangman-bluster that he ditches the stolen wine, but not so much that he won’t take a healthy swig beforehand. As this abasement of Putnam begins to suggest, the meaninglessness of this breakdown in order—no one is actually hanged, the General forgets the incident entirely, and Martin moves immediately on to the next formless adventure—is itself richly meaningful. The false, enduring pieties of official “heroism” and military glory will not be allowed to stand in Martin’s text; the tightly structured moral and ideological fable of the great and just War must give way to the evanescence, raggedness and amorality of sensual remembrance.

 

 

When Martin turns to recounting more well-known scrimmages of the war, his narrative priorities remain consistent. Consider his account of what he calls “the famous Kipp’s Bay affair, which has been criticized so much by the Historians of the Revolution.” “I was there,” he tells his readers, “and will give a true statement of all that I saw during that day.” Martin’s treatment of the occupation of Manhattan Island by the British (and the famously disorganized retreat of the Continental soldiers), like his shambling wine-battle anecdote, is both dilatory and food-centered. As the text focuses on the trials of the stomach, it resists assimilation into larger claims about the valor of the Americans.

In retreating we had to cross a level clear spot of ground, forty or fifty rods wide, exposed to the whole of the enemy’s fire; and they gave it to us in prime order; the grape shot and language flew merrily, which served to quicken our motions. When I had gotten a little out of reach of the combustibles, I found myself in company with one who was a neighbour of mine when at home, and one other man belonging to our regiment; where the rest of them were I knew not. We went into a house by the highway, in which were two women and some small children, all crying most bitterly; we asked the women if they had any spirits in the house; they placed a case bottle of rum upon the table, and bid us help ourselves. We each of us drank a glass, and bidding them good bye, betook ourselves to the highway again.

This brand of nonchalance—bullets rarely fly “merrily” in the genres of the military history or the war memoir—is not, it seems, merely a consequence of Martin’s battlefield cynicism. It is, rather, further evidence of the psychological and ideological priorities of the enlisted man—priorities in conflict with the overarching themes of Revolutionary historiography. Martin emphasizes fellowship constituted through proximity and happenstance instead of through military designation—he doesn’t seem particularly broken up about losing his regiment, so long as his neighbor and this other guy are still around. More than this, he manifests little concern for the civilians that he finds: the women and children may be “crying most bitterly,” but their sorrows pale in comparison with Martin’s need for strong drink. It may be that the sympathy-for-countrymen that constitutes national feeling may lie at the root of the women’s gift of spirits (instead of, say, self-preservation in the face of three armed and uninvited guests), but an appeal to American solidarity is nowhere in evidence in Martin’s request. Putting his friendships and personal appetites—not his patriotism or his courage or his devotion to the American cause—as well as a kind of compulsory hospitality at the center of the story of his first battle, Martin works to un-write the myth of Revolution as a product of incipient nationalism: social affiliation doesn’t travel under the sign of an Americanizing ideology, but rather under the sign of bare life.

 

 

Soon after, Martin arrives at the site of a much larger battle: “When I came to the spot where the militia were fired upon, the ground was literally covered with arms, knapsacks, staves, coats, hats and old oil flasks, perhaps some of those from the Madeira wine cellar, in New-York; all I picked up of the plunder, was a blocktin syringe [i.e. a syringe made from pure tin, not tin-plated iron], which afterwards helped me to procure a thanksgiving dinner.” What for other tellers might be a particularly poignant scene of battlefield desolation—of the material sacrifices demanded by a love of liberty, perhaps—represents for Martin a means for promoting another meal. Intimate needs and the modes (perhaps inglorious; perhaps merely incompatible with strict notions of glory) by which they may be met take precedence over symbolic grandiosity or historical synthesis.

The first in-depth account of Martin’s own fighting follows hard upon his depictions of the Battle of Kip’s Bay. It begins with the sort of narrative description of an engagement that you might find in any other contemporary battle-memoir (as Mason Locke Weems’sThe Life of General Francis Marion, a celebrated partisan officer in the Revolutionary War [1809] or his A history of the life and death, virtues and exploits, of General George Washington [1800]).

