Englishmen at Sea

Hubbard’s book presents a new and richly researched perspective on the social history of English seafarers at a crucial moment in the development of England’s maritime empire. Drawing principally on state papers, printed sources, and the detailed depositions preserved in the records of the High Court of Admiralty, Hubbard explores the experience of life at sea and the role that mariners played in the development of imperial and commercial networks across the three decades on either side of 1600. As well as presenting many fascinating vignettes of early modern life—a style that characterizes Hubbard’s other work—Englishmen at Sea represents a welcome reinterpretation of ideas about national identity within the maritime sphere.The first two chapters outline the chronology of maritime employment around the turn of the seventeenth century, when decades of warfare in the late sixteenth century, during which violent plunder was economically vital to seafarers, gave way to peace after 1603. As merchants and the state sought to encourage more routine commerce, Hubbard asserts, seafarers instead continued plundering, especially in the Mediterranean—where religious conflicts persisted.The third chapter traces the sometimes tense balance of interests within commercial shipping, as seafarers and their employers “struggled over the allocation of profits and danger” (23). The following chapter explores those who joined the surge of piracy around Ireland and the Maghreb during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. The fifth chapter turns to the early days of the East India Company, once again examining negotiations and conflicts during these especially long and perilous voyages. The final two chapters explore how seafarers constructed and performed an English identity through their experience of cross-cultural travel and then how state policy often favored sailors but became increasingly heavy-handed with the demands of renewed warfare in the 1620s.Throughout these chapters Hubbard brings new light to several areas of maritime social history; two strike me as particularly significant. The first is her argument that shipboard communities were rarely as rigid a hierarchy as has often been supposed—commanders appealed to shared interests and to ideas of nationality as well as “care and comradeship”—“rather than pitting officers against men, shipboard disputes were typically factional, with rival officers martialling their own groups of supporters” (167, 11).The second, broader point is Hubbard’s commentary on the central question of nationality. This is a distinct contribution; many scholars have emphasized the multinational and cosmopolitan nature of maritime employment. Hubbard’s response is nuanced, arguing that “the sea was not an empty, frictionless space but one in which worlds collided: borders abruptly came into being then melted away as ships met and parted” (9). She explores how different parties developed varying, and sometimes clashing, ideas of what it meant to be English, and she crucially shows that such national narratives were not only top-down constructs imposed by the state or trading companies but were also developed and endorsed by seafarers themselves.On other points I am not quite so convinced. Despite Hubbard’s emphasis on the interactions between seafarers, state, and employers throughout this period, there seems a tendency at times to fall back on a more conventional model of contrasting interests—to posit that seafarers had their own “understanding of justice” distinct from official rules or laws, or that “merchants attacked sailors’ private trade in promising new markets” (182, 102). This tendency is most marked in the fourth chapter’s argument that “pirates created a project of their own, one which put the interests of seamen first” (137). Legal evidence, on which this book draws so effectively, inevitably reveals more conflict than consensus. It seems to me that this approach risks an overemphasis on the homogeneity of seafarers (and the coordination of pirates, most of whom, as Hubbard notes, did not remain pirates long but sought out pardons or simply returned home), while underplaying the more complex social relations with employers and other communities that are also considered here.I think that it may also be premature to describe the early decades of the seventeenth century as a “turn from plunder to commerce” with empire emerging through efforts to impose order on unruly seafarers (13). Peace was no more than a temporary interlude. At least as many plunderers sailed during the 1620s as the 1590s, and every decade from the 1640s on witnessed worldwide maritime warfare, from which both merchants and empires profited. Unruly plundering seafarers were essential to the formation of empire for at least another century, if not longer.Despite these caveats, Englishmen at Sea is a landmark (or seamark) in early modern maritime social history. Hubbard’s work is sure to stimulate further discussion and debate on the role that seafarers and maritime communities played in the early phases of imperial expansion

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