“What shall we do with a drunken sailor?”

[ABOVE: The Seaman’s Spy-Glass; or, God’s Ways and Works Discovered at Sea, American Tract Society, [1820s], Cover (detail)—Ryan Tobler]

DRUNKEN SAILORS are the stuff of legend. Indeed it would be difficult to find a maritime film or piece of literature without one—alcohol is part of the swashbuckling stereotype. That is particularly true of those who lived in the age of sail.

Sailors ranked among the most ardent imbibers in a fledgling “alcoholic republic,” as historian W. J. Rorabaugh called it, building a robust culture of drinking dense with distinctive rituals, norms, and songs. Sea captains often complained that sailors’ drunkenness interfered with duty. In nineteenth-century America, the passion for drink became part of sailors’ special reputation for disorder and wickedness.

SORROW AT SEA

Sailors of this era, however, had more cause to drink than most. Like those who giddily go to war, first-time sailors often found themselves rudely awakened with backbreaking toil and profound, extended discomfort. Signing on to a sailing vessel meant adventure—but also a sharp separation from family, friends, congregations, and society at large, and entry into a hypermasculine culture that scorned weakness and virtue.

Common sailors were completely subordinate to officers and subject to brutal treatment, including corporal punishments like flogging. Desertion was commonplace. As the century advanced, fewer American farmers’ sons and middle-class people went to sea, leaving ships to be crewed by poor and desperate men without alternatives. As one pastor in Honolulu preached in 1843, citing Jeremiah, “there is sorrow upon the sea.” Alcohol was one of the few comforts available to contend with that sorrow.

New empathy for the hard lot of mariners appeared early in the nineteenth century as moral horizons expanded to include previously neglected categories of people: slaves, drunkards, prostitutes, and convicted criminals. Sailors, many now saw, were also profoundly disadvantaged. The events of the War of 1812 recast sailors as a manly, brave, and generous class of fellow citizens. Consequently maritime reform sprang up in American port cities, where voluntary societies emerged and launched an unprecedented evangelization and reform of seafaring men (see pp. 31–34; 36–38).

TEMPERING THE SEA

Many maritime reformers also came to embrace the temperance movement, the largest and most powerful of all social reform movements of the period. Maritime reformers attempted to bring temperance to hard-drinking sailors and aboard the ships they operated. Not surprisingly this proved an uphill battle, but maritime temperance advocates were remarkably successful. Many sailors knew the detriments of alcohol through experience. Reformers also scored a major win through collusion with maritime insurance companies, who agreed to cut their rates for “temperance ships”—ships that went to sea alcohol free and thus at a decreased risk of accident and loss. Many commercial shipowners made this transition, and their crews became temperate not by persuasion but as a condition of service. Reformers and evangelists assiduously made the case to sailors for a life free from alcohol.

Since the collapse of Prohibition, historians have often scoffed at temperance reform, and overdrawn reform propaganda has made that easy. Temperance engravings and lithographs of the nineteenth century depict an inevitable arc of decline for those who used alcohol, from health and prosperity into a spiraling doom of poverty, insanity, and suicide. Sailors are, incidentally, often featured in these scenes which regularly portray domestic violence and weeping wives and children.

Still these scenes were rooted in ugly realities. Reformers and clergy who advocated temperance were among the few attempting to curb the most widespread form of substance abuse in an era without modern mental health professionals or rehabilitation clinics. Given how desirable alcohol remained to Americans in general and to seamen in particular, success in these efforts was always limited. Reformers did, however, produce critical interventions for individuals seeking personal renewal. Their reputation as hard drinkers notwithstanding, many sailors were dissatisfied with the alcoholic conventions and excesses of maritime life; Christian reformers were among the first to present an alternative.