Ships of State: Literature and the Seaman's Labour in Proto-Imperial Britain 1487529473, 9781487529475

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SHIPS OF STATE Literature and the Seaman’s Labour in Proto-Imperial Britain

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LAURIE ELLINGHAUSEN

Ships of State Literature and the Seaman’s Labour in Proto-Imperial Britain

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

©  University of Toronto Press 2024 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in the USA ISBN 978-1-4875-2947-5 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4875-2949-9 (EPUB) ISBN 978-1-4875-2948-2 (PDF)

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Ships of state: literature and the seaman’s labour in proto-imperial   Britain / Laurie Ellinghausen. Names: Ellinghausen, Laurie, 1972– author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2023057310X | Canadiana (ebook) 20230573177 |   ISBN 9781487529475 (cloth) | ISBN 9781487529482 (PDF) |   ISBN 9781487529499 (EPUB) Subjects: LCSH: English literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and   criticism. | LCSH: Imperialism in literature. | LCSH: Sailors in literature. |   LCSH: Sailors – Great Britain – History. Classification: LCC PR428.I54 E45 2024 | DDC 820.9/358–dc23

Cover design: Val Cooke Cover image: Classic Image/Alamy Stock Photo We wish to acknowledge the land on which the University of Toronto Press operates. This land is the traditional territory of the Wendat, the Anishnaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, the Métis, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario, for its publishing activities.

In loving memory of my dad, who was born across the ocean

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Contents

Introduction 3 1 “Lords of the Harbors”: English Fishermen and the Newfoundland Colony 27 2 “Their Labour Doth Returne Rich Golden Gaine”: Fishmongers’ Shows and the Fisherman’s Labour in Early Modern London  51 3 “Hereditary Sloth” and the Labour of Empire in Shakespeare’s Mediterranean 67 4 “A Wife or Friend at E’ery Port”: The Common Sailor in the Ballads of Early British Empire  86 Conclusion: The “Painefull Sea-Man” of Later Imperial Britain  106 Acknowledgments 121 Notes 123 Bibliography 143 Index 159

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SHIPS OF STATE

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Introduction

The seamen of early modern England possessed a reputation for pride and outspokenness – as London’s Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths witnessed when, in April of 1660, it gathered for an entertainment honouring the Lord General George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle. That day, after the company and its guests had heard “a Song in four parts,” a “Sea-Captain” entered to proclaim the role of seafaring labour in supporting the nobility, the merchant classes, and their comfortable lifestyles. The captain asked in mock outrage: [A]re you grown so stout To contrive Peace, and leave the Seaman out? Have you in those large Bowls, which Plenty gave yee, Drank off the Ocean, and swallowed the Navy? You never think upon our rocks and shelves So you may snudge in quiet by your selves. Are you not Britains? Is not Navigation The only guard and glory of the Nation? Can you have treasure brought without a Fleet? What is it gilds Cheapside and Lombard street, But our sea trade?1

The “Seaman” and the “Navy,” according to this speech, ensure peace and prosperity alike – and yet these men apparently are “left out” of the Goldsmiths’ celebration. “[D]’ye goe about,” the captain asks in disbelief, “[t]o make a peace, and leave the Main-mast out?” The captain then addresses the duke by his first name: Up to the ears in Custard? heres a fray Compounded without bloodshed: these would be

4  Ships of State Good bitts upon a march, George; or at sea, When in the fury of temptestous weather, Wee and our meat were pickled up together: Here are pure Quarters! Plenty keeps her spring In London: ’tis a City for a King!2

While these lines no doubt played for laughs, they also evoke a sharp irony: the very men whose labour contributed to the surrounding wealth are only present in the form of an actor playing a sea captain. At that very moment, the speech proclaims, real seamen endured tempests, “shelves,” and “rocks” while the duke “snudge[d]” in comfort with his powerful friends. London is “a City for a King,” it seems, but not necessarily a city for those who defend it and supply it with “[p]lenty.” This occlusion may appear strange given the country’s legendary status as an island nation largely composed of seafarers. As Andrew ­Lambert has argued, Britain was one of only a handful of “seapower states” that embraced seafaring as part of its national identity. Yet we witness a dynamic similar to that of the 1660 entertainment in ­Shakespeare and Wilkins’s Pericles (c. 1608), where the shipwrecked Prince of Tyre regains his lost armour with the help of a band of fishermen casting nets upon the Pentapolis shore. When Pericles claims the armour as “part of my heritage,” the fishermen insist upon their due in the form of “certain condolements, certain vails” and stipulate that, if they give him the armour they themselves have recovered, he should at least “remember” them when he ascends to greatness3 – a promise that Pericles promptly forgets, as he never mentions the fishermen again. The Pentapolis fishermen capture a paradox frequently seen in the period’s literary texts: the common seaman and his labour occupy a critical position, in both narrative and economic terms, and yet, as Pericles and other texts indicate, the significance of their contribution is quickly obscured by other storylines. Such instances indicate a pattern central to this book’s claim: that representations of the common seaman’s labour, however marginalized, were nonetheless essential to the formation of imperial attitudes during the early years of the British Empire. Out of this pattern emerges a body of imaginative literature that employs the common seaman as a figure by which to grapple with the complex and multifaceted implications of maritime expansion for subjects from a wide range of classes, subject positions, and walks of life. This book argues that the figure of the common seaman supplied the authors of these texts with a device through which to imagine the various implications of maritime expansion for Britain and for the world. As both victims and agents of a burgeoning empire, common seamen

Introduction 5

experienced excruciating hardships as well as possibilities for social and economic mobility; correspondingly, authors found in these figures rich potential for exciting and even transgressive stories of adventure as well as tales of tragic loss. As Britain’s proto-imperialist and mercantilist thinkers pondered ways in which worldwide expansion would generate wealth for the realm and resolve its many social problems, maritime industries – such as shipbuilding, fishing, and merchant sailing both near and far – acquired paramount importance as a source for the labour that would facilitate those visions. As such, the later years of the British empire witnessed an affirmation of the common seaman as the emblem of Britain’s purportedly freedom-loving, enterprising nature. At the same time, however, his essential contribution – and its deep rootedness in social conflict – has been overshadowed by triumphalist narratives of imperialist expansion, largely due to the sheer numbers of lowly individuals who supplied this critical labour. The evolving cultural significance of the common seaman encapsulates the deep contradictions and complex history of the empire itself. Examining a wide range of popular writing – promotion tracts, civic pageantry, playhouse drama, and broadside ballads – I suggest in this book that writers’ interest in the seaman and his labour presents a dynamic engagement with the public itself on the subject of maritime expansion. This engagement was necessary not only to lend material support to imperial policy but also to create an imperial culture that would reshape terrestrial and domestic life. Given the transformative effects of imperial policy even on subjects who would never leave their landed communities, much less migrate outside the British archipelago, early modern writers explored these transformative effects through their various treatments of the humble maritime worker – the fisherman, the merchant sailor, and the naval recruit. The resulting representations of the seaman both reflect and attempt to shape the attitudes of popular audiences towards the imperial project. And if these writers spoke to and anticipated commoners’ experiences with an emerging imperial Britain, as my readings suggest, so did they invite critical responses to the sweeping economic and social changes that empire promised. In other words, these texts chart the development of a cultural dialogue that gained increasing exigency as proto-­imperialist and mercantilist ideas took hold over the thinking of policymakers, merchants, and investors whose ambitions would have far-reaching effects outside of elite circles. My argument operates from the premise that attitudes towards maritime empire were far more complex than the prose arguments of authors such as Samuel Purchas, Richard Hakluyt, John Dee, Edward

6  Ships of State

Misselden, Thomas Mun, and other imperial apologists and promoters indicate. The more popularized forms of literature I study reveal perspectives unaccounted for in those texts – viewpoints that may indicate agreement with or dissension towards, but most likely profound ambivalence about, the effects of maritime expansion on British life. I do not offer a simple “history from below” aimed at correcting the assumptions of elite policymakers and investors. Rather, my readings seek to open up a more diverse and capacious range of responses that include – perhaps counterintuitively – the viewpoints of terrestrial subjects who would never even come close to engaging in deep-sea sailing or colonial migration. This expanded perspective includes voices beyond the scope of elite writers and their audiences; it incorporates not only the common seaman himself but also women, the vagrant poor, and others for whom the promise of imperial wealth landed in multifarious ways. As such, I seek to demonstrate the full scope of empire as, to borrow the words of William Sherman, a “textual affair.”4 The popular genres that portrayed the seaman and his labour demonstrate the range of imaginative possibilities surrounding empire – possibilities that are far from home but also near, and frightening as well as exhilarating. This introductory chapter stages the readings to follow by sketching a broad portrait of the seaman within the contexts of early modern maritime history and literature, noting in particular the occupational settings in which he worked and the cultures of those settings. This general picture sets up the beginnings of my intervention in contemporary scholarly ideas about the early modern sea and its workers as marked by a quality of “alterity,” an idea complicated by seamen’s enduring ties to land and, in particular, the varying ways in which literary texts articulate those ties. Finally, the chapter summaries to follow will give the reader an early glimpse of how the seaman’s amphibious nature figures across various genres, all of which both dwell on the logistical, ethical, and social questions raised by maritime imperial expansion, and centre on the identity of the common seaman. The Common Seaman: A Composite Figure The reputed pride and boldness of seafarers grew out of occupational structures that permitted a high degree of freedom relative to other professions. For one thing, seafarers tended to be itinerant, moving to find work according to the season. They also were accustomed to negotiating their own contracts, pay, and working conditions.5 The fishing profession, as it was commonly practised throughout the Middle Ages and well into the Tudor period, illustrates these features. For example,

Introduction 7

fishing boats typically did not pay wages; rather, fishermen sailed for a share of the catch, and profits often were evenly split among the crew.6 Not only could fishermen negotiate their compensation, but also many were positioned to conduct their own independent small-scale trade – for example, to trade fish caught in Newfoundland for goods brought in by other boats.7 The scene from Pericles cited earlier, which I explore more deeply in chapter 3, provides an apt illustration of such customs, as the Pentapolis fishermen expect “certain” forms of recompense in exchange for surrendering the fruit of their labour. For subjects accustomed to independent trading and other forms of occupational and economic autonomy, government interference or managerial impositions onto sea travel and trade constituted an unwelcome restriction – and many members of what David Loades calls this “notoriously individualistic”8 profession were not afraid to grumble or talk back. The customs surrounding privateering and merchant sailing mirrored the broad outlines of fishing culture. Traditionally sailors, like fishermen, negotiated their own pay and conditions, and, as Cheryl A. Fury observes, shipboard hierarchy was regarded as a matter of survival, one observed by assent and not coercion.9 Impingement on wages, provisions, or other traditional “rights” was cause for protest, mutiny, or seeking justice from higher authorities. Such was the case with the widely resented practice of impressment where, as Fury writes, “[t]he centralizing early modern state had met its match” in various forms of protest.10 Resistance also showed up, for example, in merchant seamen’s willingness to litigate their wages, and other matters of custom and usage, within the High Court of the Admiralty and the Trinity Houses of Deptford Strond and Hull, the seafarers’ urban guilds.11 Evidence of sailors’ keen awareness of their entitlements, notes a collection of co-authors, “prompts us to reevaluate our perception of seafarers as wage workers in any uncomplicated sense.”12 Seafarers did not absolutely oppose the law, but they well knew when, how, and where to seek redress for perceived violations of the pay and conditions they felt they were owed. Beyond these broad outlines, however, it is difficult to define premodern “maritime culture” with specificity. This challenge arises from the fact that, especially in coastal communities such as Yarmouth and Bristol, men, women, and entire families from all over the social spectrum participated in different maritime industries. These industries included not only fishing and sailing but also shipbuilding, carpentry, and caulking; the making of nets, lines, and hooks; and the provision of food, drink, and lodging for seaborne travellers. According to Craig Lambert, such diversity of work and workers lends maritime communities an “ephemeral”

8  Ships of State

quality, with those communities “evolving as a multitude of exogenous and endogenous factors shaped them.”13 Not only did a constant influx and outflux of different people and products render these communities “ephemeral,” but so did the contingent nature of maritime labour itself. Fishermen and mariners sometimes also farmed, for example.14 Moreover, many seamen did not come from a maritime background or even start their careers at sea but found their way into the work after labouring for some time on land.15 It may therefore be more accurate to describe premodern maritime cultures as amphibian cultures, with labourers moving back and forth between opportunities on land and at sea. During the Tudor dynasty, though, efforts to bring the country’s diverse and ephemeral maritime workers into a cohesive labour force – one to be mobilized for the purposes of defence and international trade – began to emerge. One major touchstone here is John Dee’s General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (1577), in which Dee argues for the creation of a “petty navy royal” to protect the waters immediately surrounding the British archipelago. In this text Dee notes the incursion of foreign fishing boats into English waters and cites the need to protect the domestic fishing industry from such invaders. For Dee, the stakes of this project are high, as he imagines “abhominable Theves” charting and memorizing British coastlines in order to “annoy the blessed state of our Tranquilitie” and steal not only fish but eventually “our Corne, and vittailes, from Sundry our Coasts: to the great hindrance of the Publik plenty of England.”16 Moreover, Dee asserts that foreign ships – particularly “Herring Busses” from the Low Countries, which he claims have already profited immensely from fishing in the North Sea – “deprive us, yerely, of many hundred thousand pounds” while their fishermen yell anti-English obscenities, destroy English nets, and cut the cables on English vessels, resulting in the loss of anchors, boats, and workers.17At the time of General and Rare Memorials’ publication, the idea of a militarized maritime force – that is, a professional navy – was still relatively new. Before the crown had assembled a small standing navy between 1515 and 1545, it possessed only about a dozen ships and had to requisition merchant ships when needed.18 In arguing for the navy’s augmentation, then, Dee exhibits two key assumptions: that other nations want what England has – its fish, its other food sources, and ultimately its wealth – and that control of the seas promises to limit such an incursion. In this calculus the humble fish is not just a food source but also a symbol of national integrity, sovereignty, and strength in a world replete with external threats. Dee anticipates the development of mercantilist thought as well as the “free seas” debates of the mid-seventeenth century, both of which

Introduction 9

conceptualize the seas as a playing field – whether “open” to all or “closed” based on certain nations’ territorial claims – for competitive commerce. In her analysis of two early imperialist texts, Dee’s General and Rare Memorials and Walter Raleigh’s History of the World, Lesley B. Cormack detects a “troubled concept of empire” that would not ultimately yield British supremacy over the seas but rather would benefit mainly “merchants and personal adventurers.”19 Cormack notes that Dee and Raleigh seem uncertain as to how empire would happen and who would benefit. However, Dee’s text clearly envisions a boon to merchants as well as prosperity for the entire nation. After declaring the need for “Generall Brytish Securitie” from foreign invasion, he continues: “Besides that, I report me to all England Marchant[s] […] how great value to them, and Consequently, to the Publick-Weale, of this Kingdom, such a Securitie were? Wherby, both outward, & homeward […] their Marchantlike Ships (many or few, great or small) may, in our Seas, and somewhat farder, pas quietly unpilled, unspoyled and untaken, by Pyrates, or other, in time of Peace.”20 A strong naval defense, therefore, will allow merchant shipping to flourish unhindered. As for the “Publick-Weale,” Dee’s concern extends to caring for the poor, whom he envisions as being rescued from penury by the prospect of massive shipboard employment. “How many Hundreds of lusty and handsome Men,” he asks, “would be (this way) well occupied: and have needfull maintenance: Which, now, are either Idle, or, want sustenance: or, both: In to many places, of this renowmed [sic] Monarchy?”21 This sentiment echoes a theme common in proto-imperial texts: investment in naval defence and mercantile shipping will lift up the nation’s destitute, saving them from the inevitabilities of the parish rolls and the gallows. Some writers, such as Tobias Gentleman and Robert Hitchcock, also alighted on fishing as a solution to mass unemployment, as I will detail in chapter 2. Overall, arguments in favour of beefing up the nation’s shipping seemed to envision no drawbacks, but only benefits, to the scaling of maritime labour. This strategy – growing the nation’s trade by encouraging merchants and employing the poor – shows up again in the thought of early English mercantilists such as Edward Misselden, Thomas Mun, and Gerard de Malynes. While their writings are not cohesive on all points, generally the philosophy of mercantilism held that wealth was finite and therefore subject to competition; henceforth any nation wishing to compete would need to optimize the human resources necessary to claim space in the international market. Because labour facilitated trade, then, mercantilists embraced it, but because of the protectionism inherent in building national power, trade needed to happen in vessels that were

10  Ships of State

owned, built, and operated by English subjects.22 It follows that the English merchant, in the words of Misselden, becomes a national asset worthy of “noble” status: “Merchants are wont to be supported of Kings and Princes, cherished of Nobles, favoured of States-men, honoured of all men, disgrac’t of none: because the strength of Kingdomes, the revenue of Princes, the wealth of every Commonwealth, hath a Correlation with this Noble Profession.”23 Of course, even merchants supported by “Kings and Princes” and “cherished of Nobles” required massive amounts of labour to realize their ambitions – labour that would come largely from the impoverished commoners whom proto-imperialist writers regarded otherwise as a drain on national prosperity. Perceiving that “[t]he Poore sterve in the streets for want of labour,”24 Misselden ascribes trade imbalances to the poverty and prodigality of an underemployed populace. Employing the poor in mercantile endeavours, therefore, would not only constitute a smart economic strategy but also display “an excellent patterne of piety and pitty”25 on behalf of subjects who would otherwise “sterve […] for want of labour.” The pursuit of maritime trade, therefore, promised to benefit all subjects by yielding “entertainment of the rich, employment for the poore, advantage for the adventurers, and encrease of Trade to all.”26 Overall, Misselden’s conviction heralds the emergence of an imperialist British ideology that historian David Armitage influentially describes as “Protestant, commercial, maritime and free.”27 Armitage’s cluster of adjectives links Britain’s geopolitical identity within Europe – Protestant, as defined against its Catholic rivals – not only with maritime trade dominance but also with the potent seventeenthcentury political concept of liberty. Applying that concept specifically to the flow of trade, Misselden declares that “trade hath in it such a kinde of naturall liberty in the course and use thereof, as it will not indure to be fors’t by any.”28 However, the invocation of “natural liberty,” when applied to the human agents who actually executed Misselden’s commercial ideal, runs aground on the fact that the labour of maritime empire was deeply class encoded. For example, when the Navigation Acts of 1651 stipulated that only English vessels could bring goods into ­England, these laws appropriated the economic agency of maritime workers to the interests of the nation through what Lawrence A. Harper calls “an experiment in social engineering,” one that rendered sailors agents of the state.29 Given this legal development, it is not conceptually far off that sailors would eventually be considered wards of the state; they were, after all, valuable commodities and therefore in need of monitoring and guardianship, even on land. In this sense, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal comments, sailors were “not unlike gold, sugar,

Introduction 11

and slaves” within the profit-driven Atlantic imperium.30 Moreover, sailors’ status as national property conditioned how their employers thought of them in the face of extreme danger – as commodities that, while valuable, could also be replaced when lost. One writer saw the trade to the Indies as having been bought at “the price of blood” as it cost the lives of more than two thousand out of the three thousand men who voyaged; yet, as Harper observes, the “lure of sudden riches fired men’s imaginations” nonetheless.31 Richmond Barbour has documented the shocking ways in which the East India Company (EIC) justified the deaths of its seamen, men described in EIC apologetics as “refuse better carried off by sickness abroad than by the hangman in England for theft or piracy.”32 Misselden and his mercantilist colleagues reasoned along similar lines: better for the poor to sail in the service of the nation than to “starve” in the streets. Even for those who survived, the hardships of shipboard discipline are well documented. In particular, the work of historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, who meticulously recorded the history of exploitation across the “red Atlantic,” usefully links the labour of common seamen with the exploitations suffered by other colonial populations, such as slaves and indentured servants.33 Their work suggests, I wish to acknowledge as well, that the nature of the common seaman’s labour, particularly in the Atlantic context, makes him a distinct and powerful locus for early modern racial identities that were very much in flux. “Whiteness,” “Blackness,” and “slavery” were all volatile and unresolved categories at this time; the deep-sea sailor, whose work put him into closer and more frequent contact with Black and Indigenous populations than most English subjects were, illuminates the fungibility of these distinctions when it came to the labour that fuelled English colonialism. Scholars such as Michael Guasco and, more recently, Urvashi Chakravarty document a multitude of ways in which the “truism” about slavery in England – “that it could not exist,” as Chakravarty succinctly puts it – was rendered highly questionable by English labour practices, including those defining relationships of service both at home and abroad. While the “White slavery” that existed in Barbados represents one of the most obvious ways in which empire blurred the formal line between indentured servitude and slavery, Chakravarty cites it as just one of a wide range of labour, indenture, and bondage practices generating the “fictions of race” that were to rationalize slavery in the New World. While she does not address English shipboard labour in particular, this putatively voluntary form of service represents a rich and potent arena for what she calls “fictions of consent,” fictions that attached notions of free service and liberty to

12  Ships of State

the forms of coercion that seamen – particularly conscripted seamen – endured.34 The documented presence of free Black sailors on European ships, as well as intimate relationships between Black African women and European merchants at colonial ports of call, suggest additional ways in which the labour of empire put pressure on the very distinctions that later colonial practice strove to codify.35 To be sure, some scholars have pushed back on this historical narrative to show the ways in which seamen’s agency still found expression within a generally exploitative system. “Seamen were not the dregs of society,” declares Eleanor Hubbard in a recent review essay covering historians’ treatments of sailor, state, and empire.36 Atlantic maritime capitalism does not fully encompass the wealth of experiences that seafarers had, nor does it fully include the panoply of identities that seafarers adopted – for example, the practices of profit sharing, the pursuit of illicitly independent small-scale trade, seafarers’ own identities as “British” and therefore “White,” and the extreme claims to economic agency and mobility assumed by piracy, which reached its nadir in the eighteenth century. To this historical revision I would add my previous point that few English seafarers were of the sea in any absolute sense because many maintained solid attachments to home, families, communities, and alternative occupations on land. These attachments rarely figure in the writings of elite administrators and imperial apologists who saw the landed poor as an incipient mobile labour force, but they persisted nonetheless, as we can see in the archive of English sailor ballads (chapter 4 herein). As Brett Sirota observes, mercantilist perspectives alone fail to “accommodate the plurality of domestic actors and institutions undergoing this oceanic turn in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England (and Britain).”37 Imaginative texts published contemporaneously with mercantilist literature, however, can provide an important window into those domestic perspectives as they underwent what some contemporary scholars call the “oceanic turn.” At the same time, however, the sheer diversity of subjects and experiences swept up in the “oceanic turn” eventually became crystallized as the figure of the British sailor – hero, stout and resolute imperial agent, with a whiff of “Jack Tar”–like alterity underneath. Although the seaman appears in a variety of different genres, not all of which are fictional in any obvious sense, he can be called a literary creation nonetheless insofar as he is a character type, one endowed with the hopes and anxieties surrounding maritime empire. For example, a pamphlet writer named Philopatris (whom Philip Stern identifies as “probably” the EIC director Josiah Child, and which Early English Books Online identifies as Child outright) wrote fulsomely of the British seaman as

Introduction 13

an archetype of “liberty”: “a Naval Power never affrights us; Seamen never did nor ever will destroy the Liberty of their own Countrey: They naturally hate Slavery, because they see so much of the misery of it in other Countreys. All Tyrannies in the World are supported by Land-Armies: No absolute Princes have great Navies, or great Trades […] Now under God’s Providence, what can best secure us from them but our Naval Strength, and what doth especially increase and support that, but our East-India trade.”38 Here seamen’s purported “hat[red]” of “Slavery” distinguishes them, and by extension all of Britain, from the depredations of “other Countreys” mired in tyranny and absolutism. Of course, Philopatris’s post–English Civil War perspective is not exclusively outward looking: a standing navy, he suggests, also cannot “destroy the Liberty” of its own country, as when the New Model Army kept Oliver Cromwell in power throughout the 1650s. Philopatris’s use of the term liberty, in other words, differs from Mun’s in that Philopatris refers specifically to political liberty rather than free trade. In Philopatris’s rendering, though, the seaman – whatever the realities of his life, including his proximity to actual indentured servants and chattel slaves – becomes a potent symbol of a cherished ideal that, in turn, justifies Britain’s own competitive maritime endeavours. Margaret Cohen, in The Novel and the Sea, uncovers a slightly different, but still positive, dimension of the British seaman, and that is his “craft,” which Cohen defines as the “skills and demeanors [that] comprise the mariner’s excellence in action.” This fusion of “skills and demeanors” casts who he is and what he does as inextricable dimensions, thus making professional competence a matter of superior personal character. The seaman thus becomes, in Cohen’s terminology, an “icon” who achieves the status of “cultural myth.”39 Other cultural myths, however, countered this image with less savoury characteristics. The Jack Tar character who took hold in late seventeenthcentury print culture was a working-class figure associated with grimy manual labour and ordinary lowliness; the smelly and unsightly “tar” on his clothing identified him as homo pelagicus and thus fundamentally “other” from his counterparts on land.40 The alterity and extreme mobility of such a figure, Dan Brayton writes, impart “a sense of danger” surrounding him;41 this danger found expression in piracy, where disgruntled mariners took their work lives and economic fates into their own hands through criminal activity. Early modern literary culture’s fascination with the pirate has been well documented in recent years, with several scholarly studies exploring the allure of pirates in print and on stage; the enduring fascination with pirates, as well as the brutal labour practices that led them to turn pirate in the first place, may speak to a

14  Ships of State

growing awareness of and sensitivity to the structures and consequences of exploitation in our age of postcolonial critique.42 In any case, whether the seafarer is lionized, villainized, or patronized, the complex reality of his life appears to have been routinely reified as an abstract type with associations presumably shared by all members of his occupation. In analysing the common seaman across a variety of imaginative genres, this book has two goals. First, the chapters that follow consider how generic forms – prose tracts, pageant drama, playhouse drama, and ballads – reflect different aspects of the seaman’s multidimensional character and thus complicate his portrait beyond that of the mobile labourer assumed in the writings of proto-imperialist and mercantilist policymakers. Not only do I examine each genre, its writers, and its audiences in depth, but I place each genre into dialogue with the others so as to understand the difference that generic contexts made in shaping the common seaman as a cultural figure. These differences, I argue, adumbrate a wide and complex range of reception, and therefore conversation, about what the large-scale deployment of maritime labour meant for the realm and the individual lives within it. Second, my readings seek to recover the complex affiliations of the common seaman by linking him back to the terrestrial relationships and discourses of which he remained a part. My goal in doing so is to complicate the so-called radical alterity of the common seaman – a critical tradition I will unpack further – by instead highlighting his status as a social, economic, and occupational amphibian. This emphasis accounts for what the seaman actually signified to audiences beyond the circle of policymakers and investors who sought to detach him from his terrestrial conditions and put him to work on the seas; that is, the imaginative texts under study reveal the common seaman to be deeply intertwined with local populations and communities, where he maintained both practical and affective significance as father, son, lover, husband, provider, and friend. These dimensions, I argue, are just as important as – if not more so than – the more triumphalist discourses to understanding imperial culture as it emerged in early modern Britain. Reconsidering Maritime Alterity The term alterity and its synonyms appear repeatedly in scholarly conversations about early modern maritime space. Although many landed people – including women and families – performed labour related to the maritime sphere, contemporary theory and criticism routinely casts the ocean and its human cultures as distinctly “other” – that is, radically apart from terrestrial custom. Recent voices from the subfields of

Introduction 15

maritime humanities and blue cultural studies conceptualize the ocean either as a heterotopian space, one that both mirrors and interrogates life on land, or as a utopian space, one that resists the forms of capitalist “primitive accumulation” that economically marginalized commoners without access to the means for private property ownership. Antonis Balasopoulos, for example, describes how the increasing awareness of the sea by early moderns began to complicate their sense of the terrestrial realm – in particular, that realm’s heretofore primacy over human thought, custom, and social norms.43 Hence the sea – as a “deterritorialized” space characterized by an absence of signs – becomes a place for society’s “unmoored” not only to participate in wage labour but also to imagine new political freedoms. In a similar vein, Steven Mentz has sought to demonstrate how attention to oceanic space can alter existing readings of early modern literature.44 Mentz argues that, while the “stabilizing” land-management practices of pastoralism and enclosure have shaped our understanding of these texts, a critical focus on the ocean promises to “destabilize” these understandings by casting them on unpredictable and dangerous waters. Such interventions seek to call attention to and delimit the ways in which our assumptions about literary representation rest on landed spaces – the garden, the field, the city – and to introduce the ocean as a space of radical difference, one that invites us to read through a new lens.45 Moreover, just as oceanic space has been cast as other, so have been seafarers themselves. The common seaman’s alterity seems to rest largely on his status as geographically mobile, untethered from the stabilizing structures of family, guild, and town. Such mobility, according to Maria Fusaro, renders seamen “peculiar” within the occupational cultures of the medieval and early modern world, dependent as those cultures were on “structures of corporate protection usually available to other types of wage workers.”46 In truth, seamen were not entirely without occupational structure; guilds and apprenticeships did exist. The Trinity House of Deptford Strond received its first royal charter in 1514, which empowered this fraternity of seafarers to make laws and ordinances “for the relief, increase, and augmentation of the shipping of this our realm of England.”47 The 1565 Act Touching Sea-Marks and Mariners extended these powers, forbidding the destruction of ancient beacons and authorizing Trinity House to maintain the safety of ships and set up more ships; the training and licensing of harbour pilots and coastal pilots became increasingly important as well.48 Apprenticeship schemes also existed within maritime communities, including among fishermen, even if they did tend to be localized in port towns such as Yarmouth and Ipswich.49 Nonetheless, scholars who

16  Ships of State

research these arrangements also note that the individualistic culture of seamen frequently strained against such regulations. Moreover, as the need for mobile labour grew – a dirty, dangerous kind of labour characterized by bodily toil and not by the production of valuable commodities, as with the prestigious metropolitan livery companies – so did seamen come to signify a category of unsettled and itinerant labourers, landless and without a fixed “home.”50 Thus, as Brayton and others have documented, the working-class sailor, covered in tar, came to appear with increasing frequency in literary texts as a creature of an “other” world – a creature both lowly and threatening. These seamen and their culture were routinely represented in print and theatrical culture as hyper-­ masculine, profane, violent creatures of the id – and therefore radically distinct from everything else in the putatively civilized terrestrial world. Seamen’s regular appearance within new histories of the Atlantic or early modern “histories from below” serves to reinforce this image of alterity. The “red Atlantic” perspectives outlined previously, for example, locate common seamen within a historical narrative of proto-capitalist expropriation, whereby sailors become the world’s ­ “first mobile labour force” on a shipboard “floating factory.” As such, the reification of seaborne labour radically separates the common sailor from landed custom and casts him into the realm of the oceanic, the uncultivated, and the wild and uncivilized. Within the colonial hinterlands beyond the ocean, the common seaman finds kinship with other exploited populations whose labour generates wealth for colonizing nations. The hardships of the common seaman’s life, according to the research of historians such as Linebaugh and Rediker, sometimes led these men to make common cause with slave uprisings, urban riots, and other forms of violent protest in the Atlantic world; the willingness of White sailors to join a slave uprising signifies a perceived social and economic affinity with Black and Indigenous forced labour that, like the examples I note in the previous section, places additional pressure on the putatively fixed status of Whiteness in the colonial ­Atlantic context. Likewise, piracy has long been understood as a reflection of an exploitative system, whereby men abandon naval and merchant ships to take up ships and crews of their own, raiding port towns and other ships for plunder and splitting the booty according to the e­ galitarian principles of what Peter Lamborn Wilson calls “­ pirate ­ utopias.” Whether contemporaries sympathized with, thrilled to, or condemned such developments – and documentary evidence of a range of reactions exists51 – in all cases the seaman appears marginal, apart from civilization, and thus always potentially threatening to the terrestrial order and economic well-being of nations.

Introduction 17

These scholarly accounts of the common seaman and his labour have proven immensely valuable for understanding what the imperial push required of early modern Britain’s commoners; they also help us understand the critical role of the common seafarer’s labour in building empire as well as the ways in which the deployment of this labour could go awry of the schemes presented in the texts of colonial apologists and mercantilists. Indeed, my own earlier work has benefited immensely from these perspectives. However, a deeper look reveals that the framing of the seaman as radically opposed to the terrestrial world departs significantly from the actual experience of many British seafarers; more importantly for the purposes of this study, imaginative literature reveals the common seafarers’ enduring connection to the land and its people that mercantilist texts, with their focus on mobile labour, do not. In the introduction to a recent essay collection Karen Wigen asks whether “common experiences at sea enabled sailors, merchants, and even pirates to develop a distinct subjectivity – one that resonated within their communities and their own life stories beyond their careers at sea.”52 This book seeks to answer that question in the affirmative – that these experiences could be both distinct and translatable to other spheres. It does so by revealing the ways in which popular literature and drama registered such resonances for audiences across a wide social spectrum. Thus, while these readings owe a debt to the body of work charting the seafarer’s alterity, they also resist that narrative by interrogating the logic of the policy texts that sought to, on the basis of his labour, disengage the seafarer from landed culture and absorb him fully into the machinery of profit. These readings question the idea of an impermeable seaman’s “culture” and instead open that culture up to other influences and spheres. Recent work in early modern maritime history – and social history generally – points the way towards readings attuned to the “paramaritime” aspects of seamen’s representation.53 For example, we have learned that even deep-water sailors did not always become lost forever within the depredations of piracy and port life, but that many maintained family lives and a network of social relations that benefited from – even participated in – their maritime activities. To be sure, longer voyages curtailed these possibilities, and the more time seamen spent in new places, the more rootless they stood to become. But the degree to which such developments actually occurred, as Richard W. Unger notes, is “virtually impossible to measure.”54 What is certain is that many sailors, even if they spent an entire summer at sea after departing from a port close to home, returned to their own communities for the winter; thus “the great majority” of such men “were probably still anchored to a place.”55 As I have argued recently, popular literature – such

18  Ships of State

as ballads and public drama – represents one venue in which seamen’s ongoing economic and affective ties to their landed communities are registered.56 Moreover, family groups in such communities often played a critical role in the expansion of maritime enterprise; a considerable body of historical evidence attests to the importance of these connections for maintaining various business ventures.57 Such instances demonstrate the high degree to which the early modern economy could still be defined in terms of what Peter Musgrave calls “family ­strategies,”58 not just the corporate or state strategies that increasingly took root in the early decades of empire. Moreover, the involvement of family units – including members who themselves would never go to sea – calls attention to the role of women in the story of the common imperial sailor, thus holding his association with hyper-masculine, even homosocial, work environments up to scrutiny. Indeed, just as various forms of coercion abroad could blur distinctions between the free servant and the slave, and Black and White, so does the participation of women in maritime life exert pressure on categories of gender and the ways in which those categories shape perceptions of the seaman. To be sure, what Carl Bridenbaugh calls the “peculiarly male hazards of life at sea” did create a large number of widows at seaports, as well as in other towns and rural areas.59 The commonality of such occurrences lends an edge of social realism to the “female warrior” phenomenon in early modern ballads, where women bravely don disguises to follow their men to sea rather than face the consequences of being left behind.60 Yet the spectacle of women following their men on voyages, as seen in accounts of female pirates such as Anne Bonny or Mary Read, stands as a novelty apart from the women who participated in everyday transactions. Since the Middle Ages, entire families had participated in fishing work;61 the promotional writers of the early seventeenth century believed they would continue to do so, hoping that common men, their wives, and their children would migrate to the fishing colony of Newfoundland (ch. 1). Therefore, the cyclical i­tineracy of the typical fisherman’s lifestyle did not simplistically place him on the level of the “masterless man” who existed outside of guild and family structures. Women’s involvement in other maritime activities included licit as well as illicit pursuits, as women were deeply involved in piracy networks as receivers of booty and as hostesses, wives, and mistresses – all opportunities for, as John C. Appleby notes in his study of women and piracy, “the assertion of female agency in varied guises.”62 Moreover, the fact that sailors of all kinds maintained ties with women at home (and with Black and Indigenous women abroad, as I note in the previous section) highlights sailors’ enduring affective ties to land;

Introduction 19

for example, the gifting of booty sealed bonds of fidelity between partners. In contact zones abroad, women engaged with men emotionally as well as economically as business partners, language translators, cultural intermediaries, sex workers, and tavern workers.63 Even seamen of the EIC were not so easy to detach from home life as the company governors might have liked; those leaders sought to fully utilize such men’s mobile labour without interference or distraction. Historical evidence indicates that the EIC internally debated whether the wives of high-ranking workers should be allowed to accompany them abroad; this research shows that, although the company preferred its workers to be “wedded” to the company and its profit agenda, companies occasionally permitted wives to sail. Even the wives of common men, while not likely to be allowed aboard, were permitted to collect their wages, a fact that testifies to the company’s view of itself as what Julia Schleck calls “the metaphorical head of a patriarchal household,” an image in keeping with its general patriarchal attitude towards the poor.64 None of this is to say that maritime environments did not have elements of masculine violence and libertinism that resulted in the marginalization or victimization of women; to be sure, such cases show how absolute and hierarchical distinctions of gender could become reified, with tragic consequences. Rather, it is to note a wide spectrum of economic, social, and emotional participation in maritime imperial culture beyond that of men, a range of involvement that included other subject positions – landed men, women, families, friends, and communities to which the imaginative literature that I study in this book pays heed. Finally, despite mercantilists’ sense of the limited options for common sailors – men supposedly better off perishing in corporate service than starving, thieving, or facing execution at home – imaginative texts are animated with possibilities of social mobility that push against the grain of deeply entrenched class and occupational hierarchies. Mobility itself was a loaded concept in early modern England, one associated with the flouting of social norms and the potential for disorder. Negative associations with physical mobility found expression in legislative attempts to curb the phenomenon of the masterless man, a figure whom coney-catching literature cast as an inchoate criminal; as we have seen, the work conditions of the fisherman and the common sailor could risk associating him with this stigmatized category. Economic mobility, however – and its attendant promise of social ­mobility – could threaten to disrupt the grammar of class hierarchy itself. Instances in which company governors and colonial promoters strove to regulate independent, small-scale trading activity among common sailors reflect exactly this wariness around lowly subjects acquiring

