Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Canto original series) [Paperback]

Marcus Rediker (Author)

Book Description

Series: Canto original series | Publication Date: June 25, 1993

Seamen, captains and pirates occupy a special place in our popular culture, yet until now the historical record of their lives has been remarkably neglected. This brilliant account of the maritime world of the eighteenth-century reconstructs in detail the social and cultural milieu of Anglo-American seafaring and piracy. Rediker follows sailors and their ships along the pulsing trade routes, into ports with their crowded waterfront society of brothels, alehouses, brawls and jails, and paints a compelling picture of their world at sea with its brutal labour, harsh discipline, hangings and floggings. The book's focus on maritime experience illuminates the broader historical sweep of the rise of capitalism and the growth of an international working class - epic themes which were intimately bound up with everyday lives of seafaring men.

Editorial Reviews

Review

This book is...full of meat...graphically described" Socialist Review

'Triumphant ... 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

Book Description

Seamen, captains and pirates occupy a special place in our popular culture, yet until now the historical record of their lives has been remarkably neglected. This brilliant account of the maritime world of the eighteenth-century reconstructs in detail the social and cultural milieu of Anglo-American seafaring and piracy.

Product Details

• Paperback: 340 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (June 25, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521457203
• ISBN-13: 978-0521457200
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #614,079 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant and Surprising, March 9, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Canto original series) (Paperback)

Rediker is, first of all, a wonderful writer - even if you've never read a about the early 1700s before, you'll be engrossed in what he has to say about the world of "Jack Tar". People who enjoy sea-faring fiction will also get a kick out of it; Rediker reveals a world of constant backbreaking work in a very dangerous environment, brutal punishments for the tiniest infraction, and of the strange brotherhood that forms among sailors. For me the biggest surprise was that the pirates are the good guys in the story - men who broke away from the tyrannical hierachy of ships, who formed a very specific set of moral rules based upon the traditions of the English poor, who shared the booty, who championed the weak and punished the strong. Kind of a Robin Hood thing, very interesting. Entertaining, compelling, informative.

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A remarkable investigation on an original topic., May 28, 2000

By 

Sebastián Ignacio Donoso B. - See all my reviews

This review is from: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Canto original series) (Paperback)

"Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" constitutes a very serious study on a topic often covered just superficially by historians: the life, ways , customs and culture at sea in the Anglo - American Maritime World in the Eighteenth Century. The title itself suggests the wooden world of the ship, sailing through the ocean with its sailors trapped in the middle of the Devil, or the harsh conditions on board, and the Deep Blue Sea. The first part of the book provides the reader with a wide view of the port cities and trade routes where this maritime culture evolved. And starting from this geographical tour, the topic is narrowed down to the specific aspects and details regarding "Jack Tar", or the personification of an average sailor of those times. It is amazing to think of such a harsh world, very well portrayed by the autor, that was the heart of the English Commerce, and the cornerstone of the future British Empire. The conditions on board were so insane that only the stongest could survive. This reality, very accurately described by the autor, led to multiple mutinies that often ended up in piracy. The fact that English sailors died in similar proportion as slaves in the African Coast, is a true revelation for the reader. A remarkable fact dealing with piracy, that makes this book different from others, is that this investigation prooves that the pirates are the good guys of the story. These men of free spirit that broke away from the strict discipline on board, constituted a democratic but ruthless society, aside of the law, in their pirate ships and communities. Such form of democracy, based on principles of solidarity between the English poor, was one of the first examples of the fight for equality among men, before the French and American Revolutions.

27 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sailing Socialism, March 23, 2003

By 

Bruce Rux (Aurora, CO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Canto original series) (Paperback)

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.