Introduction

Seafaring, sailors and ships - in particular in the age of sail - have been stimuli for man's taste for adventure, imagination and longing for the creation of myths. Indeed, many books have been written on seafaring and the romance of the sea - and many will still be written. Yet sailors and seafaring life still seem to remain in a dimly-lit category of history.

“The ‘people,’ as the ship's company came to be called, remain an anonymous mass, too often neglected…Of all sections of the community, seafaring men and agricultural labourers have been the most ignored and therefore the worst treated, ” wrote Christopher Lloyd in his study of British seamen. “Only occasionally it is possible to discern… the identity of an individual seaman, to say what he looked like, who was his father, where he came from, because (like the farm labourer) he was usually illiterate and inarticulate.”

Evidently, seafaring people in history have left few traces, and those that remain appear to be so vague that historians examining topics like the functioning of a maritime labour market, use of migratory labour aboard, level of wages, or career patterns of individual seamen sometimes get the impression they are dealing with quantum physics or Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty. Reliable information on sailors and seafaring life is scarce and often contradictory. Precise data are even harder to find, let alone to explain and interpret plausibly. This sort of “source vacuum” has led to fascinating but often unrealistic - because seldom backed by reliable proof - stories of the sea. There is a world of difference between Marcus Rediker's Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and Nicolas Rodger's The Wooden World, or between K. Allard Coles’ Heavy Weather Sailing and Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands? To get away from the romantic picture of Jack Tar blurred by myths and tales one has at least to attempt to bring together the available knowledge and information thus far gathered on the “people of the sea. ”

Sailors and Toneladas

If we use the concept of the maritime labour market in the sense of the entity of variables, like demand and supply, that determine wages, then several problems arise. First, we hardly know how the maritime labour market functioned. Second, we know very little about supply and demand. And third, data on wages are very scarce.