20  Ships of State

economic agency for themselves rather than for the company or the state.65 As I have shown elsewhere, such anxieties converge in the dangerous but nonetheless enthralling figures of the pirate, the mercenary, and the self-appointed diplomat – the renegade, that is, whose name represents an amalgamation of the Spanish renegado (i.e., faithless apostate) and the English runagate servant who escapes his master to pursue his own agenda abroad.66 Such behaviours, while often presented in literary texts as singular phenomena, were enabled by the conceptual slippage between licit and illicit maritime activity, as seen in the fuzzy distinction between pirate and privateer during the early modern period. From the 1580s onwards it was not uncommon to find erstwhile “pirates” serving in the Queen’s navy and working abroad in merchant and privateering vessels.67 More broadly, the sea could be a means, for those without much else, of making one’s own way in the world. On this potential within the maritime professions, G.V. Scammell comments that “for those who had nothing but their native wit and talent to recommend them, the sea was unequalled. It was naturally selective in the most literal sense of the words, for the incompetent rarely survived to make the same mistake twice. Such skills as it demanded did not, on the whole, require much formal education.”68 A ship’s bosun, for example, supervised everything from the crew to the rigging; as such, to be a bosun was “to be in line for command […] bosuns were in every sense men on the make.”69 Certainly it is true that the “master-mariners” of the middling classes, men established in landed communities, sat in the pathway of wealth, as evidenced by the fact that masters typically had a will and left charitable donations behind.70 Nonetheless, the technical expertise of sailors and other seamen acquired value in its own right, and this value reflects in progressively positive representations of sailors and fishermen as emblems of the British Empire. In fact, as chapter 3 will show with respect to Pericles and The Tempest, the affirmation of skill in imperial contexts begins to pose a countervailing form of social capital, one that holds up to scrutiny the ancient claims of degree within a changing economic order. For this reason the representations of seamen studied in this book centre largely on their labour – its conditions, its hegemonic uses, and at the same time its transgressive potential. The mobile labour of the seaman throws into high relief the risks and benefits of mobility itself – for individuals as well as societies. This aspect of imperial culture has been largely neglected in imperial histories that centre on the deeds and writings of merchants, investors, adventurers, and administrators. Underneath the triumphalist rhetoric of such figures grinds the actual machinery of empire, performed by those who caught the fish, built the vessels and sailed them, and faced mortal dangers that had an impact

Introduction 21

on not only the bodies of seamen themselves but also the social fabric of their landed communities. As the sharply polarized representations of the seaman outlined earlier suggest, this labour needed to be managed for the profit and benefit of the state and moneyed interests because a seaman seeking his own benefit evoked the inchoate transgression of the poor commoner. This continuum of representation, as it emerges within popular literary genres, expands and complicates the significance of the common seaman, thus adumbrating a cultural conversation about the impacts of empire that draws on the perspectives of subjects all over the social spectrum – maritime, landed, and amphibian. A focus on the seaman’s labour intervenes in the scholarly conversation about early British maritime empire in two major ways. First, it complicates the mercantilists’ abstraction of the sailor’s labour – that is, the detachment of his labouring body from terrestrial custom for the purposes of maximizing profit – by tracing the ways in which the common maritime worker remained imbricated in emotional and social attachments on land. In her work on the wives of EIC sailors, Schleck astutely identifies this conceptual problem within seventeenth-century economic discourse, whereby “social formations such as ‘the economy’ are often reified and alienated from the bodies through whose actions that economy is constituted and through whose desires and motions economic history should be told.”71 This book aims to tell exactly that story, first by acknowledging the ways in which popular genres support the uncoupling of the sailor’s labour from his wider subjectivity, but ultimately exposing the vulnerability of that same logic by demonstrating how these texts also locate the sailor’s labouring body beyond the ship, the fishing boat, or the drying dock. Second, this expanded social and economic context counters a tendency within “economic” literary criticism to consign labour to the capitalist economy as just one more commodity. The printed texts and drama under examination here do not rest with the idea of labour as, in the words of Matthew Kendrick, “an object to be instrumentalized for economic purposes.”72 Although they certainly acknowledge how the expanding logic of exchange value has an impact on the common labourer, they also depict ways in which this commodification influences the social ties binding family, community, and larger society. What emerges is a kind of resistance to the commodification of the sailor’s allegedly mobile labour, one that not only restores the sailor to his enduring landed ties but also envisions new ways of thinking about his labour – as a skill, as a pathway to social advancement, and as a means to gain wealth, even against discourses that prohibit lower-class economic agency. In these ways literary representations of the common seaman’s labour pose a powerful

22  Ships of State

counterdiscourse to the commodification of labour as it occurred during the long transition to capitalism. Though much seaborne labour remained lowly on the occupational and social scale, the reputation of the common seaman and the respect for his skill and character concomitantly flourished from the seventeenth century onwards. He was both a symbol of national ideals and an essential resource to be managed, a fact that indicates multiple and competing discourses around his significance and the project of empire itself. Yet even within the complex spectrum of representation that played out between these polarities, the common seaman was never a mere reflection of what David Armitage calls the “Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free” ideology of the British Empire.73 Rather, as a cultural figure, he crystallized the wide range of fears, aspirations, and contradictions that characterized imperial discourse and culture in the early years of maritime empire. As such, differing conceptions of the common seaman aligned with differing conceptions of the ocean itself; these conceptions assisted formations of society as well as that society’s geopolitical ambitions. The evolving shape of culture on land, Philip E. Steinberg points out, links to the uses of and representations of oceanic space: “The ‘socially constructed’ ocean that results then goes on to shape social relations, on land and at sea. In short, the ocean is not merely a space used by society; it is one component of the space of society.”74 I would add that, just as land and sea inhabit a dialectical relationship, so does the common seaman – inhabiting the putatively lawless, othered space of the ocean – and the landed social formations from which he derives and with which he maintains relationships. In literary terms the texts studied in this book depict the common seaman as playing an important role in translating seaborne life into plots, dialogues, and themes; he serves as a kind of human interface that embodies the sea’s alterity while also rendering the sea intelligible. In the empire’s early years, maritime culture became increasingly absorbed into British life as it existed in cities, towns, parishes, and communities. The imaginative texts addressed in the following chapters demonstrate some of the compelling ways in which this absorption took shape. Chapter Summaries The first chapter considers the Atlantic fishing industry, a sector of the trade slow to capture widespread interest among the mercantile class, yet one ultimately critical to the nation’s worldwide economic expansion. By the time the Newfoundland colony was founded in 1610, English fishermen had operated alongside fishermen of other nations in North Atlantic waters for decades; a trade flourished there, even

Introduction 23

as pirates periodically raided the coast. However, by the 1620s, promotional literature – that is, literature intended to promote migration among a wide range of social classes – had appeared in the print marketplace to assess evident problems in England’s Newfoundland endeavours, propose solutions, and above all encourage commoners to relocate to the North Atlantic. Here – in the published writings of the seamen Richard Whitbourne and John Mason, as well as in a published dialogue by the preacher Richard Eburne – the colony’s failure to thrive is ascribed largely to the allegedly truculent, self-serving, and undisciplined class of fishermen working on the island. Contemporaries associated fishing, an inherently mobile occupation, with the vagrant poor, a class also considered prone to defiance of hierarchical norms. In varying ways these promotional writers linked the English fishermen operating in Newfoundland to the large swell of “idle,” unhoused, and potentially seditious commoners living in England, the same population that ­proto-colonialist and mercantilist writers in general sought to relocate to the colonial hinterlands. The fishermen in Newfoundland, as described in these texts, merely seemed to replicate the aberrant tendencies of the supposedly idle at home. These inferences paved the way for the imagination of a colonialist utopia that relied on the capitalist management of the poor and thus achieved the maximum extraction of profit. This chapter, which draws on a wide range of historical and literary scholarship addressing colonial migration, labour management, and utopian worlds, takes the case of the Newfoundland fishermen as an illustration of how colonial promoters sought to transform the early modern sea worker from a troublesome, masterless figure into a servant of empire. The wealth-building potential of the lowly fisherman’s labour also appears prominently in pageant drama that promoted seafaring interests. These texts are explored in chapter 2, which turns to the Lord Mayor’s shows put on by the Fishmongers’ Company throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These shows were sponsored by livery companies seeking to honor a new lord mayor from among their own ranks. Historian George Unwin argues that the typical livery company of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London witnessed a rift between its “artisanal” rank and file and the wealthy company governors who increasingly adopted a more mercantile approach, erecting a “craft vs. commerce” distinction that expressed itself hierarchically. However, the Fishmongers’ Company – one of London’s most ancient companies and one of its Great Twelve – presents a notable exception to this trend because fishmongers did not, themselves, fish.75 Instead the company consisted of a range of merchants, from the richest trader to the lowliest costermonger, who competed for access

24  Ships of State

to ports in which actual fishermen performed the necessary labour. Common prejudices against the company as having no true “mystery” (i.e., craft) had persisted since the Middle Ages; at the same time, men of the fishing professions enjoyed a reputation for virtue and honesty stemming from the biblical example of the disciple Peter, “a fisher of men.” The three Fishmongers’ pageants that survive in print (Thomas Nelson’s 1590 Device of the Pageant, Anthony Munday’s 1616 Chrysanaleia, and Elkanah Settle’s 1700 The Triumphs of London) grapple with all of these ancient associations by utilizing the genre’s language of encomiastic poetry and visual spectacle to promote the company’s main interests: namely, that Protestant English subjects continue observing traditional fish days and, later, that fishing pave the way towards maritime empire. Despite past scholarly descriptions of the companies as fundamentally nostalgic and medievalist, the Fishmongers’ pageants indicate in more recent scholarship that, in fact, companies were not only deeply attuned to the winds of economic change but also fluent in imaginative languages that argued for the continuing relevance of those industries. Most strikingly of all, the Fishmongers’ pageants coopt spectacles of living labour – tableaux enacted by fishermen who did not themselves belong to the company – to argue for the company’s importance to establishing a future empire of the seas. The texts under study in chapters 1 and 2 indicate that the fisherman’s labour is critical to amassing national wealth, even as it remains unclear how or if those labourers will ever see direct economic or social benefits of that wealth. Yet as the empire developed in the seventeenth century, this lowly but essential status of common seafarers persisted, in a seeming paradox, alongside the emergence of a new kind of entitlement based on skill and valour, one that would come to define the imperial seaman. Shakespeare’s Mediterranean romances, the subjects of chapter 3, stage just such an emergence, whereby traditional forms of hierarchy give way to a new occupational consciousness. As A.F. Falconer has explored at length, the drama of Shakespeare – and, other scholars would later add, that of his contemporaries – engages substantially with maritime culture; these dramatists derived much inspiration from Britain’s status as an island nation. Pericles (1609) locates this preoccupation within a Mediterranean context by adapting an ancient Greek tale to a romance narrative of loss, renewal, and redemption that also draws on the region’s contemporaneous associations with trade; The Tempest (1611) utilizes a similar setting and themes. Yet while critics frequently describe these plays as meditations on royal privilege and courtly culture, I find in them a powerful counterdiscourse – one centring on the plays’ maritime workers – that erects everyday labour as a competing form of social distinction. For

Introduction 25

example, as I describe earlier, when the shipwrecked Pericles finds his lost armour washed ashore, the fishermen who accompany him there first insist on their own due – that is, the gifts and benefits of their labour that proud and independent early modern seamen expected as a matter of course. Their initial opposition to Pericles’s entitlement may be taken as a sign of the fishermen’s social difference from that of the Prince of Tyre; yet I discover that, in fact, this practical approach extends to some of the play’s noble characters as well, whose embrace of a workmanlike form of virtue runs counter to the misdeeds of what one character in Pericles calls “[c]areless heirs.” Although Pericles and his noble counterparts in The Tempest will inherit Mediterranean empires, a close reading of the plays suggests that, without the work ethic of the kind embodied by the seamen, the heirs’ ability to build and sustain these empires is far from assured. Labour, as Laura Doyle persuasively argues, is essential to creating and sustaining empire; yet it has occupied a relatively scant place in imperial histories. This chapter, as does this book in general, restores labour to that conversation. Both the social stigmatization and the promise of the common seaman remain themes in chapter 4, which turns to the early modern ballad archive. Ballads – songs printed on cheap paper, widely circulated, and enjoyed by a wide range of subjects with different literacies – spoke in a distinctly different register than did the texts studied in the previous chapters. For example, while the goal of the promotional literature surveyed in chapter 1 was to inform and persuade, ballads functioned as lowly and slight entertainment. However, as recent scholarship by Patricia Fumerton, Richard Harvey, Stuart A. Kane, and others has aptly demonstrated, this seemingly ephemeral form nonetheless reveals much about everyday life in early modern England, particularly among the vagrant and the poor. I apply their insights to early modern ballad representations of the common seaman and his labour, and in doing so, I discover a range of perspectives on the nation’s imperial endeavours that promotional literature does not reflect. Specifically, balladry’s preoccupation with sailors – their heroism as well as their alleged misdeeds – reflects a distinctly terrestrial, domestic, and local perspective by exploring the effects of sailors’ intermittent presence and long-term absence on the social fabric of communities. The sailor of the ballads assumes varying forms: as local hero and faithful lover or as serial fornicator and slippery criminal. These representations, I argue, reflect a wide spectrum of non-elite attitudes towards Britain’s imperial project, attitudes that include fear and scepticism as well as hope and admiration. Drawing insights from scholarship on popular print and music, this chapter argues for a view of maritime empire that

26  Ships of State

is inflected not in the writings of Dee, Gilbert, Misselden, Digges, and their colleagues – writings already well accounted for in existing studies of early British empire – but through the communities of nameless commoners affected by the recruitment of the common sailor. We have learned from later histories that the British Empire would expand into a great age of sea power and then eventually deteriorate. Accordingly, the play of polarities in representations of the common seaman – between the profane, violent would-be pirate and the loyal, resolute hero – would continue, in various forms, into the realm of popular culture in later periods. As Kenneth A. Andrews writes, the development of the Atlantic empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would lead to the marriage of the scientist and the sailor, with the technical expertise of the sailor acquiring increasing prestige alongside the development of modern navigational science.76 Yet, as I argue in this book’s conclusion, the duality in representations of the seaman is never fully resolved but is still present in significant traces, animating even recent cultural representations such as those found in The Terror, Dan Simmons’s 2007 historical novel that was adapted for an AMC television series in 2018. The Terror, which speculates on the disappearance of the Franklin Expedition around 1848, presents a number of character types among the expedition’s crew, each of which echoes an aspect of the composite figure of the early modern seaman. Looking back at the various representational strategies studied in this book, I examine The Terror as part of an unfolding imperial story, in order to show how its updating of these representations serves not only to critique the historical project of empire as a whole but also to anticipate the effects of imperialism in terms of climate change and its resultant damage to the earth and its people. In some ways the story of the common seaman in proto-imperial Britain is about a changing labour model and how that change was reflected in the cultural framing of one occupational class. And yet, the story of the common seaman in the popular literature of the period is the story of the transition to imperial capitalism itself and the way in which it transformed the globe. In the genres under study in this book the seaman encapsulated many aspects and drew on many wishes, fears, and cultural preoccupations. He was a hardy sailor, a wily entrepreneur, a menacing stranger, a rapacious pirate, and a brave patriot. What I suggest, ultimately, is that his continually shifting representations are indicative of social instability itself, bound up inextricably with the massive changes accompanying the push for maritime empire. These texts reflected the diverse conversations surrounding those developments and shaped them as well.

1 “Lords of the Harbors”: English Fishermen and the Newfoundland Colony

The explorer, soldier, and parliamentarian Humphrey Gilbert (c. 1539– 83) believed that his nation would one day conquer with fish.1 Given the tales we frequently hear about glorious imperial bounties of gold, sugar, and tobacco, the idea of a fish-driven dominium may strike one as quaint. “How did you compose an epic narrative whose only encounters were with fish?” asks Mary C. Fuller in her study of New World colonialist rhetoric.2 Yet in 1583, when Gilbert claimed Newfoundland for the crown, he did so with great ceremony, “in the view of all the Flete of Englishmen and Straungers, which were in number between thirty and fortie sayle.”3 These “Englishmen and Straungers” worked on shores where Spanish, Portuguese, and French, as well as English, fishing enterprises thrived from the North Atlantic’s plenty.4 Nonetheless, English dominance of the fishery was Gilbert’s chief priority, as he quickly moved to prohibit the burning of the woods because it might pollute the waters and send the fish away.5 He did it all at the behest of the crown, whose chief administrator, William Cecil, encouraged expansion into Newfoundland and efforts to cultivate fishing there. Clearly, by 1583, piscatorial conquest comprised an important part of the imperial plan. Gilbert boasted of many accomplishments, but he was no seaman, as “voyage orator” Stephen Parmenius’s dramatic account of Gilbert’s drowning aboard the Squirrel would later suggest. Parmenius also believed – if his Latin poem on Gilbert’s last voyage is any indication – that in the New World a man would be valued by different criteria than birth and wealth.6 This idea, of course, would become a foundational myth of American democracy itself. Yet as scholars of Atlantic modernity extensively document, this story of self-determination made manifest ironically relied on such practices as naval impressment, shipboard abuse, penal transport, indentured servitude, and chattel slavery, all of

28  Ships of State

which employed capitalist methods of labour management to harness the kinds of bound labour necessary to realize the visions of protoimperialist writers and adventurers.7 As I indicate in this book’s introduction, recent work on these exploited Atlantic populations even indicates shared political goals among them, goals that sometimes ­ gained expression in acts of defiance.8 Thanks to such scholarship, we now know that European incursion into the New World by no means erased Europeans’ domestic social hierarchies. If anything, expansionist activity translated these hierarchies of class and labour into new environments and, once there, complicated further those and other identitarian markers, such as race and nationality. This chapter will explore how a traditional English industry, fishing, encapsulated the deep social and economic contradictions that characterized the colonial Atlantic. These contradictions become particularly apparent in the rhetoric of promotion literature aimed at encouraging English migration to Newfoundland. The colonization of the New World depended in large part on persuasive texts devoted to the recruitment of commoners. In the case of Newfoundland, this literature – which, in surveying the region’s natural resources, encouraged fishing in particular – flooded the print marketplace in the early seventeenth century. The texts speak to a different audience than do the writings of men such as Gilbert, his colleague John Dee, and their contemporary Dudley Digges, elite administrators who wrote mainly for the crown and for other administrators as a way to shape policy and investment strategy. Promotional texts, by contrast, spoke to all of the state’s subjects, but above all poor commoners, whose labour was necessary to realize that vision. By engaging these audiences, appealing to their desire for relief from present misery at home, and convincing them to migrate, promotional rhetoric sought to erect within these populations, as Karen Schramm puts it, “a sense of agency that inheres within the rhetoric of discovery, exploration, and colonization.”9 At the same time, however, fishermen constituted a mobile labour force that, by its very nature, resisted settlement, which was itself necessary for England to securely claim North America. The agency of these fishermen, in other words, rested on a cyclically itinerant, and relative­ly independent, occupational model. Yet stable settlement abroad – or, in the rhetoric of Newfoundland promotional writers, “planting” – was exactly what the crown needed to create trade markets, guard against foreign incursion, and keep colonial populations under control and continuing to benefit the crown directly, and no one else. These competing structures, I will show, emerge in promotional discourse that looked to Newfoundland colonization as a means by which to make use

English Fishermen and the Newfoundland Colony  29

of otherwise truculent, idle populations at home. There we see writers such as Richard Whitbourne, John Mason, and Richard Eburne grapple with the promise of colonization, particularly its potential to relieve England of its “excess” population, while striving to groom English migrants to conform to crown control administered over two thousand miles away. I begin examining this dynamic by first offering context on the push to colonize Newfoundland, a region that, compared to New England and Virginia, has attracted relatively little scholarly attention. Again, Newfoundland’s association with the modest commodity of fish, which is less storied and opulent than other New World commodities, may account for this neglect, as may the lowly social status of fishermen themselves, who, according to David Quinn, were viewed as “poor and smelly” by their contemporaries.10 Fishing was no gentleman’s profession; yet promotional writers embraced it as a gateway to the kinds of colonization that would elevate poor subjects while repurposing those same subjects to generate products for trade. The itineracy of fishing, plus the drive to generate wealth from it, provides context for the close analyses of Newfoundland promotional discourse undertaken in this chapter. Gilbert may have envisioned conquering with fish, but the rhetoric of Newfoundland promotion demonstrates that the imagined social resolutions of such a conquest would not be easily achieved by promotional writers’ fulsome descriptions of freedom and plenty abroad. Fishing in the “New Found Lands” By the late Tudor period, fishing had become one of England’s most important domestic industries, one worth assiduously protecting. As I discuss in this book’s introduction, for example, the royal adviser John Dee proposed a “petty navy royal” to protect England’s shores from the incursion of Dutch fishermen who, Dee claimed, made handsome profits in local waters.11 Likewise, the prose writer and satirist Thomas Nashe extolled the wealth-building potential of English fisheries; his Lenten Stuffe praises in particular the Norfolk coastal community of Yarmouth as a generator of food and employment for that community and, by extension, the entire realm.12 Throughout the reigns of Elizabeth and her two successors, much was done to support fishermen, as proclamations reinforcing a statute from the reign of Edward VI were issued to keep Fridays and Saturdays, Ember days, and days in Lent as fish days.13 Moreover, for more than half a century, small books and pamphlets encouraged the expansion of fishing to increase the national wealth and employ the poor. Hitchcock, for example, raised eighty thousand

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pounds to supply 225 dwindling towns with fishing vessels to set the poor to work. These activities, he explained in his 1580 pamphlet, would not only bring in wealth but also provide “for the poore, in honest and decent maner, brynging them to a good and Godly vocation of life.”14 Despite this embrace of fishing as a national good, the North Atlantic fisheries long eluded the attention of London merchants who interested themselves far more in the European wool trade.15 Publishers and readers also demonstrated little interest in writings about the North Atlantic fisheries, preferring instead works of fantasy, such as John Mandeville’s Travels, as well as books describing eastern pilgrimages. Meanwhile, the westward push had begun with some Bristol merchants, whose efforts included fishing projects in Iceland and eventually forays into North America. However, to those journeying into the North Atlantic, it quickly became apparent that the English were not the only ones with that idea. One such merchant, Anthony Parkhurst, wrote in a 1578 letter to Richard Hakluyt that one hundred Spanish ships had travelled to the region to take cod, as had ships from Portugal and France. Parkhurst also noted that “the English are not there in such numbers as other nations,” but that with proper investment the English could become “lords of the harbors where they fish” and, furthermore, command “all strangers helpe in fishing if need require.”16 Eventually such reports caught the attention of enterprising gentlemen such as Humphrey Gilbert. Gilbert wrote to the merchant venturer George Peckham of Newfoundland’s promise: “Be of good cheare, for if there were no better expectation, it were a very rich demaynes, the Country being very good and full of all sorts of victuall, as fish both of the fresh water and Sea-fish, Deere, Pheasants, Partidges, Swanns, and divers Fowles else.”17 Meanwhile, as the domination of the Hanse and Italian merchants in Europe pressured England to create more export markets abroad, the Newfoundland fishery finally captured the attention of a wide swath of English merchants; thus the London and Bristol Company became the Newfoundland Company in the early seventeenth century. During this time, writes Harold A. Innis, “the English advanced from a position of minor importance in the Newfoundland fishery at the beginning of the second half of the century to one of major importance at the end.”18 The Bristol merchant John Guy investigated the site in 1608; forty people applied for incorporation when he returned home. In 1610, James I granted a charter guaranteeing a monopoly on agriculture, mining, fishing, and hunting on the Avalon Peninsula. In 1616, grants were extended to the Bristol Society of Merchant Venturers. The Newfoundland Company also sought to establish a monopoly on the dry fishery. The company did dissolve after falling prey to piracy in

English Fishermen and the Newfoundland Colony  31

1620; still, in the ensuing years, several colonies appeared, led by such titled gentlemen as Henry Cary, George Calvert, and William Vaughn. In the 1630s and 1640s, New World commodities such as Newfoundland fish supported an economic recovery that lasted through the 1660s.19 Fishing was therefore viewed as economically essential to the realm’s expansion, and yet, in the minds of most contemporaries, fishing was by no means socially prestigious. The sailor John Mason, in his 1620 publication A briefe discourse of the New-found-land with the situation, temperature, and commodities thereof, inciting our nation to goe forward in that hopefull plantation begunne, conceded that “[f]ishing is a beastly trade & unseeming a Gentleman.”20 Such attitudes towards the fishery and its workers no doubt influenced the sparse attention that Newfoundland initially received from merchants, adventurers, and the crown. Fishing and fisheries did not inspire awe but were common, everyday, and, as Quinn comments, “[n]ot all the efforts of the colonial promoters were able entirely to overcome that prejudice,” even though fish was more important than gold for advancing English interests worldwide.21 Still, fishing labour was not only essential but also cheap. Parkhurst, in sending ships to Newfoundland from Bristol between 1575 and 1578, observed that “[fishermen] cary forthe nether ware nor mony, nether spend they abrode half the vyttels that at home they woulde, and yet brynge they home greate store of fysshe, suffycyent to serve our realme and others from whence with yt we brynge home rytche commodyte.”22 Later, the early seventeenth-century diplomat Dudley Digges would echo the same sentiment to Parliament: “Fishermen are chiefly to be cherished, for they bring in much wealthe, and carry out nothing.”23 To the administrative and merchant classes, the influx of “much wealthe” at a cost of “nothing” presented an attractive calculus indeed. More attractive still was the prospect of transporting troublesome commoners out of England and using them to generate commodities for trade. In the case of fishermen and other maritime workers, however, there existed some debate regarding the effects of maritime workers’ emigration. English mercantilist thinkers, such as William Petyt, Roger Coke, and William Petty, viewed the depopulation of the home country as the depletion of an essential resource; this “loss of labour,” writes Alain Clement, particularly imperilled “English maritime activities, which required not only vessels but also men.”24 Coke worried especially that “to intend the trades to our plantations, we neglected the fishing trade, whereby the Dutch in a manner became solely in a short time possessed of thereby have acquired this incomparable advantage above us in the trade of our plantations.”25 Coke’s invocation of Dee’s Tudor nemesis, the Dutch, indicates that at least some

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seventeenth-century thinkers still regarded the domestic fishing industry as vulnerable to European rivals, and dangerously so if too many fishermen went abroad. Coke’s argument raises a salient point of tension with respect to fishermen’s role in mercantilist visions of success. On the one hand, these practitioners of a “beastly trade,” one “unseeming a Gentleman,” could be easily numbered among the troublesome at home, and rationales for worldwide colonization regularly invoked domestic overpopulation and the reformation of the idle poor. Yet at the same time, as Nashe documented, entire English communities, and by extension the entire nation, stood to benefit from their presence. What to do about the fishermen, then, depended on whether colonies could be viewed as extensions of the nation or as competitors.26 Parkhurst, who connected the cultivation of fishermen to the growth of the navy, favoured the former view, as he saw fishing endeavours abroad as facilitating the moral and economic betterment of all English subjects: [Fishing] also increseth the navy, good maryners, good fysshermen, and that which moste strange ys, yt maketh them honest, ritche and good husbonds, againste ther onlie custome which seldome they brake unless by constraynt. These men as I saide are honest, for that they fynd not in this country wyne not women. They wex welthy, for that thier shares ys worthe thre tymes the waiges they have for france, spayne or denmarke. Nether spend they that abrode, or they cum home as in other viages. Thus can their wyves, chyldren, servants and credytors wytnes with me the swetenes and proffyt of this viage.27

In Parkhurst’s view, the important point was that transformation of otherwise idle men into “honest, ritche and good husbands” enhanced the goal of “proffyt” with other social benefits that would necessarily accrue back home. Later, in A Discourse and Discovery of Newfoundland (1620), Richard Whitbourne would see similar potential but with even more of a focus on the nation’s economic benefit, in the Newfoundland colony: Many more poore Artificers and others will be then in great numbers hereby set a-worke, what now there are; and by the increase and bettering of this Trade, a very great augmentation of your Majesties Revenues in your Customes must of necessity follow […] [The Newfoundland endeavor] bringeth in great wealth by mens labours, and carrieth away nothing but a little victuals, which would be consumed by so many idle persons in lesse then halfe the time, which have no imployments, and yet the Kingdomes receive no benefit by such Drones either.28

English Fishermen and the Newfoundland Colony  33

Here Whitbourne, like Parkhurst, views colonization as promising “a very great augmentation of your Majesties Revenues” by men who “carrieth away nothing but a little victuals”; however, Whitbourne also shores up this win-win proposition by ensuring his readers of the relief of “so many idle persons [. . .] which have no imployments” at home. Moreover, just as Gilbert and other writers would describe the land’s seemingly infinite natural bounty, so did writers also cast the English poor as an infinite resource that, when cultivated at home and abroad, would provide what Peckham called a “navy of fishermen.”29 As for the fishing trade, the mercantilist thinker Edward Misselden insisted that anyone could labour in it, for fishing is “a worke that hath in it, utility to invite, and capacity to receive, all the Kingdome.”30 Such ideas informed promotional arguments about North America generally, and they appear to have worked, with nearly eighty thousand Englishmen (2 per cent of the total population) leaving home between 1620 and 1642.31 While the majority of these did not go to Newfoundland specifically, the sheer scale of migration suggests the circulation of powerful persuasive strategies that reached the eyes and ears of commoners. The widespread migration indicates that, while colonialist authors such as Samuel Purchas and the two Richard Hakluyts won the attention of prospective New World investors, inroads into wider audiences required, in the words of Carl Bridenbaugh, “a new device, the promotion tract.”32 The migration of English subjects to the Atlantic hinterlands, and physically beyond the reach of crown control, however, seems to have come with costs of its own in terms of the potential for unruliness, sedition, and treason. For example, the 1637 Proclamation against the Disorderly Transporting His Majesty’s Subjects to the Plantations within the Parts of America recognizes the distinct possibility of social disruption abroad. The text was written to address the “numbers” in America with “idle and refractory humors whose only principal end is to live as much as they can without the reach of authority.” To control the problem, the proclamation prohibited captains and port authorities from allowing “subsidy men” – that is, men assessed in lay taxes33 – or those “of the value of subsidy men” out of the realm. Even when authorized by two justices of the peace, men of this status still were required to take an oath of loyalty prior to departure. Moreover, the proclamation required that a list of the “names and qualities” of those on plantations be submitted to the crown regularly for inspection.34 This proclamation specified a concern expressed as early as 1578, when Gilbert’s royal patent for the New World alluded to “fugitives” leaving the realm without permission.35 North America was bountiful, spacious, and free, but not so free, apparently, as to allow subjects to disregard and flout the

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crown’s authority to derive revenue and labour from its subjects and to punish those subjects who had other ideas. The dangers of such mobility became visible in the Newfoundland colony where “planters” were widely regarded as vagrant, debauched, and without governance.36 This perception in part reflects a political question concerning the planters’ right to be there and their property rights. What is certain is that these planters survived by catching fish and producing it for export. Such labour took the shape of a “vernacular industry” of inherited skills rather than that of a “directed industry” operating by manuals, standardization, and centralized management.37 Gillian T. Cell adds to the picture of emerging conflict by characterizing the Newfoundland colony of 1610–31 as largely a struggle between colonizers and fishermen. With the Mediterranean markets having been destroyed by years of war and piracy, the fishermen of Charles I’s reign had no Cecil to look out for their interests. Thus the industry of individual fishermen increased in Newfoundland; there “government interest meant only interference, government action only restriction.”38 Here again, the proud tradition of occupational independence in the fishing industry reared its head. Although some fishermen worked under masters for “shares,” Peter E. Pope notes, most others moved around to different fisheries.39 The scions of the fishing industry, as well as Trinity House (the guild for mariners), for as long as possible resisted plantation as an encroachment on the shores and the drying areas; this tendency, according to Andrew Fitzmaurice, “probably accounted for the suppression of promotional material.”40 These disputes were settled by 1620, and then England witnessed, as Fitzmaurice observes, an opening of “the promotional floodgates.”41 The earlier tensions between planters and colonizers, and among fishermen themselves, persist in the promotion literature that immediately followed. In this literature we can detect a palpable awareness of how those tensions troubled the colonial environment and therefore had compromised England’s success until that point. As we shall see, these texts prescribe a new approach to management that seeks first and foremost to stabilize the very populations – starting with the ­fishermen – that were needed to make the colony flourish at last. Reforming “Abuses”: Newfoundland Circa 1620 By the time Whitbourne had published his Discourse and Discovery, the Newfoundland colony had existed for ten years, and fishermen of varying nationalities had worked there for decades. But as an experienced mariner who spent considerable time in the region, Whitbourne had

English Fishermen and the Newfoundland Colony  35

much to say about how these endeavours had succeeded so far. Born on the coast of Devon and apprenticed to a Southampton merchant, Whitbourne involved himself in the Newfoundland cod industry for thirty years and claimed that Gilbert himself sailed on one of his voyages. Then Whitbourne governed William Vaughn’s colony on the island’s southern shore from 1618 to 1620. He even helped the English pirates Henry Mainwaring and Peter Easton, both of whom menaced the Newfoundland coast, to sue the crown for pardon. Support among the nation’s leadership lent him even further authority, as Discourse and Discovery was promoted at the behest of the Privy Council whose members, not coincidentally, held investments in Newfoundland. Moreover, the church promoted it all over England and even asked parishioners to subsidize its publication.42 Clearly, these influential bodies trusted Whitbourne on the subject of Newfoundland colonization and regarded him as a figure who could also convince others of its importance. What remained, though, was to convey the wisdom of the endeavour to a broader audience. Although Whitbourne frames his text as an address to the king, he adds a preface to “His Majesties good Subjects,” which no doubt includes merchants and investors but does not exclude subjects who lack financial resources. In writing to this potentially diverse and capacious audience, Whitbourne aims to “beget” the right frame of mind in his readers.43 English subjects, who Whitbourne sees as suffering from “sluggishness,”44 are apparently unaware that they “may fitly be stiled, The nation of the Sea.”45 The task of surmounting this native resistance will be, in Whitbourne’s estimation, a laborious one. Twice in the prefatory material Whitbourne expresses the desire to actively “worke” a new attitude in these subjects; this aspiration requires him both to “worke the more effectuall impression in them”46 and to “worke an impression in the affections of his Majesties Subjects.”47 Readers, Whitbourne hopes, will not only undergo a change in their thinking but also affectively experience something “working” within themselves that will lead to England’s embracing its destiny as the world’s leader in seafaring and navigation. Whitbourne’s aim in writing – which he undertakes, significantly, with the spiritual authority of the church that distributes his book and with the endorsement of the faithful who invest in its publication – is to change hearts and souls as well as minds. This drive to “worke an impression” suggests, of course, that England’s people have been thus far unimpressed by the prospect of Newfoundland colonization. That is to say, it suggests that previous efforts in Newfoundland have lacked the full commitment of the English people, resulting in a colony yielding exiguous results. A purportedly “sluggish” English disposition is part of the problem. However, Whitbourne

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acknowledges another hindrance in the daunting prospect of subjects’ relocating overseas: “it is an hard matter to perswade people to adventure into strange Countries; especially to remaine and settle themselves there.”48 This “hard matter” maintains its hold over English subjects, Whitbourne explains, because no one has written persuasively on the topic of Newfoundland colonization until now: “seeing that no man hath yet published any fit motives or inducements, whereby to perswade men to adventure, or plant there; I have presumed plainely to lay down these following reasons.”49 Whitbourne promises to correct, in the “plainest” terms yet, the putatively ineffective efforts of earlier writers to convince subjects to migrate. The failings of the Newfoundland project thus far ultimately are not attributed to the hardships of the journey or the land itself but to the rhetorical deficiencies of earlier promotional literature. Notably, Whitbourne was not the only English writer who thought so. Mason, who himself had spent several years in the region, positions himself similarly in his Briefe discourse of the New-found-land with the situation, temperature, and commodities thereof, inciting our nation to goe forward in that hopefull plantation begunne, published in the same year. As the latter half of the book’s title indicates, Mason examines how to “goe forward” in an endeavour already “begunne,” yet not wholly successful. Like Whitbourne, Mason attributes the colony’s failure to the “sundrie relations” of Newfoundland already published, with some writers “too much extolling it, some too much debasing it.”50 In the first case, Mason suggests, previous writers have strained the limits of readers’ credulity; in the second, readers have walked away, being convinced of nothing but the undesirability of travelling to such a wretched place. Mason promises to ameliorate these rhetorical excesses in a manner similar to Whitbourne’s – that is, by writing “in few and plaine tearmes”51 of his own experience there. Taken together, the rhetorical positioning of these two writers conveys the sense of a readership already weary and wary of the subject of Newfoundland. Moreover, just as Whitbourne aims to “worke” his audience into a new spirit and mindset, so does Mason promise to “incite” his readership to the same and thus spur them into action. The current state of inaction has led to a colony whose production is inert, even backwards, when it comes to generating profit, as Whitbourne will explain at great length. Much of Discourse and Discovery purports to uncover the numerous “abuses” of those English subjects who have already been working in the region. Some of these missteps have been committed by merchants who should know better: for example, those who sailed “neere the end of February, being commonly the foulest time in the yeere” and rushed the voyage to the extent that “both

English Fishermen and the Newfoundland Colony  37

ships and men have been suddenly cast away, to the utter undoing of many Adventurers, and families.”52 Other abuses, Whitbourne notes, have been committed by the pirates of various nations against whom England has struggled to defend the fishery. However, according to Whitbourne, the men who have already been fishing there commit the greatest abuses and thus have cost the realm most of all. Some of these abuses he claims to have seen first hand. Others he learned of through a makeshift admiralty court, set up on the island, during which he questioned some 170 shipmasters about what they themselves had witnessed among the fishermen. In these accounts, the abuses committed by “divers of our Nation” are legion. Incidents include fishing on the Sabbath; tossing overboard the stones used to press and dry fish, thus making the harbours dangerous; stealing fishing boats and breaking them into pieces “to the great prejudice and hinderance of the voyages of such ships that depend on such fishing boates, and also to the true Owners of such boates”;53 ripping down drying stages and setting them on fire; and stealing bait and salt. Taken together, reports of such activities portray a kind of lawless wild west on the island. Newfoundland, in other words, appears as a no man’s land full of rapacious individuals who seek to profit themselves by sabotaging others’ efforts. The shipmasters also report that “divers of your Majesties subjects have come to that Coast, in fishing voyages in ships not appertayning to any of your Majesties subjects, which they conceived worth of punishment, and reformation.”54 The fact that these vessels do not appear to belong to any Englishman and are not visibly under the control of any nation’s flag merely underscores the sense that these fishermen are not working for any common good, certainly not for the king’s realm, but for their own profit. Indeed, Whitbourne’s description of the fishermen affords such men little distinction from the pirates who steal from and ravage the coast. In his assessment the shipmasters’ reports demonstrate “a part of some great wrongs that have been committed there by Pyrats and some erring subjects.”55 Like pirates, these fishermen operate as violent and destructive lone agents, sailing under no country’s authority, devoid of national affiliation and loyalty; the fact that Whitbourne names both pirates and other “erring subjects” together in one succinct phrase suggests that he sees little difference between pirates and the current population of fishermen. The enemy to the realm’s interests, therefore, lies not outside the island but within it, among the subjects currently there. This point gains reinforcement in the fact that Whitbourne does not regard the island’s native inhabitants – that is, the population that existed there prior to the European presence – as a major threat.

