The maritime turn in English social history draws attention to the participants in oceanic expansion as well as the ships they sailed, the cargoes they carried, and the economic, diplomatic, and imperial consequences of early modern seaborne ventures. Eleanor Hubbard's new book, Englishmen at Sea: Labor and the Nation at the Dawn of Empire, 1570–1630, presents English seamen in this vein as actors on a global stage, sailing all the world's oceans. She shows them raiding, trading, stealing, intriguing, acting, dancing, fighting, and dying, mostly in foreign parts. “Labor” here means employment rather than work, for there is little in Hubbard's sources about hauling ropes, raising sails, turning capstans, or the rest of the routine activity that kept a vessel shipshape. Her mariners are the surprisingly well documented commoners whose lives are glimpsed in the rich but under-exploited records of the High Court of Admiralty and the East India Company.
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century admiralty judges examined hundreds of complainants and witnesses who spoke of their voyages and ventures. Deponents described ships and men, pirates and partners, enemies and companions, as they explained and excused their behavior at sea. The calendaring and cataloguing of these manuscripts in The National Archives is minimal, yet Hubbard has extracted from them a host of dramatic narratives. Combining these sources with published voyage accounts, state papers, and judicious review of secondary scholarship, she has produced a fresh and indispensable analysis of the community of Elizabethan and early Stuart mariners. She offers a populated history, with names, lives, and voices that are otherwise unrecorded. She shows how early modern voyaging allowed mariners to fill their chests, and how so many of them lost everything to sickness, combat, treachery, tempest, or misadventure.
Each chapter begins with an anecdote or incident that advances Hubbard's argument. She introduces Elizabethan mariners as a plundering people, engaged in a culture of predatory seafaring driven by violence and greed. Many of their voyages combined privateering and commerce with elements of piracy, slaving, and war. English sailors faced conflict, privation, abandonment, and capture in every area where Europeans sailed. Most were seeking gain, but religious differences with Spanish Catholics and cultural differences with indigenous inhabitants helped to shape their sense of an English identity. This identity was tested in the period of Jacobean peace, as renegades and opportunists who served both Muslim and Catholic masters in the Mediterranean, the Levant, and North Africa gained reputations for perfidy and violence. Venetian and Ottoman officials pressured the English crown to discipline or repudiate its most troublesome subjects, forcing some of them to explain themselves in London. Colonial authorities in the New World criticized mariners’ indiscipline, while the Jacobean government sought to suppress their piracies that ranged from Virginia to Morocco. The sailors in Hubbard's sources were pioneers of a global Britain, and exemplars of Englishmen behaving badly.
Deft exploitation of minutes and journals of the East India Company underpins a chapter rich in detail on the perils and profits of voyages to Asia. The Company appealed to English solidarity against Dutch, Moluccan, and Japanese partners and competitors, yet treated its seamen as expendable employees. The presence of foreign crewmen on English ships, and English sailors in foreign service, encouraged both cosmopolitan and national identities. New ways of performing Englishness emerged as Company merchants sought to display their men as more courteous than their Portuguese, Spanish, or Dutch competitors. Parades before East Indian audiences were designed to present the English as a respectful and well-governed people under a mighty sovereign, a show that was not always convincing.
A final chapter on sailors and the state examines official support for English seafarers abroad. The crown protected English fishing and claimed local sovereignty of the sea but relied on merchants and shipowners for the management of their men, and had difficulty projecting power at a distance. English sailors captured by hostile foreigners pleaded their nationality when seeking help from the Stuart crown. Charles I needed mariners for his wars against Spain and France but failed to pay them or meet their needs. It is not yet known, and Hubbard does not ask, how many of those who sailed to Cadiz or La Rochelle were veterans of more exotic voyages. Stories of fights and follies in distant waters are succeeded by accounts of sailors rioting in London.
Yale University Press launches this book with its own on-board freight of reviews. The back cover praises Hubbard's work as “empirically rigorous, conceptually sophisticated” and “an extraordinary accomplishment.” It is hard to disagree. Yet some readers may find the welter of micro-narratives overwhelming, and the sustaining argument hard to follow. The wealth of material risks swamping the analysis. Missing from this survey are the thousands of English mariners who plied local waters with no less risk and drama. Hubbard's global panorama anticipates England's course for empire, but it underestimates the importance of seamen who sailed nearer home.
