Cathcart’s moves through the slave hierarchy to a position of relative comfort and prosperity were accomplished partly through his ability to navigate—or manipulate—complex relationships and partly through the power of literacy.

Marine insurance itself was a business that flourished during periods of war and uncertainty. It had a complex relationship with the British state.

By making pirate stories dramatic and exciting, Ellms transformed pirates from news objects and historical actors to distinctly literary characters.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

That the federal government created this health care system for merchant mariners in the early American republic will surprise many.

Those Separatists who emigrated directly from England and those who had just left Leyden, Holland, would have been equals in their ability to recognize that whaling could be an immensely profitable business.

Once again abandoned by her husband and afflicted with uncertainty and poverty, Eunice began to direct her own life…

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Even within itself, the China trade was a complex, multisided, many-splendored thing . . .

The Americans had to decide whether to support the British when doing so meant potentially damaging their nation’s relationship with China in its infancy.

How, and why, did the language of love and romance become the language of war?

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Melville was moved by the native cultures of the South Seas and appalled by what the missionaries had wrought in Hawaii.

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.

In September of 1776, the Continental Navy became the first American military branch to designate an official uniform. In March […]

Did fugitive slaves find haven on naval ships? And […] could I trace the lives of some of the colored mariners I had identified from other sources?

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.

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.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

Descriptive and analytical, the sea eye serves also as a metaphor and a theory of representation.

What started out as just wanting to make a few paintings of whales ultimately became an eight-year project, with still no end in sight.

Booth does impressive work to illuminate Salem tableaus that don’t often get recreated in such detail, from the bustle of life along Union Wharf to the seedy rooms of the Mumford bar and brothel on the edge of town.

“Skin and Bones” invites visitors to contemplate what tattoos meant to the sailors who made the decision to use their skin as a canvas.

Simpson weaves together a scrupulously researched and only lightly imagined twin narrative for his dual protagonists—one black and one white—as they lead lives that touch in profoundly different ways on the great issues of the United States’ first century

For liability purposes, it is the sea that will kill you.—Pirate Captain, The Simpsons “In the beginning was the land.” […]

How would we, the voyagers, find quiet moments for reflection on this remarkable voyage? How would we behave among strangers?

Sailors were not really supposed to sleep. They were supposed to work.

Published as part of the Special Edition: “First Person: The 38th Voyage”

I took from time with the Morgan an energized and reconceived sense of how to stage participatory projects, both within the academy and under the aegis of other cultural institutions.

The archive is small but so is the country, and because of that it remains manageable.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

[I]n the days when wind and sail provided the fastest means of travel, when continental and global circumnavigations lay far in the future, there was no obvious way to test whether widely separated seas, such as those that lay off the Arabian Peninsula and those of the Mediterranean, were in any way contiguous.

Before independence from Britain, North American merchants belonged to an imperial trade network that spanned the globe, from nearby Jamaica […]

What version of the past was this? Was I really getting a taste of what life would have been like for someone like Franklin during his many months at sea?

Whalers yearned for family members, wished for love and sex, drank and caroused in ports, and longed to prosper from any great catch.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

“Last Night some time in the Middle watch a very extraordinary affair happend to Mr Orton my Clerk, he having been drinking in the Evening, some Malicious person or persons in the Ship took the advantage of his being drunk and cut off all the cloaths from off his back, not being satisfied with this they some time after went into his Cabbin and cut off a part of both his Ears as he lay asleep in his bed.”

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

For three thousand years, these peoples made a homeland of the sea enclosed by Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji. Hava’iki, they called it. They sailed the circuit of the sea with confidence. They traded. They raided. They adventured.

Published as part of the Special Edition “First Person: The 38th Voyage”

This Article is Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Huge crowds in The Hague, Leiden, Haarlem, and Amsterdam welcomed Piet Hein as a hero. His valor appealed to the imagination of many young men, especially orphans, who broke off their vocational training to sign up as sailors with the WIC.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: “Pacific Routes”

For those of us interested in the early history of the United States, these Pacific communities may not be as well known or as influential as their Atlantic counterparts, but their stories still have much to teach us.

“People expect to find in American Memory every kind of historical documentation possible on every aspect of American history, and they communicate their surprise at discovering otherwise.”

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

[T]he Manila Galleon, rather than being a curio or sideshow, represented one of the turning points in history, for with its establishment we find for the first time “substantial and continuous trade across the Pacific Ocean.”

I found out my pirate name: Calico Bess Kidd. I installed a Multi-Lingual Pirate Insult Generator on my laptop, you poxy bilge rat. […]

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Cook and Malaspina pursued the same goal in the icy North Pacific—a waterway to the Atlantic Ocean—and they each viewed the purported existence of this natural phenomena with rational skepticism.

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