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The conclusion to his book relates a tale in which three mariners are “robbed in the night by the Savages,” in addition to being involved in other minor disasters;56 yet in the main body of the text he counts these inhabitants as “but few in number,” and, although he acknowledges them to be “rude and savage,” they are nonetheless deemed “an ingenuous and tractable people” who have been “ready to assist [European travellers] with great labour and patience.”57 In his 1622 follow-up text, A discourse containing a loving invitation, Whitbourne does propose converting the native inhabitants to Christianity, but he still does not describe those inhabitants as a menace to European interests. Mason, for his part, scarcely regards the native inhabitants at all, reporting “but few Salvages in the north” with whom English travellers might trade. Mason does not directly address the state of the island’s fishermen, but if Whitbourne is to be believed, the fishermen themselves are anything but patient or, in Whitbourne’s word, “tractable.” Nor are the fishermen particularly hard-working. Some of them apparently do not work at all, as Whitbourne describes “divers idle persons, which were hired for those voyages, when they come thither, notwithstanding that they were still in health, would not worke, and were so lazy and idle, that their worke was to little purpose: which was worthy of punishment.”58 Whitbourne elaborates on some of these idlers, whom he encountered in 1618: “[They] had remained there a whole yeere, before I came neere, or knew any of them; and never applied themselves to any commendable thing, no not so much as to make themselves an house to lodge in, but lay in such cold and simple roomes all the winter, as the Fishermen had formerly built there for their necessary occasions, the yeere before those men arrived there.”59 These individuals, having failed to “appl[y] themselves to any commendable thing,” live in a vagabond manner, without even “an house to lodge in,” dwelling only in “cold and simple roomes.” If the more criminally active fishermen described in the shipmasters’ reports resemble pirates, then these men – idle, vagrant, unhoused – resemble the very masses of poor commoners that Whitbourne, in the manner of many a colonialist writer, describes as destroying the social fabric of England. Also like those writers, he recommends that the poor masses be transported elsewhere, where they may be reformed by work disciplines that have failed to take hold at home due to the sheer scale of vagrancy. Whitbourne counsels the king: [I]t would be a great ease to all the rest of your Majesties subjects, if some part of our superabounding multitudes were transplanted into Newfound-land; for besides the great number of idle persons that live there,

English Fishermen and the Newfoundland Colony  39 spending their time in drinking, and other excesse, amongst which many of your New-found-land men may be reckoned, during the winter season, whilest they are at home: There are many thousands of poore people of both sexes, which might be spared out of all your Majesties Dominions, who living penuriously, and in great want, would be perswaded to remove their dwelling into New-found-land, where they might not onely free themselves of their present miseries, but also by their industrie, in time inrich themselves, and deserve well of the State by their imploiments: for there is yeerely great abundance of good fish lost for want of labourers, and other good things also.60

For the problem of the “superabounding multitudes” who, “living penuriously, and in great want,” crowd out all good order at home, relocation to Newfoundland presents the answer “if they may be perswaded,” that is with the help of Whitbourne’s book, “to remove their dwelling.” However, as long as the realm permits idle and piratical fishermen to languish in Newfoundland, the island stands to replicate the very conditions at home that its colonization is meant to solve, and the colony becomes an extension of England in the worst possible way. Therefore, if a change does not occur, the island will yield yet more “idle persons,” and, Whitbourne emphasizes, “[s]uch persons are not fit to advance your Majesties intended worke, but rather disgrace and hinder the same.”61 The realm, therefore, must make better use not only of these men but also of the “superabounding multitudes” that Whitbourne hopes will join them. The solution, Whitbourne proposes, is plantation. In writing of the “idle people” already there who are “so unfit for the service,” Whitbourne reminds his audience that these subjects had been “formerly sent to plant.”62 Moreover, although the eventual relocation of entire families representing many crafts is critical to achieving a profitable colony, the plantation effort should begin, he insists, by fostering “quietnes amongst the fishermen.”63 Abandoning fishing itself for the sake of fostering other industries is out of the question. Fish, Whitbourne makes clear, is the most valuable commodity and remains the gateway to cultivating the island: “the chiefe commodity of New-found-land yet knowne, and which is growne to be a settled trade, and that may be much bettered by an orderly Plantation there, (if the traders thither will take some better course, then formerly they have done, as shall be declared) is the Cod-fishing upon that Coast, by which our Nation and many other Countries are enrich.”64 Mason, in his own book, agrees, as he reminds readers that fish is “a staple commoditie with us” and has been for sixty years. Fish can be sold in other countries, Mason

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explains, and fishing employs many men, thus providing for wives and children at home.65 Fishing, therefore, is the key not only to broader colonization but also to the continued well-being of English families. Whether they actively destroy others’ property or merely lie idle in abandoned rooms, however, the present population of English fishermen on the island is restive. Therefore, they present not only an economic liability but also a threat to crown control. The stabilization of this threat, for Whitbourne, will require “the setting of some better order and governement amongst the Fishermen, and all others of our Nation that yeerely trade there, then nowe there is; so that there may be a reformation of such abuses as are there yerely committed.”66 This “better order” means incorporating fishing, an occupation characterized by “free trading,”67 into a work model that resembles the master-servant relationships that characterize other occupations throughout England, thus rendering the allegedly “free” somewhat less free. The book’s frequent use of the verb set – as in “the setting of some better order and governement,” the dictum to “set on worke” England’s vagrant and unhoused multitudes, or the speculation on what can happen if “this Trade and Plantation were once settled in such manner” – aptly conveys the idea of taking up what is cyclically itinerant and fixing it into place. As part of a program that purports to bring “quitenes” among the fishermen, setting and settling people will ensure that wealth flows through the proper channels. “Plantation,” in this sense, begins with the picking up, relocating, “setting” down, and “planting” of people. On this point as well, Mason appears to agree: while his relatively brief pamphlet does not report idleness on the island, he does deem the current residents’ knowledge of the area “superficiall” with the exception of “their fishings.”68 Fishing has been happening, that is, without sufficient investment in planting. Therefore, English endeavours so far have been “superficiall” because the fishing trade has not been tethered to a broader project. To achieve this broadening and its presumed stabilizing effect, Whitbourne prescribes a new arrangement, one that incorporates heretofore “free” economic agents into an efficient structure that will extract maximum profit. The first step is to bind each fisherman to the master of the voyage that brings him to the island. The fisherman will pay for his passage and his keep by living on the island and taking “a single share” of the fish he catches, surrendering the rest to his master. Whitbourne explains the scheme at length: Such as will undertake to send people to that land, as aforesaid, I would also advise them to acquaint themselves with a fit man to be Master in each Ship, that understands the order of a fishing voyage to that Country;

English Fishermen and the Newfoundland Colony  41 and hee will procure fit fishermen, to goe with him to that purpose, and likewise acquaint them with every particular thing that is fit for such a voyage. And withall it is to be observed, that for every such servant that any Master will sent thither to plant, and live all the yeere, hee is to have a single share allowed unto every man alike of such fish as is taken, whilest they labour together in the Summer time with the ships company with whom they are, though afterwards they stay in the land, and follow some other service for their masters, whiles the ships are imployed abroad in venting their commodities, and untill they returne to them againe, to the New-found-land: which single share of fish so taken, may well defray all the charge and hire that any man shall have of his master, who doth stay there all the winter, with good advantage.69

In this arrangement the fishermen will no longer work as free traders who fend for themselves but will render “service for their masters,” which, by implication, could also extend to non-fishing work. They might, for example, “imploy themselves beneficially in Husbandry upon the land, as servants ought to do.”70 In addition to a “share” of their own catch, the fishermen will also gain protection from pirates because war ships will be stationed there to defend the shores. A portion of the catch that they give to their masters will defray the costs of that defence.71 Whitbourne proposes additional details that exceed the scope of this chapter, but in conveying the general plan to the king, he underscores the wisdom of incorporating the idle, those who otherwise draw too heavily on the national coffers, into a master-servant hierarchy. Increased wealth will be the result: “[C]ertainely if this Trade and Plantation were once settled in such manner, it would prove more commodious and beneficiall then any other Plantation your Majestie hath elsewhere: for, as I have said, it bringeth in great wealth, and carrieth away nothing but a little victuals, which would be consumed by so many idle persons in lesse than halfe the time, which have no imployments, and yet the Kingdomes receive no benefit by such Drones neither.”72 In line with Anthony Parkhurst and Dudley Digges, Whitbourne sees the proper employment of fishermen yielding much in the way of profit, while costing little in the way of the workers’ maintenance. For Whitbourne, who laments the draw of the idle on the kingdom’s economic potential, the beginnings of a plantation rest in the liminal, littoral space in which fishermen work. The goal, then, is to make those who are languishing in temporary rooms on the shores, stealing bait, and burning boats and docks into reliable servants of shipmasters and, by extension, the realm itself. Whitbourne proposes, in other words, a “plantation” and a “settlement” that is, ironically, derived from an inherently unplanted, unsettled workforce.

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Breaking the Ice: Preaching and Planting in 1624 While Whitbourne and Mason possessed considerable experience in the region, there is no evidence at all that the preacher Richard Eburne ever spent time there. His rationale for joining the conversation stemmed rather from a deep conviction, bolstered by nationalist fervour, social critique, and biblical authority, that the cultivation of Newfoundland represented both the economic path forward for England and the solution to its domestic problems. Like his 1620 predecessors, Eburne proceeds by acknowledging previous writers, including Whitbourne, whose “sundry Motives” all have been the same: “To move our people of England, to plant themselves abroad, and free themselves of that peril of penurie and perill of want, wherein they live at home.”73 Eburne embraces a socially diverse range of readers, but he specifically singles out poor commoners in hopes of “perswading and stirring up of the people of this Land, chiefly the poorer and common sort to affect and effect these Attempts better than yet they doe.”74 Also like Whitbourne and Mason, Eburne strives to move and stir readers into action. Unlike his predecessors, Eburne cannot claim to have undergone movement across the Atlantic; he is neither a sailor nor a merchant. What he is, however, is a preacher and thus a powerful rhetorician with a different kind of persuasive authority. In rallying those powers, he undertakes to present the doctrine of plantation as no one has before: “I am the first that hath broken this Ice, and searched out this way.”75 Ingeniously, Eburne appropriates the language of northern exploration, characterized by formidable barriers of “[i]ce” to be “broken” through, to his own rhetorical labour, thus creating a platform for persuasion that equals, even bests, that of the actual northern explorers who came before him. As an author taking on a well-worn subject that has yet to fully move England’s people, Eburne styles himself as a brave and intrepid explorer in his own right. The voluminous Plaine path-way to plantations that is, a discourse in generall, concerning the plantation of our English people in other countries contains three parts. Across all three Eburne adopts a generic form borrowed from traditions of European humanism: the dialogue, exemplified most famously in England by Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), which opens with a conversation between More’s friend Peter Giles and the fictional explorer Raphael Hythloday. Among the different kinds of dialogue written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Eburne’s text most closely resembles the subgenre of disputation, in which, according to Peter Burke, “different points of view are expressed, but one speaker is allowed to win, more or less subtly.”76 Eburne’s two interlocutors are

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Respire, a farmer, and Enrubie, a merchant whose name represents a variation on Eburne and, as such, reinforces the explorer persona that Eburne adopts in his prefatory address.77 The merchant Enrubie will prove to be the dialogue’s eventual winner as he undertakes the laborious process of selling Respire on the wisdom of northern migration. Although it may appear odd that a text purporting to address the poorer and common sort would adopt a classical form embraced by highly literate humanists, Burke reminds us of one important feature of the dialogue form: “the suitability of this kind of text for reading aloud.”78 The power of oral transmission to reach illiterate masses could not have been lost on the preacher Richard Eburne. Indeed, he conjures his audience to take in his arguments through both visual and auditory channels: “Harken unto me, read, heare, and consider what I say for your better information, and to stirre up and animate you to accept your good, while you may. […] Let truth take place within you, let reason move, and let evidence of the cause sway and settle you.”79 Furthermore, the exchange between two interlocutors promises to facilitate this acceptance through the familiarity and approachability of everyday conversation. To this point, Roger Deakins usefully defines the literary dialogue as “discussion that is ‘philosophical’ (in the root sense of ‘loving wisdom’) but that nonetheless rejects the technical languages of professional academic philosophy in favour of language which is (in some sense) ‘ordinary’ or ‘natural.’”80 Thus, on the one hand, the text appears learned and deliberate, conveying a sense of thoughtfulness, but on the other hand it adopts “natural” language between two “ordinary” characters who convey “plaine” meaning, albeit carefully reasoned out in conversation. Eburne’s text is no technical manual detailing strategies, costs, and returns for an audience of investors. Its purpose, rather, is more abstract, even affective, in nature: Eburne aims to move a general audience to consider certain truths about Newfoundland and to accept the “good” that will result. Respire and Enrubie converse exhaustively on many different aspects of northward migration, the Newfoundland region, and the social reforms that English plantation will help to achieve. As one might expect, they largely arrive at conclusions that echo those of Whitbourne and Mason: the fishing industry, while serving as the gateway to broader cultivation of the island, has suffered too long at the hands of the idle and thus requires capitalist management not only for fishing to thrive but also for the island itself to reach its full capacity as a colony of “planted” people. On fishing and fishermen themselves, Eburne says little, in comparison to Whitbourne who, as we have seen, addresses at great length the abuses in the industry. Eburne does, however,

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acknowledge fishing as critically important to England’s economic health. The fishing scene in Newfoundland abounds with endless promise, of which nations have attempted to avail themselves for eight decades: “the whole Country is rich, viz. the Sea coast with fish beyond measure, as where our Nation and some others have fished these fourescore yeeres, and where there is never like to be an end of want of that Commodity.”81 Moreover, Eburne warns that losing England’s capacity to fish there, due to invasion and takeover by another country, would be disastrous, with “the losse for ever of our fishing voyages there, which these fourescore yeeres we have frequented and enjoyed: which losse alone, would be even the undoing of many of our Sea-cost Townes in England, that doe now live much by them.”82 Thus we witness the reasoning of another colonial thinker who, unlike Roger Coke, regards Newfoundland fishing not as a depletion of the domestic workforce but as an extension of it, for Eburne appeals to the vulnerability of two coasts – the Newfoundland shore and, closer to home, the southern coast of England, where not only the domestic fishing industry thrived but also entire communities lived off income from the Newfoundland trade. The preservation of English fishing in Newfoundland, which Eburne suggests has heretofore taken place under the grasping and speculative view of other nations’ seacraft, is essential to the health of the English nation. Yet the threat to the fishery is not only external. Like Whitbourne, who gives some mention to piracy but dwells at far greater length on the fishermen already there, Eburne detects the social disease of “idleness” running rampant in the present colony. “Divers of them that have gone over,” Enrubie complains, “have beene Bankerupts and Spendthrifts, Idlers and Loyterers, who, as they thrived not in England, (for how should they thrive that run thriftlesse and heedlesse courses?) so they will not commonly in any Land.”83 On this subject Eburne the preacher hits his rhetorical stride; while he knows relatively little about fishing, he knows a great deal about the human propensity to sin. For him the proliferation of “Idlers” and other miscreants in Newfoundland reflects not so much problems within the fishing industry as problems in England’s domestic social management. In other words, these idlers do not change simply by being transported abroad; rather, they continue in the new world as they had in the old – thriftless, feckless, and unwilling to work – and thus, as Whitbourne feared, the colony stands to become like the worst of England itself. At this point it is not necessary to belabour Eburne’s descriptions of the social disease of idleness at home; in those passages he merely reiterates points made by the colonialist writers who came before him.

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However, Eburne’s use of the dialogue form draws a relationship between his text and the texts of previous early modern English writers who used the form to meditate on utopian possibilities and attendant social reforms. More’s Utopia, for example, has been identified by scholars as a major touchstone in England’s turn towards work discipline as a means of social reform.84 In that text More decries the practice of capital punishment, stating that while the labour of criminals is useful for profit, their deaths are not. More’s fellow humanists, such as Juan Luis Vives,85 shared these convictions; such views were later taken up by Protestant clerics seeking to repurpose dissolved religious houses as houses of correction, such as the Bridewell “hospital.” But the dialogue perhaps most germane to Eburne’s purpose is Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), where the interlocutors Irinius and Eudoxus discuss the best means of conquering the recalcitrant natives of the island. In a recent article Sarah Hogan calls attention to a much-overlooked portion of that text, one in which Spenser sets out a post-war program for imposing a division of labour between English settlers and native Irish. This program, which comprises the entire final third of Spenser’s book, distinguishes A View from earlier utopian texts. While the literary utopias of More and other predecessors omit discussion of the changes that create such places in the first place – assuming, in other words, that such places already exist elsewhere – a work such as A View is, Hogan explains, “better understood as a utopia of transition” in which “a subjugated land and its people becomes both the laboratory and the raw material for reinventing the imperial self, and the colonial tract therefore takes on a utopian rhetoric that privileges the question of transition in its overall picture of grand transformation.”86 For Spenser, Ireland’s “grand transformation” will take place not only by conquering the native inhabitants but also through their subsequent reform via English plantation and the maximum extraction of profit from the inhabitants’ labour. Eburne’s vision for Newfoundland, I would argue, falls along similar lines, as do the writings of Whitbourne. The difference in the case of Newfoundland, however, is that there apparently is no truculent Indigenous population to uproot; there are, rather, English subjects, many of whom are fishermen, who have merely exported the native English social diseases of vagrancy and poverty. The solution proposed by the Newfoundland writers is effectively the same as Spenser’s: a process of reform through the planting of people and the imposition of work discipline on an erstwhile idle and potentially treasonous population. Among them, Eburne’s choice to deliver such ideas in dialogue form calls attention not only to the kinship between his text and other

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utopian narratives but in particular to his text’s resemblance to Spenser’s colonialist “utopia of transition.” The second half of Eburne’s title – concerning the plantation of our English people in other countries – lays out this solution in two ways. On the one hand, the preposition of indicates that the plantation will belong to the English people, that they themselves will be doing the planting. But of also suggests that the English people are the objects, not the subjects, of the planting; in other words, they themselves will be the ones planted. Enrubie frames these plans in highly class-encoded terms. Conceding that these will be “matters of great labour, time and expence,”87 he nominates England’s better sort as the ones who can achieve such stability through the dedicated management of the poor and the idle: “When men of fashion and meanes doe go over, that are able to set up themselves and others, and that will be industrious to take the benefit of the time and place, then I doubt not but it will soone appeare what good may be done in those places, and that men may, if they will, easily and quickly prove rich and wealthy there. Then, and not till then, if riches arise not, let men blame the places from whence it was expected they should arise.”88 When reading this passage, one might ask what exactly “was expected” over the last eight decades in Newfoundland, and from whom. If successful colonization, operating with an eye towards maximum profit, was expected but did not come to pass, it seems that this was the fault not of the land but of the people who had worked there thus far – mainly fishermen and other putatively idle persons. Problematically these individuals have been operating as economic free agents rather than as servants to the crown, thus calling for “some good order and course for such a purpose, such I meane, as may be setled generally all the Land over, by Regall and Legall authoritie, and not by private agreements and directions only, which if I be not much deceived, will never effect such a worke while the world standeth.”89 The firm hands of “men of fashion and meanes,” apparently the most fitting arbiters of hard work and discipline, must therefore be applied to achieve “rich and wealthy” ends. Any other approach, Eburne suggests, not only wastes resources but sows the seeds of rebellion on the island. On the presence of the native inhabitants, Eburne, like Whitbourne and Mason, has little to say because, again, the “savages” in this case come from England itself. Eburne describes the types of people who should be in Newfoundland, declaring: “The strength of a land, consisteth not so much in the number of people, as, in the aptnesse, and ablenesse of them unto service.”90 Most of the people currently there, though, are unfit for service. This unfitness not only diminishes the nation’s wealth but also endangers

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England’s command over the island: “There may be more doubt of them rather, lest in time of Peace they raise tumults, and fall to uproares for their bellies sake, and in time of Warre lest they joyne with the Enemie, and take parts against us, for our pillage and livings sake.”91 Tumultuous, hungry, and duplicitous spirits abroad can only undermine crown control. Not only is management by the “better sort” therefore required, but also Enrubie warns against populating the colony with men untethered from family structures. Some investors, Enrubie complains, “send out a few young and single men, that have little or no experience in the world, and so are readier indeed and likelier to overthrow then to uphold a Plantation.”92 This description of troublesome young and single men resonates with contemporaneous perceptions of the restive and even violent urban apprentice class, as has been described in detail by historians such as Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos and Alexandra Shepard. As it goes in the London borough of Southwark, so it goes evidently in the Newfoundland colony. The single man, Enrubie elaborates further, is one who “fights or rather shifts for himselfe, and therefore will soone either yeeld or runne away.”93 Unaccountable to a family – and Eburne, like his predecessors, continually emphasizes that entire families must be persuaded to migrate – the single man stands to “shift for himselfe” and seek his own profit, much like the unaffiliated fishermen described in Whitbourne’s pamphlet, who act as lone economic agents. Eburne’s speculation that such men could “runne away” also recalls the cultural figure of the runaway apprentice who, as I have argued elsewhere, provides a conceptual root for the phenomenon of the “renegade,” the man who runs away from domestic family and occupational structures to pursue his own ends abroad.94 Thus Enrubie’s fears of rebellion among the present population of Newfoundland rally a number of cultural anxieties surrounding vagrancy, masterlessness, youth, and singlehood. The solution is to impose structures of service and family onto this population to make them loyal and serviceable to the crown. This is, in sum, a strategy for population management as well as for colonization. Throughout the book’s dialogue, Respire, a settled farmer who is as tied to the land as anyone is, functions as a stand-in for anyone in ­England who remains unconvinced as to the wisdom of cultivating ­Newfoundland. Enrubie eventually persuades Respire by arguing in agrarian metaphors that a farmer will understand: he contends that idle and excess people, at home and abroad, must first be “rooted out” and then “transplanted into some other soile.”95 Success will take, in other words, the planting or replanting of a largely mobile set of common people.

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Enrubie’s arguments eventually prove successful. By the end of the third book Respire’s initial scepticism has dissolved and, indeed, he is making plans to travel to Newfoundland himself. The ice has been broken at last. An Ironic Aftermath For all the passionate conviction animating these promotional texts, the historical aftermath of the colony is nonetheless replete with false starts and failures. In the introduction to the “Newfoundland” section of the Literature of Justification database hosted by Lehigh University’s Digital Library, the site’s authors conclude that the ideological impact of the Newfoundland promotional texts “far outweighs the historical significance of the short-lived colony.”96 On the one hand, these texts tell us much about how a major thread of early British imperialist thought alighted on a particular region and its biggest industry; on the other hand, the aim of the writers’ arguments – to achieve a Newfoundland colony flourishing under centralized control – was not fulfilled in any consistent way. Various attempts at investment and proprietary governorship, which regularly involved conflicts with the French who dominated the southern part of the island, eventually foundered; the sole governorship of the royalist David Kirke lasted only from 1638 to 1651, when the Kirkes found themselves on the losing side of the English Civil War; by 1675 the crown was no longer setting up a local governor in Newfoundland. Later attempts at permanent settlement, as well as negotiations with the French, continued throughout the next centuries; the island became a crown colony in 1854 and a dominion of the British Empire in 1907; finally, the colony joined Canada in 1949. More ironically still, the very pretext for the early modern push towards the Northern Atlantic, with its allegedly endless abundance of fish, did not last in the end. Although in 1626 William Vaughn saw Newfoundland as “never to be exhausted dry,” this is exactly what was happening by the early 1980s, when the cod fishery began to face depletion. In response, the Canadian government officially closed the Newfoundland fishery in 1992.97 One more point of irony emerges between the 1620s’ heyday of Newfoundland promotion and its later history, a point that distinguishes the story of the island from that of the earliest English colonies in the ­present-day United States. Unlike Virginia and other colonies to the south, Newfoundland never witnessed the mass instalment of Black chattel slavery from Africa as the basis for a plantation economy. The dreams of Newfoundland migration expressed in the 1620s rested on the

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hope that English commoners – many of whom, to be sure, were deemed poor and undesirable and without better options – would migrate to Newfoundland and form a stable society there. Yet by the latter half of the seventeenth century English administrators had begun to worry over the loss of “their” people – that is, White Britons – to the colonies. Hence the domestically sourced labour that administrators hoped would grow these colonies was soon re-envisioned in terms that protected and preserved “their” people at the expense of “others.” Here the diminishment of the domestic fishing trade, about which Coke worried in 1670, paved the way for a more explicitly racialized New World labour force, one that, as Abigail Swingen has elaborated, would recast White E ­ nglish labour as domestically “ours” while consigning Black labour to the ­American plantations.98 This is not to say that English fishing labour did not persist in Newfoundland but rather to note that the push for Atlantic plantation soon began to adopt a very different labour model than the one envisioned by Whitbourne, Mason, Eburne, and their colleagues. Nothing like the massive tobacco, cotton, and sugar plantations to the south, soon to be powered almost entirely by the stolen and enforced labour of Black slaves, existed among the fisheries of Newfoundland. Thus, while the colonialist utopias envisioned by the Newfoundland promotional writers never took shape, their texts are nonetheless instructive for the study of proto-imperial discourse and its conception of the maritime worker. Like much of the period’s proto-imperialist and mercantilist writing, these texts look to the cultivation of the sea and its industries – long-distance sailing and, in particular, fishing – as the key to manifesting England’s destiny as a “nation of the Sea,” a nation that would thrive due to the resultant influx of wealth and the distribution of its people in markets all over the world. Such sentiments represent one early articulation of the “Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free” ideal that David Armitage sees as defining English imperialist thought.99 At the same time, the Newfoundland texts’ particular focus on an industry defined by its mobility, its occupational independence, and the lowly social status of its members merely underscores the variety of social conflicts complicating the push into the Atlantic. The story of the Newfoundland colony and its aftermath demonstrates that plantation would not come about as the promotional writers had envisioned it: as a simple uprooting and re-“setting” of commoners into a new environment where work itself would achieve the kinds of social reform badly needed at home. The abuses allegedly committed by the island’s fishermen demonstrate quite the contrary, that idleness and its associated social problems would not only persist but also become far more complicated in new environments containing Indigenous inhabitants,

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foreign competitors, and threatening natural elements. “The nation of the Sea,” one that English fishermen and sailors were employed to realize, therefore would become a project requiring much more of ­England’s social, economic, and intellectual resources than the promotional texts, with their optimistic rhetoric of colonial destiny, allowed. Such profound historical irony testifies to the fact that there ultimately was no unitary state functioning as an absolute actor on the colonial stage. This same fact invites us to examine the role of other forms of imaginative writing, such as drama and poetry, in the shaping of imperial discourse and the common seaman’s role within it. The next chapter homes in specifically on the London Lord Mayor’s shows that flourished during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, that period of inchoate empire in which drama, like the non-dramatic texts discussed so far, also appears to work through the various effects of imperial ambition on the nation’s social fabric; like the non-dramatic texts, drama grapples with vastly differing and often contradictory perceptions of the common seaman. With the shows commissioned by the Fishmongers’ Company we return to the figure of the fisherman, a labourer full of promise for the nation’s prosperity but at the same time lowly in his relative social status. The Fishmongers’ shows, we will see, utilize this complex representation to chart a course for the nation’s fishing industry as a key participant in the maritime empire to come, a course that realizes the empire’s promise of riches while theoretically maintaining laudable ideals of liberty, virtue, and industriousness for all subjects.

2 “Their Labour Doth Returne Rich Golden Gaine”: Fishmongers’ Shows and the Fisherman’s Labour in Early Modern London

Audiences for early modern English plays inhabited an island kingdom. Therefore, the drama’s preoccupation with the sea comes as no surprise. Maritime settings abound in comedy, tragedy, history, and romance. Even the most ostensibly land-bound genres, such as city comedy, incorporate the ocean in ways that signal its importance to the nation’s identity and, specifically, its economy.1 A.F. Falconer speculates that the period’s most famous playwright, Shakespeare, spent time at sea himself, so diverse and plentiful are the maritime references in Shakespeare’s canon.2 The ocean also figures prominently in the London Lord Mayors’ shows, civic dramas staged to commend one citizen’s ascendancy to the city’s highest office. Oceanic images typically play an allegorical or mythological role in these productions. The shows regularly incorporate “ship of state” metaphors into visions of civic governance.3 Neptune makes occasional appearances to convey his mightiness, only then to submit to the new mayor’s superior virtues.4 Shows sometimes call for the mayor to arrive by barge, a custom that recruits the Thames into the shows’ penchant for waterworks.5 Such imaginative features serve the general purpose of providing counsel to the incoming mayor and inspiring him to cultivate the qualities needed to see the city through the perilous waters of inevitable change. The successful mayor, these productions suggest, will distinguish himself as an upright, judicious, and knowledgeable captain of his proverbial ship and its charges.6 The Lord Mayors’ shows represent the mayor’s leadership as critical to the capital’s, and by extension the nation’s, social, economic, and political health. But London’s livery companies – those ancient institutions that commissioned the shows and indeed conferred the prestige of urban citizenship in the first place – also viewed themselves as critical to those ends. Scholars have characterized the Lord Mayors’

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shows as promoting “unity” among various civic interests.7 These perspectives, however, tend to leave under-explored the reality of competition among London’s industries and, by extension, the ways in which companies’ specific interests registered in the shows commissioned by them.8 In keeping with the book’s focus on representations of seaborne labour in early imperial texts, this chapter will attempt to complicate the unity aesthetic by analysing representations of fishing in shows commissioned by the Fishmongers’ Company. I will home in on the three early modern shows surviving in print9 – Thomas Nelson’s The Device of the Pageant: Set forth by the Worshipfull Companie of the Fishmongers (1590); Anthony Munday’s Chrysanaleia: The Golden Fishing: Or, Honour of Fishmongers (1616); and Elkanah Settle’s The Triumphs of ­London (1700) – to analyse how one company used the civic show to argue for its industry’s continued relevance in an economy that was increasingly dependent on the long-distance trade of luxury goods, goods that were different in value and kind from those yielded by the humble fishermen who supplied the company. I will argue that these productions affirm fishing specifically, and sea labour in general, in a way that anticipates the maritime foundation of the British Empire and argues for the Fishmongers’ importance within that economic scheme. I will suggest further that the London livery companies, although sometimes characterized as fossilized in nostalgia,10 in fact were highly responsive to change and particularly attuned to the representational possibilities of the Lord Mayor’s show for imagining a specific industry’s role in a prosperous national future. The Fishmongers’ wealth and position derived in part from the abilities of the fishermen with whom they worked. Significantly the fisherman’s skill in sailing and navigation would one day become central to the success of the British Empire, that project characterized by Armitage as “Protestant, commercial, maritime and free.”11 As I have noted throughout this book, Armitage roots these four interrelated ideals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when figures such as Dee, Hakluyt, and Mun began to conceive of the oceans as highways for the kinds of large-scale trade and colonization that would ensure Britain’s prosperity for centuries to come. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the British sailor acquired not only practical value for his skills but also symbolic value as an emblem of liberty, courage, and virtuous commerce. Let us recall again the words of Philopatris: “Seamen never did nor ever will destroy the Liberty of their own Countrey: They naturally hate Slavery, because they see so much of the misery of it in other Countreys. All Tyrannies in the World are supported by Land-Armies: No absolute Princes have great Navies, or

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great Trades […] Now under God’s Providence, what can best secure us from them but our Naval Strength, and what doth especially increase and support that, but our East-India trade.”12 Philopatris conflates “our Naval Strength” with the seaman’s love of “Liberty” and hatred of “Slavery”; this rhetorical move morally justifies the imperialist project and distinguishes it from the depredations of corrupt, militaristic imperial Rome and perhaps, as I suggest earlier, England’s own recent past.13 Similarly, as we also have seen, Margaret Cohen detects in these early modern imperialist writings a level of admiration for the “specific skills” of seamen and the “characteristic set of demeanors” thought to accompany those skills. This combination of skill and character, Cohen demonstrates, helped construct an ideal of “craft” that disrupted “traditional philosophical hierarchies, which separate what are framed as the admirable pursuits of the mind from the devalued body.”14 Labour and art combined to valorize the sailor as the embodiment of imperial Britain at its best. If those “traditional philosophical hierarchies” ever truly disappeared by the late seventeenth century,15 however, they had not yet done so for mariners of the sixteenth century, when low regard for manual labour, particularly sea labour, remained firmly entrenched. The Fishmongers’ ancient prestige in fact depended on a relatively humble class of workers.16 In fact, as Patricia Fumerton explains, Tudors associated the work of ship, shipyard, port, and shore with itinerant poverty and therefore – within a moral calculus that harshly punished the allegedly “masterless” – inchoate criminality.17 Sea work in general was viewed as the province of the lowly and the poor. More particular to the subject of this chapter, George Unwin finds similar prejudices against manual labour within the early modern livery companies themselves, where he identifies a widening gap between the mercantile elites governing the companies and the artisanal rank and file.18 Skill, to the degree it reflects cultural admiration for physical labour, thus seems a contested term at best in Tudor and Jacobean society. It is notable, then, that – despite the mock protestations of the captain whose address to the Goldsmiths’ Company introduces this book – ­positive representations of labour figure prominently in the Lord Mayor’s shows, a dramatic form that, in the view of some scholars, affirms mercantile wealth and elite governance. For example, Theodore B. ­Leinwand sees in the shows an overriding “mercantilist ethos” that fuses “wealth, trade, religion, and power”; Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky finds a similar dynamic, leading him to conclude that shows mainly bolstered merchants’ “economic authority” by glorifying traders as generators of wealth.19 Yet as Kara Northway demonstrates, the shows,

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despite their apparent fixation on trade, also embraced labour on multiple levels of expression, from the deliberately “laboured” poetry of the speeches to staged representations of work as a means by which to achieve both social mobility and national prosperity. I find that the “labouring circle” of industrious virtue, as Northway calls it,20 plays a unique role in the Fishmongers’ shows. Despite the inequality between fishmongers and fishermen, these shows place the labour of fishermen front and centre as part of a representational strategy that highlights the specific value of sea work, and the rewards accrued from it, for both sustaining the realm and preparing it for economic adventures abroad. Mining the waters for bounty, the fisherman symbolically bridges the landed subjects of the Commonwealth with the distant oceans that would ensure not only their sustenance but their prosperity. By incorporating the fisherman’s labour into their representational strategy, the Fishmongers’ shows afford a glimpse into the ways in which one native industry utilized the form to imagine its purchase on the future. Fish Days and “Finny Freeholders”: Fishing as National Economic Strategy Nelson’s Device of the Pageant celebrated the induction of Fishmonger John Allot in 1590. Given Allot’s occupational connection to the sea, Nelson’s show opens fittingly enough with a figure riding on the back of a merman. This eye-catching visual, although steeped in whimsy, stages the articulation of a more homely concern, one that ties the specific interests of the Fishmongers to the social and economic health of the nation. The rider argues, that is, for the reinstatement of fish days: “Then Englands store would be increast with butter, cheese & beefe, / And thousands set to worke for fish, that now beg for releefe.”21 The invocation of a medieval dietary custom might seem to signal the traditionalism that scholars frequently ascribe to the metropolitan companies. After all, the Fishmongers derived much of their historical importance from their ability to provision a food source that bridged the mundane need for daily sustenance and the practices of piety during Lent and other fasting days on the liturgical calendar. The argument to reinstate fish days thus could appeal to nostalgia among the audience by conveying the idea that, despite the association of fish days with papism, a new prayer book need not constitute the total abandonment of old ways. Yet the merman rider’s pronouncement appeals to more than a longing for ancient custom. His words invoke a more recent phenomenon: domestic poverty and its deleterious effects on both urban and provincial life. Accordingly, the speaker’s appeal for fish days takes a practical bent,

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addressing not only the perennial problem of food supply – “Englands store” – but the additional problem of “thousands” that “now beg for releefe” (my italics). Thus the medieval practice of fish days can be applied, the speaker reasons, to a contemporary and secular problem.22 Nelson’s contemporaries shared his perception that the nation’s poor needed something to do as well as something to eat. For example, as mentioned in this book’s introduction, Thomas Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe praises the coastal town of Yarmouth’s provision of fish for the realm, an activity that benefits the “common good” of “the whole state” (C4v). The benefit is not only dietary but also social because “thousands” who would otherwise go hungry are “set a-work” catching fish and making nets (E2). Nashe’s argument for the domestic good seems to be convincing enough on its own. Yet significantly, he extends his view beyond Britain’s shores to assert the importance of this labour for growing the nation’s trade and navigational skill: “In exchange for [fish] from other countries [the Yarmouth traders] return wine and woads, for which is always paid ready gold, with salt, canvas, vitry, and a great deal of good trash. Her Majesty’s tributes and customs this Semper Augustus of the sea’s finny freeholders augmenteth & enlargeth uncountably, and to the increase of navigation for her service he is no enemy” (E2). These “finny freeholders,” it seems, can bring in more than just food from the surrounding waters; their surplus enables trade for gold, wine, and other goods and becomes a basis for advancing English navigation as well. Nashe’s proposed augmentation of “Her Majesty’s tributes and ­customs” indicates that fishing had become not just a way to supplement the national diet but also an activity that aroused the competitive instincts of nationalist writers. We can recall here how, for instance, Dee, imperial thinker and arguably the first person to use the term British Empire, worried over the incursion of foreign fishing boats into ­British waters and therefore, in his General and rare memorials pertayning to the perfect arte of navigation, insisted on the need to protect the native fishing industry by creating a “petty navy royal” to guard the island’s shores.23 And again, more germane to the fishing industry specifically, the military writer Robert Hitchcock shared both Dee’s concerns and Nashe’s eye for potential. Hitchcock’s pamphlet A pollitique platt, which promises to unfold the “hidden treasures” of the island nation, argues for shipbuilding and fishing as means to secure “greate plentie and mutche wealthe, and benefite, to all the inhabitauntes of this Realme.”24 Again, as we have seen, Hitchcock notes an additional benefit: these activities not only bring in wealth but also “provideth for the poore, in honest and decent maner, brynging them to a good and Godly vocation of life.”25 Before unfolding a detailed scheme for implementing

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these activities in a number of British towns, he reminds readers that continental Europe has a strong demand for well-cured fish and that the English, like the Dutch, could trade fish for wine and other goods.26 Hitchcock’s proposal attracted the interest of parliamentarians as well as the admiration of Thomas Mun, who in 1615 became director of the East India Company.27 Of course, the fact that these arguments came from the upper social ranks casts a note of paternalism over their concerns for the poor and, particularly in the case of Mun, a readiness to profit from the labour discipline imposed by fishing schemes. However, the arguments of the mariner Tobias Gentleman, author of the 1614 text Englands way to win wealth, suggest that the governing classes were not alone in possessing enthusiasm for such projects. Like his social betters, Gentleman asserts that the Netherlands have been fishing in Britain’s waters and becoming wealthy and powerful as a result. Yet despite the elite resonances of his surname, Gentleman is not a man of the court but a “fisherman and mariner,” that is, a member of the very occupational group under discussion. By announcing himself as such, he places his modest status front and centre. He asks his dedicatee not to be offended by the humbleness of his proposal, “the matter being both honest and commendable, and in true valew of as great substance, as the offer of Sebastian Cabota, to King Henry the seventh, for the discovery of the West Indes.”28 Disrupting conventions that assign authority to rank and formal education, Gentleman insists that he is not a scholar: “I am more skilfull in Nets, Lines, and Hookes, then in Rethoricke, Logicke, or learned books.”29 This proclaimed lack of formal learning becomes a kind of authority in its own right for, as someone who has dedicated his life to sea labour, Gentleman is positioned to observe that his is “such a plentifull Countrey” and yet full of “such store of able and idle people,” including subsistence fishers who catch only enough for themselves30 – a perception of fishermen we have seen already in the Newfoundland promotional tracts described in chapter 1. Yet as a clearly self-identified commoner and mariner himself, Gentleman can convincingly present the able-bodied poor as part of the existing problem, lending particular credence to his proposal to set “poore and idle people on worke, which now know not how to live, and to teach many a tall fellow to know the propper names of the ropes, in a ship, and to hale the bowline that now lacke for employment many such, by the inconvenience of idle living, are compelled to end their daies, with a rope by an untimely death, which by the employment of the Busses might well by avoyded, and they in time become right honest serviceable and trusty Subjects.”31 Such arguments, powerful in themselves, combine with Gentleman’s