…In the forenoon, the enemy, as we expected, followed us ‘hard up,’ and were advancing through a level field; our rangers and some few other light troops, under the Command of Colonel Knowlton, of Connecticut, and Major Leitch of (I believe) Virginia, were in waiting for them. Seeing them advancing, the rangers, &c. concealed themselves in a deep gully overgrown with bushes; upon the western verge of this defile was a post and rail fence, and over that the forementioned field. Our people let the enemy advance until they arrived at the fence, when they arose and poured in a volley upon them. How many of the enemy were killed and wounded could not be known, as the British were always careful as Indians to conceal their losses. There were, doubtless, some killed, as I myself counted nineteen ball-holes through a single rail of the fence at which the enemy were standing when the action began. The British gave back and our people advanced into the field. The action soon became warm. Colonel Knowlton, a brave man, and commander of the detachment, fell in the early part of the engagement. It was said, by those who saw it, that he lost his valuable life by unadvisedly exposing himself singly to the enemy.

Although his non-commissioned perspective is unusual, Martin otherwise performs perfectly the duty of the conventional historical witness: he lays out a coherent story in which he records terrain, marks important officers, acknowledges individual and collective bravery, aligns the enemy with inscrutable Otherness, and recognizes patriotic sacrifice. As he continues, however, Martin’s relish for such conventionality begins to fade.

The men were very much fatigued and faint, having had nothing to eat for forty-eight hours,—at least the greater part were in this condition, and I among the rest. While standing in the field, after the action had ceased, one of the men near the Lieut. Colonel, complained of being hungry; the Colonel, putting his hand into his coat pocket, took out a piece of an ear of Indian corn, burnt as black as coal, ‘Here,’ said he to the man complaining, ‘eat this and be a soldier.’

Again diverting his descriptive energies from the grand narratives of combat, of territory contested and lives lost, Martin lingers on the sensory experience of starving in the field. It is hunger that brings the “greater part” of these men together—and Martin “among the rest”—rather than ideological or political congruence. With his burnt corn, the Colonel reinforces the point: “Eat this and be a soldier.” To be a Continental is not necessarily to believe in the sovereign right of a people to govern themselves, nor to stand up for American freedom, nor to engage the enemy, nor to make sense of the events of the war (or even, it seems, to pay them much mind) but rather to starve or eat terrible food without complaint.

The recollection of this burnt corn episode spurs Martin further still from the story of his formative skirmish: upon returning to camp, he finds the “invalids” of his company to be “broiling…beef on small sticks, in Indian stile, round blazing fires, made of dry chestnut rails. The meat, when cooked, was as black as a coal on the outside, and as raw on the inside as if it had not been near the fire. ‘I asked no questions, for conscience’s sake,’ but fell to and helped myself to a feast of this raw beef, without bread or salt.” Martin’s prior descriptions of military engagement pale in comparison with his descriptions of the beef, its preparation, and its consumption; measured in terms of detail, the emotional (and extra-narrative) weight of the dinner far exceeds the emotional (and narrative) weight of the fighting. Only as an afterthought does he add the following: “We had eight or ten of our regiment killed in the action, and a number wounded, but none of them belonged to our company.”

Moments like this one proliferate: whenever the text threatens to fall neatly into a standard military story, Martin’s appetite drags it back out. One of his most piquant memories (the one that gets the “starving memory” appellation from which I take my title) is of the “rice and vinegar thanksgiving” of 1777. In Philadelphia, participating in the defense and eventual retaking of that city from the British, Martin watches the Army and its livestock waste away to nothing. Then, at long last, the new American government intervenes. Sort of.

While we lay here there was a Continental thanksgiving ordered by Congress; and as the army had all the cause in the world to be particularly thankful, if not for being well off, at least, that it was no worse, we were ordered to participate in it. We had nothing to eat for two or three days previous, except what the trees of the fields and forests afforded us. But we must now have what Congress said—a sumptuous thanksgiving to close the year of high living, we had now nearly seen brought to a close. Well—to add something extraordinary to our present stock of provisions, our country, ever mindful of the suffering army, opened her sympathizing heart so wide, upon this occasion, as to give us something to make the world stare. And what do you think it was, reader?—Guess.—You cannot guess, be you as much of a Yankee as you will. I will tell you: it gave each and every man half a gill of rice, and a table spoon full of vinegar!! After we had made sure of this extraordinary superabundant donation, we were ordered out to attend a meeting, and hear a sermon delivered upon the happy occasion.

