Abstract
In the 1840s, John Bechervaise invited his readers to admire the extent of the British Empire, and credit the British seaman for its magnitude:
The history of England is the history of her Navy. It is to that, under the providence of God, that she stands before the world unrivalled; the asylum of oppressed freedom, the scourge of tyranny, and the emporium of commerce. It is through her seamen that she is at this moment, in every part of the world, enlarging the domains of religion and civilization. And well may we adopt the beautiful lines of the poet, and say—“Far as the breeze can blow the billow’s foam, Behold our empire, and survey our home.”1
Ironically for such a jingoist, Bechervaise was born on the French-speaking island of Jersey. He was, however, one of many sailors in the post-1797 era who felt entitled to identify themselves closely with Britannia, whether as her defender or even, in a sense, as her consort.
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Notes
John Bechervaise, A Farewell to My Old Shipmates (Portsea: W. Woodward, 1847), 7.
John Bechervaise, Thirty-Six Years of a Seafaring Life (Portsea: Woodward, 1839), 38–39.
See Iliad Book VI, 447–449, and also Aeneid, Book II and the first lines of Book III. David Skilton, “Tourists at the Ruins of London: The Metropolis and the Struggle for Empire,” Cercles 17 (2007): 93–119.
For the belief in a direct historical link between the fall of Troy and the founding of the British nation, see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 65–67.
Thomas W. Laqueur, “Bodies, Details and the Humanitarian Narrative,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 176–204.
For more general discussions of the cultural context of humanitarianism, see Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility,” Part 1, American Historical Review 90 (1985): 339–361 and Part 2: 547–566;
G. J. BarkerBenfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
James Walvin, England, Slaves, and Freedom, 1776–1838 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 156;
Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
William Robinson, Nautical Economy (London: William Robinson, 1836), vii;
Charles Reece Pemberton, The Autobiography of Pel. Verjuice, ed. Eric Partridge (London: Scholartis, 1929), 215.
Samuel Leech, A Voice from the Main Deck (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1999), 17.
Hester Blum’s important and stimulating The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008) nonetheless has little to say about the political views of her sailor-authors.
Jonathan Rose, Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 344.
To find his sources, Rose used John Burnett, David Vincent, and David Mayall, eds., The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical Bibliography (New York: New York University Press, 1984). Also of great value is Vincent, Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom.
John Nicol, The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1822), 1.
Nicol’s outlook, then, is an instructive contrast to the one suggested in Emma Christopher, “‘Ten Thousand Times Worse than the Convicts’: Rebellious Sailors, Convict Transportation and the Struggle for Freedom, 1787–1800,” Journal of Australian Colonial History 5 (2004): 30–46.
Peter Mandler, “‘Race’ and ‘Nation’ in Mid-Victorian Thought,” in History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History, 1750– 1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 232.
Matthew Barker, Greenwich Hospital (London: James Robins, 1826), 7, 99.
Charles McPherson, Life on Board a Man-of-War (Glasgow: Blackie, Fullarton, 1829), 158–159.
Dibdin references abound in the autobiographies; see for example John Brown, Sixty Years’ Gleanings from Life’s Harvest (New York: D. Appleton, 1859), 95.
Ibid., 149. See also Matthew Barker, Tough Yarns (London: Effingham Wilson, 1835) 17.
Michael Snape, The Redcoat and Religion: The Forgotten History of the British Soldier from the Age of Marlborough to the Eve of the First World War (London: Routledge, 2005), 38.
Jonathan Martin, The Life of Jonathan Martin, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: R. E. Leary, 1828), 15–17, is a particularly delightful account of his attempts to preach in churches. He is accused of killing a pony through witchcraft on page 38.
Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 170, 175–176.
G. C. Smith, The Quarter Master; or, the Second Part of The Boatswain’s Mate (Cincinnati: Western Navigation and Bible Tract Society, 1819), 8. Originally published in London, 1812.
Almost every evangelist who ministered to the armed forces in this period had a story to tell of this kind. For one, see Roald Kverndal, Seamen’s Missions, Their Origin and Early Growth: A Contribution to the History of the Church Maritime (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1986), 163–164.