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self-presentation as a relatively lowly, yet knowledgeable and experienced, man of the sea to make his argument particularly convincing. Taken as a whole, these writings suggest that to realize the potential of the sea was to realize the potential of sea labour for both international prestige and domestic management. In the 1615 pamphlet Britaines busse, one “E.S.” builds on the recommendations of “divers treatises” by providing detailed figures to show what a fishing and shipbuilding program would cost.32 Such dry calculation does not translate easily to the magnificent, highly symbolic language of the typical Lord Mayor’s show. However, while each set of texts employs a different mode of speaking – a practical language in the pamphlets and an imaginative language in the shows – they are united by an interest in envisioning national prosperity. The Fishmongers’ shows bear the most direct correspondence to the fishing schemes, as both the pamphlets and the shows argue specifically on behalf of seaborne labour to advance national ambitions as well as to provide sustenance for the realm’s subjects. From Fish Days to Global Empire: The Fishmongers’ Shows To be sure, the Fishmongers’ shows derive much of their authority to make contemporary recommendations from the Fishmongers’ illustrious past, a history rooted in patriotic service and virtuous Christian example. The pious resonances of fish days bolster old perceptions of the Fishmongers as benevolent leaders who possessed a reputation for honesty, an association from which Shakespeare drew when Hamlet deems Polonius insufficiently upright to be “a fishmonger” after all.33 John Taylor, “The Water Poet,” also alludes to this reputation in his Jack a’ Lent, which associates fishmongers with Christ’s disciples and describes fishmongers’ piety as a trait indigenous to the “Calling” they share with “Fisher-men”: “To speake of the honesty of Fisher-men, and the account that wee ought to make of their Calling, it was the faculty of Simon, Andrew, James and John, the blessed Apostles, and by a common Rule, all Fishermen must be men singularly endued, and possest with the virtue of patience.”34 Nelson draws on such positive associations when invoking the Fishmongers’ record of courageous national service. Device of the Pageant calls upon the legend of Lord Mayor Sir William Walworth who, in 1381, put down the rebel Jack Straw in sight of Richard II. Appearing alongside King Richard in the pageant, Walworth declares: “First Knight was I of London you may reade, / and since each Maior gaines knighthood by my deede” (Nelson A4). While Lord Mayor’s shows typically appeal to chronicle history,35 Walworth’s words are notable also for the credit they take on behalf of his

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profession: it was a fishmonger who “[f]irst” elevated the mayoralty to “knighthood” through the kind of exemplary service indigenous to the fishmongers’ profession. Yet while the Fishmongers may have been first among other merchants in terms of noble sacrifice, Device of the Pageant does not omit entirely the contributions of other companies. It acknowledges one, the Goldsmiths’ Company, with whom the Fishmongers enjoyed a long-standing special relationship. The inclusion of the Goldsmiths does not compromise the Fishmongers’ proclaimed specialness, however; in fact, it enhances that specialness. After the merman rider, another rider enters, on the back of a unicorn, to speak briefly on the Goldsmiths’ behalf: “I that do support the Goldsmiths armes, / which long in love to you hath bin united, / Will do my best to shadow you from harmes, / and finde the meanes your loves may be requighted” (Nelson A2v ). On the most obvious level, this proclamation provides the endorsement of another prominent company and thus strengthens the Fishmongers’ position in the city. Yet below the surface of this commendation, the speaker alludes to “harmes” threatening the Fishmongers, impending dangers that will require the Goldsmiths’ protective “shadow[ing].” These harms go unspecified here in 1590. Yet the Fishmongers’ shows of 1616 and 1700 will strategically invoke the relationship with the Goldsmiths again, doing so in ways that suggest a need for a mutually supportive partnership in a changing and expanding economy. Lord Mayor’s shows in general resembled court entertainments in their use of spectacle and poetry and their affirmation of qualities deemed necessary for leadership. One would expect, then, to see arguments for the new Lord Mayor’s “nobility” that suited the social aspirations of the company governors, even if such nobility derived from something other than blood.36 Yet, while Nelson’s show does demonstrate this aspirational impulse, it also reveals aspirations trending in a future direction. It does so in two ways: first, by recruiting an old custom – fish days – to address a current problem that was perceived to be weakening the nation economically and socially; and second, by reminding audiences that the Fishmongers always had been – and by implication would continue to be – a group of merchants endowed with particular virtue. These lines of argument will show up again twenty-six years later in 1616, but then with an eye more clearly trained on wealth beyond the British archipelago. Munday’s showgestures clearly beyond the present to anticipate a maritime empire. Departing from Nelson’s mainly traditionalist modes of appeal, Chrysanaleia’s commemoration of the new lord mayor John Leman constructs a hopeful future, one in which maritime acumen could play an essential role in securing national prosperity

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and prestige. In Chrysanaleia the humble fisherman is as a symbolic link to the more far-flung enterprises that will require his skills. Certainly, Munday’s show does not abandon the language of nostalgia and ancient precedent entirely; after all, such conventions comprised an important part of the show as genre. As in 1590, Chrysanaleia invokes the Fishmongers’ history of national service, thus reminding the spectators of the company’s important role in securing king and commonwealth.37 Also like Nelson, Munday attributes extraordinary honesty to the Fishmongers, paraphrasing the scriptural passage in which the apostle Peter demonstrates the fisherman’s characteristic humility as well as his obedience: “his best Master called him from that humble and lowly condition, and made him a Fisher of men”(Chrysanaleia B1v). Whether in service to an earthly king or a heavenly “Master,” the fisherman can be counted on to put his individual self-interest aside for a higher purpose. However, while Munday echoes Nelson’s enforcement of the fishing industry’s inherent piety and virtue, a surviving drawing from Munday’s production reveals more about Chrysanaleia’s representational strategies, showing how Munday martialled the visual language of the form to assist the Fishmongers’ cause. This drawing depicts three fishermen hard at work on a boat called the “Fishmongers Esperanza, or Hope of London.” The men, wearing serene expressions and nary a drop of sweat, deploy their nets to yield incredible stores; indeed, so rich are the waters that fish leap out of the air and onto the boat, seemingly of their own accord. Yet, despite the apparent ease of the men’s task, Munday’s lines describe them as “seriously at labour, drawing up their Nets, laden with living fish, and bestowing them bountifully among the people” (B1v As in Nelson’s show, fishing here achieves two important domestic functions: “bountifully” feeding “the people” and setting otherwise poor men to work in an honest occupation. The spectacle of the “fishing busse” and its attendant description achieves several important functions in terms of promoting the Fishmongers’ industry. First, the striking visual infuses wonder into an everyday task, thus defamiliarizing it and inviting spectators to consider the value of such labour anew. Second, it makes fishing highly transparent as a labour process: the labour, and the commodity yielded by that labour, can be seen, a fact that endows the Fishmongers’ product with an immediacy and authenticity missing from spectators’ experiences with other merchants and their commodities.38 This implied transparency resembles the “plain” style characteristic of later mariners’ journals, concise and economical writings that, in Margaret Cohen’s description, display “the language of work at sea” where “efficiency and economy

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were paramount.”39 Plain style, Cohen elaborates, creates an effect of “authenticity.”40 This authenticating effect can be detected in the mariner Tobias Gentleman’s deliberately humble self-presentation, and, in a commercial context, “plain dealing” described an extraordinary level of honesty.41 Third, Munday’s display of common men working hard at the provision of food extends to the instruction of the new mayor, who himself must use his office to secure “bounty” for his people and the health of the nation’s metropolis. As a Fishmonger himself – that is, endowed with the honesty,42 work ethic, and Christian virtue displayed by his fishermen associates – he is uniquely positioned to do so. At first glance, such gestures merely seem to echo similar assertions about the Fishmongers’ value that were made in Nelson’s show. Munday, however, adds elements that anticipate the coming age of maritime empire and the role of sea labour within it. The “bounty” that Munday envisions, in other words, goes beyond the provision of fish for every table to the provision of wealth through global enterprise. He signals this direction in lines that urge the Lord Mayor “to know / The toylsome travell of poore Fisher-men / Subjected to all weathers, where and when” (Chrysanaleia C2v).These lines positively assert the difficulty and danger of fishermen’s labour, a statement at odds with both the serene appearance of the men in the drawing and the actual experience of a Lord Mayor Fishmonger arriving at his position not through hard physical labour but through mercantile success. The lines elaborate on the patriotic significance of fishermen’s virtue in action: In stormy tempests they omit no paine, To blesse all lands with the Seas bounteous store: Their labour doth returne rich golden gaine, Whereof themselves taste least by Sea or shore, But (like good soules) contented evermore With any benefit their toyle can bring; The Fisher is well term’d Contents true king. (Chrysanaleia C2v)

The portrayal of the seas as dangerous was heralded by the earlier arrival of a dolphin, a creature described as triumphant after “Robbers and Pirates on the seas, would maliciously have drowned him” (B1v). “Robbers and Pirates,” of course, are enemies of honest commerce and pose hazards that fishermen, like other maritime workers, must face in their quest to acquire the nation’s goods. Their ability to withstand such threats testifies not only to their extraordinary service on behalf of the nation but to their skill in negotiating the indigenous perils of the setting in which they work.

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Yet, while these claims adumbrate the particular value of the ­ ishmongers’ industry, it is important to note that the company does F not claim to withstand such dangers alone; once again, the Goldsmiths appear on the scene to enhance the Fishmongers’ prestige. The Fishmongers and the Goldsmiths, Munday maintains, shared a history of crusading “in divers dangerous adventures, as well on the Seas, as the land,” where they achieved victory against the “Pagans” of Jerusalem (Chrysanaleia A4v). Munday elaborates on the dangers endured and their fruits: “There was then much necesity of their paines and endeavour, not only (by Fishing and Shipping) to supply the daily wants of the Souldiours: but also for bringing Gold and Silver thither, for beautifying Gods City and Temple” (A4v). In this narrative the Fishmongers and the Goldsmiths employ “Fishing and Shipping” to enact a two-pronged strategy of provision: they “supply the daily wants” of Christian “Souldiours” while also honouring “Gods City and Temple” with “Gold and Silver.” In Munday’s representation of the two companies’ partnership, maritime strategy combines with bravery, sacrifice, and the ability to recover precious metals for the honour of the Christian God. This history, however, demonstrates more than just a propensity for Christian service; it also suggests a special talent for conquest and its bounty. Munday’s earlier show for the Goldsmiths, Chruso-thriambos: The Triumphs of Golde (1611), anticipated the spectacular results of the Goldsmiths’ proclaimed willingness to venture across the seas into exotic lands. The show opened with the new mayor, James Pemberton, arriving by barge. With him appeared also “sundry Ships, Frigots, and Gallies” from “the rich and Golden Indian mines”; over the scene presided a “Golden King” and his “peerelesse Queene” bearing “no meane quantity of Indian Gold.”43 Lest spectators, not unreasonably, think such stores arrive as the result of violence, Munday assures them that the Indian royal couple come “at their owne entreaty” so as to “behold the Countries beauty, and the immediate day of sollemne tryumph.”44 In a markedly imperialist spin on the shows’ conventional unity aesthetic, Munday renders the Indian king and queen the cheerful abettors of their own country’s conquest; it is under their benevolent gaze that miners, in the next scene, labour to carve gold and silver out of rock.45 The spectacle of the miners’ labour helps identify these claims of bounty specifically with the Goldsmiths and what they provide. The Goldsmiths’ miners mirror the Fishmongers’ fishermen in this respect; that is, their labour authenticates the activities of a relatively elite merchant class. Moreover, just as the Goldsmiths assist in the Fishmongers’ self-representations, so do the Fishmongers appear in Chruso-thriambos, this time to validate the Goldsmiths. Munday calls on the Fishmongers’ associations with Christ

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to yoke the two companies together in biblical precedent: “Peters Keies, with Davids Cup of Golde / May freely march together, uncontroulde.”46 The keys of the apostle Peter, which today still feature in the Fishmongers’ coat of arms, combine with the wealth of the Hebrew kings to equate the acquisition and possession of gold with godliness. Therefore, the provision of gold in foreign mines also represents a virtue. The colonialist imagery of Chruso-thriambos echoes five years later in Munday’s Fishmongers’ show. After the dolphin enters the scene with the fishing boat, a Moor scattering gold soon follows (Chrysanaleia B1v). The figure of the Moor yokes wealth together with travel to lands beyond the seas, and, like the royal Indian couple, he appears to share his wealth willingly with the city’s people. Yet it is not the Moor, ultimately, who is to be thanked. Rather, a pelican immediately follows and, in accordance with her mythological roots, pierces her own breast to feed her children. The theme of sacrifice links with and enhances the sacrifices that the Fishmongers claim on behalf of their nation, suggesting that it is their own nation’s adventurers, not these exotic others, who make the ultimate sacrifice and thus perform the ultimate service. The show assigns this caretaking role particularly to Leman, urging the new mayor to become “a nursing father of the Family” (B2).47 A description of a “device” (B2v) visually portraying the Fishmongers’ valiant fighting in the nation’s history immediately follows, reinforcing the idea that it is the Fishmongers and their friends who, in a spirit of national service and Christian virtue, truly serve and provide. The ancient friendship of the Goldsmiths and the Fishmongers is expressed in images shared by the two shows, through which each company aids the other’s self-promotion. A curious remark in Chrusothriambos, however, suggests that the relationship may not have been entirely equal. The figure of Time, commending the friendship of the two companies, offers the following caution: Yet let no censure stray so far at large, To thinke the reason of that unity Makes Fish-Mongers support the Gold-Smithes And their expences shared equally: No, ti’s the Gold-Smiths sole Society. That in this Triumph beares the Pursse for all: As theirs the like, when like their lot doth fall.48

These lines intimate the potential for “censure” of the two companies’ partnership without clearly spelling out the basis for such censure. One hint arrives in the appearance, which Time denies, that “their expences”

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are “shared equally” rather than being borne “sole[ly]” by the Goldsmiths; in other words, the Fishmongers may somehow be paying for their continued association with the Goldsmiths rather than enjoying the generous gifts of friendship and, perhaps, the “protection” alluded to in Nelson’s show. Of course, as Tracey Hill notes, these lines also declare that the Fishmongers have not shared expenses for the show, even though the show promotes them as well.49 The companies share the same “lot” nonetheless, Time assures the audience, and so do the Fishmongers and the Goldsmiths “fall” together. Yet this very assertion indicates that the two companies may not have stood on equal footing in terms of their relative prestige and contributions to the nation’s wealth. “As the purveyors of the ultimate luxury goods,” Janelle Day Jenstad writes, “goldsmiths were central to London’s developing commodity culture” and “had frequent dealings with all kinds of gentlemen”; goldsmiths, as retailers of fine commodities, thus were specially positioned to enjoy access to wealth, influence, and social mobility.50 While we cannot say for certain that the Fishmongers did not enjoy some of the same, it is clear from Munday’s Fishmongers’ show that the friendship of the Goldsmiths, with their link to worldwide luxury markets, posed a boon to the Fishmongers’ own self-presentation as a company important to the quest for global wealth. In Elkanah Settle’s show at the turn of the century gold and fish will come together again, this time uniting even more closely in a vision of global enterprise that depends on them both. The last surviving early modern Fishmongers’ show, Settle’s Triumphs of London (1700), commemorating the Lord Mayor Thomas Abney, takes the occupational claims of the earlier productions in a significant direction. Like Munday’s production, Triumphs of London features a fishing vessel with a hardworking crew, bountiful fish in that vessel, and a commemoration of William Walworth. Also like Munday, Settle keenly enumerates the ocean’s particular dangers: “We trust our All t’inconstant Winds and Sea; / Whilst hope of Gain’s the Anchor which we weigh / Industry trims our Tackle and our Sails / But Fortune only lends the prosp’rous Gales.”51 However, Settle advances the economic significance of this reminder by suggesting that the hazards of an “inconstant” environment now have an impact on all industries, given the high volume of trade that now relies upon the ocean. Essentially Settle makes sea labour into a metaphor for global commerce itself: As ’tis the Plough that does the World maintain: The Husbandman the Land, we plough the Main. What’s Art, what’s Commerce, what’s Society?

64  Ships of State Trade’s but a Bark, and all but Fishery. [. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .] Each steers at his own Helm: Mankind all post Their speediest Voyage to the Golden Coast. Some few have reacht it; but there’s Thousands lost.52

While still advancing a particular claim for the special requirements of sea labour, Settle extends the hazards of an unpredictable environment into an assessment of trade in general, which ultimately is “but a Bark” vulnerable to uncontrollable forces. These hazards now apply to all who “plough,” thus requiring all to adopt the courage and fortitude of the sea labourer. Successful maritime commerce may indeed be a matter of skill, but as Settle reminds his audience, skill meets its match in the countervailing forces of unruly nature and seaborne crime, dangers with which nearly all merchants must contend. The universality of such perils, however, does not mean that all industries meet them in the same way or with the same aptitude. Here, as in the first two pageants, the Fishmongers rise to the top of the occupational heap. The preface declares at length the virtues of the Fishmongers’ profession: When I enter the Walls of your Honourable Foundation, methinks your very Constitution seems to stand upon the fairest Basis of all the Societies of Trade throughout the whole Nation. For INDUSTRY, that Virtue, which is the Support of Kingdoms, more particularly shines in your Sphere. The Product of most other Industrious Arts, Professions or Manufactures, seems to be but a stinted Wealth. In our Drapery, for Instance, or our Tillage, we can spin out our Wooll no farther than our Sheeps Backs can bear; nor heap our Granaries fuller than the Crop of the Glebe will yield us. But FISHERY drains from an Inexhaustible Fountain, viz. the bottomless and boundless Ocean: And all that’s gotten from thence is an entire Additional Increase to the Wealth of a Nation, whilst all that’s rais’d from the other Funds is but an Improvement of what we have of our own before.53

In short, the Fishmongers possess the “virtue” of “industry” “more particularly” than any other trade. Notably, Settle’s bold claim does not invoke the Christological precedent of Peter, as did the two previous shows. This time the Fishmongers’ virtue resides in their ability to mine to the hilt an “Inexhaustible Fountain,” the ocean. This approach, Settle explains, sets fishing apart from industries such as drapery and tillage, which merely rely on “what we have of our own.” By contrast, the sea is a sphere of “Additional Increase,” one that is “bottomless”

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and “boundless,” and thus not subject to the “stinted Wealth” derived from Britain’s own limited resources on land. Settle values the impact of maritime industry, in other words, according to the assumed limitlessness of that industry’s source. Several words and phrases in this passage – Inexhaustible, bottomless, boundless, stinted, and Additional Increase – merit further attention given the commercial expansion intimated earlier in Munday’s show. Settle describes Britain’s landed industries as sharply limited and therefore insufficient to guarantee wealth in the long term. Outside of Britain, however, the possibilities reach beyond “bounds.” Essentially Settle’s description extends the imagination of his audiences into new spheres – or perhaps, to state it more accurately, old spheres rendered in new ways. Whereas the protectionist writings of Dee portray the ocean as subject to foreign plunder, and therefore very much exhaustible, Settle casts the ocean as a wide-open space that perpetually rewards those who know how to “drain” from it. Triumphs of London encourages its audience to stop looking inward at the land and instead look outward. The Fishmongers, Settle’s preface implies, already do so, and this virtue positions them to secure the “Support” of “Kingdoms” better than their landed counterparts do. This encomium for the fishing industry extends beyond the sea itself, however. The sea, after all, ultimately reaches towards foreign lands that themselves promise to yield fresh stores of wealth, as portrayed by Munday’s Chruso-thriambos. In Triumphs of London the Goldsmiths again figure as the link to these additional stores. While commending the Fishmongers, Settle adds: “methinks that the FISHMONGERS and GOLDSMITHS were once very justly incorporated together. For as one raises his Increase from the Depth of the Sea, so the other from the Bowels of the Earth.”54 Just as the “Depth of the Sea” is rendered boundless, so are the “Bowels of the Earth” that miners excavate to recover precious minerals. Both industries, in other words, possess the virtue to identify “inexhaustible” spheres and mine those spheres in support of the nation’s wealth. This linkage of land and sea, symbolized by the ancient alliance of the two companies, paints a picture of limitless possibility that is not only vertical but also horizontal; that is, it is a matter not only of plumbing the depths of earth and ocean but also of reaching across that ocean into new territories. The Fishmongers and the Goldsmiths, therefore, are represented as being uniquely equipped to extend Britain’s commercial reach into the realms of ever-expanding wealth. The very nature of their respective industries, according to Settle’s description, equips them with the virtue, the skill, and the ­commercial acumen to lead the way.

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As the last surviving Fishmongers’ show of the early modern period, Settle’s production imagines most fully the sea labour’s centrality to global prosperity and takes the further step of abstracting that labour, and the similarly rendered labour of the Goldsmiths, into a model for all commercial endeavours. It also anticipates the seaman’s own potent symbolism and employs it to rationalize imperial schemes as indicative of courage, resolve, and the virtue of liberty in action. However, Triumphs of London also acknowledges the hazards of such an enterprise, thus confronting the shows’ typically sunny confidence in “Fortune” with the very real dangers encountered by men of the sea – men who will move the goods of all companies, and all industries, forward into new markets. The future, indeed, rests in the “Bark,” but that bark, Settle reminds his audience, will require the extraordinary virtue of industrious men to bring its bounty safely home. The shifting emphasis from bountifulness and Christian honesty to the individualistic embrace of profit and risk became apparent in London’s playhouses. The next chapter’s focus, on Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Shakespeare and Wilkins’s Pericles, demonstrates the outlines of this conversation within the language of dramatic romance, a genre encoded with aristocratic affirmations and yet gaining widespread appeal among audiences of all classes in the early seventeenth century. In these dramas sailors, fishermen, and shipbuilders play seemingly minor roles that nonetheless adumbrate a major development: the cultivation of seaborne labour on a bigger scale than ever before to support and grow the nation’s expansionist schemes. As with the other analyses undertaken in this book, my readings of Shakespeare’s late romances show fluctuations in class hierarchy – sometimes manifesting in open expressions of conflict – to be very much a part of this massive scaling of seaborne labour.

3 “Hereditary Sloth” and the Labour of Empire in Shakespeare’s Mediterranean

In the previous chapter I analysed the ways in which the Fishmongers’ shows promoted the fishing industry by featuring set pieces that displayed or described fishermen at work. To be certain, such pieces served the interests of the merchants governing the company, who themselves would never actually fish. However, this qualification does not necessarily defuse the shows’ power to affirm the fishermen’s labour, and humble labour in general, as a mode of social distinction in its own right. As we saw Northway explain in the previous chapter, shows staged by a variety of early modern livery companies promoted work as a form of virtue. This promotion, Northway elaborates, occurred on an artistic level, where deliberately “laboured” verse implied artistic merit; it also occurred on a thematic level by praising work as a means by which to achieve both economic gain and social mobility. These features combined to “stimulate industry” among livery members and non-members alike “for the betterment of the country.”1 Thus the influence of elite governors on a show in no way precluded a more general message about the virtue of labour for audiences all over the social spectrum. The Fishmongers’ shows conveyed this message in memorable and distinct visual language, as well as poetry, while spectators witnessed indefatigable fishermen sweating over their nets. Set pieces depicting humble seaborne labour do not appear solely in Lord Mayor’s shows, for Shakespeare’s late romances – in particular, Pericles (with George Wilkinson) and The Tempest – contain several scenes that recall those pageants. Pericles, for example, vividly depicts a group of Pentapolis fishermen labouring at their craft before the shipwrecked Pericles appeals to them for aid. The Tempest also displays seaborne labour in the play’s opening scene, where the Boatswain and his crew struggle to rescue the foundering ship and its noble passengers. Ships, like castles and towers, appeared regularly in civic drama dating

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back to the late medieval York cycle;2 furthermore, the Lord Mayor’s shows of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries featured arrivals by water that symbolically gestured towards the wider world of seaborne trade.3 Whether Shakespeare specifically had such conventions at front of mind, it is difficult to say with certainty. However, as a London-based writer he would have witnessed such productions and, therefore, the ships, fishermen, and other maritime symbols that routinely populated them. The maritime workers in his late plays might well represent what Bruce Smith calls “pageant moments,” instances that utilize pageant conventions to present “an order of reality” distinct from, and even competing with, the linear narrative of the main plot.4 To be sure, the humble figures who animate these scenes appear marginal to the plays’ overall arc of aristocratic development. Yet the distinctive presentation of these scenes calls attention to the critical functioning of seaborne labour in the Mediterranean, a region becoming increasingly important for English trade. Indeed, previous critics have noted the thematic importance of labour in Shakespeare’s late romances. Maurice Hunt, for example, describes the juxtaposition of work versus idleness as a key structural principle by which “providential action” becomes “redemptive” for the characters. For Hunt, though, “work” encompasses a wide range of activity: Prospero’s art, the fugitive Pericles’s journeying, and even the “stir” of the storm itself.5 Such an abstraction of all effort into one category absorbs those singular activities into the realm of the figurative and thus neglects to account for the social distinctions encoded in different types of work; it also empties work of its material resonances. The topical significance of the plays’ location – the Mediterranean basin – calls for a reading that identifies the kinds of labour that actually promote, rather than detract from, the flourishing of trade and empire.6 The work of the plays’ common seamen, as I will argue in this chapter, stands fundamentally apart from the labours of Prospero, Pericles, and many of the other aristocratic characters. That seaborne work, impressed on audiences through poetry and visual spectacle, anticipates the kinds of skill and acumen that Britain would require to grow and flourish its maritime imperium. In a sense, my argument departs from recent scholarship that also seeks to recuperate labour from commodity logic and restore labour’s inherent dignity as everyday praxis. For example, Bruno Gulli argues for labour as a “praxis that makes the world” rather than as a mere commodity to exchange for wages; labour, in this formulation, becomes a worthy habit of being rather than a commodity for sale. The “true potentiality” of labour, Gulli declares, is “betrayed” by capital’s focus on the “productive” and “non-productive.”7 On the one hand, my

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argument affirms this statement by noting that the language of spectacle encourages audiences to absorb the performance of labour in the moment and to value it as a process rather than as a means to an end, such as wages or profit. The sight of humble men hard at work, particularly when viewed by a socially mixed audience, suggests intrinsic value in manual labour itself. On the other hand, contra Hunt, not all broadly defined labour in the plays is equal; some labours make the world, while others damage and undo it, and in this sense the outcome of labour does matter. Pericles’s journeying certainly requires courage and exertion, yet we should also remember that Pericles travels largely because he is on the run from the court of Antioch, due to a fatal error in judgment, and that his fugitive status has required him to temporarily vacate his duties at home. Likewise, while Prospero exercises intellectual labour, the deployment of his art retrenches divisions among the Italian courtiers and, furthermore, exploits and manipulates his charges, Ariel, Caliban, and Miranda.8 The labour of the Pentapolis fishermen, however, yields food, a commodity for trade, and it is eventually a ­major key to Pericles’s own redemption; the labour of The Tempest’s Boatswain saves the lives of many of the play’s principal characters and, in doing so, helps bring about forgiveness and the restoration of the Milanese dynasty. Such instances substantiate Forman’s observation that Shakespeare’s romances “are not only interested in restoration or conservation, but also in exploring the relationships among production, profit, and the accumulation of value that expansion enables.”9 Yet I would expand this focus on imperial expansion to include not only the common labourers but also the play’s non-idle aristocrats, such as Pericles’s modest regent Helicanus and the doctor Cerimon, who saves the life of Pericles’s queen. What emerges in these plays is not ultimately a class-specific affirmation but the affirmation of a broader ethic that builds, promotes, and sustains empire rather than complicating or stalling it – an ethic that would become the basis of reality in imperial maritime Britain, where the high costs of failure required crew members, particularly officers, to work harder at cultivating genuine skill than at brandishing social entitlements, and where men from low backgrounds could move up the ranks. Shakespeare’s Mediterranean setting particularly lends itself to a meditation on future empire. As Jerry Brotton observes, The Tempest in particular depicts “a geopolitical bifurcation between the Old World and the New.”10 First, that region recalls the early Greek explorations and the Roman imperial endeavours that Britons regarded as foundational to their culture. The Mediterranean setting of these plays, in other words, prompts audiences to consider the shape of the next imperium,

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their own. When imagining a new empire of the seas, British imperialist thinkers considered these historical examples, desiring one that would match the glory of ancient Rome while avoiding that empire’s tendencies towards corruption and tyranny.11 Although these thinkers differed on the mechanics of the new empire, one clear idea emerged: merchants and trade would prove critical to this new, supposedly improved, and distinctly British “empire for liberty.”12 The region possessed additional topical relevance for audiences of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Levantine trade, which burgeoned between the founding of the Muscovy Company and that of the East India Company, represented a critical phase in the development of the British maritime empire. In particular, Mediterranean opportunities promoted the building of ships and the outfitting of skilled sailors and tradesmen.13 Moreover, historical research on the region’s trade indicates that these skilled seamen were highly cognizant of the value they brought to the trading enterprises they served. As noted in the introduction, admiralty court records show that sailors regularly adjudicated wages and working conditions on their own behalf; other sailors utilized their talents to maximize their own earnings through small-scale trading or even smuggling.14 Therefore, the Mediterranean sphere generated not only profit for mercantile elites but also opportunities for common seamen to assess, argue for, and utilize their own skills. Shakespeare’s Mediterranean dramas bring these contemporary contexts to bear on the genre of romance, thus lending that genre particular appeal to commoners and the upwardly mobile classes. With respect to the enticements of the mercantile realm, Goran Stanivukovic describes early modern trade as a new form of reward, a new mode of knight-errantry that permits “new opportunities to explore new ideas about agency and society.” The emergent middle class was, Stanivukovic elaborates, “preoccupied with civic ideals, with honour derived from social achievement, not from inherited right, including success in the domestic commercial market and on the overseas trading routes.”15 While I hesitate to adopt the term middle class to capture such a diversity of social and professional identities, these remarks nonetheless elucidate the ways in which trade romances engage a diversity of non-elite class positions. Such is particularly the case for Pericles, having been first performed on public stages and thus subject to viewing by audiences roughly equivalent to the Pentapolis fishermen’s caste. Thus, the staging of Mediterranean romance at this particular historical moment invites an assessment of the plays that allows for a capacious range of possibilities for the articulation of social value, a range that includes, even elevates, everyday labour as an essential aspect of future empire.

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“Certain Condolements, Certain Vails”: How or How Not to Build an Empire Twentieth-century criticism largely aligns romance plots with aristocratic restoration and redemption. Northrop Frye offers a representative assessment in The Secular Scripture: “One very obvious feature of romance is its pervasive social snobbery. Naïve romance confines itself largely to royal families; sentimental romance gives us patterns of aristocratic courage and courtesy, and much of it adopts a ‘blood will tell’ convention, the association of moral virtue and social rank implied in the word ‘noble.’”16 Pericles, which draws heavily on the Greek romance of Apollonius of Tyre, evokes classical tradition as well as the trajectory of an extraordinary figure, one whose journey displays “patterns of aristocratic courage and courtesy” and suggests an “association of moral virtue and social rank.” Despite the “pervasive social snobbery” that Frye finds in the plays, however, he also maintains in another publication that “dramatic romances of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, whatever the circumstances of their original performance, have their roots in the popular theater with its unselected audience.”17 Pericles indeed proved popular in these venues, despite (or perhaps accounting for) Ben Jonson’s oft-cited dismissal of the play as a “mouldy tale.”18 More recent critics also caution against viewing the play as an elite production, noting not only its origins on the public stage but also the ways in which its plot elements reflect, in the words of Steven Mullaney, “signs of a changing political and cultural climate” – specifically the sweeping social and economic transformations afoot as London developed into a thriving trade metropolis of global consequence.19 The same can be said for The Tempest’s social and economic reach, despite speculation that it was written to be performed initially for a relatively wealthy audience at the private Blackfriars Theatre.20 Early modern maritime expansion, which required the participation of a wide range of classes and occupations, led contemporaries to grapple with the archetypal otherness of the sea – a fearful alterity that, some scholars have argued, dominated premodern thought. I have documented these views, and their relevance to the study of early modern texts, in the introduction to this book. Shakespeare’s late romances, however, invite a closer look at the sea’s symbolic status with an eye towards detecting how this status may show up differently according to the classes and occupations of different characters and different audiences. With respect to the ocean as narrative device, Steven Mentz writes: “the lessons of the oceanic encounter were not simply the familiar virtues of faith and sympathy but more radical truths about shared

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catastrophe and endurance.”21 Indeed, the sea is essential to the mythological readings that have held sway over conversations about Pericles since the modernist era. Yet critical commentary mainly has applied these shared truths to Pericles himself, for whom the sea becomes a crucible for cultivating the quality of patience.22 Such views gain support when Gower, as Chorus, describes Pericles’s maritime experience in terms that prioritize the hero’s spiritual evolution. Gower relates the story of Pericles’s shipwreck and arrival on the shores of Pentapolis: He […] put forth to seas, Where when men been there’s seldom ease; For now the wind begins to blow; Thunder above and deeps below Makes such unquiet that the ship Should house him safe is wrecked and split, And he, good prince, having all lost, By waves from coast to coast is tossed. All perishen of men, of pelf, Ne aught escapend but himself; Till fortune, tired with doing bad, Threw him ashore, to give him glad.23

Gower frames the sea not as an impersonal force but as a personalized instrument of “fortune” “doing bad” to Pericles but ultimately relenting, “to give him glad.” Even though “there’s seldom ease” for men when “put forth to seas,” Pericles nonetheless poses a special exception; no one “escapend” the shipwreck “but himself.” However, Gower’s initial description of the sea as a universal source of sorrow contradicts his view of fortune as taking particular interest in Pericles. Clearly, the “seldom ease” endemic to oceanic travel does not affect all men in the same way. The Tempest’s Gonzalo spells out the difference to his grieving king: You have cause, So have we all, of joy, for our escape Is much beyond our loss. Our hint of woe Is common; every day some sailor’s wife, The masters of some merchant, and the merchant, Have just our theme of woe. But for the miracle, I mean our preservation, few in millions Can speak like us.24

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Even as Gonzalo calls shipwreck common, he distinguishes those who face shipwreck every day from those who, like himself and his fellow courtiers, number among the “few in millions” receiving the “miracle” of “preservation” with a mere “hint of woe.” Given these courtiers’ elite status relative to the status of the figurative sailor’s wife and merchant, everyday shipwreck seems common indeed, insofar as the courtiers taste it only to advance the play’s narrative of aristocratic restoration. This class-based difference within the distribution of fortune lends support to Bernard Klein’s observation that “[f]ortune recycling, and extending lives, is the privilege of a haughty, indifferent elite.”25 In line with this “privilege,” Pericles’s own shipwreck is invested with a kind of spiritual significance that distinguishes it from the daily perils faced by mariners and their kind. After Pericles washes ashore with “[n]othing to think on but ensuing death,” he witnesses the fishermen talking of “the poor men that were cast away before us even now,” men for whom the “wat’ry grave” became gravely literal.26 As with the Milanese courtiers, so does Pericles’s salvation become “the miracle” reserved for “few in millions” – “few,” that is, among the nameless “millions” lost to sea travel’s dangers. This uneven application of fortune lends an element of social realism to the common hazards, physical and financial, of sea travel and commerce.27 It also demarcates a difference in perspective among the social orders in the play, one that underscores Emily S. Bartels’s observation of how “the play works to break apart the illusion of strangeness that it identifies as the stock and trade of travel, exposing its own extraordinary story of shipwreck and encounter as surprisingly ordinary.”28 To paraphrase her point, what is strange to some characters in the play is ordinary to others. Pericles bears a different relationship to this putatively “universal” natural force than do the fishermen, the sailors, and the unnumbered, nameless drowned travellers who accompanied him. For Pericles, oceanic peril is an agent of his singular redemption; for the fishermen, it is an everyday peril made familiar through the regular engagement with the elements that their work requires. The staged spectacle of this work that introduces the scene creates a snapshot of its everydayness in action and, for a moment, elevates it as notable in its own right, rather than as a mere backdrop to Pericles’s journey. The dialogue that immediately follows builds on the significance of this labour by delineating some fundamental differences in thinking between the fishermen and the Prince of Tyre. While working, the fishermen share witty reflections that cast both the rapacious wealthy and the idle poor as parasites leeching off others’ labour. From these men Pericles learns of Thaisa, whom “princes and knights come from all

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parts of the world”29 to woo. Then Pericles’s lost armour turns up in the Second Fisherman’s net, prompting Pericles to declare the armour as “part of my heritage.”30 The events of this scene have prompted Jean Howard to describe the fishermen, who at first seem devoted to ­Pericles’s service and uninterested in their own benefit, as participating in the play’s conservative archaism.31 Yet, when Pericles attempts to seize the armour, the fishermen dispute his claim with one of their own: “Ay, but hark you, my friend, ’twas we that made up this garment through the rough seams of the waters. There are certain condolements, certain vails. I hope, sir, if you thrive, you’ll remember from whence you had them.”32 This making, the men reason, entitles them to “certain vails” – that is, particular benefits, profits, or advantages on account of their labour, an expectation that evokes the kinds of small-scale trading that early modern seamen often performed to optimize their earnings.33 The fishermen’s insistence also references the medieval legal tradition, still current in the early seventeenth century, of wreccum maris (wreck of the sea), which adjudicated the disputed ownership of wrecked goods. Shipwrecks, according to David Cressy, “dissolved ownership and reassigned property, extinguishing prior possession and establishing new entitlements,” and some of these entitlements accrued to the salvagers who, rightly, in the eyes of the law, “expected moieties, droits, and rewards” for their recovery efforts.34 Additionally, the fishermen’s rejoinder gestures towards the custom of fishermen sailing for a share of the catch, rather than for wages, as compensation.35 Finally, as I describe in this book’s introduction, the scene testifies to the independent, even obstreperous, occupational culture of the seafaring professions, as the fishermen reply to the prince’s command by asserting their own entitlements. Only when Pericles agrees to “remember from whence [he] had” the armour do the fishermen part with it. The fishermen expect reciprocity and, furthermore, do not hesitate to educate the Prince of Tyre on the customary nature of this expectation. The Pentapolis fishermen are not the only seamen who must explain such customs to Pericles. The play’s third act opens with Pericles aboard another ship, facing another storm, this time with Thaisa on the brink of dying while in childbirth. When the shipmaster approaches Pericles as the prince holds the orphaned Marina on deck, Pericles expresses his wish that the storm “would be quiet” for the sake of the newborn child, “this fresh new seafarer.”36 Immediately, the Master calls back to the storm, “Thou wilt not, / wilt thou? Blow, and split thyself,”37 and then orders his crew to let more slack into the bowlines. Thus the wistful charm of Pericles’s wish, that the storm quiet itself for the motherless child’s sake, meets the Master’s grim acknowledgment that the storm

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will do no such thing and that the humans on board must act accordingly. These differences in perception of the storm come to a head when the Master informs Pericles that Thaisa’s corpse must be cast overboard because the sea “will not lie till the ship be cleared of the dead.”38 When Pericles retorts, “That’s your superstition,” the Master insists: “Pardon us, sir. With us at sea it hath been still observed, and we are strong in custom. Therefore briefly yield ‘er, for she must overboard straight.”39 This exchange exhibits a clash between superstition and custom, with each term casting a particular lens on what must be done with Thaisa’s body. Pericles’s term superstition labels the Master’s command as one rooted in fear, ignorance, and irrationality, thus assigning the crew’s beliefs and practices to unenlightened, folkish belief in the supernatural.40 But the Master’s invocation of “custom” – a concept that carried the force of law both on early modern ships and in admiralty courts41 – lets the prince know whose domain he abides within and whose rules he must therefore follow.42 While the Master does couch his insistence in terms that acknowledge Pericles’s rank as well as the emotional difficulty of his position (“Pardon us, sir”), he nonetheless makes clear that the body must be disposed of “straight,” a word that Pericles absorbs into his own speech a few lines later to signal his compliance.43 As on the shores of Pentapolis, so here must Pericles face a set of rules unfamiliar to him, rules borne out of occupational custom as well as the experience of those who deal regularly with the ocean’s dangers. Each time, those rules prevail – as they must, for Pericles depends on the seamen in order to continue his journey. Therefore, the characters’ relative social and occupational positions become starkly apparent in the tumult of every storm. What follows during that storm is a clear delineation of what those positions mean in relationship to nature itself. In the case of the seamen, not only does custom call for a certain level of awe toward the storms that Pericles dismisses as “superstitious,” but it also signals the persistence of what James Holstun calls “a particular form of situated practical and theoretical consciousness,” a form of consciousness that is pragmatically attuned to the requirements of the immediate situation and honed over the course of experience.44 Shipboard custom, in other words, proves to be practical as well as traditional and therefore not entirely reducible to superstition. Custom also highlights the emerging inextricability of skill and personal bearing in social discourse about seafaring cultures. As I have noted throughout this book and as Margaret Cohen in particular has described, mariners of the early modern period “developed elaborate professional practices, which they shared, compared, and refined. These practices included specific skills, and they included a

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characteristic set of demeanors. Taken together, these skills and demeanors comprise the mariner’s excellence in action.” This “excellence in action,” Cohen notes further, eventually establishes the seaman as “an icon of effective practice and human ingenuity” in the early modern period.45 In other words, alongside the stereotypical image of the lowly and profane seaman appears a countervailing image of valour, competence, and overall “excellence” – the human embodiment of maritime empire at its theoretical best. Moreover, this combination of personal characteristics and professional skills poses an alternative form of social value, one that competes with established class hierarchies on land. Commenting on the professionalization of seamanship during the early modern period, Jowitt detects an uncoupling of class privilege and “mastery” whereby shifts in the use of terms such as master, captain, and general become “reflective and constitutive of the ways leadership roles themselves were in process of redefinition to suit new requirements and values emergent in English overseas expansionism at the end of the sixteenth century.” Those “new requirements and values” called primarily for the skills of “professional sea captains” who, in the view of Richard Hakluyt, exhibited “[m]aritime experience and strategic purpose” over “wealth or bravura, or military success.”46 To put it in the simplest terms, being a gentleman did not, in and of itself, suit a man for shipboard mastery. Instead, maritime empire called for the skills of professionals who did not necessarily come from groups traditionally entitled to “mastery” over others.47 The opening scene of The Tempest dramatically exhibits the uncoupling of class and mastery that Jowitt describes. The Boatswain’s retort to the hectoring Italian courtiers – “Work you, then”48 – counters their entitlement with the practical requirements of the moment. This exchange, which for a brief moment stages an affirmation of manual labour over elite privilege, has been viewed by some critics as part of the play’s utopian theme – as imaginary as the “commonwealth” later imagined by Gonzalo, who would admit “no name of magistrate” to his imagined commonwealth.49 Yet the professionalization of seamanship and its concomitant displacement of hereditary claims to social value suggest that the Boatswain’s confrontation with the courtiers is no mere utopian fantasy. Rather, these courtiers resemble those seafaring gentlemen in contemporaneous accounts who do not work and yet outnumber the sailors on board; their indolence results in a shortage of effort to survive a storm that requires all hands to combat.50 Moreover, the central position of a boatswain during the scene invites further comment on the topical significance of that particular role.