As in Martin’s preface, we see the dissonance between the general officer’s sense of the story of the war and the enlisted man’s: the wicked irony of the small amount of rice and vinegar as an “extraordinary superabundant donation”—and as evidence of the “sympathizing heart” of the Army—makes the case clearly enough. Again, though, the structure of Martin’s complaint is as important as its content: where Congress orders and declares, he defers and delays. His dashes and his rhetorical questions multiply out of narrative control. He pauses repeatedly, interrupting his story to embroider his ironies, to insert surplus phrases (“I will tell you”; “upon this occasion”), and to feign audience participation. In so doing, he not only heightens the impact of the rice-and-vinegar dénouement and suggests that Congressional policy is better suited to shaggy-dog jokes than to linear histories, he also recreates in miniature the experience of privation. The reader, just as Martin himself, must wait and wait for closure—the tale recapitulates in its halting narrative form the problem of fighting in the Revolution. As the grumbling stomach makes itself heard, the conventional claims of a Revolutionary American nationalism are indefinitely suspended; the exigencies of hunger-on-the-ground disrupt political theory and coherent historiography.

Martin’s account of the Campaign of 1782 rehearses a new variant in the galaxy of deprivation and narrative false-starts. Lacking much else to do, Martin is sent with a couple of other men to track down a deserter in the New Jersey countryside. Martin prefaces his relation of this adventure with a promise of its exceptionality: “And now, my dear reader, excuse me for being so minute in detailing this little excursion, for it yet seems to my fancy, among the privations of that war, like one of those little verdant plats of ground, amid the burning sands of Arabia, so often described by travelers.” This sense of an oasis of anecdote in the desert of smooth descriptions of undifferentiated daily horror rapidly dissipates: the intriguing (and progressive) processes of tracking a man and returning him “to his duty” are forgotten immediately. By way of beginning this little “story,” Martin recalls

One of our Captains and another of our men being about going that way on furlough [i.e., into New Jersey], I and my two men set off with them. We received, that day, two or three rations of fresh pork and hard bread. We had no cause to call this pork ‘carrion’ or ‘hogmeat,’ for, on the contrary, it was so fat, and being entirely fresh, we could not eat it at all. The first night of our expedition, we boiled our meat; and I asked the landlady for a little sauce, she told me to go to the garden and take as much cabbage as I pleased, and that, boiled with the meat, was all we would eat.

Just as the “setting off” is immediately postponed to discuss the state of the provisions received and the problems of cooking them, there is no “movement” the next day—only the negotiation and preparation of side dishes. Whatever narrative promise the “expedition” holds is subordinated to thick descriptions of appetite, and to the niceties of eating and drinking. A day later and a few miles down the road, Martin finds the same thing:

In the morning, when we were about to proceed on our journey, the man of the house came into the room and put some bread to the fire to toast; he next produced some cider, as good and as rich as wine, then giving us each a large slice of his toasted bread, he told us to eat it and drink the cider, —observing that he had done so for a number of years and found it the best stimulater imaginable.

Although there is a certain narrative progression—the bread turns into toast, the toast is distributed among the men, the toast is eaten and digested (with cider as a “stimulater” for the latter)—the story of the journey is deferred—they are always “about to proceed”—never actually proceeding.

Then, the punchline:

We again prepared to go on, having given up the idea of finding the deserter. Our landlord then told us that we must not leave his house till we had taken breakfast with him; we thought we were very well dealt with already, but concluded not to refuse a good offer. We therefore staid and had a genuine New-Jersey breakfast, consisting of buckwheat slapjacks, flowing with butter and honey, and a capital dish of chockolate. We then went on, determined not to hurry ourselves, so long as the thanksgiving lasted.”