Richard Marks, The Retrospect, 13th ed. (London: James Nisbet, 1828), 92–105, 113–114.
See also Margarette Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy: British Sea Power, 1750–1815 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 109–136.
G. C. Smith, The Boatswain’s Mate, or An Interesting Dialogue between Two British Seamen (New York: New York Religious Tract Society, 1818), 4. Kverndal, Seamen’s Missions, 109 dates the first publication of The Boatswain’s Mate at 1812.
Smith, Quarter Master, 8–9. For a larger context, see Jeremy Gregory, “Homo Religiosus: Masculinity and Religion in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in English Masculinities, 1660–1800, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen (London: Longman, 1999), 85–110.
Ibid., 6, 7, 8ff, 33, 40ff, 47, 77. See also Thomas Trotter, A Practica-ble Plan for Manning the Royal Navy without Impressment (Newcastle upon Tyne: Longman, 1819), 30ff.
Seymour Drescher, “Cart Whip and Billy Roller: Antislavery and Reform Symbolism in Industrializing Britain,” Journal of Social History 15, no. 1 (1981): 3–24;
Patricia Hollis, “Anti-Slavery and British Working-Class Radicalism in the Years of Reform,” in Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey, ed. Chris-tine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (Folkestone: W. Dawson, 1980), 294–315;
J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Antislavery: The Mobilization of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 33.
Thomas Urquhart, Letters on the Evils of Impressment, 2nd ed. (London: J. Richardson, 1816), 16.
For masculinity, see Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
Earle, Sailors, 159. See also Daniel Vickers, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers and the Age of Sail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 214–247.
Robert Hay, Landsman Hay: The Memoirs of Robert Hay, 1789–1847, ed. M. D. Hay (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953), 75–76.
Isaac Land, “Men with the Faces of Brutes: Physiognomy, Urban Anxieties, and Police States,” in Enemies of Humanity: The Nineteenth-Century War on Terrorism, ed. Isaac Land (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 117–135.
For context, see Maxine Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy, 1815–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); a new chair in Political Economy at Oxford was established by 1830:
Francis E. Mineka, The Dissidence of Dissent: The Monthly Repository, 1806–1838 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 227.
Thomas Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy: Four Lectures Delivered at the London Mechanics’ Institution (London: Charles Tait, 1827), 125, 160; Robinson, Nautical Economy, 8–9, 95–96, 109–110.
Edward Royle, “Mechanics’ Institutes and the Working Classes, 1840–1860,” Historical Journal 14, no. 2 (1971): 305–321;
Richard Johnson, “Really Useful Knowledge: Radical Education and Working-Class Culture, 1790–1848,” in Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory, ed. John Clarke, Chas Critcher, and Richard Johnson (1979; New York: Routledge, 2007), 75–102; Vincent, Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom, 133–165.
Asa Briggs, “Ebenezer Elliott, The Corn Law Rhymer,” Cambridge Journal 3, no. 11 (1950): 686–695;
Ebenezer Elliott, The Poetical Works of Ebenezer Elliott, The Corn Law Rhymer (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1840), 167–173.
Pemberton, Autobiography, 111; see also 102, 152. This style and content is similar to the delightful (though unfinished) autobiography of John James Bezer, “Autobiography of One of the Chartist Rebels of 1848,” in Testaments of Radicalism. Memoirs of Working-Class Politicians, 1790–1885, ed. David Vincent (London: Europa, 1977), 149–187. Bezer’s father, incidentally, was a naval veteran (who bore scars from flogging); he was eligible for Greenwich Hospital, although like many pensioners there, he had to give up his place in order to work and support his family.
Ibid., 214–215. For Crabbe, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
I have developed these ideas in greater depth in Isaac Land, “‘Sinful Propensities’: Piracy, Sodomy, and Empire in the Rhetoric of Naval Reform,” in Discipline and the Other Body. Humanitarianism, Violence, and the Colonial Exception, ed. Anupama Rao and Steven Pierce (Duke University Press, 2006).
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© 2009 Isaac Land
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Land, I. (2009). Behold Our Empire: Loyalists, Reformers, and Radicals. In: War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101067_6
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