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The central task of a boatswain (or bosun) was to make sure others on board fulfilled their duties; the boatswain supervised everything, from the crew to the rigging, and strove to maximize all effort on board in times of emergency. Noting this strong managerial component, Scammell associates the role with upward mobility: “to be a bosun was to be in line for command. And indeed the impression from such as can be traced is that bosuns were in every sense men on the make.”51 Admittedly, one might wonder at the fitness of Shakespeare’s own Boatswain for eventual command given that the ship will, after all, split during the storm and scatter the survivors.52 Still, the presence of a skilled “man on the make” among hapless courtiers during a maritime disaster indicates a confrontation between, on the one hand, the professional competence of an upwardly mobile figure and, on the other, elite entitlement – a confrontation that calls the putatively superior value of the courtiers into question. The Boatswain exerts his skill alongside the courtiers’ concomitant devaluation of his social status. The epithets that the courtiers hurl his way (“blasphemous, incharitable dog,” “cur,” “whoreson, insolent noisemaker,” and “drunkard”)53 mix common negative associations of seamen (noisy, profane, perpetually inebriated) with animalistic and criminal traits commonly ascribed to lowly subjects thought destined for the “gallows.”54 Cur encapsulates these varied associations in a term that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, signifies both “a worthless, low-bred, or snappish dog” and “a surly, ill-bred, low or cowardly fellow.” As Paul Yachnin elucidates, dog and cur represent “general terms of opprobrium in Shakespeare’s culture,” terms that derive from a cultural notion “that humans are strung out along a hierarchy of capabilities and entitlements that coordinates to differences of sex, ethnicity, race, religion, and social rank (or breeding or blood).” Within this logic, Yachnin comments further, it was “in no way obvious” that “people of lesser rank were human the way male members of the upper ranks were human.”55 The courtiers’ characterization of the Boatswain as less valuable than themselves finds a historical analogue in the fact that, for trading corporations like the East India Company, common sailors were treated as expendable, their deaths justified as ridding the commonwealth of otherwise idle, troublesome would-be criminals.56 The opening scene of the play demonstrates just this misalignment between the sailor’s critical role and his dearth of social capital; that is to say, it shows how the mariner of the common ranks may be deemed useful for what he could do, yet still dismissed as ultimately replaceable. Shakespeare’s particular lens on these discourses, however, calls the common mariner’s social betters to account in ways that highlight the latter’s relative lack of usefulness. As Gonzalo holds forth on his utopian

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commonwealth, Sebastian and Antonio poke fun at Gonzalo’s vision of “innocent and pure”57 subjects at rest in natural abundance. These denizens will be, Antonio speculates, “all idle – whores and knaves.”58 Yet fewer than one hundred lines later, when Antonio and Sebastian conspire in private, Sebastian describes himself as “standing water” rather than flowing and active water, due to what he claims as his own ­“hereditary sloth.”59 Whereas early moderns commonly viewed idleness as a moral failing endemic to the lower social orders (i.e., those subjects whom Tudor laws designated as the “undeserving” poor), the king of Naples’ brother enjoys “sloth” as a form of entitlement. Such a claim illustrates Susan Penberthy’s observation that idleness, in the plays of Shakespeare, serves “as a powerful adjunct to power.” Yet this alignment of sloth and entitlement, Penberthy also notes, depends heavily on context because, in other instances throughout Shakespeare, “work is the value and idleness is condemned as a vice, a sign of non-election and of an untrue subject.”60 This exchange between Antonio and ­Sebastian lands squarely into the realm of the latter. “Hereditary sloth” fittingly characterizes those whom Pericles’s learned doctor Cerimon (to whom we will return shortly) describes as “careless heirs,”61 entitled figures who do not know how to utilize their inherited privileges for the benefit of others. Pericles, as well as The Tempest, features just such heirs as these – for example, the incestuous king Antiochus and the feckless governor Cleon of Tharsus, both of whom manage to (borrowing again Cerimon’s words) “darken and expend”62 their own kingdoms through wicked or severely misguided choices. Such instances call into question customary elisions between hereditary right and social value, showing hereditary sloth to be not only unproductive but potentially destructive. Such moments might at first seem to essentialize class positions, with the aristocracy cast as naturally prone to indolence and common seamen as naturally prone to industry and pragmatism. Along similar lines, some readings have sought to recuperate the plays’ “popular” elements as a counterweight to their apparently courtly aesthetics and aristocratic narratives. David Morrow, for example, detects in the fishermen a “vision of non-alienated labour, which stands as a positive vision in contrast to the dispossessed vagrants about whom the fishermen speak and for whom Pericles at the same time stands as an emblem.”63 This assessment, which focuses on the spectacle of “living labour,” casts the fishermen’s work as a form of vital creativity that starkly contrasts with commodified “dead labour.”64 This reading reflects a broader critical movement to reintroduce popular elements, such as material labour as a feature of non-aristocratic life, into our understanding of Shakespeare’s work.65

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While I share these general aims, any analysis seeking to distinguish the popular from the aristocratic risks casting them as mutually exclusive terms, thus demarcating them as conceptual categories that echo classbased divisions of manual versus moral or intellectual labour. Indeed, such divisions, translated into the language of hierarchy, find ample support in early modern writing that defines gentlemanly status as freedom from the need for paid work.66 Yet despite those hierarchies’ persistence in social descriptions, I see emerging in Pericles and The Tempest a powerful counterdiscourse to such stratifications, one that stems from the plays’ staging of labour as everyday practice.67 Moreover, evidence of this counterdiscourse appears not only among the plays’ “low” figures but also across a range of class positions in the plays. For example, when a gentleman “marvel[s]” at the willingness of the finely dressed doctor Cerimon to rise early to revive the shipwrecked Thaisa, Cerimon replies: I hold it ever Virtue and cunning were endowments greater Than nobleness and riches. Careless heirs May the two latter darken and expend, But immortality attends the former, Making a man a god. ’Tis known I ever Have studied physic […] which doth give me A more content in course of true delight Than to be thirsty after tottering honor, Or tie my pleasure up in silken bags To please the fool and death.68

To be sure, Cerimon – like Prospero – practices a learned art, not manual labour. But Cerimon positions the practice of his craft as an explicit rejection of aristocratic “endowments,” as he seeks to cultivate “virtue and cunning” instead.69 The embrace of such qualities mitigates the consequences of the actions of “[c]areless heirs,” heirs such as the ousted Duke of Milan and the fugitive Prince of Tyre. Moreover, his “true delight” in work over indolence affirms the earlier words of the fishermen: “here’s nothing to be got now-a-days, unless thou canst fish for it.”70 These statements embrace work not only as virtue but as an effective way of negotiating the social and environmental hazards that members of all social orders encounter. Moreover, Cerimon’s preference for such an approach suggests that virtue and cunning – that blend of personal and professional characteristics ascribed to the imperial British seaman at his best – are not necessarily an exclusively non-aristocratic ideal. Shakespeare further

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explores the broad social applicability of this counterdiscourse in ­Gower’s description of Helicanus: Good Helicane, that stayed at home – Not to eat honey like a drone From others’ labours, for though he strive To killen bad, keep good alive, And to fulfill his prince’ desire – Sends word of all that haps in Tyre […]71

By juxtaposing counsellor and prince, Gower compares the “striv[ing]” Helicanus to his wandering monarch. While Pericles receives “word of all that haps in Tyre” at a distance, Helicanus stays “at home” “[t]o killen bad, keep good alive.” Significantly, Gower’s reference to the “drone” who “eat[s] honey” “[f]rom other’s labours” echoes the Third Fisherman’s desire to “purge the land” of “drones that rob the bee of her honey.”72 Helicanus, by contrast, is definitively not a parasitical drone; so effective is he, in fact, that he must fend off petitions to govern Tyre permanently. “[T]his kingdom is without a head,” proclaims one Tyrian lord, concluding that Helicanus himself “best know[s] how to rule and how to reign.”73 Pericles’s wandering, then, is undercut by the counsellor who rules in his stead. Helicanus’s devotion to duty signals the counterdiscourse of diligent labour, grounded in workmanlike humility and everyday activity, that surfaces in the play. Incidentally this discourse, while economic in its implications, differs from the mere market activity of working, getting, and spending. The play articulates the difference in the fourth act. The Mytilene bawds, widely regarded by critics as base creatures of the market,74 understand that it is a “shame to get” money as they do and Pander admits that “the gods” do not ordain these activities: “we offend [the gods] worse. Neither is our profession any trade; it’s no calling.”75 Pander’s distinction between his “profession” and an actual “calling,” when used in reference to the gods’ approval, begs the question of what a legitimate calling might look like. The bawds of Mytilene fall short of it; Cerimon, Helicanus, and the Pentapolis ­fishermen suggest how one might fulfil it.76 Even so, the play erects one set of rapacious criminals as affecting the progress of Pericles’s dynasty: the pirates who kidnap Marina.77 As I note in the introduction to this book, pirates might be said to represent the most extreme version of the seaman who utilizes his skill to advance and benefit himself, given that many of them joined pirate ships after running away from naval and merchant ships on which they had endured harsh and exploitative

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treatment. These pirates’ subsequent sale of Marina to the Mytilene bawds reflects the amoral and self-interested depredation of such men; yet, at the same time, those same men unwittingly rescue Marina from murder at the hands of Queen Dionyza’s assassin and thus help keep Pericles’s dynasty intact. It is a sequence of events that, in a most ironic way, demonstrates the extent to which men possessed of maritime skill affected the progress of the empire over and against the mishaps of that empire’s governors. Thus Pericles, although lofty in its generic affiliations, hints at a revision of traditional hierarchies that typically assign to hereditary sloth a higher social value than to everyday labour. And if Pericles does speak to the early stages of British imperialism, as recent criticism suggests, then the play does so by raising the question of how an empire might be not only acquired but also sustained. After all, Pericles is, as Constance Relihan points out, a derelict ruler who leaves his lands unstable, with members of the royal family divided among them.78 It is therefore reasonable to ask if the imperial Pericles has achieved an empire that will last. Meanwhile early modern seamen, with their history of marginalization as putatively rough, unruly, lowly characters, were acquiring a countervailing practical and symbolic value as men with the skills necessary to realize British imperial ambition.79 These are the kinds of men who rescue the despairing Pericles from the “watr’y grave” of his own folly, equip him with his own lost armour, and thus make the achievement of his Mediterranean empire possible in the first place. Trees into Logs, Logs into Ships Here I have framed the plays’ treatment of the seaman’s labour as introducing a countervailing discourse to traditional class-based hierarchies of subordination and domination. Those hierarchies, both plays suggest, ultimately are insufficient to secure and maintain a future empire of the seas because those at the top – that is, those imprinted by the entitlements of hereditary sloth – do not possess the skills and traits necessary to building, fortifying, and maintaining a maritime imperium. “Careless heirs,” that is, are not the ones best equipped to steer ships when the cost of failure is high. To be sure, the emergence of this counterdiscourse in the plays is by no means uncomplicated; moreover, there is a certain irony in the idea that humans of Britain’s lower social orders would become, in large part, the agents of Britain’s global domination and its attendant subjection of Indigenous populations abroad. Even so, these plays, staged on the cusp of an empire on which, as the saying goes, the sun would never set, anticipate significant transformations in domestic

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hierarchical structures of class, labour, and occupation, transformations that would prove critical to a new kind of empire, one truly worldwide in scope and powered by the critical skills of hardworking commoners. This reading, which, like the rest of this book, seeks to account more fully for the role of labour in imperial histories, aims to push against the long-standing critical notion that Pericles and Prospero, as the figures putatively central to the plays, ultimately evolve in the direction of redemption. While some critics view Pericles as a kind of wily adventurer, one who, like Odysseus, gets smarter and more skilled in the course of his travels,80 the play presents little evidence that Pericles learns much in terms of imperial management. In fact, as Klein observes, the fishermen’s “watery” empire is the only one actually achieved in the play.81 The fishermen, Klein notes further, are unimpressed by Pericles’s profession of authority,82 and, I would add, they seem to have made little impression on Pericles either, given how quickly he forgets to acknowledge their help. Prospero, one might argue, is a much more potent figure given his command of the natural elements and therefore of the movements of the other characters; after all, the very storm that precipitates the inversion of social order on the ship is Prospero’s creation, a device to hasten his revenge. Yet Prospero nonetheless admits that he and Miranda depend for their survival upon the manual labour of Caliban, the lowest underling of the island: “We cannot miss him. / He does make our fire, / Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices / That profit us.”83 The fact that Ferdinand must later serve as “log-man,” hauling wood to win the hand of Miranda, shows that the noble characters are not physically incapable of doing that same work. It is, rather, that work’s class-encoded status prohibits noble participation, as becomes clear when Ferdinand describes the “baseness” of his “mean task,” baseness that leads Miranda to weep at the sight of a prince performing it.84 The widely discussed wedding masque of act 4, where Prospero must dispel his opulent spectacle upon remembering Caliban’s planned insurrection, presents another moment in which class-encoded discourses of labour become complicated. The masque enacts a hierarchy of labour that aligns with the commanding privilege of elite power: one pageant depicts “sunburned sicklemen”85 leaving their work to dance at the command of the goddess Iris, who herself appears at the behest of Prospero to entertain his noble heirs. The reapers, who inhabit the bottom of the masque’s hierarchy of workers,86 serve at the pleasure of the goddesses, who themselves serve Prospero; such is Prospero’s preferred arrangement, as Norbrook comments: “in Prospero’s golden age there is a hierarchical structure in which the labour of the reapers

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is ultimately motivated by the transcendent gods and goddesses who are figures of the leisured aristocracy.”87 Yet while the goddesses, and by extension the reapers, appear at the pleasure of Prospero within the frame of this imaginal “golden age,” Caliban himself cannot be called forth or dispelled by Prospero’s magic; if anything, Prospero worries about Caliban’s ability to dispel him.88 Nor has Prospero’s magic dispensed with the hardy seamen who allegedly went down with the ship in the opening scene; the Boatswain, that signifier of upwardly mobile seamanship, returns at the end of the play to take the entire court back to Italy. The crew, the Boatswain tells the court, was not dead but merely “dead of sleep” before being set “at liberty” to behold a newly restored ship that leads the Master to dance for joy.89 Given the fact that Prospero has already resolved to “drown [his] book,”90 Prospero’s actual role in facilitating the ship’s restoration is unclear. In any case, the re-emergence of a fully restored ship and crew signals the enduring necessity of skilled sea labour for undergirding the dynasty and its territorial power. On a related note, The Tempest not only highlights the importance of skilled seamen but also hints at the importance of shipbuilding itself. It does so through a proliferation of references to logs, woods, and trees throughout the play. Ecocritical readings have taken Ferdinand’s log-hauling as referencing the process of deforestation that accelerated with the English enclosure laws, when wealthy landowners sought to cultivate heretofore common areas for the sake of profit. Such scenes, according to David Gray, signal “humanity’s role as a geological agent affecting the Earth’s climate and environment”;91 I would add, however, that they also coincide with the late Tudor push to ramp up the production of ships, as can be seen in the plans published by such proto-imperialist writers as Robert Hitchcock and the anonymous “E.S.,” both discussed in chapter 3. Moreover, shipbuilding, like fishing, was considered to be a “nursery” for English seamen;92 this fact highlights the merging of human labour with the cultivation of natural resources for the sake of imperial advancement. The seventeenth-century sailor ballad “The Lancashire Lovers, or the Merry Wooing of Thomas and Betty” (1691–4) encapsulates this fusion in its refrain: “The Ash and the Oak, and the Ivy-tree, / Flourish bravely at home in our own Country.” The native trees, when rooted, “flourish bravely” in a way that recalls the steadfastness of the ideal seaman, home-grown on British soil; however, those same trees literally assist the brave flourishing of the empire itself when cut down and repurposed to build ships. The Tempest’s numerous references to trees, oaks, pines, logs, and wood can be seen as topical allusions not only to the land itself but also to the land’s

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importance as a supplier of natural resources for maritime expansion.93 The logs in particular, carried by slave and prince alike, are necessary to create fire, that ancient emblem of human art and industry, and are a basic good for survival that even Prospero requires. Such multivalent images capture well what Klein calls the “mix of symbolism and factuality” in the play,94 signalling archetypal associations with human progress and creation as well as the raw material for oceanic expansion. By way of conclusion, it may be worth pausing briefly to consider what such an affirmation of non-elite labour might mean coming from Shakespeare himself, by this time a successful theatre professional and landlord who had achieved some measure of independence from noble patronage.95 Is the distinction between the outlook of the careless heirs and those performing honest labour meant as a deliberate confrontation of ingrained class hierarchy and its attendant assumptions about occupational identity? Figuratively speaking, do the Pentapolis fishermen ultimately need Pericles’s recognition in order to thrive? For insight into this question we might look again at the emerging class of professional writers who composed the civic shows and staged dramas that may have informed the Pentapolis scene. Munday, Dekker, Webster, and Middleton all wrote in a variety of genres and made their living not just from patronage but also from the burgeoning demand for print and drama that rewarded writers according to a market-driven model. In theory, aristocratic bounty matters less when new options to exercise writerly labour, and be paid for it, become available. Although Shakespeare certainly aspired to a higher social status, as seen in his commissioning of a family crest and the acquisition of a Stratford estate later in life, it also is important to ask how Shakespeare’s own artisanal outlook was shaped by the activities of his fellow professional writers. In a recent article on another Shakespearean romance, Cymbeline, Erica Sheen expands that play’s own questions of empire and autonomy into a comparison of Shakespeare with Jonson that captures Shakespeare’s relative autonomy as a developing professional who is increasingly less reliant on patronage: “The importance of the fact that Shakespeare wrote himself into contracts of ownership rather than into print as an author should not be underestimated, but invariably has been […] Officially and ideologically under court patronage, but financially and materially independent to a remarkable extent, Shakespeare was in an unprecedented position to use theatre to make present within the discourses of his culture relations between political and professional ­mastery which he himself was helping to unsettle.”96 Sheen’s point about Shakespeare’s relative independence, which Norbrook takes up as well, mirrors the specifically artisanal forms of skill

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and independence that I have noted in the Mediterranean romances. While Shakespeare depended to some degree on courtly sponsorship of his theatre company, he also participated in business arrangements that made him “financially and materially independent to a remarkable extent.” This achievement of “professional mastery,” Sheen suggests, makes a “political” statement that draws social and economic power to the craftsman – the individual, that is, whose talents hold real value outside of the patronage system. Likewise, although Pericles denies the fishermen their “certain vails,” one cannot doubt that they would continue to make their living and, if the growth of Britain’s fisheries were any indication, thrive from it, as the island nation increasingly expanded its maritime commerce into an imperial strategy that would operate for centuries. The empire that Pericles and his family erect together is built on shaky ground at best; likewise, the future of Prospero’s own dynasty remains uncertain. Each play’s conclusion leaves the question open as to how that empire ultimately will sustain itself. Will it endure through the careless heirs who have come together largely through the labours of those well outside the lines of inheritance? Or is it more likely to thrive through the craft and skill of men like the Pentapolis fishermen who equip Pericles with armour; the learned doctor who restores the lost queen; the faithful servant who governs capably enough to lead his associates to consider installing him permanently; or the crew that knows what must be done to survive a storm? The plays may not answer these questions definitively, but through the counterdiscourse of labour they raise the questions nonetheless, inviting us to reconsider the supposedly aristocratic trajectory of Shakespeare’s late romances. Those same questions, with their broad implications for seamen’s changing social value, also apply when we re-examine class- and gender-encoded conflict at home, conflict that imperial discourse brought to the fore. The corpus of early modern sailor ballads, as a more diffuse and less overtly ideological genre than the promotion tracts addressed in chapter 1, throws these conflicts into even sharper relief, as we will see in the next chapter. While the Newfoundland promoters aspired to speak to everyone in the realm, the ballads – delivered in song to those who could not read and write, while also collected and enjoyed by the ­literate – actually did have the social reach that promoters merely wished to ­obtain. It is to that rich corpus of popular literature that we will now turn.

4 “A Wife or Friend at E’ery Port”: The Common Sailor in the Ballads of Early British Empire

A Saylor is a cunning Knave, who does all sorts of women Court, It is well known that they will have, a wife or friend at e’ery Port, O marry not a Seaman then, For they are cunning crafty men.1

So begins the ballad “The Mothers Kindness, Conquer’d by her ­Daughters Vindication of Valiant and Renowned Seamen” (c. 1676–96). It depicts a dialogue in which an unnamed mother and her daughter June debate sailors’ suitability for marriage. Sailors, Mother declares, are “cunning,” “crafty,” and “careless roving men,” unfaithful and unsettled in body and mind. They thus pose too great a risk for maidens, such as June, to consider as husbands. June, however, sees things differently: Dear Mother do not them revile, for they are valient stout and brave, Strong Bulwarks to their native Isle, the Kingdom to support and save. Therefore I love them as my life, And fain would be a Seamans wife.

Answering Mother’s view of sailors as dangerously mobile (“careless” and “roving”), June counters with adjectives signalling the opposite quality: steadfastness (“stout” and “[s]trong”). Moreover, the sailor’s steadfast character, when employed in Britain’s service, strengthens the small island realm (“Strong Bulwarks to their native Isle, / the ­Kingdom to support and save”). Not only do sailors bolster the kingdom, June continues, but they also enrich it by steering the “Golden Fleet” home. So convincing

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is June’s counterargument that Mother finally concedes the point: sailors do not illicitly avail themselves of personal liberty but instead “defend our Liberty” (emphasis added) from external threats to the realm. Her conclusion seems to anticipate broadly those “Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free” ideals of the British empire,2 although the ballad also extends these ideals into domestic life. The sailor is good for a maiden, June and Mother reason, because he is good for the entire country. In this way “The Mothers Kindness” appears to resolve the question of sailors’ character once and for all. Seventeenth-century ballads as a whole, however, are not nearly so conclusive. To be sure, many do expound on the steadfastness and bravery described by June. One attributed to the famous balladeer Martin Parker, titled “Saylors for my money” (c. 1630), praises sailors by “shew-ing the nature of so worthy a calling, and effects of their industry.” Another ballad, titled “The constant maids resolution: or The damsels loyal love to a seaman” (c. 1674–9), features a maiden extrapolating the manly virtue of “resolution” to the sailor’s matrimonial potential: “A Seaman he is of all men neatest, / And in my eye is the most compleatest.” Yet notably this maiden, in spite of her personal convictions, keeps her desire a secret from her community: “I love thee dear but I dare not show it / Do thou the like but let no man know it.” Thus the ballad, even as it defends the sailor’s character, also anticipates widespread disapproval of the maiden’s choice. Other ballads suggest some reasons. Songs about such infamous rovers as the Barbary corsair John Ward, the Dutch pirate Simon Danseker, and the Scottish pirate Andrew Barton proliferated throughout the Tudor/Jacobean period and beyond. The alleged libertine and criminal behaviour reported therein extended to more ordinary figures as well, for example, in “The seamans frolick: or, A cooler for the captain” (1680–2), which details the sexual adventures to be had in the world’s ports, all at the risk of getting venereal disease and bringing it home. Men of such habits threatened the lives and reputations of maidens who were unlucky enough to fall prey to their roguish charms, as we learn in ballads whose titles speak for themselves: “The Mariner’s Delight, or, The Seaman’s Seaven Wives” (1662–92); “The Jealous Lover: or, The Damosel’s Complaint of her Seaman’s Unkindness” (c.  1683–1703); and “The Cruel Lover: or, the False-hearted Sailor, ­Being a relation of one Mary Shalford, near Ratliff-Cross, that was in love with a sea-man, who had promised her marriage” (c. 1664–1703). Taken ­together with the more positive representations cited earlier, these ballads indicate a widespread cultural conversation not only about sailors’ general character but also specifically about their fitness as husbands to the nation’s women, as fathers to its children, and as members of its communities.

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It is true that dramatic tales of love lost and won represented standard ballad fare. Moreover, as Mark Hailwood demonstrates, the occupational characteristics of particular professions also featured strongly in ballad discourse.3 However, while Hailwood usefully uncovers how early modern ballads both reflected and influenced the occupational identities of members of the incorporated professions – blacksmiths, tailors, and shoemakers, for example – the occupational identity of the sailor merits special attention because it reflects how ballad discourse responded to early imperialism’s heavy reliance on the unincorporated labour of common men. In particular, the ballad scenario of a young maiden loving a sailor signifies a larger conversation, one that critically examines the potential rewards and consequences of imperial expansion from a terrestrial, local, and communal perspective. Like the other texts treated in this book, the sailor ballads display an “imperial theme” that is markedly different in kind from the one articulated by early imperialists such as Dee, Hitchcock, Hakluyt, and Misselden. Writing mainly for an audience of elite administrators, these men looked to the nation’s commoners – especially its “idle” and vagrant poor – to provide the labour necessary to realize the kinds of colonial and commercial projects characteristic of what Kenneth A. Andrews calls the period’s mood of “economic nationalism.”4 As I detail in this book’s introduction, promoters such as Robert Hitchcock reasoned that the cultivation of shipbuilders, fishermen, and especially deep-sea sailors was believed to not only bring “greate plentie and mutche wealthe, and benefite, to all the inhabitauntes of this Realme” but also provide “for the poore, in honest and decent maner, brynging them to a good and Godly vocation of life.”5 We should also recall the words of Misselden, who observed that “[t]he Poore sterve in the streets for want of labour” and believed that cultivating the sea “promiseth Renowne to the King, Revenue to the Crowne, treasure to the Kingdome, a purchase for the land, a prize for the sea, ships for Navigation, Navigation for ships, Mariners for both: entertainment of the rich, employment for the poore, advantage for the adventurers, and encrease of Trade to all the Subjects. A Mine of Gold it is: the Mine is deepe, the veines are great, the Ore is rare, the Gold is pure, the extent unlimited, the wealth unknowne, the worth invaluable.”6 Such views assume that the worldwide expansion of seafaring will bring nothing but benefit to the nation’s masses. In doing so, they foreshadow the burgeoning early modern economic discourse known as “mercantilism” that embraced worldwide trade as the surest path to national prosperity, with sailors and vessels emblematizing that path.7 The ballads, like many of the popular texts explored throughout this book, are more circumspect on these promises. By dwelling on the

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character of seamen in general and on their fitness as marriage partners in particular, ballads ask whether the anticipated rewards of maritime empire are worth the potential damage sailors could do to family stability, mutual trust, and popular morality within communities – that is, to the very structures that were supposed to stabilize and uphold society. Such questions, even when delivered in ballads’ characteristically entertaining way, necessarily complicate the optimism of Hitchcock, Misselden, and their peers. In recent years scholars have correlated the writings of early mercantilists and imperialists with literary genres that meditate on the nature of risk – for example, with voyage dramas that adopt the tragicomic arc of romance convention, a topic I explore in chapter 3 – to justify risky investment for the sake of great reward.8 Sailor ballads, however, show that large sums of money were not the only thing at stake in colonial expansion, and, in doing so, they alert us to the under-explored role of non-elite labour in forging empire. By focusing on the common sailor and his human attachments, the ballads adumbrate a reality unaccounted for by the mercantilists, that the very fabric of everyday life in which the sailor participated stood to become unravelled the more these men went to sea and the longer they remained there. But before examining more closely how the ballads register such views both within and among themselves, I will survey the situation of the common sailor, and crucially his landed intimates, in the early decades of empire. “Sometimes in Safety, Yet Still Not So”: The Common Sailor and His Landed Relations “[W]hat canst thou expect to gain, / But the Hazard, Love, of being slain[?],” cries “Nancy,” the desperate maiden of “The Undaunted ­Marriner; or, The Seaman’s Valiant Resolution” (c. 1664–1703). True to the ballad’s promise, the sailor meets her pleas with “valiant resolution” to sail anyway. Yet Nancy’s fears are well founded, for it was widely known that men would be gone for a long time, possibly forever, once they left port. As Marcus Rediker puts it, “Work at sea meant painful distance from family and friends, in the short term and, for many, the long: all relationships involving sailors were haunted by the Grim Reaper – captains drew the death’s head, a symbol of mortality, into their logs to record a sailor’s end, far from home.”9 To be sure, a host of perilous conditions invited the Grim Reaper to claim the common sailor and thus permanently separate him from his loved ones on land. The natural forces of the ocean itself posed one such condition, an inexorable one that claimed many sailors’ lives as a matter of course.

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Rogue waves, forceful winds, hurricanes, and typhoons overcame even the sturdiest of ships and the most skilled of mariners. The ballad “Neptunes Raging Fury” (1684–6) details the dangers: The bitter storms and tempests, poor Seamen must endure, Both Day & Night, with many a fright, we seldome rest secure, Our sleep it is disturbed, with visions strange to know, And with dreams on the streams, when the stormy winds do blow.

These “bitter storms and tempests” include “[c]laps of roaring thunder / which darkness doth enforce,” causing ships to become “tost in waves” and veer helplessly away from their charted direction. ­Rendered in song, such lines dramatically portray the perils of those forced to cross the ocean, that watery sphere that many early moderns (according to the scholars discussed in this book’s introduction) still regarded as possessing dangerous and mysterious alterity. Sailors forced to face such elements were vulnerable indeed, and, as Steve Mentz notes, such prolonged immersion sometimes inscribed the early modern “global ocean” onto the sailor himself, rendering him a creature of this strange and threatening sphere and thus estranging him from terrestrial custom.10 Occupational hazards for sailors also included maritime violence between ships. The ballad “The Saylors only Delight; Shewing the brave Fight between the George-Aloe, the Sweepstake, and certain Frenchmen at Sea” (1663–74) tells the tale of two English merchant ships, the George Aloe and the Sweepstake, that encounter conflict with a French man-of-war while bound for the Barbary coast. The Sweepstake, which has proceeded to its destination while the George Aloe is at anchor, is overrun by the invading enemy’s violence and plunder: “They laid us aboord the Starboord side, / with hey, with ho, & c. / And they overthrow us into the Sea so wide, / and alongst & c.” Upon hearing the news, the George Aloe travels ahead to assist the Sweepstake in a heroic victory related in the ballad’s remaining lines, which spare no detail in reporting this news of near disaster to “Englands coast” from “Bardary [sic].” As a whole, the ballad indicates the kinds of depredation – enemy ships, pirates, slaving corsairs – that were common on well-travelled trade routes, thus presenting another set of perils common to maritime travel and trade.

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Then came the treacherous conditions on the ship itself. Food for common sailors tended to be meagre and of low nutritional value. Malnutrition, combined with a lack of hygiene, exposed sailors to disabling and fatal diseases.11 With respect to the navy, additional suffering often came at the hands of the ship’s officers, who resorted to the whip and other humiliating punishments for alleged transgressions of order.12 Corruption was common too, according to the seventeenth-century seaman Edward Barlow, who in his diary reports a practice in which the ship’s “purser” (the officer in charge of distributing food and drink) gives the crew inferior provisions, pockets the profit from the rest, and sometimes even shares that profit with the captain.13 As with the exterior forces of nature, ballads documented these shipboard hardships as well. One titled “Cordial advice: to all rash young men, who think to advance their decaying fortunes by navigation” (1695–1707) sharply indicts the brutality of seemingly “valiant” naval commanders and merchants: “Our Captains and Commanders, / are valiant men and stout: / They’ve fought in France and Flanders, / and never wou’d give out, / They beat our Men like Stock-fish, / all to increase our woe.” Although a range of social classes consumed ballads, these lines impart a distinctly “low” perspective that confronts the professed glory of commanders with allegations of shameful abuse.14 Indeed, the ballad’s title alone, addressing men “who think to advance their decaying fortunes by navigation,” aims to warn commoners away from seafaring’s supposed promise of wealth and promotion. To labour in such a profession, the ballad declares, instead is tantamount to slavery: To take our lading in, We moil like Argier slaves, And if we to complain begin, The capital lash we have, A cursed cat with thrice three tails, Does much increase our woe […]

Thus the ballad’s refrain, repeating the words “increase our woe,” reinforces through song the only real increase that “rash young men” can expect when they precipitously take to the seas in hopes of building their fortunes. Even sailors who returned alive and intact faced difficulties that had an impact on their families and communities as well. The pay of a returned naval sailor might be delayed indefinitely, a phenomenon especially familiar to naval men serving under the notoriously

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parsimonious Elizabeth I.15 Similar delays in payment continued throughout the seventeenth century, thus placing hardship on seamen’s wives and children and making them all likely to draw on parish poor relief.16 The ballad archive has something to say on this subject as well. “The Sea-Martyrs; or, The Seamen’s sad Lamentation for their Faithful Service, Bad Pay, and Cruel Usage” (1691) describes a series of events in which some naval men caused a public disturbance over delayed wages – apparently “their betters” needed to be paid first – and were hanged as punishment. The ballad heightens the shock of their execution by noting that the sailors had served faithfully, fighting the king’s wars while their own families “starved” at home. The end-rhyme further reinforces the irony and injustice of a situation in which sailors fought like “slaves” – yet another term suggesting imperial labour’s disruption of racial and class markers – only to be called “knaves” for asserting their rights. Noting that even foreign nations pay their poor men, the ballad predicts that the country will go to ruin for abandoning “Old Englands ways” of caring for its own poor. It concludes with an explicit call for political revolution: God bless our noble Parliament, And give them the whole Government That they may see we’re worse than ever, And us from Lawless rule deliver, For England’s sinking, unless they Do take the helm, and better sway.

