There can be no doubt that labour conditions for sailors during the age of sail in the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries were characterized by great variations. There were differences in time, between or even within countries or regions, and according to the categories of shipping. It made a great difference if a sailor joined the navy, a merchant vessel, or a fisherman craft.

The working skills needed to handle a sailing vessel, whatever its size or trade, were basically the same, which made it in principle possible for sailors to move from trade to trade. Only when more specialized skills were needed in, for example, fishing, whaling or fighting, was it difficult to make such a switch. In practice, however, sailors seem to have been more traditional and were inclined to stay in a certain type of trade. It has been suggested that the labour market for sailors was imperfect and that a segmentation in markets or recruitment patterns along regional lines more or less “dictated” the trade in which a sailor would end up. But it might well be that individual choices made by newcomers on the labour market were in the first instance influenced by labour conditions - not only the material gain that was to be expected but also the non-material side.

Wage-Earning Proletarians?

It was already common in Europe by the seventeenth century to pay sailors in money, either in monthly wages or fixed rates for a certain voyage. Because of this dependence on wages, Marcus Rediker called seamen one of the first groups of collective labourers:

In short, the sailor was the exemplification of the “proletarian of the period of manufacture.”

But even if we accept Rediker's ideas about the wage-earning seamen, we must admit that his picture is not complete. It may have been true for sailors in deep-sea trades, for those serving in the large chartered companies or perhaps even the navy.