Daniel Vickers

Beyond Jack Tar

P OPULAR history of seafaring in America has always commanded a wide and enthusiastic audience. Clipper ships to California, piracy in the Gulf of Mexico, whaling voyages to tropical seas, naval actions off Chesapeake Bay: all form part of a maritime mythology that supports a sizable corner of the publishing market as well as some of the most important of Americas historical museums. This popular history has no comparable academic counterpart. Consider how little most students of early American history know about the fisheries, shipbuilding industries, and seafaring communities of the thirteen colonies. American people may be interested in their maritime past, and a large group of museum historians and popular writers may labor hard to answer their questions, but the great majority of academic historians-those who train other historians-pay maritime subjects little heed. Accordingly, the maritime history of early America is strong on public presentation but weak on analytic content. A number of possible explanations for this imbalance suggest themselves. One is that in simple quantitative terms seafarers and their families did not count for much, since most colonists belonged to agricultural or craft households that earned their living from the land. Another is that maritime subjects have not mattered terribly in the greater calculus of national affairs that activates scholarly attention today. Twentieth-century historians are far more preoccupied with topics such as class, race, gender, and economic policy-all of which have contemporary resonance-than they are with the origins of shipping and fishing industries that have spent most of this century in decay. Another is the absence of any well-defined body of maritime theory around which research and debate might be organized. Labor historians can argue the questions formulated by Marx and Weber; economic historians have an even more refined body of thought descending from Adam Smith to give direction to their work; and ethnohistorians can work with models of cultural behavior derived from anthropology. American maritime historians do not in the main address one another at all. Lacking any powerful common agenda, they sit as it

Errors Expected: The Culture of Credit in Rural New England, 1750–1800

This article uses farm diaries from eighteenth-century New England recast as account books in order to describe more accurately the rules of exchange and the culture of credit that prevailed in early America. This culture, which was post-medieval yet pre-modern, derived its fundamental characteristics from the fact that it connected participants who dealt with one another as formal equals before the law. It employed strategies inside and outside the market, and, rather than embracing or rejecting commercial activity, aimed to use whatever means necessary to achieve for householders the goal of comfortable independence.

The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society, 1600–1775

For most of the sixteenth century, the landholding and trading classes of northwestern Europe imagined the New World, based on the example set by the Spanish and Portuguese empires, as a field for conquest, plunder, and dominion. When English, French, or Dutch adventurers trained their minds on the Atlantic and its western shores, they dreamt of precious metals seized from Spanish galleons and conquered Indian peoples, rich estates worked by Indian or European subjects and supervised by transplanted gentlemen, or lucrative trading posts where willing and naive Indians would trade away their high-valued wares for next to nothing. Such projects would reward their promoters, less in the hard-won profit margins of competitive trade than in booty, rents, swindle, royal favor, and sometimes in the sense of having done one’s duty for king, country, or the true faith. With a few magnificent exceptions, however, most of these adventures came to nought. They did not repay their investors, nor did they establish any of the north European countries as a significant colonial power. By the turn of the century, therefore, a new generation of adventurers – first in England and then more gradually on the continent – began to consider a change in strategy. Listening to the arguments of men such as Richard Hakluyt, they planned and promoted overseas settlements where Europeans would support themselves by raising staple commodities for sale in the Atlantic marketplace. This principle – that colonies could be sustained and investors rewarded from the profits of trade – remained the common denominator within all the successful overseas undertakings in the decades to come.

History and Context: Reflections from Newfoundland

John Crosbie, the Canadian minister of fisheries, stunned Newfoundlanders on July 2, 1992, when he announced the first moratorium on the northern cod fishery, bringing to an end one of the oldest and richest fisheries on Earth. I was then teaching maritime history at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, and the news caught me entirely off guard. Though aware of the problems in the cod fishery for some years, I had not realized that things were as bad as they were—or at least I was not certain enough to do anything about it. For almost fifteen years I had been writing a book on the social history of colonial New England’s cod fishery that dealt well enough with the hard lives of fishermen but ignored entirely the possibility that the livelihood they pursued might have been in the long run unsustainable. I had concerned myself only with the way in which the profits from the fishery had been shared and had ignored entirely the process through which the fishery itself was vanishing. And although it seemed true enough that the degradation of the cod stocks had not yet begun before 1850, the period I was studying, I could not run from the feeling that I had been dealing with a problem of the second order. Remarkably, two of my most talented colleagues at Memorial—Rosemary Ommer and Sean Cadigan— were completing parallel studies of the Gaspe and of Newfoundland in the nineteenth century that also focused on the social relations of production in the fishery rather than the question of its ecological sustainability. Although there is no reason to be ashamed of any of these books for what they did achieve, we were in some real way fiddling while Rome burned.

Building the Bay Colony: Local Economy and Culture in Early Massachusetts, by James E. McWilliams. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 201.

that requires the editors to prefer italics to underlining, the word “per” to the per symbol, or that every paragraph be indented. Texts have not been “rendered as literally as possible” when datelines are silently moved to the top of every document, when they originally appeared elsewhere, and when repeated words have been omitted without editorial comment. Furthermore, moving the punctuation beneath superscripted letters next to the raised letter(s) is an example of the editors trying to replicate in print something that is largely beyond the reach of “modern typography.” What one often ends up with is punctuation that is both regularized and in the wrong place. For example, the semicolon under the raised “r” in the first line of Thomas McKean’s letter to Adams from 18 November 1782 is changed in this volume into a colon, raised above the line, and placed after the superscripted “r.” Although not a perfect solution, it might have made more sense simply to treat such pieces of punctuation as a superfluous indication of the presence of a raised letter and ignore them. Two last issues deserve consideration. The Adams Papers has almost always included interlineations silently in its transcriptions. Although this results in a cleaner text, compositional meaning is inevitably lost. For example, when Adams originally wrote Lady Penn on 14 January 1783, he stated: “I received yesterday the Letter, you did me the Honour to write me”; he then deleted the word “you” and added “your Ladyship” above it. This is a small, but telling alteration, and it (and similar changes) should be accounted for. Lastly, it is interesting to note that only the translations of foreign language documents are indexed in this volume. Although the reasons behind this decision are easy enough to see, it comes perilously close to indexing the annotation and not the document in question. If foreign language master texts are truly worth printing in full (and in a larger font than their translations to boot), then they should be indexed as well. Such concerns aside, this is a fine effort and a worthy addition to both the Papers of John Adams and to document-based editing as a whole.

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Daniel Vickers examines the shifting labor strategies used by colonists as New England evolved from a string of frontier settlements to a mature society on the brink of industrialization. Lacking a means to purchase slaves or hire help, seventeenth-century settlers adapted the labor systems of Europe to cope with the shortages of capital and workers they encountered on the edge of the wilderness. As their world developed, changes in labor arrangements paved the way for the economic transformations of the nineteenth century. By reconstructing the work experiences of thousands of farmers and fishermen in eastern Massachusetts, Vickers identifies who worked for whom and under what terms. Seventeenth-century farmers, for example, maintained patriarchal control over their sons largely to assure themselves of a labor force. The first generation of fish merchants relied on a system of clientage that bound poor fishermen to deliver their hauls in exchange for goods. Toward the end of the colonial period, land scarcity forced farmers and fishermen to search for ways to support themselves through wage employment and home manufacture. Out of these adjustments, says Vickers, emerged a labor market sufficient for industrialization.