Customer Reviews

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

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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.

"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.

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.

Markus Rediker explores the amazing way in which the harsh conditions surrounding seafaring in the Eighteenth Century built up a unique environment. The wooden world that constituted the deep sea sailor's reality is carefully detailed and well documented, which makes it very interesting and entertaining to read. Rediker reveals the reader what the real world was like, much different from the romantic idea of the sailor, built up by popular culture. He shows how seamen fought their lives caught "between the devil...", or the harsh conditions on board, and "the deep blue sea", that surrounded everything. He takes the reader in a fascinating trip to the most important port cities of the old Anglo-American Maritime World to experience how and where the personality, ideology, psychological and social characteristics of the deep sea sailor evolved. And, the most interestig feature of all, is how a group of brave and daring men decided to break away and declare a war where "no quarter wold be given" to that unfair reality to which they once belonged. Those rebels became the notorious pirates of the Golden Age of Piracy, who are undoubtedly the most fascinating seamen of the period. Rediker's comparison of the tyrannical conditions of the merchant service and the navy, on one hand, and the democratic principals that guided the Pirate Brotherhood, on the other, is a true revelation of this outstanding book.

On one side stood the devil (captain), who backed by the merchant and royal official, held near-dictorial powers that served captialism globally/On the other side stood the relentlessly dangerous narural world, the deep blue sea. In this fine and scholarly work by Buford Rediker the reader will find a bottom up history of the common seaman, focusing on roughly the early 18th century, some what like Howard Zinn's Peoples History, some 16 years later, on the American worker. The sailor'(tar) experiences of that time, pointed in many ways toward the industrial revolution to come. In the domain of culture as in others, seamen were enmeshed in the momentous transition in which the world came to be governed by capitalism and class.
It is organized topically beginning with a survey of the seaman's world circa 1740, which tours the major ports of the British North Atlantic, describes the commodities piled on the docks and quays, and details those aspects of political economy and history that shaped the seaman's life. Chapter 2 discusses the organiztion and experience of work at sea. Chapter 3 considers the wage in free wage labor and analyzes wage rates and negotiations. Chapter 4 examines culture and community at sea. Chapter 5 explores maritime authority and labor discipline. Chapter 6 investigates the social world of piracy and how it effected the larger culture of maritime labor. The conclusion analyzes the seaman's experience to the process of social change and working-class development in America and England. The jolly tar did indeed live in a world possessed of a sordid & vicious side. His creative survival is the suject of this book (at times in gruesome details). There are quotes in the oringinal written word, and there are many detailed footnotes, maps, and several oringinal illustrations that were of the times. It is very well written, researhced, in-depth analyses of those times. Reading this is time well spent, not only enriched by the history itself, but more importantly, how it coincides with the new world order's globalization of today's world.
In the words of one seaman/Those who would go to sea for pleasure would go to hell for pastime, as the old sea song said: a damned hard life, full of toil and strife. They took to the sea because they could not get bread by land. Work at sea meant virtual incarceration, asa seaman was forcibly assimulated into a severe shipboard regimen of despotic authority, discipline, and control. Shipboard life constituted a binding chain of linked limits: limited freedom, limited movemen, limited sensory stimulation, and limited choices of liesure activities, socil interaction, food, and play.There was too little space aboard the ship and too much outside. As an old salt explained to a green hand/There is no justice or injustice on board ship, my lad. There are only two things: duty and mutiny-mind that. All that you are ordered to do is duty. All that you refuse to do is mutiny. The green hand would soon find out what an almost universal feature of life was for an 18th century sailor, the unrestricted power of the captain to treat his men with the utmost cruelty without redress.
Since the capitalist mode of production ultimately requires the sale and purchase of labor poer in a marketthrough the medium of the wage, a major imperative of early mpdern capitalist developmentwas the simultaneuos dispossession of large numbers of small property holders and the consolidation and centralization of newly available property in the hands of a minority.