That’s it. Although Martin’s recollections continue, the project of finding the deserter—of recalling the wayward man to the duties of “national” service—is now and forever absolutely abandoned. Instead, there is breakfast, recalled some fifty years after the fact with an enviable delight. The point here is clear: faced with choosing the potentially un-narratable joy of pancakes or the narrative pursuit of the overt ideological interests of his country, Martin opts for the pancakes.

It seems proper to conclude with some very brief speculations about the kinds of questions that Martin’s anti-narrative narrative can help us to ask—both about his historical moment and about our own. To do so, we should return to an apparently throwaway moment in the first lines of Martin’s memoir—one that’s not about being hungry, but that does tell us more about the potentially distorting nature of story-telling. “The heroes of all Histories, Narratives, Adventures, Novels and Romances, have, or are supposed to have ancestors, or some root from which they sprang. I conclude, then, that it is not altogether inconsistent to suppose that I had parents too.” Savvy enough to know that the memoirist is a literary character like other literary characters, and that the tale he would tell is subject to the rules established by other stories, Martin cultivates an ironic distance from his subject and underscores the artifice of his work. But there is more. Martin imagines a reader who may only suppose that a memoirist has parents because narrative convention insists upon it: parentage becomes a matter of literary formality rather than biology; only because other writers’ “heroes” had ancestors can Martin be said to have them himself.

In conjuring an audience for which the rules of fictional narrative are more immediately recognizable and count as surer argumentative proof than the empirical facts of the everyday, Martin neatly distills some of the stickiest problems of his past and our present. How do plot conventions, which reinforce our expectations of narrative coherence, disfigure or displace what we might think of (or wish for) as historical reality? Are stories—especially the ones that comprise historiography—in and of themselves a tool of entrenched and essentially conservative power? The links between nation-building, nationalism and traditional narration have been made clear enough over the years; might we fashion other modes of community or associative feeling in and through anti-narrative? Can we use counter-stories like Martin’s to undo providential tales of American exceptionality (which have served, after all, as elaborate rationalizations for imperialism abroad and socio-economic neglect at home) and to reimagine the United States? For Martin himself, answers seem to be forthcoming: with his emphasis on speaking to his “neighborhood” and on finding patriotism and community in lack, in hunger, in improvisation, and in comparative (if necessarily incomplete) expressions of personal feeling, he writes a life in which the expectations of nationalist myth fall away. For our lives during wartime, though—as we count the days past “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq and Afghanistan, as we deploy more troops and watch the numbers of killed and wounded on all sides edge up and up, as we wonder at our head of state carving a plastic turkey for another “rice and vinegar thanksgiving,” as President George W. Bush did back in fall 2003—such questions remain uncomfortably open.

Compare Martin’s account with Timothy Dwight Sprague’s account of General Israel Putnam after the battle of Long Island.

Joseph Plumb Martin

The men were very much fatigued and faint, having had nothing to eat for forty-eight hours,—at least the greater part were in this condition, and I among the rest. While standing in the field, after the action had ceased, one of the men near the Lieut. Colonel, complained of being hungry; the Colonel, putting his hand into his coat pocket, took out a piece of an ear of Indian corn, burnt as black as coal, ‘Here,’ said he to the man complaining, ‘eat this and be a soldier.’

Timothy Dwight Sprague

The British were “marching to intercept Putnam’s retreat, and the enemy thus closing in upon him on each side. Putnam urged his men with all the vehemence of his natural ardor, increased by the perilous situation in which he found himself. Riding backwards and forwards in his impatience, he encouraged the soldiers, who were, in many instances, fainting from fatigue and thirst. A portion of the British army was already seen descending upon the right, and the rear of Putman’s [sic] division was fired upon. But his exertions saved them, and they slipped through just before the enemy’s lines were extended from river to river.”

For Sprague, as for most nineteenth-century historians of the Revolution, thirst, starvation and desperate fatigue in the ranks are quickly overcome by the “natural ardor” and the heroic efforts of a commissioned officer; Putnam’s singular “exertions” and exhortations restore order and unit-coherence long enough for the Continentals to make their retreat. As is customary, the distribution of gallantry is minimal: one man on horseback “encourages”—that is, lends courage to—the ragged masses; no matter how many other actors are present, the story belongs to him alone.

Compare facsimiles of Sprague’s and Martin’s accounts.