Here the ballad recruits the conventional ship-of-state metaphor, a device that, according to David Norbrook, appears increasingly in radical writings throughout the seventeenth century,17 for the purpose of imagining a government more compassionate towards seamen. Given that the ballad survives in print, it seems to have at least partly evaded censorship. Yet even if it had not, the ballad’s delivery as song would have made its message easy to memorize and share orally, henceforth sustaining its radical potential beyond any official attempts at silencing it.18 Thus another perspective “from below” is transmitted in a way that circumvents the need for reading and writing, a set of skills that few commoners possessed. The defiant sailors commemorated by “The Sea Martyrs” represent one form of protest against common seamen’s conditions. Piracy represents another scenario in which desperate men turned bold. Historical evidence relates episodes of revenge in which pirates quizzed men on captured ships, asked these men how they were treated by their

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captains, and then administered justice to the captains while incorporating the aggrieved men into the pirate crew.19 Yet historians also acknowledge that the more common scenario for piracy was far less dramatic; it was an activity that could be performed on a small scale to make ends meet, with transgressors slipping in and out of “legitimate” activity rather than adopting a sustained criminal identity.20 For this reason, Christopher Harding argues, “we need to view the piratical identity itself as less stable and neatly defined compared to that presented in later images.”21 Whether individual cases appeared romantically colourful or unremarkably common, the capacious category of illegal commerce labelled “piracy” grew largely out of legal practices and social realities – that is, social and labour practices so egregious as to encourage a spectrum of resistant behaviours.22 The very culture of seafaring, then, whether displayed under the auspices of a national flag, a merchant’s lucrative trade, or the Jolly Roger, gave way to a cluster of associations with mobility, unpredictability, and moral and physical danger. In other words, sailors seemed to embody the “economic, spatial, and psychic mobility” that Patricia Fumerton finds in the daily lives of early modern commoners, particularly those associated with the sea.23 It is as though, in the early modern imagination, men of the maritime world took on the qualities of the ocean itself, which writers often appropriated as a metaphor for the fickle nature of life, as in the ballad “A comparison of the life of Man” (c. 1624–80): “Mans life is like a ship oth Seas, / Which is sometimes as Fortune please, / Sometimes in safety, yet still not so, / Even as proud Boreas blasts doe blow.” The presence of a sailor in a love ballad therefore applies this inherent instability to a consideration of the risky nature of marriage itself and exposes that particular social contract’s vulnerability to destabilization and disaster. After all, given the perilous conditions described earlier, even the most steadfast and valiant sailors might leave and never return. As for less resolute men, one ballad recounting the story of Danseker the Dutchman poses a provocative quandary: “Some Christians so delight in evils, / That they become the sons of Divels” (“The sea-mans song of Danse[k?]ar the Dutch-man,” 1658–64?). As a notorious rover, Danseker represents the “divel”-ish flip side of the dutiful, obedient “Christian” seafarer – a latent side perhaps but always potentially emergent. Tracing this semantic slippage between the seemingly good servant and the rapacious criminal, Sonja Schillings paraphrases the very questions that contemporaries asked: “What was the nature of common sailors – were they most appropriately viewed as monsters in disguise, slaves to be broken for the prevention of revolt, innocent subjects to be protected, citizens to be

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respected, or even sovereigns in the making?”24 Indeed, colonial expansion itself increased the uncertainty surrounding the common sailor’s true character and potentially disruptive capabilities, as the “untamed” global spaces in which sailors often laboured stood beyond the reach of law, at least as it operated in “civilized” Europe.25 The common sailor, loyal and resolute agent of empire, always held within him the potential to become something radically, threateningly other. What did this potential instability mean for landed communities tied to sailors, dependent on them not only for wages but bound to them affectively as well? The question acquired more urgency as the requirements of empire building brought about increased training programs for mariners and impressment campaigns that sent large numbers of men to sea.26 Early imperialist arguments do not consider the effects of these men’s absence from home because those arguments cast the sailor strictly in the role of mobile labour, fully detachable from his landed affiliations and commitments. The ballads, however, maintain a sense of those terrestrial ties and explore what can happen when death, distance, and mobility disrupt them. Whether a sailor’s work takes him to Spain, Italy, the Indies, the Americas, or elsewhere, his connections to his landed intimates remain. I note in the introduction to this book Julia Schleck’s observation concerning the men of the East India Company and their wives, which bears repeating here: “social formations such as ‘the economy’ are often reified and alienated from the bodies through whose actions that economy is constituted and through whose desires and motions economic history should be told.”27 As we shall see, the sailor ballads of early imperial Britain tell a different kind of story by countering the reification of the sailor’s labour with the voices of those for whom sailors represent other – more tangible, less ­quantifiable – things. “Though He Seem’d a Fariner”: Ballad Maidens and Their Sailors Thanks to a tradition of ballad criticism starting with the early ­twentieth-century work of Hyder E. Rollins, it is now difficult to dismiss the early modern English ballad as merely frivolous entertainment. As scholars since Rollins have elaborated, even the most bawdy or comic ballads yield important insights into early modern culture, particularly the “popular” spaces inhabited by commoners, craftspeople, labourers, the vagrant, and the poor.28 Common modes and themes – the love story, the nostalgic yarn, the report of supernatural events in otherwise unremarkable settings – reflect not only the tastes of a wide range of social classes but also the subjects of conversation

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among those classes; as Frederick O. Wage puts it, “The themes, ideas, histories contained in urban broadsides were mostly chosen to be of immediate, local, topical interest, to the widest possible audience.”29 Thus ballads, composed with an ear close to the topical ground, have been described as more closely approximating “news-stories and editorials” than poetry, and, like the modern newspaper, they were printed in the millions.30 Natascha Wurzbach modifies this assessment by reminding us that the early modern balladeer, as purveyor of “news,” was not bound to tell the unadorned “truth” in a manner we might expect of journalists today.31 Rather, ballads treating current events impart news in an often whimsical and fantastical form, stoking popular fascination and, through the use of rhyme and ballad metre, encouraging audiences to commit the episode to memory through song.32 Indeed, we can be as sceptical of the literal truths of ballads as we can of any imaginative text – play, poem, or prose narrative – inspired by local events or concerns. However, ballads as a genre offer certain unique features that shape the kinds of stories told and how they are told; in the case of cultural discourse about sailors these features allow ballads to complicate the optimistic sureties and triumphalist convictions embraced by much contemporaneous imperialist discourse. First, ballads themselves were materially ephemeral, printed on cheap paper, cheaply bought and sold, and reusable for a variety of homely and pragmatic ends such as kindling, toilet paper, pipe stuffing, and makeshift wallpaper on alehouse walls. Fumerton correlates this transience with the “vagrant” culture of the working classes and the poor who inhabited alehouses and learned ballad songs; this vagrancy, I would add, epitomizes the very qualities of the poor that writers such as Hitchcock and Misselden proposed to eliminate by putting commoners to work. Second, ballads commonly assume dialogue form, whereby two characters debate divergent points of view in a way that is only superficially, if ever, resolved, as we see in “The Mothers Kindness.”33 Third, this rehearsal of different perspectives is delivered not only as readable print – again, inaccessible to many – but also as song, a fact that permits singers to actually voice those points of view, perhaps even memorize them, and thus take on a series of what Paxton Hehmeyer calls “provisional subjectivities.”34 Thus the singer, sometimes a professional singer but just as likely a regular alehouse-goer, inhabits the point of view of the sailor, the maiden, the mother, Robin Hood, or whoever speaks in the ballad. To adopt another’s perspective, not only in mind but also in voice and body, raises the possibility of empathy, an understanding gained by actually voicing the words of one different from oneself. Such conventions allow ballads to impart an experience

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of reality that may diverge widely from the perspectives available to elites who could access and read books. Taken together, the features of vagrancy, dialectic structure, and orality give ballads the potential to tell a kind of “masterless history.” Specifically, the sailor ballads narrate personal, lived histories that imperialist writers take for granted when advocating for the timely recruitment of commoners onto ships. These histories are authenticated by the kinds of truth claims that, as Frances E. Dolan argues, characterize ballads’ tendency to “create the appearance of truth without really constituting it.”35 The first such strategy, according to Dolan, manifests in the strategic insertion of supposedly factual detail. While these sailor ballads, like others, tell fantastical and unlikely stories, they also contain elements that tether these stories to specific localities and individuals. Some name specific ports, such as Yarmouth, Bristol, Plymouth, and Wapping, although these locations also may simply invoke well-known coastal towns where sailors could be reasonably assumed to congregate. Some give their lovers generic names such as “Will” and “Kate” or “Thomas” and “Betty,” but others name particular individuals, such as “Mary Shalford, near Ratliff-Cross.” The ballads’ relationship to actual fact, however, is for our purposes less important than the fact that their scenarios were imaginable for ballad writers and held some level of basic plausibility for audiences hearing and reading them. They do so by means of another, more general, strategy that Dolan ascribes to early modern ballads: by rallying the kinds of “popular knowledge, widely used language, and tenacious associations” that lend ballads evocative power as “caches of metaphors and tropes, anxieties and desires, conventional scripts and jarring details.”36 For example, whether or not an actual sailor named Anthony wooed a maid named Susan while having “seaven wives” elsewhere, such a thing still was conceivable when sailors travelled to the very places named by the ballad as homes for Anthony’s other women: Holland, Virginia, Calais, Wales, and elsewhere in England. America, the Indies, Jamaica, and Mediterranean ports all figure by name as locations potentially influencing a sailor’s fidelity to his English love; these are the same locations to which merchants and mercantilists looked to cultivate maritime empire. Thus when “The Mariner’s Delight, or, The Seaman’s Seaven Wives” concludes by warning maidens to be wary of sailors, it offers advice that brings imagination to bear on actual fact, with an eye towards a population – the young women of England – for which imperialist tracts do not account.37 One example demonstrates several threads of this alternative discourse. “The Virgins Constancy; Or the Faithfull Marriner, Who proved most loyall, though he seem’d a Fariner” (c. 1647–65) offers a particularly

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rich exploration of the vexing questions that hovered around the common sailor: his constancy in love and marriage, his low social and occupational status and his countervailing potential to enrich the kingdom, and his association with “roving.” It is a song in dialogue form, first delivered in the voice of a rich young woman, “Kate,” who is in love with a poor mariner, “Will.” Will speaks in the second half. Kate has “cruel friends” who do not approve of her matrimonial choice and, in response, confine her in her house “as a Bird in Cage […] With Iron Barrs and Bolts.” The first part of the ballad voices her despair as she speaks from her makeshift prison: Hard hap had I, poor harmlesse Maid, Thus by the Fates to be betray’d. My Loyal Friend, whose constant love, No tortures great could e’r remove, Was forc’d from me for to depart, Yet he alone enjoys my Heart.

The refrain “Yet he alone enjoys my Heart” punctuates the end of each ensuing stanza, thus repeating the maiden’s devotion to her “constant love.”38 Fortunately for Kate, Will proves to be equally “constant”; by the second part her friends have died, and Will has returned to claim her. By the end of the story Will not only marries Kate as promised but also sweetens the couple’s moral victory by bringing home “most costly goods” from his travels.39 Thus everything appears to work out for the best: the snobbish friends who oppose the marriage disappear, and the unfairly maligned sailor returns to fulfil his promise with new wealth in tow – tangible proof of his selfless devotion both to his betrothed and to his country. The couple’s turmoil seems worth it in the end. Yet suggestions about what could have happened – that is, a tragic betrayal of both the maid and her country – remain. This tension registers in the ballad’s subheading: “[T]he Faithfull Marriner, Who proved most loyall, though he seem’d a Fariner.” Ballads typically employed extended subheadings to give prospective buyers an idea of what the ballad would contain.40 In this case, the conditional phrase “though he seem’d a Fariner” qualifies the term loyall and introduces an element of danger into the story. That danger is encapsulated in the term fariner, that is, the thing that Will “seem’d” to be at first. While the Oxford English Dictionary does not list the word, one close approximation would be foreigner, a word indicating not only a “stranger” but also a “non-­ guildsman.” Stranger, in seventeenth-century usage, suggests potentially malevolent otherness; non-guildsman adds a further association with

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non-incorporated, essentially vagrant, wage labour.41 Taken together, both meanings signify the incursion of something radically unstable and detrimental into the maiden’s body and into the community. This apprehension of a foreign threat recalls Jonathan Gil Harris’s exploration of the reliance of mercantilist discourse on metaphors of invasive disease.42 According to Harris, mercantilist writings demonstrate a keen awareness that England’s competitive pursuit of global trade, while deemed good and necessary in itself, also opened the nation to the rest of the world and thus invited the destabilizing incursion of various border-crossers: human beings, commodities, and literal diseases.43 Notably, the common sailor was associated with all three of these migratory phenomena: he transported commodities, his labour made him a commodity, and his purportedly “roving” nature made him particularly apt to bring venereal diseases home, as the “The seamans frolick” suggests. Likewise, the putatively “faithfull mariner” of “The Virgins Constancy” carries similar associations with foreign infection. The rhyme between Marriner and fariner, like many uses of end-rhyme, suggests a relationship between the two terms; in this case, the flip side of the mariner is the foreigner within, always lurking and ready to infect the community’s norms and values.44 This idea of the sailor as “fariner” echoes in the contemporaneous ballad “The valiant sea-mans happy return to his love, after seven long years absence” (1672–96). Here the sailor returns to a maiden who believes he is dead and thus does not recognize him. When he presents her with a ring, she refuses the gift, insisting that she will “have no stranger.” Yet even after she realizes his true identity, she perceives that her beloved has changed in the direction of “strangeness”: she remarks on how he now is “well versed in several speeches” and jokes that, if he could coin money, he would get riches. Thus even the faithful sailor bears the stamp of the “fariner” in that he has learned to impersonate the speech of a stranger quite convincingly and even, if he wishes, could profit from that impersonation with the help of counterfeit currency.45 The idea of the faithful sailor as erstwhile “fariner” raises other cultural sensitivities as well. First is the island nation’s relative weakness as a small, geographically isolated Protestant realm facing Catholic Europe.46 The Catholic threat, sustained in political propaganda and religious discourse throughout the period, registers in “The Unchangeable Lovers” (1662–91), in which an English maiden presses her sailor, bound for Venice, to promise he will resist the city’s temptations. He reassures her: Tis true that we Sailers strange wonders do see, And strangers oft kind

The Common Sailor in the Ballads of Early British Empire  99 to the English will be, But the beauties of Venice can never come near Thy Feature, my darling my Love and my dear.

The phrase “beauties of Venice” indicates Venetian women but also alludes to the sailor’s impending exposure to Catholicism and the possibility that such exposure will alter his character. “Mary Foart” of “Loyal Constancy; Or, The Seamans Love-Letter” (1672–96) expresses a similar worry when she begs her beloved, this one bound for Catholic Iberia, to “[l]et not Spains beauty gain thy duty / nor win thee by her charms.” Here “Spain,” like “Venice,” evokes a cluster of associations with sexual temptation and Catholicism, both of which threaten to exert an inalterable influence on the English sailor, to render him, in other words, a “fariner.” A geographical variation on the theme can be found in “The sea-mans answer to his sweet-hearts loyal loveetter” (1641–72), in which the maiden asks a lover bound for the Anglo-Dutch Wars to resist the allure of foreign beauty; the motif is visible also in Thomas Deloney’s “The Spanish lady’s love to an English sailor” (1543–1600), which depicts a virtuous Englishman turning down the advances of an Iberian noblewoman to whom a less steadfast Englishman might easily succumb. Foreign women in ballads, it seems, are always scheming to obtain E ­ nglish men and thus, through the intermingling of languages, religions, and ethnic identities, compromise their Englishness. But whether sailors can resist such temptations, and the exotic cultural trappings in which they are packaged, remains an open possibility. So then does the risk of foreign “infections” – sexual, religious, and c­ ultural – being brought home by men with recent exposure to strangers and their customs. Another theme highlighted in “The Virgins Constancy” and echoed elsewhere is social mobility and the role of wealth and marriage in promoting it. As noted, landed class hierarchies often were replicated on ships (with the exception of pirate vessels).47 Yet, when ballads valorize the common sailor, as they often did, that valorization confronts the very hierarchies that devalue him on the basis of his degree. For example, “Neptunes Raging Fury” echoes the sentiments of the Goldsmiths’ entertainment, which opens this book by asserting that, in the burgeoning age of worldwide trade, the hard work and bravery of “poor” yet “valiant” seamen help the landed upper classes maintain themselves in their accustomed luxury: We bring home costly merchandize, and Jewels of great price,

100  Ships of State To serve our English gallantry, with many a rare device: To please the English gallantry our pains we freely show, For we toyl and we moile, when the story winds do blow.

These lines offer a perspective on mercantilism that, unlike most at the time, gives full attention to the common sailor’s otherwise thankless role in prospering the nation, or, to more pointedly state the case, the elites of his nation. Similar sentiments echo in “The praise of Saylors here set forth, With the hard fortunes which do befall them on the Seas, when ­Landmen sheep [sic] safe on their beds” (1658–64), which features a narrator reflecting on the comfort that he and others like him enjoy at the sailor’s expense: “Our Saylors they work night and day / their mand-hood for to try, / When Landed men and ruffling Jacks / Do in their Cabins lye.” Here the word landed puns on two interrelated forms of entitlement, one being the privilege of remaining on land and out of danger, and the other alluding to land as the traditional basis for social entitlement. A “[l]anded m[a]n,” in other words, maintains his status in both senses precisely due to the sacrifices of un-landed, common maritime men. This ballad, like “Neptunes Raging Fury,” proposes that the sailor deserves praise and admiration, rather than snobbish contempt, for the fact that he ventures to supply his betters with goods that he presumably does not enjoy himself. The sentiments of those ballads, while certainly assertive on the behalf of sailors, do not necessarily disrupt the status quo that keeps landed gentlemen and un-landed sailors in their “places.” The love ballads, however, do introduce the possibility of upward social mobility because, when the sailor brings foreign wealth home to earn and enhance his own marriage, he is partly appropriating that wealth to himself and no longer only serves his betters. In “The gallant seamans return from the Indies, or the happy meeting of two faithful lovers” (1674–9), “Betty” is pursued by a sailor who woos her with the wealth he stands to bring home: “If I do get treasure i’le bring it to thee, / And i’le venture my life for my pretty Betty.” Among this “treasure,” he promises, she will receive “new fashions.” As historical scholarship on early modern clothing has detailed, fashions were intimately tied with class identity, hence the rationale for sumptuary laws dictating the social degrees that may wear certain materials.48 The sailor’s promise of new fashions for Betty accordingly implies an upward change in social status, one both expressed and achieved through rich clothing. N ­ otably, Betty deliberately resists other men who could give her such things

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without going abroad: she assures her lover that she is not interested in any “London knight.” Therefore, the virtuous maiden professes both a clear preference for her sailor over higher-born suitors and a desire to stay in her community rather than relocate to a more cosmopolitan one; her reunion with her sailor thus confirms both the affirmation of nonelite social identity and the social mobility that a successful common sailor can provide. Mary Foart of “Loyal Constancy; Or, The Seamans Love-Letter” similarly rejects the “London youth[s]” who come calling while her lover is away. Her preference, like that of Betty, affirms non-elite identity and values; it also affirms the humble community in which she resides, as she resists the allure of the capital – so often described as a den of iniquity by contemporaneous writers49 – and its glittering promises of luxury. The laudable goal, it seems, is not the old wealth of lineage and land but the new wealth to be gained by the valour and diligence that the common sailor, at his best, epitomizes. Inherent in this idea, however, is a more traditional attitude that the accumulation of riches, when motivated by self-interest, can have corrosive effects on both the individual and the surrounding community, starting with the maiden and her sailor. Indeed, the couples in these texts openly disclaim desire for riches for its own sake, enjoying wealth only as the after-effect of the more virtuous behaviours of waiting patiently, resisting temptation, and remaining steadfast. Another “Betty,” this time in “The constant maids resolution: or The damsels loyal love to a seaman,” explicitly defies her father’s command that she marry a man of wealth: “what care I for a misers money / So that I may have my own dear honey.”50 The rhetorical foil of the grasping miser calibrates any potential enjoyment of wealth away from self-interested accumulation, thus defining the “right” way to receive riches as the effect of virtue, hard work, and selflessness. Parker’s “Saylors for my money” also conditions the enjoyment of wealth by attaching it to the qualities that sailors emblematize: resolution, diligence, and the virtuous exercise of liberty. The ballad assures its audience that, even though these sailors return home with “wealthe,” “there’s none more free than sailors” and that they care nothing for “a crowne” – suggesting indifference not only to possessing the money (metonymically speaking, the “crowne” on a coin) but also to receiving the quasi-royal entitlement (the “crowne” one might wear) that comes with it. The more tragic ballads often feature parents who refuse to see such “nobility,” as they oppose the marriage of a daughter to a sailor “so meanly bred” (“The Yarmouth Tragedy,” 1728–63), preferring that the daughter marry a rich merchant or wealthy gentleman. In such cases the destructive effects of greed are demonstrated in

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a series of events leading to the tragic death of both lovers, as can be seen in “The Yarmouth Tragedy,” which ends with a pointed warning to parents who covet gold, and in “The Plymouth tragedy” (1736–63) as well. One more set of cultural anxieties emerges in the common sailor’s effect on the sexual morality of a community. As “The Mothers ­Kindness” points out, sailors reputedly have “a wife or friend at e’ery port,” and even ballads that extol the sailor often do so from a defensive posture. “Saylors deserve no wrong,” proclaims the speaker of “The praise of sailors,” making a statement that begs the question of who might believe sailors do deserve wrong. Certainly, the writer of “A Display Of the Headpiece and Codpiece Valour of the most renowned Colonel Robert Jermy” (1660) seems to think so because the ballad names, shames, exposes, and ridicules a naval officer who impregnated a maiden and then abandoned her to sail for New England. Other ­ballads  – for example “The Laundry-Maids Lamentation for the Loss of her Seaman” (1672–96), “The Gosport Tragedy” (c. 1728), and “The Faithless Captain” (1802–9) – rehearse their own stories in which a maiden (and therefore her family and community) becomes burdened with a fatherless child due to one sailor’s “roving.” Indeed, while the sailor in these songs is excoriated as an individual, his actions reverberate more widely into the community he leaves behind. Moreover, even sailors who commit no such wrong might negatively affect the sexual morality of a community on account of their very absence. “The Distressed Damsels: Or, a doleful Ditty of a sorrowful Assembly of young maidens […] to bewail the Loss of their Loves which were lately press’d away to Sea (c. 1675–96) addresses the effects of naval impressment on forlorn young women deprived of husbands. The women wander aimlessly about the town, the ballad reports, in a “sorrowful case.” The shortage of marriageable young men threatens to become so dire that, the ballad predicts, these unattached girls soon become prostitutes: Last year I declare, young Maids was choice War[e] But now they grow wonderful plenty I sware, All over the Town they walk up and down, I reckon you may have a Score for a Crown, By Midsummer.

A town full of “streetwalkers” is a morally threatened town indeed. Impressment is to blame and thus becomes a potential social ill rather than a means by which to achieve a greater national good.

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The possibility of widespread prostitution imagined in “The Distressed Damsels” leads to a related question: what if the sailor’s absence encourages women to do some “roving” of their own? Here too the ballads have stories to tell as they demonstrate, in Fumerton’s words, that “maids as well as men change.”51 The title of “I Father a Child that’s none of my own” (c. 1672–96) anticipates the tale to come, that of a sailor’s wife who turns out to be a “Whore instead of a Saint” as she takes full sexual advantage of a seven-year separation from her husband. When the husband arrives home at last, he finds her pregnant, leaving him, the survivor of a perilous deep-sea voyage, ironically “Ship-wrack’d on Land” instead. Another ballad, Joseph Martin’s “The Seaman’s Folly In Marrying One so quickly” (c. 1686), warns sailors off marrying altogether by telling of a new bride who cuckolded her husband the very next day; “The Seamans safe Return” (c. 1671–1702) and “The Seamans Wives ranting Resolution” (c. 1680–2) also recount the merry transgressions of absent sailors’ wives. “The Seamans safe Return” suggests that infidelity is not just a personal or family matter but also a public one. After neighbors inform a returned sailor that his wife has been conducting an affair with a shoemaker and spending all the sailor’s money, the sailor brings them both before the local justice. The justice upbraids not only the wife and the shoemaker but also the sailor, telling him that “though indeed you wear the [horn] / you are a fool to blow it” and ordering the couple to reconcile. The justice’s order privileges the restoration of domestic, and ultimately public, harmony over individual punishment, thus indicating that the sexual immorality resulting in a sailor’s absence was viewed ultimately as a community issue, not just an individual problem.52 These stories of deep-sea sailors and their loves demonstrate that the common sailor was not just a commodity, an instrument of wage labour interchangeable with other sailors and easily replaced when lost. He was, the ballads tell us, an embodied subject with affective attachments that his status as imperial labourer could not so easily erase. The best testament to that fact is the women left behind on land, subjects who figure infrequently in historical accounts of early modern seafaring and not at all in the fervent dreams of early modern imperialists. Indeed, writers such as Hakluyt, Dee, Misselden, and Hitchcock had their eyes on the imperial prize, trained on the sea’s horizon. But the ballads disrupt this optimistic vision by showing that the domestic effects of seaborne labour could reverberate beyond the exigencies of mass employment and economic expansion. The ballads ask what the price of such outcomes would be, vacillating between the binaries of wealth and corruption, love and abandonment, virtue and incontinence. The sailor

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ballads remind their audiences that economic development is never merely about riches but also about the social, moral, and emotional life of the nation’s communities. Economic Nationalism and Its Discontents The ballads discussed in this chapter, like all the texts analysed in this book, represent the early stages of an imperialist discourse that would change shape in the later years of empire. By the late Victorian era the figure of the common sailor would become associated with an ideal of “naval manhood,” as Mary A. Conley describes in her study of seafaring and masculinity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth ­centuries. In the period that Conley studies, efforts to socially and morally redeem Jack Tar were well underway in the guise of naval reforms, a subject to which I will return in the conclusion to this book. At that time, such administrative efforts coincided with the appearance of print illustrations, ballads, and chinaware that romanticized the sailor as a man deeply attached to his home and family. These representations, Conley argues, “began to assert a cohesive masculinity that was endowed with self-restraint, respectability and bravery.”53 Of course, the need for such assertions in the first place stemmed from the assumption that sailors needed to be socially and morally redeemed in order to fit within new cultural ideals of family, home, and domesticity. The ballads examined here demonstrate exactly how problematic the sailor’s image had been, centuries before, for imagining his place within such ideals. As I have shown, even the most loyal and faithful sailors in the ballads of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shadow the possibility that they could easily become treacherous for domestic life. Thus, before the sailor became a symbol of imperial greatness, particularly one linked with idealized notions of the domestic sphere, his symbolic status was as much in flux as the early modern economy itself. Although the ballads display this fluctuation in its nuances and different applications, the conversation about sailors was not limited to the ballads alone. In an illustrative example, Thomas Middleton’s play The Phoenix anticipates the very problematic roving nature of the sailor from the vantage point of 1603–4. Here an unnamed mariner, generically named Captain, marries the widowed mother of a nobleman and immediately regrets his decision just as much as her horrified adult son regrets it on her behalf. As the son worries over her having married a professional wanderer, the Captain himself chafes at the ribbing of his mates and wonders over more serious matters in private – chiefly, the likelihood that his new bride will cuckold him while he is at sea.

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He responds to these fears by attempting to sell his wife to a wealthy merchant. Claire Jowitt reads the Captain as hyperbolically individualist and sexually deviant, a significant aberration from the conservative political ethos of the rest of the play.54 I wish to suggest, however, that the Captain is not so aberrant when it comes to the class of men to which he belongs and to what they signified in the culture at large. As in the ballads, questions of illicit ambition, sexual infidelity, and greed circulate around this figure, named generically as if to summon associations with sailors in general. Although the Captain is forced to repent his actions at the end of the play, such an ending is about as conclusive as the putatively happy endings of the sailor ballads: it leaves many questions open to debate and in no way resolves the potential social problems wrought by roving, absent men. The concerns raised by Middleton’s Captain, and elaborated over the course of the ballads discussed here, present a powerful response to the giddy pursuit of wealth prescribed by imperialist and mercantilist writers and pursued by the period’s merchants. In a recent popular book Stephen Alford details the lives of the most famous and successful of these London merchants – men such as Richard Gresham and his son Thomas, Anthony Jenkinson, Michael Lok, and Thomas Smythe – and shows how global trade did indeed bring wealth into the kingdom and elevate these men to great heights.55 Yet such histories, concerned as they are with the fruits of mercantile “venturing” and the opportunistic spirit that inspired them,56 necessarily occlude the stories of the (usually anonymous) men whose dangerous labours made these voyages possible. For the common sailor and his landed associates, risk involved not only economic, but also moral and social, consequences that were unimagined by mercantilist writers; hesitation at these consequences is reflected, in various ways, in the sailor ballads.57 In a sense the ballads, as “low” and “vagrant” forms, inhabit this potential for instability; at the same time, they also represent cautious and thoughtful meditations on the kinds of actions and policies that incur certain risks and at cost to traditional ways of life. In other words, the sailor ballads, as a subgenre of the popular ballad form, both exemplify mercantilists’ openness to risk and display arguments against it by focusing on the vulnerable body and attachments of the sailor himself. Between the faithful would-be husband returning home and the wily rover with a “wife or friend at e’ery Port,” the sailor’s significance to early imperial England sits squarely not with one of those polarities but ultimately between them.

Conclusion: The “Painefull Sea-Man” of Later Imperial Britain

In this book I have argued that the representations of the essential, yet marginalized, common seaman found in proto-imperial literature signal a different kind of cultural conversation than the one found in the works of imperial apologists and promoters. While those latter texts, written as they were for investors and policymakers, treat the common seaman as a necessary commodity – one that must be carefully managed on account of his alleged criminal tendencies and childlike proclivities – the more popularized texts I have examined here point towards an expanded view of the seaman’s importance, one that inherently speculates on the ambiguous but nonetheless transformative effects of a burgeoning maritime empire on domestic life. The genres under study here incorporate a capacious range of human subjects (women, land dwellers, and entire terrestrial communities in addition to seamen) as well as a socially diverse range of readers, thus enacting a dynamic engagement between writers and audiences that facilitates critical perspectives on the imperial project. The result, I have shown, is a dynamic literary engagement with the promises and dangers of empire. I also have shown ways in which different genres allow particular perspectives on commoners’ labour as part of maritime empire. For example, the promotional literature addressing England’s cultivation of the North Atlantic argues for imposing extractive capitalist management onto a supposedly languishing population of English fishermen working in the region. Yet the promotional writers make this argument not by directly addressing elite investors and policymakers, those “better sorts” in the management class, but by striving to persuade commoners themselves to migrate and thus escape the hardships of domestic life in England. By contrast, drama staged in London’s public venues speaks to the importance of fishermen and other English mariners in a

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different register. The Lord Mayor’s shows of the Fishmongers’ Company, for example, promote the physical labour of the common seaman through striking visual devices and rhetorical commendations of seamen hard at work; paradoxically, they do so in order to appropriate that labour in the service of elite power. Yet, if the Lord Mayor’s shows appear to affirm class-labour hierarchies within the fishing industry, and by extension the maritime world generally, drama staged in the playhouses complicates those hierarchies by staging the seaman’s labour in ways that only ambiguously argue for the ascendancy of elite governors. In the case of early seventeenth-century romance drama the practical everydayness of the common seaman’s labour poses a distinct counterdiscourse to the entitlement of courtiers, princes, and other would-be inheritors of empire. In contrast to these genres of imaginative writing, the ballad archive speaks to the imperial project in a more homely register, one that permeates the everyday spaces in which ballads were sung, circulated, and read. When sailor ballads portray the triumphant stories as well as the lamentable outcomes heralded by the mass recruitment of men into the merchant service and the navy, they ultimately invite audiences to ponder the possibilities of empire for social mobility while imagining its deleterious effects on English communities. When we study these genres in their own terms and place them in conversation with one another, the common seaman’s symbolic status as a lightning rod in the cultural debate about empire becomes visible. Although my discussion covers a range of different perspectives, these perspectives also suggest areas for future study outside the scope of this book. Topics for additional research emerge from within the crucible of the Mediterranean trading region, the sphere of Atlantic modernity, and areas less explored by early modern literary scholars, such as the Indian Ocean. For example, the “Black Atlantic,” a term coined by Paul Gilroy, serves as a potent reminder that the British imperial subject, even one as lowly born and roughly used as the common sailor, still “belonged” to the homeland by virtue of his presumed Whiteness, even as his labour conditions invited comparison to – and even affinity with – the forced labour performed by non-White chattel slaves. The seeming paradoxes within the sailor’s identity and labour conditions invite further investigation into how imperial work cultures blurred discursive boundaries of race. As Emma Christopher observes, White sailors derived much of their ideals of liberty from proximity to Black slavery;1 likewise, Eleanor Hubbard notes that British seamen operating in East India “were considered to be stronger, more steadfast, and more courageous in battle than Asian seamen […] They were, all in all,

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thought to be more manly.”2 These facts complicate historical narratives of common cause between White proletarians and imperial labourers of colour, much as their respective conditions stood them in exploitative relation to the same power structures. Race, in other words, was a critical yet constantly fluctuating aspect of a common sailor’s identity, an aspect that – along with his class and labour status – shaped his participation in maritime empire. Various dimensions of gender, as they manifested in the common sailor’s world, also merit further enquiry. Because women generally did not work on board ships, as Valerie Burton observes, “[i]mages and narratives of sea-going have afforded powerful ways of representing maleness.”3 Yet this maleness is neither monolithic nor stable; rather, it assumes different class-based modes and expressions, according to the “rough,” “artisanal,” or “gentlemanly” work cultures in which a sailor might participate, and these hierarchical differences, whereby labour structures mirror broader social structures, become even more pronounced in the nineteenth century.4 Of course, these male-­dominated shipboard cultures also served as sites of heterodox expressions of sexual desire, trans and non-binary identity, and gender fluidity, as embodied both within individual men and within the shipboard collective, although some historians have argued that, for various reasons, such digressions from heterosexual norms occurred less often than contemporaries sometimes assume of a presumably all-male environment.5 Nonetheless these expressions, when unearthed from the archives and made subject to scholarly scrutiny, might well revise and complicate certain aspects of “male” seafaring culture – for example, the stereotypically masculine activities of “drinking and whoring” that are supposedly endogamous to common seafaring men and thought to signify a certain kind of virility and prowess.6 Thus, although this book focuses on class and labour organization, various articulations of race and gender intersect with these markers and thus help define, and at the same time complicate, both the image and the reality of the common seaman. Yet, in addition to exploring this complex formation of identities, it is also necessary to consider the impact of emerging technologies that enabled Britain’s maritime dominance. Looking towards developments in the northwest ­Atlantic, Kenneth A. Andrews observes an “uncomfortable but improving alliance between sailor and scientist,”7 as elaborated by the early ­seventeenth-century explorer Luke Foxe: “For it is not enough to be a Sea-man, but to be a painefull Sea-man; for a Sea-bred man of reasonable Capacity may attaine to so much Art as may serve to Circle the Earths Globe about; but the other, wanting the experimentall part,

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cannot; for I do not allow any to be a good Sea-man that hath not undergone the most Offices about a Ship and that hath not in his youth bin both taught and inured to all labours.”8 The “painefull Sea-man,” according to Foxe, possesses both technical knowledge (“so much Art as may serve to Circle the Earths Globe about”) and experience (“the experimentall part”), which afford him practical command of a ship’s various functions. In this sense, he resembles the eighteenth-century man of “craft” described by Cohen, a man merely shadowed but nonetheless anticipated in the Tudor/Jacobean texts explored in this book. As the maritime empire developed past this period, technologies adding “art” to the seaman’s “experimentall” acumen included the map, the astrolabe, the H1 chronometer, and the logbook. As such, shipboard culture became, according to Ulrich Kinzel, a culture of expertise and learning that equipped crews to withstand better the heretofore “contingent,” dangerous, and unpredictable nature of sea travel.9 Skill and science combined to set the terms for imperial success, as seen in the great age of British sea power that took hold in the centuries following this book’s main historical focus. Or so it would seem. That is to say, the extent to which such developments ultimately succeeded in conquering the forces of nature, not to mention the conflicts that arose from a diverse colonial population largely subjected to exploitation, is itself subject to scrutiny. In fact, for all the historical changes outlined here, portrayals of common seamen after the Tudor/Jacobean period demonstrate a persistence – from the seventeenth century to the nadir of maritime empire to the gradual decline of empire within the nineteenth century – of the paradox I have identified in this book: the hardy servant of empire, even at his most competent, remains vulnerable to violence from his colleagues as well as foreign “others” and is subject to overwhelming natural forces and technological failures. The rest of this chapter explores that paradox with respect to The Terror, Dan Simmons’s 2007 historical novel that was adapted as a television series, which was produced by Ridley Scott and aired on AMC in the spring of 2018. The novel and series speculate on the fate of the Franklin Expedition, the crew of which attempted to locate the Northwest Passage but mysteriously disappeared after their departure from Britain in 1845. The Terror, as both book and television adaptation, critically explores the continuance of the myths of the heroic imperial sailor, the assurance of technology, Britain’s manifest destiny, and the wisdom of shipboard hierarchy and labour management. Furthermore, as artefacts of contemporary popular culture, the book and the series utilize imaginative language to expose the vulnerabilities of the later British empire, an entity imagined by seventeenth-century

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imperialists and still largely associated today with glory and triumph. Hubbard writes that “[f]ull acceptance of sailors as British heroes had to wait until the mid-19th century, when sailing ships had become a sentimentalized reminder of a simpler past.”10 Yet The Terror shows that the nineteenth-century seaman himself may be, for us, similarly sentimentalized and simplified, a fact that opens that figure up to scrutiny through twenty-first-century art. Imperial Horror: The Terror’s “Shipwreck Metaphorics” My sense of the post-Tudor/Jacobean sailor, and the suggestive possibilities for his representation, derive in part from an assessment by maritime historian Roger Morriss of the “triumphal view of the expansion of Britain’s maritime empire, naval power and economic wealth” that defined imperial thought during the flourishing of the empire and has left its imprint on later historical accounts. Morriss argues that this triumphalism that colours so many imperial histories has been conditioned by upper-class bias, with the empire’s alleged heroes deriving mainly from the ranks of “statesmen, military officers and gentlemen capitalists.”11 This observation indicates that the technological changes that took root in the nineteenth century cannot be assessed fully without also considering how social changes in the period reflected in shipboard management, structures that display the fulfilment of a social process that I, in this book, saw underway in previous centuries. Within this historical trajectory the ascendancy of Lord Nelson at Trafalgar (1805), as well as other great naval victories, established a turning point for public perception of the seaman. “No longer despised as a social outcast, or pitied as the victim of an unjust system,” writes Christopher Lloyd, the sailor “became admired as the chief defender of the country at a period when the Army played a small and inglorious part in its defence.”12 Lloyd elaborates on this shift in perception by pointing to “the number of popular products dating from this time, which range from Staffordshire and Sunderland pottery to ballads, songs and innumerable cartoons of which the British tar is represented in the image of the national hero.”13 Such cultural celebrations of the seaman, however, were belied by other events that fractured his developing image as unambiguous “national hero.” The Spithead and Nore mutinies of 1797, for example, are famous episodes from a period of flourishing radicalism in the Atlantic; although the Spithead mutiny was relatively peaceful, the Nore mutiny was spontaneous, disorderly, and clearly motivated by radical political ideals. The expansion of the officer corps, as well as formal mechanisms of shipboard punishment, had contributed to such discontent.14

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The Royal Navy underwent a series of reforms at this time, whereby “the power of surveillance” was brought to bear on notions of personal responsibility and appropriate conduct.15 In short, to manage the oceans, the navy itself had to be managed – as did the Newfoundland fishermen in earlier times, as I describe in chapter 1 – and for this reason, Siobhan Carroll observes, “many eighteenth- and ­nineteenth-century literary works portray the ocean as a space that troubles rather than supports Britain’s pretensions to imperial power.”16 Against this historical backdrop of patriotic heroism punctuated by rebellious discontent, The Terror tells a story not only of sailors versus nature but of sailors at war with each other and within themselves. It is a story that speaks most immediately, perhaps, to the historical memory of the Napoleonic British navy; however, I aim to position it also within the longer historical narrative undertaken in this book, where we see much earlier iterations of the British seaman’s complex social identity and symbolic power. Before I launch into a detailed discussion of the narrative itself, which takes place almost entirely among the disasters faced by the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus in the Canadian Arctic, it may be helpful to recall Hans Blumenberg’s influential text Shipwreck and Spectator, in which he identifies the nineteenth century as “the epoch of shipwrecks.”17 In that sense, the fate of the Franklin Expedition is not at all exceptional but in fact illustrative because England lost five thousand men a year through shipwrecks, the kinds of disasters that J.M.W. Turner portrayed vividly in his shipwreck paintings. Blumenberg extrapolates the frequency of these events into a “shipwreck metaphorics” that is characteristic of the period’s art, which he describes as possessing a “newly emerging historical consciousness and its insoluble dilemma of theoretical distance versus living engagement.”18 Although Blumenberg writes about nineteenth-century Britain, a time in which artists of the Romantic period derived much inspiration from the sea,19 the binary of “theoretical distance versus living engagement” also can be usefully applied to The Terror as twenty-first-century historical fiction. Specifically, as the horrors of “living engagement” encroach upon the Franklin crew, wrenching them out of the patriotic hubris of “theoretical distance” that informed the push into the North Atlantic in the first place, the ships’ foundering on the ice brings the sureties of science and navigation up against the reality of vulnerable men seeking to dominate forces that exceed their comprehension. Simmons’s novel fictionalizes the historical figures who travelled with the Franklin Expedition. First is Sir John Franklin himself, first-incommand and captain of the Erebus; Franklin is a devout man seeking to redeem his reputation after a prior failed Arctic expedition. His first

