Pirates & Privateers: Myra C. Glenn's Books

Seafaring accounts are popular reading fare for the American public in the years before the Civil War. Jack Tar’s Story examines such tomes, many written by men who participate in the War of 1812, but encompasses life aboard whalers and merchantmen, privateers and naval ships. While the book’s primary focus involves narratives published between 1815 and 1860, Glenn does include a few that predate this period. The majority are from white Anglo-American citizens, in part because few black mariners write about their maritime experiences.

While she asks many questions as regards these narratives and their writers, the chief questions she poses are:

Who are the retired antebellum mariners who publish their memoirs and autobiographies?
How do these men remember and interpret their experiences at sea and in port?
What common themes, rhetorical strategies, and tropes do they articulate?

Each of the five chapters focuses on specific aspects of seamen’s lives as depicted in these narratives. Through her well-researched examination, Glenn shows how masculinity and national pride are important elements of these stories.

In chapter one, she explores coming-of-age narratives, such as Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, Nathaniel Ames’s A Mariner’s Sketches, and Samuel Leech’s A Voice from the Main Deck. These have three common themes: escape, freedom, and captivity. Some writers are “gentlemen sailors,” while others come from working-class families familiar with poverty and limited education.

Chapters two and three examine how seamen remember their experiences, such as naval encounters and captivity, during the American Revolution and the War of 1812, as well as lesser-known conflicts involving the United States in some way. The themes in these chapters concern manhood, tyranny, race, and patriotism, as can be seen in such titles as James M’Lean’s Seventeen Years’ History, Horace Lane’s The Wandering Boy, and Joshua Penny’s The Life and Adventures of Joshua Penny.

Punishment exposés, particularly flogging, are the focus of the fourth chapter. She examines how this punishment threatens sailors’ masculinity and reflect on the nation. William Meacham Murrell’s Cruise of the Frigate Columbia around the World and Jacob Hazen’s Five Years Before the Mast are two of the narratives referred to in this section.

The final chapter covers depictions of the changing waterfront culture, religious revivals, and evangelical reforms and how such changes impacted seamen’s perceptions of themselves as manly men in such titles as Samuel F. Holbrook’s Threescore Years.

Following Glenn’s conclusions, she includes an appendix citing the twenty-six autobiographies and memoirs focused on in the book. An index rounds out the title.

What sets this study apart from others is Glenn’s use of historical records to verify what the authors write about their experiences: crew lists, ships’ logs, records of impressments and prisoners of war, pension files, census reports, and documents from the Sailors’ Snug Harbor (a home for elderly and ill seamen in New York). Such fact-checking permits her to clearly demonstrate that these narratives are a mix of fact and fiction, while remaining vital windows into seamen’s life during the later period of the Age of Sail. Although they contain interpretations and memories, these narratives reflect their writers’ values and mentality during turbulent, peaceful, and changing times. Jack Tar’s Story is a well-written, scholarly, and highly informative assessment of how seamen view the world in which they live and work based on their life experiences.

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