Product Description

The common seaman and the pirate in the age of sail are romantic historical figures who occupy a special place in the popular culture of the modern age. And yet in many ways, these daring men remain little known to us. Like most other poor working people of the past, they left few first-hand accounts of their lives. But their lives are not beyond recovery. In this book, Marcus Rediker uses a huge array of historical sources (court records, diaries, travel accounts, and many others) to reconstruct the social cultural world of the Anglo-American seamen and pirates who sailed the seas in the first half of the eighteenth century. Rediker tours the sailor's North Atlantic, following seamen and their ships along the pulsing routes of trade and into rowdy port towns. He recreates life along the waterfront, where seafaring men from around the world crowded into the sailortown and its brothels, alehouses, street brawls, and city jail. His study explores the natural terror that inevitably shaped the existence of those who plied the forbidding oceans of the globe in small, brittle wooden vessels. It also treats the man-made terror--the harsh discipline, brutal floggings, and grisly hangings--that was a central fact of life at sea. Rediker surveys the commonplaces of the maritime world: the monotonous rounds of daily labor, the negotiations of wage contracts, and the bawdy singing, dancing, and tale telling that were a part of every voyage. He also analyzes the dramatic moments of the sailor's existence, as Jack Tar battled wind and water during a slashing storm, as he stood by his "brother tars" in a mutiny or a stike, and as he risked his neck by joining a band of outlaws beneath the Jolly Roger, the notorious pirate flag. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea focuses upon the seaman's experience in order to illuminate larger historical issues such as the rise of capitalism, the genesis the free wage labor, and the growth of an international working class. These epic themes were intimately bound up with everyday hopes and fears of the common seamen.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #280279 in Books
• Published on: 1989-02-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 337 pages

Review
"...an excellent up-from-the-lower deck study of deepwater sailors in the eighteenth century...the best working-class history I've read in years." Robert Schaeffer, In These Times

"...No one interested in the history of the 18th century can afford to ignore this book." Christopher Hill

"...A fresh and powerful analysis of the 18th century maritime world." Gary Nash

"...the style is lucid, the tone is assured, the documentation professional and economical. And the book is brought to a triumphant conclusion with two superb chapters on the seaman as the 'Spirit of Rebellion' and as a pirate...What distinguishes Rediker's work is his unwavering and unsentimental focus on the seaman's labour and experience in his cramped wooden world." E.P. Thompson, The Guardian

"...a book that undoubtedly will have an enduring value. Every student of early eighteenth-century maritime affairs should read Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea." John D. Byrn, Jr., The Eighteenth Century

"...luminous study of a neglected segment of colonial society." Robert M. Calhoon, Historical Journal of Massachusetts

Customer Reviews

Sailing Socialism
Rediker is hardly the only man to notice - though he is one of only a very few to have written on the topic at length - that the Anglo-American Maritime world of the early to mid 18th Century was a socio-political hotbed of burgeoning revolution. To criticize the author for being a Marxist is absurd - the era about which he is writing, and the sailors and specific cultural events of that era, were socialist themselves, though they wouldn't have had the insight to realize it at the time.

Political scientists and economists should find this book of even more interest than historians, as many of the same events in the rise of Capitalism as Rediker writes about are now coming full circle and repeating themselves, with NAFTA and GATT creating the same social conditions that led to widespread - and often remarkably effective (in the case of piracy) - rebellion between 1700 and 1750. As Rediker points out, our very word "strike," in its labor union connotation, originated with merchant mariners striking sail on their ships and halting the movement of their cargoes.

Rediker is a remarkably thorough researcher, backing his thesis with the best possible sources and representing both the Capitalist and Labor points of view from contemporaneous documents. His masterful rendering of the world of "Jack Tar," an average mariner of the age, ably demonstrates that the social upheaval witnessed during the Golden Age of Piracy was an inevitability - as was its eventual downfall. Rediker is not a Marxist apologist, as his critics claim, but a keen and competent observer of statistical trends and social events, which he elucidates with extreme precision. He is less advancing any kind of argument, than simply putting the merchant marine world of three centuries ago into clear focus, and to some degree comparing and contrasting it with our modern landscape.

This is a truly fascinating book, as much for its brilliantly vivid portraiture of the age as for the validity of its social and economic arguments. It would make an excellent textbook for political science, economics, or sociology classes.

No Quarters given
First off, before you even think about buying this book, understand that is a socioeconomic study of the maritime profession from 1700 to 1750. The book was written by a Marxist who has succumbed to Hollywood's romantic characterization of the Pirate as a misunderstood individual who only wanted his unalienable rights which were withheld by the running dog lackeys of the capitalist pigs who ran the shipping business and the Navy. Even if he had to murder people to get it.

If you want a semi-legitimate justification of piracy, you may find enough here to keep you happy. Most of the study is a legitmate presentation of maritime economics and the danger of the trade in the early part of the 18th century. Yes, most ship owners and captains were capitalist pigs who would man a ship with a minimum crew and pray they lost no crew members to the many dangers that were common to shipping at that time. Not the least of which was piracy.

His arguements begin to fall down when he describes the commraderie and equalitarian brotherhood that pervailed on board a pirate ship. He intimates that slaves captured were treated as equals. (there is documentation to indicate otherwise including the sinking of a pirate ship which the crew members escaped, but the captured slaves were allowed to drown.

If you are reading this for the economic history of the shipping industry or for information of the quaint Naval custom of impressing their crew (both the Americans and British were known for grabbing able bodied saling men off the docks and encouraging them to join - they'd untie them when they were far enough out to sea) then this book is excellent.

If you are looking for information on a typical sailor's life, I'd suggest "Before the Mast" in conjuntion with this. But if you are looking for real information on pirates and piracy, This book does not provide much. there is is more accurate information regarding piracy in "Under the Black Flag" with a more varied discussion of the possible causes of the choice of piracy, backed by statements taken from court records of the time.

I would not recommend Between the Devel and the Deep Blue Sea as a history to most people as the author is attributing many modern sociological and psychological causes to historical events about which we have only in some cases, the account books for reference.

A Review
This text is interesting and engaging, but Rediker's bias ruins the credibility of his arguments. Rediker is a Marxist historian and therefore provides an extremely slanted view of seafaring men. His thesis is centered on the seaman as a member of the working class, and his struggle to rise in a capitalist system. One example of how his bias has clouded his analysis is in his discussion of alcoholism. Rediker assumes that the resort to alcohol is caused by alienation- this draws obvious parallels to Marx's own work focussed on the alienation of the workers (200). A particularly appalling example of his bias is when Rediker discusses the cruel treatment of seaman by their masters. Rediker then asserts that "when Karl Marx noted that the modern wage labor system could not have emerged without the bloody assistance of the lash, he may well have had the early modern shipping industry in mind" (213 n19). Clearly there is no basis for this statement save his personal beliefs.