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officer on board the Erebus, the handsome and swaggering Commander James Fitzjames, serves as his closest friend and associate. Bearing a more antagonistic relationship to Franklin, however, is Captain Francis Crozier, who, as captain of the Terror, stands as Fitzjames’s superior yet regularly endures jibes about his dour demeanour at the hands of Franklin’s closest circle – especially when Crozier, an officer of superior seafaring skill, attempts to warn Franklin about the dangers of the ice looming ahead. The story, which is suffused with a feeling of doom from the start, contains other historical figures such as a benevolent doctor, Henry Goodsir, and the Irish caulker’s mate Cornelius Hickey, who in the television series attempts to ingratiate himself to Crozier as a fellow Irishman;when he does not succeed, he begins plotting mutiny instead. Thus the simmering conflicts among the crew, which derive largely from class-based forms of resistance to shipboard hierarchy, hobble them in the face of the unforgiving landscape and its penultimate expression, the ice monster Tuunbaq, who begins picking the men off one by one before the ships are frozen in ice and the remaining crew members are forced to abandon them. The Terror joins other contemporary popular entertainment depicting shipboard cultures of the distant or recent past. Recent examples include the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise (and its various promotional products, including a ride at Disney World), Captain Phillips, and the video game Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Often these cultural products romanticize even the uglier aspects of seafaring and, in doing so, appropriate the figure of the sailor to certain ideological and political work. For example, as James Chapman demonstrates with respect to the 2003 film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (adapted from a series of novels by Patrick O’Brian), depictions of bravery in battle can offer comment on current geopolitical developments and even take a side in those developments.20 The film’s Royal Navy captain, Aubrey, and the ship’s doctor, Maturin, represent the fusion of practical experience and science that Andrews identifies; ultimately these two figures and their crew come together to triumph against the French in the Napoleonic Wars. Attending to the historical circumstances of the film’s production and reception, Chapman notes that the nemesis throughout the film is a French ship, depicted at a time in which France was termed “old Europe” for its refusal to enter the Iraq War.21 The film proved more popular in nations that supported the invasion, unsurprisingly given its overall contribution to Anglo-­American discourses of national identity; indeed, it received ten Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director (Peter Weir), at the seventy-sixth Academy Awards as

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well as a BAFTA for Best Direction, facts that testify to its popularity and critical reception in the pro-war Anglo-American world. In contrast, The Terror is far more circumspect on the subject of the legendary maritime heroism of the past, even going so far as to dismantle the concept of heroism itself. Both the novel and the series resemble more closely the complex image of the seaman that I have revealed in this book, including the critiques of empire embedded in depictions of that figure. However, The Terror extends further into the additional topics outlined at the start of this chapter, and the novel and series map competing and overlapping intersections of race, ethnicity, religion, class, sexuality, and masculinity onto the technocratic labour structures of the mid-nineteenth century Royal Navy. In his book-length study of the famous mutiny on the HMS Bounty (a historical episode that has also been the subject of a Hollywood film), Greg Dening describes a “theater of authority” within the organization of the navy and on board its ships; he does so for the purpose of dissecting the social politics of command and what happens when the command structure is disrupted. In particular, Dening sees within the events leading up to the 1789 mutiny a developing distinction between “institutionalism” and “entrepreneurialism,” whereby officers exhibit the latter by acting in light of the social opportunity at home (as in the case of the “social dilettante” Captain Bligh) while the “institutional” men of the crew are “alienated by their sense of powerlessness over the structures they know they create by their own deferences.”22 This very alienation, however, affords the common crew members “some independence in this dialectic of dominance and deference,”23 and we see a similar dynamic play out among the officers and crew of The Terror. On board the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus, the “theater of authority” proves itself highly assailable both from without and within, thus exposing the vulnerability of the navy itself and the social and organizational forces that uphold it. Taken as a whole, The Terror ascribes a variety of causes to the failure of the Franklin Expedition, all of which work together to prompt critical reflection on the hubris of the imperial project and, by implication, on the hubris of present-day nationalistic, imperialistic thought. Along these lines Anita Lam situates the brand of historical revision or cautionary tale offered by the television series within the genre of “survival horror.” Although this generic term typically is invoked with respect to video games such as those in the Resident Evil series, Lam applies it fruitfully to The Terror by locating the novel and series within the tradition of earlier depictions of Arctic horror, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.24 In such tales, Lam explains, terror and horror are often opposed, with the

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one being expansive and sublime and the other being corporeal and compressing. Survival horror blends these two into one, as in the case of The Terror, where the north becomes “an inescapable haunted house” that “breaks Franklin” of imperialistic ambition and White Christian supremacy.25 While Lam reads The Terror chiefly as a failure of Whiteness, which finds its demise ironically in the “white beast” that is the snow monster, the story also indicts modern technology (for example, in the case of the ship’s supply of canned food, which infects the crew with lead poisoning) and, more so in the case of the novel, the destructive will to dominate the earth and its climate for the sake of “progress.”26 The point was not lost on critics who wrote about the series, deeming it a “colonialist nightmare” (Darren Franich, Entertainment Weekly) saturated with “bleak, claustrophobic whiteness” (Brian Lowry, CNN) and “endless white space” (Maureen Ryan, Variety). Within this setting, the main characters themselves evoke social ­tensions that may have originated on land but find their full expression on the expedition itself. On board the Erebus, Franklin and Fitzjames represent the officer class whose command always is inflected with ambition for cultivating a certain legacy and public image at home. Such is especially the case for Franklin, who has much to live down at the start of the expedition: not only had he failed once already in the ­Arctic ­(resulting in his men starving to death, after resorting to cannibalism, and Franklin having to eat his own shoes) but also, having been removed from his post as lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen’s Land ­(present-day Tasmania), he joined the Northwest Passage expedition due to the campaigning of his wife, the “indomitable” Lady Jane,27 who made it her project to restore his reputation at home.28 Yet his spotty history does not seem to faze him on board the Erebus, as Franklin maintains a naive confidence in the eventual triumph of the project of locating the Northwest Passage, the success of which will assure ­Britain’s command over the worldwide ocean and its trading potential. His devout Christianity also manifests as a misguided assurance that God will guide his crew through all dangers; indeed, in the television series he quixotically describes their quest as “finding the Grail.” This conviction underpins his disregard for warnings to the contrary from Crozier and other men on board, as we see when he foolishly opts to continue forward rather than wintering in the harbour, as his officers advise. Fitzjames, in his devotion to Sir John, often enables this misplaced confidence simply by appearing to assent to, or at least staying silent in the face of, Franklin’s declarations of confidence. Fitzjames’s own rise in the navy is due to his connections back home, where he counts friends in the admiralty and promotes his own reputation as a swashbuckling adventurer, despite

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his relative inexperience as a seaman. As representatives of the officer class, both men exemplify the social “entrepreneurialism” identified by Dening, as each one acts with one eye trained on his reputation in Britain. In philosophical terms, Franklin especially could be viewed as exemplifying the “stable self” from the Stoic canon that was, Kinzel notes, revived in the sixteenth century with the beginnings of deep-sea travel. The stable self in a maritime context, Kinzel writes, manifests as a “helmsman” and “the essence of the moral subject whose position (the safe harbour) [exists] beyond the changing and overwhelming modes of time and the sea.”29 Similarly, Franklin is held stable by his Christian faith and patriotic confidence in Britain’s imperial destiny, leaving him unmoved by the encroaching dangers – fatally so, as he will soon be killed by the Tuunbaq, leaving his crew and particularly Fitzjames morally disoriented and emotionally bereft. If Franklin epitomizes the stable self as well as the entrepreneurial officer class, then “short, rat-faced”30 Cornelius Hickey represents its opposite, dramatizing the ressentiment of the common crew member managed by the officer class. Within a story whose narrative is regularly interspersed with other characters’ memories in the form of fl ­ ashbacks – Crozier’s in particular, and especially in the novel – Hickey seems to exist entirely in terms of the present, where he plots mutiny and desertion through the manipulation of various crew members. Hickey is also an Irishman, a fact that is significant given the association of the 1798 mutinies with Irish rebellion. According to Morriss, “[o]f 719 mutineers seized between 1793 and 1801, 302 or 28 per cent possessed Irish birth places; in 1797, 22 per cent of those arrested were Irish; and in 1798, 75 per cent of those charged with mutiny were Irish.”31 Thus Hickey’s national identity not only marks him as lowly in the view of his English counterparts but also aligns him with the age’s spirit of political defiance. As Simmons writes, “Cornelius Hickey hated kings and queens. He thought they were all bloodsucking parasites on the corpus-ass of the body politick.”32 Hickey’s difference expresses itself in a variety of ways that offend the culture and mores promoted by the British navy. He engages in at least one tryst with a male shipmate, thus committing a highly punishable offence. As he deviates from Victorian ideas of sexual normalcy, he deviates also from Christian practice by persuading several men to engage in “superstitious” rituals that they hope will charm and pacify the Tuunbaq. His most flagrant violation of naval honour, however, occurs when he and several other crew members forcibly kidnap an Inuit woman whom the crew has dubbed “Lady Silence.” Silence becomes familiar to the crew when they take on board her father, who is shot

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after being mistaken for a polar bear by one of the crew’s sergeants. While Silence and her father receive care from Dr Goodsir, Hickey convinces his associates that Silence is responsible for the Tuunbaq’s campaign of destruction. The resulting punishment – a particularly humiliating public flogging ordered by Crozier, who assumes command after Franklin’s death – turns Hickey against Crozier at last. Once the crew must abandon the ships for land, Hickey grows fully into his role as the human epitome of what Kinzel calls “transgression and contingency,”33 as the television series reveals that he has in fact been impersonating a real man named Cornelius Hickey in order to gain passage out of Britain. The show’s creators indicate that they made this choice, which diverges from the novel, in order to avoid sullying the historical legacy of the real Cornelius Hickey, but the effect is to render the character even more detached from home and accountability; indeed, we never do learn his real name, only the initials “E.C.” scrawled into his cupboard, which underscores the sense that he has virtually no personhood beyond the expedition itself and the given moment in which he operates. The actor who plays him, Adam ­Nagaitis, has commented: “[Hickey] is a character who stepped into a horror movie well before the show begins. This is somebody who’s already in the middle of a survival story when we meet him, unlike the rest of the characters around him. So when the Arctic survival story kicks in, he’s not fazed by it because he’s been using those tools and resources in his own self for, for a long time.”34 In order to create this portrait, Nagaitis shares that he boxed, did not eat much, and spent a great deal of time alone for the role. What follows is a character with a “lean and hungry look,” to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,35 and as Nagaitis adds, one that seems to be “a distinct product of his environment.” Hickey’s overall aim is not just survival but defiance, as ­Nagaitis’s interviewer Matthew Greene writes: “In some ways, in the midst of a series brimming with the pitfalls of colonial hubris, Hickey is a testament to the idea that the society that helped make this expedition possible also abandoned many of the people it meant to serve [but, Nagaitis adds, Hickey] ‘chooses not to play those games.’”36 “Those games” are those that stem from the control and hypocrisy of empire. To cap it off, in the most explicit counterpoint to Franklin, Hickey ­“remove[s] God from the equation” altogether, as Nagaitis puts it. If Franklin and Hickey stand as opposites, with the former representing stability and the latter representing contingency, Francis Crozier holds the two polarities together in tension: on the one hand, he is an officer; yet on the other hand, his social and professional advancements are impeded on account of his Irishness, a fact that deeply embitters him.

Conclusion 117

As a seaman, Crozier has skill and experience that are unmatched; as an Irishman, however, he has faced a glass ceiling that stands in the way of greater promotion within the navy, not to mention the full respect of his fellow officers. In this regard, Crozier, although he is an officer, possesses the keen awareness of what Dening calls the “institutionalism” of common crewmen, and Simmons has him wondering: “why did one Francis Crozier keep returning to these terrible places time after time, serving a nation and its officers that have never recognized his abilities and worth as a man, even while he knew in his heart that someday he would die in the arctic cold and dark?”37 Furthermore, Crozier is an alcoholic, a sceptic towards human nature and the providence of God (as indicated in the novel when he follows Fitzjames’s recitation of Psalm 46 to the crew with a reading from Thomas H ­ obbes’s Leviathan),38 and at the time of the expedition he is smarting from the recent romantic rejection by Franklin’s niece, Sophia, due to his lack of equivalent social status. Well aware of the limitations imposed upon him, Crozier remembers once being called a “black Irish n[——]” by an English officer,39 a memory that invites comparison to the empire’s most stigmatized and exploited class. At the start of the story, his fellow Irishman Hickey attempts to form a bond with him; Hickey’s flogging, of course, replaces those presumed bonds of ethnicity and nationality with enmity. Even then, however, Hickey claims special knowledge of Crozier; in the series, for example, while Hickey is imprisoned by C ­ rozier on land, Hickey informs Crozier that he is his only equal among the crew, thus inviting audiences to consider the enduring similarities between the two men, even in light of their antagonism. The Terror’s main characters, then, can be plotted along a spectrum of stability versus contingency, with Crozier as the mediating figure between Franklin’s centred, but naive, selfhood and Hickey’s vagrant, yet eminently practical, criminality. That said, the bleakly unforgiving ice, emblematized by the terrifying Tuunbaq, can be considered a character in its own right, one that effectively reduces the men’s moral convictions, their social aspirations, their technical expertise, and their very humanity to the level of a zero-sum game. The ice and the monster stand outside of the ship and its labour hierarchy, thus rendering that hierarchy and its social underpinnings ultimately meaningless as the landscape has its way with the ships and the men. Throughout my book I have noted the persistence of ideals of liberty within imperial thought, with liberty frequently supplying political and philosophical justification for the pursuit of British empire. The freezing ice, however, limits this liberty in a literal and most dramatic way: the ice physically bounds the ships and thus bounds the “free” sailor not only to a harsh

118  Ships of State

landscape but also to a level of humanity that disrupts all his British ideals of civilization.40 Indeed, by the time the men are stranded on the ice, they have resorted to cannibalism – a point of irony given that Franklin’s original trip to the Arctic, one of the disasters from which he sought personal redemption, had devolved into much the same. Yet by the end of the tale one member of Franklin’s crew manages to survive: Francis Crozier. What does it mean for this character, a man straddling the line between gentlemanly officer and unruly commoner, to be depicted as the last one standing from the Franklin Expedition? Perhaps more importantly, what can we glean from the way in which Crozier survives, as though this anti-hero is, in the terms of his contemporary Charles Darwin, “the fittest” for surviving the most inhumane conditions? While, on the one hand, Franklin seeks to win – that is, to dominate the earth and ascend to glory – on the other hand, Crozier adapts, and he does so in stages as the expedition’s situation deteriorates. After Franklin’s death Crozier assumes first command and is forced to work with his nemesis, the grieving Fitzjames, whose inexperience rapidly becomes apparent. During an argument in which ­Fitzjames warns him about the possible consequences of his a­lcohol-fuelled anger, Crozier determines to stop drinking, dispenses with the rest of his whisky, and enters a painful three-week detoxification before coming out on the other side. Crozier’s conquest of a habit that had been fuelling his anger represents an attempt to come to terms with the landscape and the moment as it is, recognizing the physical and mental acuity that survival and command of Franklin’s dwindling numbers will require. Later, on the ice, after the deaths of all the other men – including Fitzjames, who dies of scurvy after at last forming a bond of sworn brotherhood with Crozier – Crozier finds himself alone with Silence (whose real name, he learns, is Silna) and her people. Crozier’s last opportunity for survival, it seems, depends upon submitting to and essentially becoming one with the Inuit people who live in and with the landscape, rather than in antagonistic relationship to it. Effectively outside of his native language, his accustomed habitat, his ethnicity, and his social and occupational milieu, Crozier disappears towards Britain and dissolves into the Arctic world. By now it is apparent that this conclusion represents a very different sort of ending than what we would expect to find in triumphalist imperialism, where Britain conquers all for God and country, bringing all “other” elements into the fold. The landscape, rather, conquers Crozier, and yet he does not perish but survives. In fact, in the novel he finds himself musing about the possibility of a “second chance,” one in which he could “disappear” to England (“has England ever been home for him?”) and enjoy the chance at a

Conclusion 119

“new life” that “[m]any men” would wish to have.41 Through Crozier, Simmons offers a third pathway, one that pointedly departs from the well-worn narratives of returning to Britain triumphant or of dying in heroic service. “The Terror Is Us”: Shipwreck, the Sailor, and the Problem of Aesthetic Distance My brief analysis of The Terror omits a great deal of detail for the sake of a broad outline; much more could be said about the relationships among the sailors, their relationships with the Inuit people, and the individual fate of each man, especially that of Crozier. Yet, by way of concluding this book, I suggest that the fictional story of Crozier – ­neither triumphant nor tragic, strange and yet oddly fitting – invites us to return to Blumenberg’s musings about shipwreck as an index for affect, one that assumes different forms according to various historical understandings of sea travel. His discussion prompts us ultimately to consider The Terror within the realm of the literary and the imaginative, which has been a primary concern of this book as well. Blumenberg writes: “Two prior assumptions above all determine the burden of meaning carried by the metaphorics of seafaring and shipwreck: first, the sea as a naturally given boundary of the realm of human activities and, second, its demonization as the sphere of the unreckonable and lawless, in which it is difficult to find one’s bearings.”42 The Terror’s imagined ending for the Franklin Expedition plays within the realm of these “[t]wo prior assumptions” in that it delineates, horrifically, the “naturally given boundary of the realm of human activities,” and at the same time stages the sailors’ confrontation with the “demonized” realm of the “unreckonable and lawless,” one in which “find[ing] one’s bearings” proves not only difficult but also impossible; in fact, as Crozier’s fate indicates, losing one’s bearings may be the only way to survive. Blumenberg suggests something even more important, however, to understanding the Franklin Expedition as material for critical reflection on the empire itself and its aesthetic potential for historical entertainment. The title of his essay, Shipwreck and Spectator, foregrounds the essay’s central concern with shipwreck narratives – specifically, how they reward audiences with the opportunity to feel compassion that comes only from aesthetic distance from the actual incident. Blumenberg notes that “[i]t is only because the spectator stands on firm ground that he is fascinated by the fateful drama on the high seas.”43 However, by turning the fate of the Franklin Expedition into a visceral tale of horror, one that indicts imperialism, technological hubris, White supremacy,

120  Ships of State

and environmental terrorism all at once, The Terror does not permit that kind of aesthetic distance, the kind of distance afforded to the viewer of a Turner painting. “Compassion” would seem to hit far from the intended mark. Indeed, reviewers of the series have written in terms that implicate everyone in the story of the Franklin crew. Emily St. James of Vox, for example, muses: “The series follows follies as they beget other follies, but always traces them back to the one central folly of believing technology could best the ice at all […] We believe ourselves conquerors, but we are prisoners of the gravity that binds us to a planet indifferent to our survival and our own feeble bodies that break so easily” (emphasis added). Indiewire’s Ben Travers puts it more succinctly: “the terror is us” (emphasis added). If these claims are felt more widely by audiences, then The Terror allows little room for the safe aesthetic distance that Blumenberg assigns to compassionate witnesses of shipwreck. When The Terror translates a historical mystery into a tale that is so hopeless, so disastrous, it sheds light on the very real dangers and losses that accompanied the supposed glory of imperial pursuit. In doing so, it refuses to reify the concept of risk – acknowledged merely in the abstract by seventeenth-century mercantilists – and instead explores the felt risks, including grisly deaths, imprinted on the body of the sailor. The questions and struggles depicted in this later novel and television series would, in broad terms, likely be recognizable to the Tudor and Jacobean prose writers, balladeers, and dramatists who turned to imaginative literature to explore a fuller and more complex view of the sailor’s significance to early imperial Britain. It is this view that imaginative texts portraying the imperial sailor invite us to interrogate and, in doing so, make way for an imperial history that accounts for his labour as marginal but also necessary, as a flashpoint for the project of empire itself.

Acknowledgments

The initial research for this book was undertaken with the support of a University of Missouri Research Board grant in the fall of 2017. I am grateful to the Research Board for funding that semester-long release from my teaching and service duties, without which this book would have taken much longer to complete. I also wish to thank my colleagues at my home institution, the University of Missouri–Kansas City, for their interest in and ongoing support of this work. Additionally, I am grateful to the Shakespeare Association of America for opportunities to present portions of chapters 2 and 3 in dialogue with colleagues throughout the field. The SAA’s seminar format, for me, has consistently provided the richest dialogue for sharing and nurturing work in progress. I wish to particularly thank the SAA for continuing to offer programming remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic; I and many other colleagues welcomed the opportunity to continue developing our work and connecting with our scholarly community as best we could, even in the midst of crisis and uncertainty. And to my friends from the conference circuit, both long-time and recent, go my deepest thanks as well. They are too many to name, but I hope they recognize themselves here. Thanks go to the University of Toronto Press and acquisitions editor Suzanne Rancourt for their interest in working with me on a second monograph. I am grateful for their belief in my work and their consummate professionalism during all stages of the book development process. I also wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers who commented on the earliest version of the full manuscript. While their astute suggestions for improvement reflect throughout this book, any errors therein are entirely my own. Parts of chapters 2 were originally published as “‘Their labour doth returne rich golden gaine’: Fishmongers’ Pageants and the Fisherman’s

122 Acknowledgments

Labour in Early Modern London,” in Comparative Drama 51, no. 2 (2017), 134–56. Parts of chapter 4 were originally published as “‘A wife or friend at e’ery Port’: The Common Sailor in Ballads of the Early British Empire,” in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 50, no. 2 (2020), 431–53. Both essays are reproduced here with the permission of the publishers. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the unflagging daily support of my family and friends. In particular, my two intrepid felines, Myles and Reggie, provided hourly home office visits and invitations to take five-minute breaks to bask on the carpet in a sunbeam. My husband, Jeff Callan, provided love, belief, and positivity during the most difficult of moments. For his deeply loving nature and unwavering faith in me – not to mention his soul-sustaining Sunday dinners – I owe the greatest debt of all.

Notes

Introduction 1 “A Speech Made,” 16. 2 “A Speech Made,” 17. 3 Shakespeare 2.1.125, 152–3, 153. All citations from Shakespeare come from Bevington’s edition. References are to act, scene, and line. 4 Sherman 152. 5 Fury, Tides 16, 19, 34–5, 85, 94, 123, 145. 6 Andrews, “Elizabethan Seaman” 255; Cell 16; Pope 164; Sweetinburgh 209–10. 7 Cell x; Fusaro, Blakemore, et al. 776–8. 8 Loades 9. 9 Fury, Tides 45. 10 Tides 262; see also Lemisch. 11 Fusaro 35–7; Blakemore. 12 Fusaro, Blakemore, et al., 778. 13 C. Lambert 324. 14 C. Lambert 324; Land 191; Sweetinburgh 204, 210–11; Vickers. 15 Scammell, “Manning” 139–40. 16 Dee A2v, A4. 17 Dee A4. 18 Andrews, Trade 235–8; Loades, 8–9. 19 L.B. Cormack 47. 20 Dee A2v. 21 Dee A4. 22 Unger 15. 23 Misselden 18. 24 Misselden 132; italics in the original. 25 Misselden 138.

124  Notes to pages 10–17 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Misselden 140. Armitage, Ideological Origins 8. Misselden 112. Harper vii; see also Unger 16. Perl-Rosenthal 26–7. Harper 14–15. Barbour 143. Armitage, “Red Atlantic.” Chakravarty 1–2, 7, 133, 244n12. For visual confirmation of the Black sailor’s presence in European maritime settings, see Rembrandt’s mid-seventeenth-century painting of two African men and Mark Ponte’s accompanying commentary (Black in Rembrandt’s Time, 56–7); for an English example, see Kaufman’s discussion (Black Tudors, 56–89) of Diego the circumnavigator, who served Francis Drake and facilitated several of Drake’s American exploits. For an extensive discussion of Black women’s intimate relations with European traders on the coast of West Africa – relations that often took similar shape in the New World – see Johnson, particularly chapter 1. Hubbard 349. Sirota 196. Quoted in Stern 517. M. Cohen 15. Brayton 514–15. Brayton 525. See for example Ellinghausen, Pirates, chs. 2 and 3; Jowitt, Culture of Piracy; and Schillings, chs. 2–4. Balasopoulos 124–31. Mentz, At the Bottom; Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity; and Mentz, “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies.” For other examples, see Corbin, ch. 1; Connery, “Ideologies”; Connery, “Oceanic Feeling”; Horden and Purcell; Mentz, At the Bottom; and Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity. Fusaro 29. Quoted in Falconer 78. Falconer 80. Fury, “Training and Education”; Loades 9; Webb. Fumerton, Unsettled 65, 83–5. Ellinghausen, Pirates; Jowitt, Culture of Piracy. Wigen 17. I use this term in Isaac Land’s sense, whereby “people, things, and activities that are not-quite-oceanic abound” (177) within the maritime culture

Notes to pages 17–28  125

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76

of port towns. Land credits the origination of the term paramaritime to the historian Gerard Le Bouedec. Unger 10. Unger 10–11; see also J.C. Appleby, Under the Bloody Flag 17–18. Ellinghausen, Pirates, ch. 3. C. Lambert 330; J.C. Appleby, Under the Bloody Flag 18. Musgrave 202. Bridenbaugh 27. For a book-length study, see Dugaw. Sweetinburgh. J.C. Appleby, Women and English Piracy 15. Land 179, 191–2. Schleck 85, 87, 88. Fusaro, Blakemore, et al. 776; Fusaro, “Invasion” 41–2; Schleck 85, 96. Ellinghausen, Pirates. Fury, Tides 250. Scammell, “Manning” 143. Scammell, “Manning” 150. C. Lambert 337. Schleck 86. Kendrick 27. For more targeted critique of the tendency of “market”-­ focused scholarship to ignore labour processes, see Shershow. Armitage, Ideological Origins 8. Steinberg 20. This thesis, stated explicitly in Unwin (217) informs his book as a whole, but for how it specifically applied to the Fishmongers, see page 38. Fishmongers, in fact, did not necessarily deal in fish at all, given that livery company members were not required to practise the trade of the company. Andrews, Trade 355.

1 “Lords of the Harbors”: English Fishermen and the Newfoundland Colony 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Sherman 164–5. Fuller 15. Quinn, New American World, vol. 2, 444–5. Quinn, “Newfoundland” 307; Sweet 399. Sweet 399. Fitzmaurice 45, 49. See for example Burnard; Games; Perl-Rosenthal; and Swingen.

126  Notes to pages 28–35 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

See for example Christopher; and Linebaugh and Rediker. Schramm 71. Quinn, “Newfoundland” 301. Dee 7. Nashe C4v–D1. Hereafter cited parenthetically. Falconer 129–30. For a deeper analysis of fish policy in the Elizabethan era, see Sgroi. Hitchcock, preface to A pollitique platt. Andrews, Trade 56–7. Quinn, New American World, vol. 4, 8. Quinn, New American World, vol. 4, 23. Innis 30. Sweet 416–17. Mason B. Quinn, “Newfoundland” 320, 301. Quinn, New American World, vol. 4, 6. Quoted in Bridenbaugh 227. Clement 302. Quoted in Clement 302. For more on the debate, in which some writers took the position that allowing foreigners to enter the realm would serve its economic interests by bolstering its population, see Joyce Appleby 135–7. Clement makes this point on page 303, citing thinkers such as Josiah Child and Charles Davenant. Quinn, New American World, vol. 4, 6. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery H1v. Test 208. Misselden 140. Bridenbaugh 395. Bridenbaugh 398. Games, Migration 99. Proclamation. “Letter,” in Proclamation. Pope 2. Pope 31–2. Cell 108. Pope 161–5, 175–7, 181–9. Fitzmaurice 94. Fitzmaurice 94. Wright 136–40. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery A3v. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery F2.

Notes to pages 35–45  127 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83 84

Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery B. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery A3v. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery B3v. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery B3. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery C2. Mason A1v. Mason A1v. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery F3-F3v. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery L4. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery L4v. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery M; emphasis added. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery M4v. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery D1v. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery L4v–M. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery G2–G2v. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery F2. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery G2v. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery G2v. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery M. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery E2. Mason B1v. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery L3. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery F. Mason A3. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery I–I1v. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery G3. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery K. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery I3. Eburne B. Eburne A1. Eburne B. Burke 3. This also is a convention of early modern dialogue, as Burke notes of the genre: “Some authors put characters by their own names into their dialogues” (5). Burke 8. Eburne B2v; emphasis added. Deakins 5. Eburne P4. Eburne P4v. Eburne G–G1v. See for example Beier 42–3; Nyquist 625; and Ritger.

128  Notes to pages 45–52 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

Beier 44–5. Hogan 465. Eburne G. Eburne G1v. Eburne N4v. Eburne M2v. Eburne M2v. Eburne Q2. Eburne Q3. Ellinghausen, Pirates 4. Eburne D. “Newfoundland – Introduction.” Test 203. Swingen 1. Armitage, Ideological Origins 8.

2 “Their Labour Doth Returne Rich Golden Gaine”: Fishmongers’ Shows and the Fisherman’s Labour in Early Modern London 1 See for example Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599); Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston’s Eastward Ho (1605); and William Rowley’s A New Wonder, a Woman Never Vexed (1631). 2 Falconer xii–xiii, 147. 3 T. Hill 93–4; Norbrook 258; Bradbrook 96. 4 Bergeron, “Anthony Munday” 349, 358–9; Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry 167, 172. 5 Manley 271. 6 See for example Dekker’s Troia-Nova triumphans (1612), which depicts the mayor as the pilot of a ship that he steers through a sea of moral hazards. Neptune counsels him: “Goe therefore on, goe boldly: thou must saile / In rough Seas (now) of Rule: and every Gale / Will not perhaps befriend thee: But (how blacke / So ere the Skyes looke) dread not Thou a Wracke, / For when Integrity and Innocence sit / Steering the Helme, no Rocke the Ship can split” (B1v). 7 Bergeron, “Anthony Munday” 349 and passim; Berlin 15 and passim. 8 I take my cue in part from Sarah Beckwith’s critique of Mervyn James (Signifying God, 53), who reads themes of incorporation in medieval cycle drama as efforts to resolve economic tensions in the city. Beckwith counters by arguing that these dramas in fact created and maintained distinctions between crafts, thus rendering unity an “idealizing fiction imposed from above” (discussed in Rice and Pappano 32–3). The appropriateness of Beckwith’s approach for the early modern period is suggested in

Notes to pages 52–5  129

9

10

11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18

19

20 21 22

Manley’s intervention, which describes conversations among differing groups and agendas within the form. These dialogues, Manley writes, reveal the outlines of “groups and interests whose identity was recognized as distinctive without being divisive” (259), an observation echoed in Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky’s remark that the powerful livery companies were not nearly as united as literary treatments seem to suggest (889). Bergeron himself, who sees unity as the dominant aesthetic in the shows, also acknowledges “a healthy competitive rivalry among the companies” that registers in their attempts to outdo one another in pageantry (English Civic Pageantry 125). Robertson and Gordon record a 1636 show for the Lord Mayor Sir Edward Bromfield that either is lost or was never performed; members of the company paid for the show through levies imposed on them (125). Musgrave, for example, describes the livery companies as “designed to prevent, or at least reduce, the possibility of innovation and change” (72). Tracey Hill similarly argues that “[t]he livery company system, which still governed so much of London’s social and economic life, was becoming increasingly anachronistic in the later sixteenth century” (153). Armitage 8. Quoted in Stern 517. On humanist critiques of ancient empire see Stern 516–17. M. Cohen 15, 21. Linebaugh and Rediker paint a starkly opposing picture, one in which the common sailor of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was regarded as a profane, unruly creature in need of harsh discipline. See Rediker, Between the Devil, ch. 5; and Linebaugh and Rediker, ch. 5. On the “patchwork economy” of the typical fisherman’s life see Bak 7–8. Fumerton, Unsettled 65. On seamen’s itineracy see also Fury, Tides 20. Unwin 217. Robert Ashton notes, however, that some trades lacked a manufacturing element altogether, including the Fishmongers, who traded fish but did not catch them (44). I cite Unwin’s point only as evidence of a growing cultural division between commerce and crafts, with privilege accruing to the former. Leinwand 140, 148; Lobanov-Rostovsky 892, 889. Bradbrook also notes a trend in the period towards more shows sponsored by the Drapers, the Haberdashers, the Mercers, and “above all, the very rich Merchant Taylors,” a development reflecting the fact that “the leading citizens were now capitalists and merchant-venturers rather than craftsmen” (96). Northway 168. Nelson A2. Hereafter cited parenthetically. The late Tudor administrator William Cecil did attempt to boost English ports, shipbuilding, and mariners by encouraging English Protestants

130  Notes to pages 55–9

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38

to eat more fish. While fishermen did benefit somewhat from these gestures, the latter ultimately did not seem to confer any more prestige on fishing as an occupation (Bak 7–8). Whether such initiatives grew from Fishmongers’ efforts to promote their industry in shows and elsewhere, it is difficult to say, although Kipling reports that King Henry VII once did respond to a show by galvanizing the shipbuilding and clothmaking industries (55). Dee 7. For more on Dee’s influence as one of Britain’s first imperialist writers see Armitage, Ideological Origins 105. Hitchcock, preface to A politique platt. Hitchcock, preface to A politique platt. Hichcock A3–A3v. Mun N5v. Gentleman A3. Gentleman B2. Gentleman G2v. Gentleman G3. “E.S.” A2. Shakespeare, Hamlet 2.2.174–6; references are to act, scene, and lines. These examples are cited in Billington 102. Hoffman finds evidence of similar perceptions on the Continent; for example, the Spanish writer Fernando Basurto’s Dialogo que agora se hazia [Dialogue between a Hunter and a Fisher] (1539) argues for the moral superiority of fishing over hunting. Basurto cites Genesis 25:27: “‘Esau was a hunter,’ because he was a sinner, and in the whole of the holy scriptures we do not find any holy hunter, we find holy fishers” (quoted in Hoffman 203). On such “resurrections” see Palmer. For more on the shows’ affirmation of virtue as the basis of fame and honour see Kipling 50–6. Munday, Chrysanaleia B2v–B3. Hereafter cited parenthetically, with Munday’s italics. For example, William Scott’s An Essay of Drapery (London, 1635) admonishes drapers for the common abuse of adjusting the weight of the cloth to falsely reflect its substance: “the number of Weight shewes the substance, which is too often abused by increasing the number of measure, that both bee according to the Statute is desired by those who would buy good cloth good cheape” (B). Taylor, that admirer of fishmongers’ honesty, speaks to such practices in distinguishing his own lowly work as a waterman from that of deceitful commodity merchants: “If a waterman would be false in his trade, I muse what falsehood he could use, he hath no weights or measures to curtail a man’s passage, but he will land a man for his money, and not bate him an inch of the place he is

Notes to pages 59–68  131

39 40 41

42

43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54

appointed: His shop is not dark like a woolen draper’s on purpose, because the buyer shall not see the coarseness of the cloth, or the falseness of the color: no, his work and ware is seen and known, and he utters it with the sweat of his brows” (Humpherus 1:186). For further discussion of Taylor’s occupational consciousness relative to other trades see Ellinghausen, Labour and Writing 104–11. M. Cohen 42. M. Cohen 44. On seamen as noted “plain dealers” see Rediker, Between the Devil, ch. 4. Taylor also embraced the term to link his waterman’s trade with his literary endeavours; see Ellinghausen, Labour and Writing 104–11. Withington notes that early modern citizens viewed honestas in particular as “a touchstone of urban freedom and bedrock against servility and slavery” (174). Munday, Chruso-thriambos A3v. Munday, Chruso-thriambos A3v. Munday, Chruso-thriambos A4. Munday, Chruso-thriambos C2v. Tracey Hill reads the pelican as “a metaphor of the City as a nurse” (24), an emphasis more in keeping with civic identity than with occupational identity. Similarly, Leinwand reads the shows’ rehearsal of Walworth’s deeds as “concerned less with the fact that national peace was preserved than with the recognition that it was a Londoner who accomplished this deed – never mind which Londoner” (150). In contrast, I think “which Londoner” in fact matters very much to the commissioning company, whose bias gains support from both Nelson’s and Munday’s portrayals of the Fishmongers’ special virtue. In other words, I am suggesting here that the occupational context matters at least as much as the civic context. Munday, Chruso-thriambos C2–C2v. T. Hill 156. Jenstad 1–3. Settle 3–4. Settle 3–4. Settle, preface. Settle, preface.

3 “Hereditary Sloth” and the Labour of Empire in Shakespeare’s Mediterranean 1 Northway 174, 184, 176. 2 Lancashire 49, 119. 3 Manley 286–7, 291.

132  Notes to pages 68–72 4 Smith, “Perspectives” 54, 62. On Pericles’s use of emblematic conventions from medieval morality plays, royal processions, and Lord Mayor’s shows, see Barrett. On Shakespeare’s exposure to civic pageantry to and use of pageantry conventions throughout his drama, see Martin. 5 Hunt 285–6, 291. For arguments along similar lines, see Hale, and Rockett. 6 In adopting this focus, I follow the lead of critics such as Brotton; Walter Cohen (129, 134–5); Bradin Cormack; and Klein (121, 124) – all of whom argue for readings attuned to the topical exigency of the Levantine trade. 7 Gulli 7, 1. 8 Doty analyzes Prospero’s interactions with his island charges as violations of the early modern ideals of master-servant relations. Prospero’s “thoroughly injurious” behaviour leads Doty to conclude that “The Tempest does not, as is commonly thought, blithely celebrate authority and social order” (239, 250), a proposition I would extend to Pericles as well. For a seminal reading of Prospero’s magic as assertion of colonial power, see Barker and Hulme. 9 Forman 64. 10 Brotton 37; italics in the original. 11 Armitage, Ideological Origins 100–1; for more on Rome as imperial precedent see Pagden, ch. 1. 12 Armitage, Ideological Origins 101. 13 Andrews, Trade 99–100. 14 Fusaro, Blakemore, et al. 776–8. 15 Stanivukovic 47, 42. For more on early modern trade and romance see Murrin. 16 Frye, Secular Scripture 161. For commentary along similar lines see also Bergeron (Shakespeare’s Romances); Schmidgall; and Tennenhouse (185). 17 Frye, “Romance as Masque” 30. 18 Jonson, “Ode to Himself,” lines 21–2. The title page of the 1609 quarto edition of Pericles indicates that it was “divers and sundry times acted by his majesty’s servants, at the Globe on the Bankside.” 19 Mullaney 170. For an argument along similar lines see Morrow. 20 See Gurr 202. Despite the location of the play’s first staging, “it is worth remembering,” Norbrook writes, that “[Shakespeare’s] audience [for this play] would have contained people who were far from taking an absolutist dynastic perspective for granted, and the play does permit a certain detachment from the courtly viewpoint” (260). 21 Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity 29. 22 See Danby 101–2; Muir 36; and Stauffer 269, 271, 274. 23 Chorus, in Shakespeare, Pericles 2.27.40. 24 Shakespeare, The Tempest 2.1.1–8.

