One standard character in the gallery of maritime literature is the “Old Tar,” “Ancient Mariner,” “Old Salt,” or whatever he is called. As the names denote, he was an elderly sailor with long experience sailing the seven seas. He was the epitome of a long accumulation of maritime skills, a symbol of the special expertise required by deep-sea sailors which made his profession much more demanding than typical landward occupations.

This is not just a romantic perception but one that also has been shared by many serious historians. Thus, for example, Basil Greenhill wrote in a recent article that seamanship “was perhaps the most complex and demanding pattern of skills ever acquired by ordinary men.” And he also emphasizes the importance of training by reminding us of Rudyard Kipling's description in Captains courageous of how Long Jack, at the first possible moment, taught young Harvey Cheyne “things at the sea that every man must know, blind, drunk, or asleep.”

The idea that sailors were very special people is by no means surprising. Intuitively, all of us admit that life aboard old sailing vessels must have been hard and demanding and that everyone who did well in such a profession developed a special “pattern of skills.” This was, in fact, what even the sailors themselves wanted to demonstrate. Both in outward looks and behaviour they reflected their specialty, and the contempt they expressed towards landlubbers, “greenhorns” and farm hands (“with hay-seed in their hair”) implicitly also conveyed the idea of a profession that required the very best of men.

Yet maritime literature also abounds with very different characters. The popular image of ordinary seaman, “Jack Tar,” exhibits no pretensions either for advanced age or exceptional skills and experience - rather Jack was the epitome of a merry fellow who had a girl in each port and drank his earnings in a matter of few weeks. And an even starker picture of the professional (as well as moral) levels of sailors can be found in such realistic descriptions as Herman Melville's Redburn or Jack London's Mutiny on board of the Elsinore.