Notes to pages 73–6  133 25 Klein 127. Norbrook comments similarly on this passage, interpreting Gonazlo’s counsel to mean that Alonso “should enjoy a sense of social superiority which will come from the exclusiveness of his delivery” (256). 26 Shakespeare, Pericles 2.1.7, 18–19. 27 For an exploration of the word fortune in the context of early modern maritime trade, see Degenhardt. 28 Bartels 170. 29 Shakespeare, Pericles 2.1.110–11. 30 Shakespeare, Pericles 2.1.125. 31 J. Howard 38. 32 Shakespeare, Pericles 2.1.150–4; emphasis added. 33 For a survey of scholarship on seamen’s entrepreneurial activities, see Fusaro, Blakemore, et al. 34 Cressy 55, 64. 35 Andrews, “Elizabethan Seaman” 255; Cell 16. Pope notes that, even in the case of payment through wages, fishermen often questioned their masters and, in this way, strove to negotiate “the relationship between masters and servants in the fishery” (164). 36 Shakespeare, Pericles 3.1.41–2. 37 Shakespeare, Pericles 3.1.43–4. 38 Shakespeare, Pericles 4.1.48–9. 39 Shakespeare, Pericles 3.1.51–3. 40 Oxford English Dictionary online, s.v. “superstition,” 3: “Religious belief or practice considered to be irrational, unfounded, or based on fear or ignorance; excessively credulous belief in and reverence for the supernatural.” 41 Blakemore writes at length about ways in which law and custom frequently intermingled in practice, thus indicating that “custom must be understood within the legal system, not outside or against it” (102). 42 Oxford English Dictionary online, s.v. “custom,” 1.a: “A mode of behaviour or procedure which is widely practised and accepted (and typically long established) in a particular society, community, etc.; a convention, a tradition.” 43 Shakespeare, Pericles 3.1.59. 44 Holstun 101. 45 M. Cohen 15. 46 Jowitt, “The Hero and the Sea.” See also J.C. Appleby, Under the Bloody Flag 170; Falconer 42; Rodger, Command of the Ocean 120–1; and Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea 404. 47 Kluwick similarly links the prevailing need for nautical expertise, as evident in the opening scene of The Tempest, to the disruption of class hierarchy: “the sea is dangerous precisely because in addition to revealing the

134  Notes to pages 76–8

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63 64 65

precariousness of human life as such, it poses a threat to the status quo, unsettling social hierarchies by instituting a different chain of authority. The boatswain’s challenges to kingly authority are possible because the state of emergency renders a strict adherence to nautical ritual and expertise indispensable, and compels even the king to submit to this altered chain of command” (55). Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.1.43. Shakespeare, The Tempest 2.1.150, 152. Bulger 38; Norbrook 252. Jowitt, “The Hero and the Sea.” Scammell, “Manning” 150. Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.1.59, 62. Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.1.41–2, 44–5, 56. Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.1.31. Yachnin 191, 192, 187. Bailey reads this scene similarly, arguing that the courtiers’ epithets represent an attempt to reassert their own comparatively fuller claim to humanness (153); although the main focus of Bailey’s article is on Blackness as a site for contesting degrees of humanness and personhood, her general approach is useful for reading the class dynamics of the play as well. In fact, the best expression of the way in which the play intermingles class and race on the subject of personhood may arrive in the “sunburned sicklemen” – agricultural workers with darkened skin – of Prospero’s wedding masque. See Barbour 142; Andrews, Trade 26–7, 210. Shakespeare, The Tempest 2.1.158. Shakespeare, The Tempest 2.1.169. Shakespeare, The Tempest 2.1.224; emphasis added. Penberthy 317, 320. Forman sees the fishermen in Pericles making a similar point: “the fishermen see the beggars and the rich as committing the similar transgression – that is, the sin of idleness; the rich are drones that rob honey from the worker bee, and ‘begging’ is directly opposed to ‘working’” (76). Shakespeare, Pericles 3.2.30. Shakespeare, Pericles 3.2.31. Morrow 366. For an extended discussion of Marx’s term living labour, see Gulli; on its applicability to early modern English drama, see Kendrick 1. These efforts stem from somewhat different critical directions. For a critique of the tendency of “market”-focused scholarship to ignore labour, see Shershow. On labour as counterdiscourse to commodification, see Kendrick. On “popular” politics as a counterweight to courtly ethos and aesthetics, see Norbrook. For different approaches to the “popular,” see Dimmock and Hadfield.

Notes to pages 79–83  135 66 See Ellinghausen, Labour and Writing 2–3. 67 The term everyday is borrowed here from Michel de Certeau. See Fumerton on its utility for scholars seeking to trace “the common in both a class and cultural sense: the low (common people), the ordinary (common speech, common wares, common sense), the familiar (commonly known), the customary or typical or taken-for-granted (common law, commonplace, communal), etc.” (“Introduction” 3). 68 Shakespeare, Pericles 3.2.28–34, 40–4. 69 Morrow makes a similar point on 363–4, as does Falconer on 61–2. 70 Shakespeare, Pericles 2.1.69–70. 71 Shakespeare, Pericles, Chorus 2.17–22. 72 Shakespeare, Pericles 2.1.46–7. 73 Shakespeare, Pericles 2.4.35, 38. On the question of the capacity of Pericles to lead, Hall detects in his journeying a “continued reduction of an aristocratic subjectivity” (5) that leads Pericles to lose confidence in himself as one who commands. The courtiers’ sense of Helicanus’s fitness for leadership would support this development. 74 See Alvarez 208; Forman 49; Halpern 148; and Mullaney 175. 75 Shakespeare, Pericles 4.2.28, 37–8. 76 Although early modern uses of the term calling stem from Protestant Christian theology, I see the play Pericles employing the term more generally – in reference to the sanction of unspecified gods – to articulate a kind of social legitimacy derived from honest, virtuous labour and duty. See Weber, ch. 3, for more on this legitimation. 77 Shakespeare, Pericles 4.1.96–9. 78 Relihan 291–2. 79 On this evolution see Margaret Cohen (15–21, 38) and Stern. 80 Greenfield 59; Bradin Cormack 157. 81 Klein 133. 82 Klein 135. 83 Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.2.314–16. 84 Shakespeare, The Tempest 3.1.2, 4, 12. 85 Shakespeare, The Tempest 4.1.134. 86 Socially and occupationally, and possibly also in terms of race (see my earlier note on Bailey’s reading). This moment represents another instance in which, as I describe in the introduction to this book, labour becomes a site for blurring the conceptual boundaries between classes and races that are upheld in imperial discourse. 87 Norbrook 261. 88 Gilman comments that this scene disrupts the authority not only of Prospero but also of the very assumptions of authority that underwrite the genre of the masque: “[Prospero’s masque] first asserts, but then partially

136  Notes to pages 83–9

89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

denies or shadows, the imperial power of the imagination conventionally celebrated in the Stuart masque. Prospero’s undermined masque becomes a delicately subversive maneuver staged in the enemy camp and hinting at the bedazzled, insulated self-regard of such entertainments” (220). Indeed, such “bedazzled, insulated self-regard” may be regarded as a symptom of hereditary sloth and its ultimate ineptitude. Shakespeare, The Tempest 5.1.232, 237. Shakespeare, The Tempest 5.1.57. Gray 2. Bridenbaugh 422; Falconer 101; Musgrave 185. For more on the developing link between deforestation and shipbuilding during the period, see McRae 413–14, 419. Klein 132. I take this cue from Morrow, who suggests the connection. Sheen 73.

4 “A Wife or Friend at E’ery Port”: The Common Sailor in the Ballads of Early British Empire 1 The ballads cited in this chapter were accessed via two online databases: the English Broadside Ballad Archive at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Broadside Ballads Online from the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University. These texts were digitized mainly from later ballad collections such as the Pepys and the Roxburghe; therefore the date of each original publication is uncertain. The estimated date for each ballad is taken from the databases; some titles have been shortened. The digital scans of these texts contain no page or line numbers. 2 Armitage, Ideological Origins 8. 3 Hailwood 188–9, 200. 4 Andrews, Trade 33. 5 Hitchcock, A pollitique platt. 6 Misselden 132, 140–1. 7 My working definition of mercantilism incorporates Michael Tratner’s brief survey of mercantilist thinking in the period’s literature (“Trade and Commerce”) while also taking up John J. McCusker’s caution that mercantilist thought took diverse shapes, unified by “little more than a shared perception [. . .] that foreign trade could be used to serve the interests of government – and vice versa” (Economy of British ­America 35). 8 For two widely cited studies correlating mercantile risk with generic structure see Forman and Lesser. 9 Rediker, Outlaws 33.

Notes to pages 90–4  137 10 Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity xxii. 11 See Andrews, Trade 26–7; Fury, “First English” 74–7; Fury, Tides, ch. 4; and Lloyd 42–6, 50, 94. 12 See Fury, Tides, ch. 2; Lloyd, 72, 87, 275; and Rediker, “Pirate.” 13 Rediker, Outlaws, 37–8. For a fuller examination of Barlow’s writings in the context of shipboard life see Fumerton, Unsettled 63–130. 14 On ballads’ wide readership across classes, see Watt 12. Nonetheless, while ballads may have been enjoyed across society, their form and content tended towards a lower-class perspective, as Fumerton also has explored at length (“Not Home”; Unsettled 45–6, 131–52). 15 Fury, Tides 262. 16 Fury, Tides 212–18. Dugaw cites the likely destitution of the abandoned wife as one social reality underpinning the “female warrior” phenomenon in early modern ballads, suggesting that women donning disguises to follow their men “may have preferred the hardships of battle and camp life to the poverty and starvation which threatened them at home, and against which they would have had to struggle alone” (128). 17 Norbrook 258. 18 Woolf describes the transgressive potential of oral transmission in exactly these terms: “Like unwritten song, oral tradition answered to no one: it was ‘masterless history.’ A tradition in praise of riot and rebellion could scarcely be more welcome to England’s ruling orders than a printed history advocating the same, and it was vastly more difficult to control” (37). 19 For a brief summary of such accounts see Rediker, “Pirate.” 20 For example, Netzloff notes that, in admiralty court records from the first four decades of the seventeenth century, seventy-three of the men listed as pirates were listed as sailors by profession (59–60). For a more general look at occupational itineracy among seafarers see Fury, Tides, ch. 1. 21 Harding 38. 22 For accounts of pirates as self-conscious political actors defying oppressive norms see Christopher Hill, as well as Linebaugh and Rediker, ch. 5. For some literary applications of this phenomenon see Ellinghausen, Pirates, chs. 2 and 3. 23 Fumerton, Unsettled 50; see also 83–7. For additional associations of vagrancy with seafaring see J.C. Appleby, Under the Bloody Flag 154, 160–1; J.C. Appleby, Women 25; and McCormick 28–30. 24 Schillings 86. 25 For more on the legal and conceptual conundrum concerning the reach of European law into the imperial hinterlands, see Gould 105–20. On philosophical debates surrounding international law in early imperial British contexts, see Warren, ch. 5.

138  Notes to pages 94–8 26 On impressment see Fury, Tides 20, 28, 31, 68; and Lloyd, 124, 154. On training programs see Andrews, Trade 28–9; Fury, “Training”; and Webb. 27 Schleck 86. For an account of how mercantilist discourse reified the labour of the common sailor, with often tragic consequences, see Barbour. 28 See in particular Fumerton, “Not Home”; Fumerton, Unsettled, 45–6 and 131–52; Harvey; and Kane. 29 Wage 732. 30 Rollins 265; see also Watt 11, 37. 31 Wurzbach 146–7. 32 For a book-length exploration of how popular music figured in the negotiation of early modern social relations, see Marsh, who addresses ballads in particular in chs. 5 and 6. 33 For a survey of ballad dialogue’s formal features see Wurzbach 187–94. 34 Hehmeyer. Similar points have been made by Fumerton (Unsettled, 58, 141, 145–6, 150–2) and Smith (Acoustic World, 198). 35 Dolan 175. 36 Dolan 175. 37 See J.C. Appleby’s Women for a book-length study of women’s roles in the various maritime endeavours of the period. 38 For more on how ballads employed melody to reinforce meaning see McIlvenna. 39 On the sometime practice of profit-sharing in the seafaring occupations see Andrews, Trade 26–7, and Pope 164. 40 Rollins 316; Watt 118. 41 On the common equation that contemporaries made between seamen, vagrancy, and treason see McCormick 28–30. 42 Early modernists have commented extensively on England’s culture of fear and suspicion surrounding travel and travellers. In addition to Harris, see Carey; Hadfield; and C. Howard. 43 Harris 1–28. 44 In this sense the ballad demonstrates the “either/or” and “both/and” dynamic that Fumerton finds in the sailor ballads (Unsettled 138). 45 Games describes how the acquisition of such “foreign” knowledge signified the dissolution of the commercial traveller’s “unthinking attachments to a single nation,” ultimately pointing towards a “mutability of identity” that put pressure on norms of “Englishness” (“England’s Global Transition” 25, 29). On how suspicions of cultural malleability attached themselves to international merchants see Aune; on how these suspicions attached to merchants’ factors see Sebek. 46 Knapp notes the self-conscious “littleness,” due largely to a sense of “circumscription by enemies,” that was underwriting England’s competitive push into worldwide trade and colonialism (4–5). For more on this sense

Notes to pages 98–108  139

47 48

49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57

of relative weakness see Games (“England’s Global Transition” 24); on how this weakness manifests as intimations of doubt and impending failure in England’s early colonialist narratives see Linton (6) and Barbour (130). For more on these “pirate utopias” see Scammell (“European Exiles”) and Wilson. For a detailed discussion of the statutes and their social implications see Hooper. For more on clothing as a mobile signifier of status and other markers of identity see Jones and Stallybrass. For a critical survey of this topic see Bailey and Hentschell. Dugaw observes that women of the ballads, even when they do not don disguises to follow their men, often demonstrate the “same physical toughness and energy” that the female warrior exhibits when she adopts the typically male attributes of men in battle or at sea (122). The ballad heroine also frequently “takes an assertive role in her courtship” (123) when she, for example, defies her parents. Fumerton, Unsettled 144. Bialo notes an association between ballads and the relative sexual permissiveness of lower-class women (302–3). Conley 3. Jowitt, “Captains.” Alford, London’s Triumph. For an elaboration on “(ad)venturing” in the period’s economic discourse and literature see Vitkus. Previous studies on economic themes in other early modern literary genres almost uniformly reach this conclusion, but on the inextricability of economics and social relations I have gleaned the greatest amount of insight from Muldrew’s Economy of Obligation, which focuses in particular on socio-economic dynamics in local communities bound by mutual trust.

Conclusion: The “Painefull Sea-Man” of Later Imperial Britain 1 Christopher 226–9. For a more general survey of White English attitudes towards liberty in response to slavery, see Guasco, ch. 1. 2 Hubbard 353. 3 Burton 84. 4 Burton 85. See also both Baron and Rose on class differentiations among working men in the nineteenth century. 5 See Cordingly 142–5; Earle 102–3; and Rodger, Wooden World 80–1. 6 Burton 88. 7 Andrews, Trade 355.

140  Notes to pages 109–15 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

29 30

Quoted in Andrews, Trade 354. Kinzel 33. Hubbard 350. Morriss, Foundations 1. Lloyd 248. Lloyd 248. Morriss, Foundations 261–3. With regard to the accompanying lack of career mobility for common sailors, see Burton on the 1849 abolishment of statutory apprenticeship in favour of written exams for engineers, mates, and masters, which she describes as a process of “embourgeoisement” (87). Prior to this time, apprenticeship had long served as a means of access to “technical education” as well as a way to inculcate “social discipline”; such training facilitated upward mobility because “a completed apprenticeship with an adept navigator increased one’s worth on the labour market” (Fury, “Training” 147, 156). Carroll 75; Morriss, Naval Power 36–42. Carroll 74. Blumenberg 67. Blumenberg 67. For a book-length study of this phenomenon see Baker. Chapman 60–1. Chapman 61–2. Dening 28. Dening 28. Lam 189. For more on this literary legacy as it applies to ice monsters and climate change, see Lanone. Lam 187. For further discussion of The Terror in terms of horror genres see Thiess. “When the Tuunbaq dies because of the kabloona sickness [i.e., the invasion of the “pale people], the spirit-governors-of-the-sky knew, its cold, white domain will begin to heat and melt and thaw […] This is the future they saw” (Simmons 710). Simmons 98. The Australian Dictionary of Biography specifically attributes Franklin’s joining of the Northwest Passage expedition to his failure in Australia: “The wound received in Van Diemen’s Land had been the spur to the achievement of his heart’s desire” (Fitzpatrick). Simmons casts doubt on the success of Franklin’s redemption efforts altogether: “He was – and always would be – the man who ate his shoes” (15). Kinzel 39. Simmons 4.

Notes to pages 115–19  141 31 Morriss, Foundations 262. For more on late eighteenth-century promoters of radical thought, such as the Society of United Irishmen and the ­London Corresponding Society, who influenced the working classes, see Curtin; Davis, Epistein, Fruchtman, and Thale; Graham; and Kennedy. 32 Simmons 663. 33 Kinzel 28. 34 Quoted in Greene. 35 Shakespeare, Julius Caesar 1.2.194. 36 Greene. 37 Simmons 190. 38 Simmons 244–7. 39 Simmons 123. 40 Lam and Lovasz make similar points on 191 and 158, respectively. 41 Simmons 736. 42 Blumenberg 8. 43 Blumenberg 39.

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Index

Abney, Thomas (Lord Mayor of London), 63 “Act touching Sea-marks and mariners” (1565), 15 admiralty courts, 37, 70, 75, 137n20; High Court of the Admiralty, 7 Alford, Stephen, 105 Allot, John (Lord Mayor of London), 54 alterity, as theoretical concept, 6, 12, 13–17, 22, 71, 90 Andrews, Kenneth A., 26, 88, 108, 112 Appleby, John C., 18, 138n37 apprenticeships, maritime, 15, 140n14 Arctic region, 111, 113–14, 116, 118 aristocracy, 66, 68, 84; as represented in Shakespeare’s Mediterranean plays, 68–9, 71–3, 77–80, 85, 135n73 Armitage, David, 10, 22, 49, 52 Ashton, Robert, 129n18 Atlantic modernity, 27–8, 107 Atlantic region, 11–12, 16, 22–3, 26, 27–8, 30, 33, 42, 48–9, 107, 108, 110, 111 Avalon Peninsula, 30 Bailey, Amanda, 134n55, 135n86 Balasopoulos, Antonis, 15

ballads: occupational discourse within, 88; as purveyors of news, 95; as “vagrant” forms, 94–6 Barbour, Richmond, 11 Barlow, Edward, 91 Bartels, Emily S., 73 Barton, Andrew, 87 Basurto, Fernando: Dialogo que agora se hazia [Dialogue between a Hunter and a Fisher], 130n34 Beckwith, Sarah, 128–9n8 Bergeron, David, 128–9n8 Bialo, Carolyn, 139n52 “Black Atlantic,” 107. See also Atlantic region; slavery Blackfriars Theatre, 71 Blakemore, Richard J., 133n41 Bligh, William, 113 Blumenberg, Hans, 111, 119–20 boats, fishing, 7–8, 21, 37, 41, 55, 56–7; in civic shows, 59, 62 boatswains (bosuns): in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, 67, 69, 76, 83, 133–4n37; skills and social backgrounds, 20, 76–7 Bonny, Anne, 18 Bradbrook, Muriel, 129n19 Brayton, Dan, 13, 16 Bridenbaugh, Carl, 18, 33

160 Index Bristol, 7, 30, 31, 96 Brotton, Jerry, 69 Burke, Peter, 42, 43, 127n77 Burton, Valerie, 108, 140n14 calling, as vocational concept, 57, 80, 135n76 Canada, 48 carpentry, 7. See also shipbuilding Carroll, Siobhan, 111 Catholicism, 10, 98–9 Cecil, William (Lord Burghley), 27, 34, 129–30n22 Cell, Gillian T., 34 Chakravarty, Urvashi, 11–12 Chapman, James, 112 Charles I (king), 34 Child, Josiah, 12, 126n26; writing as “Philopatris,” 12–13. See also mercantilism Christopher, Emma, 107 Civil War, English, 13, 48 Clement, Alain, 31, 126n26 climate change, 26, 83, 114 clothing, as signal of occupation and social class, 13, 100, 139n48 cod, as trade commodity, 30, 35, 39, 48 Cohen, Margaret, 13, 53, 59–60, 75–6, 109 Coke, Roger, 31–2, 44, 49. See also mercantilism Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 113 colonial migration, 6; from England to North America, 23, 28, 33, 43, 48–9. See also plantation; population Conley, Mary A., 104 Cormack, Lesley B., 9 craft, as social and occupational concept, 13, 23–4, 53, 79, 109 Cressy, David, 74

Cromwell, Oliver (lord protector), 13 custom, 64, 133n42; as counterpoint to superstition, 75; as legally binding, 133n41; as part of shipboard culture, 7, 74–5 Danseker, Simon, 87; as subject of “The sea-mans song of Danse[k?]ar the Dutch-man,” 93 Darwin, Charles, 118 Deakins, Roger, 43 Dee, John, 5, 8–9, 26, 28, 29, 31, 52, 55, 65, 88, 103, 130n23; General and rare memorials pertayning to the perfect arte of navigation, 8–9, 55; “petty navy royal,” 8, 29, 55 Dekker, Thomas, 84; Troia-Nova triumphans, 128n6 Deloney, Thomas: “The Spanish lady’s love to an English sailor,” 99 De Malynes, Gerald, 9. See also mercantilism Dening, Greg, 113, 115, 117 dialogue, as humanist genre, 42–3, 45–6, 127n77 Digges, Dudley, 26, 28, 31, 41. See also mercantilism Digital Library (Literature of Justification at Lehigh University), 48 discipline: as reform strategy for criminalized poor, 38–9, 45–6, 56, 140n14; shipboard, 11, 129n15 Dolan, Frances E., 96 Doty, Jeffrey S., 132n8 Doyle, Laura, 25 Dugaw, Diane, 137n16, 139n50 East India Company (EIC), 56, 70n94; role in English trade, 13, 53; treatment of common sailors, 11, 77

Index 161 Easton, Peter, 35 Eburne, Richard: Plaine path-way to plantations that is, a discourse in generall, concerning the plantation of our English people in other countries, 23, 29, 42–8, 49 ecocriticism, 83–4 Edward VI (king), 29 Elizabeth I (queen), 29, 91–2 empire, maritime: Roman empire as historical model, 53, 69–70; triumphal views, 5, 14, 20–1, 95, 110, 118 enclosure laws, 15, 83 “E.S.”: Britaines busse, 57 Falconer, A.F., 24, 51 families: participation in maritime work, 7, 14, 18; relocation to colonies, 37, 40; ties to sailors, 12, 17, 19, 21, 47, 89, 91–2, 102, 104 fish days: laws, 29; as promotion of English fishing industry, 24, 29, 57; as strategy for feeding the poor, 54–5, 58 fishermen: association with Christ’s disciples, 24, 57; social status of, 29, 31–2; as source of naval manpower, 32–3; working conditions of, 6–7, 40–1, 74. See also fishing; seamen fishing: as domestic industry, 8–9, 28, 31–2, 34, 44, 50–5, 59–65, 107, 129–30n22; as national economic strategy, 54–5, 61, 85. See also fishermen; Fishmongers, Worshipful Company of; Newfoundland colony Fishmongers, Worshipful Company of: alliance with Goldsmiths’ Company, 58–63, 65; coat of arms, 62; position relative to fishermen,

23–4, 52, 60, 125n75, 129n18; public image, 24, 57–60, 130–1n38. See also fishing Fitzmaurice, Andrew, 34 food supplies: domestic, 8, 29, 54–5, 60, 69; shipboard, 91, 114 Forman, Valerie, 69, 134n60 fortune: role in Shakespeare’s Mediterranean plays, 72–3, 133n27. See also risk; shipwrecks Foxe, Luke, 108–9 France, 30, 112 Franklin Expedition, 26, 109, 111, 113, 119, 140n28. See also Northwest Passage; Terror, The free seas debates (Mare liberum), 8–9 Frye, Northrop, 71 Fuller, Mary C., 27 Fumerton, Patricia, 25, 53, 93, 95, 103, 135n67, 137n14, 138n44 Fury, Cheryl A., 7, 140n14 Fusaro, Maria, 15 Games, Alison, 138n45 gender, 85; composition on ships, 108; as fluid concept in maritime empire, 18–19. See also masculinity; women Gentleman, Tobias, 9, 56, 60; Englands way to win wealth, 56–7 Gilbert, Humphrey, 26, 28, 29, 30, 33, 35; claiming Newfoundland, 27; death, 27; royal patent (1578), 33 Gilman, Ernest B., 135–6n88 Gilroy, Paul, 107 Goldsmiths, Worshipful Company of, 58, 61–6; 1660 entertainment, 3–4, 53, 99; friendship with Fishmongers’ Company, 62–3 Gray, David, 83 Greene, Matthew, 116 Guasco, Michael, 11

162 Index Gulli, Bruno, 68–9 Guy, John, 30 Hailwood, Mark, 88 Hakluyt, Richard, 5, 30, 33, 52, 76, 88, 103 Harding, Christopher, 93 Harper, Lawrence A., 10 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 98 Harvey, Richard, 25 Hill, Tracey, 63, 129n10, 131n47 Hitchcock, Richard, 83, 89, 95, 103; A pollitique platte, 29–30, 55–6, 88 Hoffman, Richard C., 130n34 Hogan, Sarah, 45 Holstun, James, 75 Howard, Jean, 74 Hubbard, Eleanor, 12, 107–8, 110 Hunt, Maurice, 68, 69 impressment, 7, 27, 94, 102, 138n26 Indigenous populations, 11, 81–2; in Atlantic context, 11–12, 16, 18–19; in Newfoundland, 37–8, 45, 46, 49 Innis, Harold A., 30 Ipswich, 15 Ireland: English colonization of, 45–6; Irish mutineers, 115, 141n31 “Jack Tar” figure, 12, 13–14, 104 James I (king), 30 Jenstad, Janelle Day, 63 Jonson, Ben, 84; dismissal of Pericles, 71 Jowitt, Claire, 76, 105 Kane, Stuart A., 25 Kendrick, Matthew, 21 Kinzel, Ulrich, 109, 115, 116 Kipling, Gordon, 129–30n22 Kirke, David, 43 Klein, Bernard, 73, 82, 84

Kluwick, Ursula, 133–4n47 Knapp, Jeffrey, 138n46 Krausman Ben-Amos, Ilana, 47 labour: as everyday praxis, 68–70, 73, 79–81, 107, 135n67; as imperial commodity, 21, 98, 103, 106; as social value, 53–4, 68–9, 76, 81, 85 Lam, Anita, 113–14 Lambert, Andrew, 4 Lambert, Craig, 7–8 Lamborn Wilson, Peter, 16 Leinwand, Theodore B., 53, 131n47 Leman, John (Lord Mayor of London), 58, 62 liberty: as mercantilist concept, 10, 11–12, 13; as political ideal, 50, 52, 53, 66, 70, 87, 101, 107, 117 Linebaugh, Peter, 11, 16, 129n15 Lloyd, Christopher, 110 Loades, David, 7 Lobanov-Rostovsky, Sergei, 53, 129n8 Lord Mayor, office of, 58, 60; as addressee in civic drama, 23; ideal qualities of, 51, 58, 62, 128n6. See also Abney, Thomas; Allot, John; Leman, John; Walworth, William Lord Mayor’s shows: characteristics and ethos of, 51–2, 53–4, 57–8, 67–8, 128n6, 132n4; general, 23, 50, 107. See also Fishmongers, Worshipful Company of; Munday, Anthony; Nelson, Thomas; Settle, Elkanah Low Countries (Netherlands), 56; Dutch fishermen in North Sea, 29, 31–2, 56 Lowry, Brian, 114 Mainwaring, Henry, 35 management, capitalist, 7, 22, 23, 28, 34, 43–4, 57, 106, 109; social profile of management class, 46–7, 106

Index 163 Mandeville, John: Travels, 30 Manley, Lawrence, 128–9n8 masculinity, 113; as characteristic of sailors and shipboard cultures, 16, 18–19, 104, 108. See also gender; women Mason, John: A briefe discourse of the New-found-land with the situation, temperature, and commodities thereof, inciting our nation to goe forward in that hopefull plantation begunne, 23, 29, 31, 36, 38, 39–40, 42, 46, 49 Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (film), 112–13 masterlessness, association with seafarers, 18–19, 23, 47, 53. See also vagrancy McCusker, John J., 136n7 Mediterranean region, 24–5, 34, 68–70, 81, 85, 96, 107 Mentz, Steven, 15, 71–2, 90 mercantilism, 5, 8–9, 31–3, 53, 88–9, 96, 105, 136n7; abstraction of maritime labour, 12, 14, 17, 21, 49, 100, 120, 138n27; attitudes towards domestic poor, 9–11, 19, 23; metaphors of invasive disease, 98–9. See also Child, Josiah; Coke, Roger; Digges, Dudley; Misselden, Edward; trade merchants, as agents of empire, 3, 9, 10, 12, 20, 23–4, 30–1, 36, 53, 58, 59, 61, 64, 70, 91, 96, 105, 130–1n38, 138n45 merchant ships and sailing, 5, 7, 8, 9, 16, 20, 80, 107 Merchant Venturers, Bristol Society of, 30 Middle Ages, 6–7, 18, 24 middle class, 70 Middleton, Thomas, 84; The Phoenix, 103–5

Misselden, Edward, 5–6, 9, 26, 88, 89, 95, 103; The Circle of Commerce, or, The Ballance of Trade, 10–11, 33, 88. See also mercantilism mobility: geographic, 13, 15, 19, 34, 49, 94; socioeconomic, 5, 12, 19–21, 54, 63, 67, 77, 93, 99–101, 107, 133–4n47, 140n14 Monck, George (lord general), 3 More, Thomas. See utopias Morriss, Roger, 110, 115 Morrow, David, 78, 136n95 Muldrew, Craig, 139n57 Mullaney, Steven, 71 Mun, Thomas, 6, 9, 13, 52, 56 Munday, Anthony, 84; Chrusothriambos: The Triumphs of Golde, 61–2, 65; Chrysanaleia: The Golden Fishing: Or, Honour of Fishmongers, 24, 52, 58–61, 62, 63, 65, 131n47 Musgrave, Peter, 18, 129n10 mutinies, 7, 115; Bounty (ship), 113; Nore (ship), 110; Spithead (ship), 110 Nagaitis, Adam, 116 Napoleonic Wars, 112 Nashe, Thomas: Lenten Stuffe, 29, 32, 55 navies and naval men, 3–4, 5, 13, 16, 32–3, 91–2, 107; navy in Tudor period, 8, 20; “petty navy royal” (John Dee), 8–9, 29, 55; Royal Navy in Victorian period, 104, 110–11, 113 Navigation Acts (1651), 10 Nelson, Horatio, 110 Nelson, Thomas: Device of the Pageant: Set forth by the Worshipfull Companie of the Fishmongers, 24, 52, 54–5, 57–60, 63, 131n47 Netzloff, Mark, 137n20

164 Index Newfoundland colony: behaviour of English fishermen there, 36–41; decline after 1620s, 48–50; establishment in 1610, 22, 30; Indigenous populations, 37–8, 45, 46, 49; similarities to colonized Ireland, 45–6; struggles between colonizers and fishermen, 34. See also fishing Newfoundland Company (formerly the London and Bristol Company), 30–1 New Model Army, 13 Norbrook, David, 82–3, 84, 92, 132n20, 133n25 North Sea, 8 Northway, Kara, 53–4, 67 Northwest Passage, 109, 114, 140n28. See also Franklin Expedition; Terror, The oceans: early modern views of, 14–17, 22, 71, 90; as social construct, 22. See also alterity officers, shipboard, 69, 91, 110, 116–17; class designations of, 110, 115, 118; social “entrepreneurialism” of, 113–15 Parker, Martin: “Saylors for my money,” 87, 101 Parkhurst, Anthony, 30, 31, 32, 33, 41 Parmenius, Stephen, 27 Peckham, George, 30, 33 Penberthy, Susan, 78 Perl-Rosenthal, Nathan, 10–11 Peter (disciple of Christ), 24, 59, 62, 64 piracy, 11, 12, 13–14, 17, 20, 22–3, 26, 30–1, 34, 37–8, 41, 44, 60, 80–1, 87, 90, 92–3, 99, 137n20, 137n22; “pirate utopias,” 16, 139n47;

women’s engagement with, 18. See also privateering plainness, as rhetorical style, 36, 43, 59–60, 131n41 plantation, 31, 33, 34; labour model outside Newfoundland, 48–9; as population management strategy, 28–9, 38–41, 42–7. See also colonial migration; population Ponte, Mark, 124n35 Pope, Peter E., 34, 133n35 popular literature, as site of maritime representation, 5–6, 17–18, 21, 26, 88–9, 105, 106 population, strategies for management, 16, 22–3, 28–9, 31–4, 40, 45–8, 106, 109. See also colonial migration; plantation poverty, domestic, 10, 45, 53, 54–5, 137n16 print culture: as authorial strategy, 84; role in colonial promotion, 23, 28; role in representing seamen, 13–14, 16, 92, 104 privateering, 7, 20. See also piracy Privy Council, 35 Proclamation against the Disorderly Transporting His Majesty’s Subjects to the Plantations within the Parts of America (1637), 33–4 promotional literature, general characteristics of, 25, 28–9, 34 Protestantism, as part of national identity, 10, 24, 98–9 Purchas, Samuel, 5, 33 Quinn, David, 29, 31 race: as co-discourse to labour, 11–12, 134n55, 135n86; as unstable concept in maritime empire, 28, 107–8, 113

Index 165 Raleigh, Walter: History of the World, 9 Read, Mary, 18 “red” Atlantic, as critical perspective, 11. See also Atlantic region Rediker, Marcus, 11, 16, 89, 129n15 Relihan, Constance, 81 renegade figures (renegado), 20, 47 Richard II (king), 57 risk, as mercantile concept, 66, 89, 105, 120. See also fortune; shipwrecks Rollins, Hyder E., 94 romance plays, late; as aristocratic genre, 66, 68, 71, 78–9, 85, 135n73; pageant influences, 67–8; representations of work within, 68–9, 82–3. See also Shakespeare, William Romantic period, 111 Ryan, Maureen, 114 sailors. See seamen Scammell, G.V., 20, 77 Schillings, Sonya, 93–4 Schleck, Julia, 19, 21, 94 Schramm, Karen, 28 Scott, William: An Essay of Drapery, 130–1n38 seafaring; associated dangers, 11, 15, 16, 20–1, 60–1, 63, 64, 66, 73, 90, 93, 109, 120, 133–4n37; as employment strategy for the poor, 9–10, 56–7, 88, 103; role of technology, 109, 114 seamen: as amphibious figures, 6, 14, 17–18, 21, 124–5n53; apprenticeship, 15–16, 140n14; employment contracts, 6–7; as imperial symbol, 13, 22, 52, 66, 81, 104, 107, 111; as mobile labour source, 16–21, 28–9, 94; occupational itineracy, 18, 28–9,

40, 53, 129n17, 137n20; pay, 6–7, 19, 40, 69–70, 74, 91–2, 133n35; rebelliousness, 7, 16, 25, 28, 46–7, 74, 80–1, 92–3, 115; relationships with landed communities, 17–18, 20–2, 89–104, 105; sexual conduct, 87, 99, 102, 105, 108, 115; as wards of the state, 10–11. See also fishermen Settle, Elkanah: The Triumphs of London, 24, 52, 63–6 Shakespeare, William, 4, 24, 51, 57, 66, 116; as professional writer, 84–5; as witness to London’s civic shows, 67–8, 132n4. See also romance plays Sheen, Erica, 84–5 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein, 113 Shepard, Alexandra, 47 Sherman, William, 6 shipbuilding, 5, 7, 55, 57, 70, 83–4, 129–30n22, 136n93 shipwrecks: as aesthetic objects, 111, 119–20; Pericles, 4, 25, 68, 72, 73–4; The Tempest, 72–3. See also fortune; risk Simmons, Dan, 26, 109, 111, 115, 117, 119. See also Terror, The Sirota, Brett, 12 slavery: in Atlantic world, 48–9, 90; resemblance to common seaman’s working conditions, 10–13, 16, 18, 27–8, 91–2, 107–8. See also “Black Atlantic”; Whiteness Smith, Bruce, 68 Spain, 94, 99 “Speech Made to his Excellency the Lord General Monck, At the Council of State at Goldsmiths Hall in London” (1660), 3–4, 53 Spenser, Edmund: A View of the Present State of Ireland, 45–6

166 Index Stanivukovic, Goran, 70 Steinberg, Philip E., 22 Stern, Philip, 12 St. James, Emily, 120 Straw, Jack, 57 subsidy men, 33 survival horror, as genre, 113–14 Swingen, Abigail, 49 Taylor, John (“The Water Poet”), 130–1n38; commentary on fishermen, 57 Terror, The: historical novel, 26, 109–20; television series, 26, 109–10, 112–14, 116–17, 120. See also Franklin Expedition; Northwest Passage; Simmons, Dan Thames River, 51 trade, 9–13, 22–3, 24, 28, 29, 30–2, 52–6, 63–4, 68, 70, 88, 90, 98, 105, 132n6; protectionism, 8–9, 10; small-scale, 7, 12, 38, 41, 69. See also mercantilism; Navigation Acts of 1651 Trafalgar, Battle of, 110 Tratner, Michael, 136n7 Travers, Ben, 120 Trinity Houses of Deptford Strond and Hull, 7, 15, 34 Turner, J.M.W., 111, 120

34, 137n23, 138n41; as domestic problem, 38–40, 45, 47, 88. See also masterlessness Vaughn, William, 31, 35, 48 Venice, 98–9 Victorian period, ideal of “naval manhood,” 104, 118 Virginia, 29, 48, 96 “The Virgins Constancy; Or the Faithfull Marriner, Who proved most loyall, though he seem’d a Fariner,” 96–9 Vives, Juan Luis, 45

Unger, Richard W., 17 Unwin, George, 23, 53, 125n75, 129n18 utopias, 15; as literary genre, 45; as part of colonial imaginary, 23, 45–6, 49; “pirate utopias,” 116, 139n47; in The Tempest, 76, 77–8; Utopia (Thomas More), 42, 45

Wage, Frederick O., 95 Walworth, William (Lord Mayor of London), 57–8, 63, 131n47 Ward, John, 87 Whitbourne, Richard: A Discourse and Discovery of Newfoundland, 23, 29, 32–3, 34–41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49; A discourse containing a loving invitation, 38 Whiteness; as aspect of British identity, 49, 107, 114, 119; as fluid category in maritime empire, 11, 16, 18, 108. See also slavery Wigen, Karen, 17 Withington, Phil, 131n42 women, 6, 106; as maritime workers, 8, 18–19, 108, 138n37; as partners to seamen, 12, 18–19, 21, 40, 87, 92, 94, 96, 103, 124n35, 137n16, 139n50, 139n52. See also gender; masculinity Woolf, D.R., 137n18 wreck, laws of (wreccum maris), 74. See also shipwrecks Wurzbach, Natascha, 95

vagrancy, 6, 25, 94–6, 105, 117; association with seafarers, 23,

Yachnin, Paul, 77 Yarmouth, 7, 15, 29, 55, 96