The major sources of dispossession were disbanding of fuedal retainers, the dissolution of feudal monasteries, changes in agricultural methods, foreclosure by debt, and probably best known of all enclosure. Wealthy land owners enclosed their lands and extinguished the common rights/They hang the man and flog the woman Who steals the goose from off the Common; But let the greater criminal loose Who steals the Common from the goose(old verse of the times).
The many were then suddenly and forcebly torn from their prior means of subsistence and hurled on the labor market, as free, unprotected, and rightless proletarians. They had no alternative but to sell their labor power to make a living. The next stop? Between the devil & the deep blue sea
What I enjoyed most was that this period was protrayed by the author for what it was/ a long, slow, uneven, and bloody transition from fuedalism to capitalism. One illustration I liked by Hogarth anticipated the claim that the gallows and whip lined the road to wage labor. In this domain of culture, as in others, the seamen were emeshed in the momentous transition in which the world came to be governed by capitalism & class.
The rise of deep-sea supremacy began with the founding of the Russian Company(1553), the Eastland Company(1578), the Levant Company(1581), the East India Company(1600), and considerably later, the Royal Adventures into Africa(1660), soon to become Royal African Company.
The history is something I never learned in high school. For instance, during Queen Anne's reign, seaman had enterred the navy like men dragged to execution. And that is precisely what naval service amounted to for untold thousands, since almost half of all those pressed into the 17th & 18th centuries died at sea. Or how a seaman wrote about the East India Company/But for nations to come and plant themselves in islands and countries by force, and build forts and raise laws, and force the people to customs against the true natures and people of the said places without their consent, how this wiil stand with the law of God and the religion we profess, lrt the world be the judge. This book was published in 1987. Iraq & Afghanistan were on the drawing board in the 1990s. Or that a leading expert on illicit trade argues that in the early modern period smugglers accounted for at least one half the English overseas trade. Between 1680 and 1780was the golden century of smuggling.
Maritime workers in this early period, by linking the producers and consumers of the world through their labors in the international markets, were central to the accumulation of riches on ascale previously unimagined. At the same time, they were crucial to the emergence of new relations between capital and labor. Employments connected to shipping were notorious then, as later, a precarious occupations(Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor In Precarious Times
by Andrew Ross, about 21st century labor markets).
It should come as no surprise then that the collectivism that informed the seafaring work that the very term strike evolved from the decision of British seamen in 1768 to strike the sails of their vessels and thereby to cripple the commerce of the empire's capital city. The collectivism of the ship was vertical, that of the common wage-earning seaman horizontal.
The international capitalist economy wasemerging as an increasingly cooperative totality, and the strategically situated merchant seaman provided many of the links in the system. The completely contractual and waged nature of maritime work represented a capital-labor relation quite distinct from the landlord-tenant, master-servant, or master-apprentice relationships. The pay systems of the seamen were very well detailed and analysed, from how they were intiated and how they evolved. Ship owners, merchants, and ship captains aspired to enhance the accumulation of capital by controlling wages, food and drink or customary usage, social access to the product, spatial perogatives, and the nature of the voyage. inded, the very process of accumulation was built upon thr bilked wages, the pinched guts, and often the very lives, prematurely ended, of men at sea. A central part of capital's plan during the early and uncertain stages of expansion was to shift as many of the burdens and risks associated with the growing but ubstable Atlantic economy as possible to the seaman's shoulders.
There were two networks of information. One purveyed information about ship masters and their customary usage of sailors/the other carried reports of the discipline, skills, and behavoir of the maritime workers. The former was constructed by and for seamen, the latter by and for ship owners, merchants, and captains.
The very sucess of pirates between 1716 and 1726 depended upon their access to the information that flowed through this informal network. The pirate chapterwas my favorite, probably sumed up best by pirate Charles Bellamy/you are a sneaking Puppy, and so are those who submit to be governed by Laws which rich Men have made for their own Security, for the cowardly whelps have not the courage to defend what they get by their Knavery; but damn ye altogether...They villify us, the Scoundrels do, when there is only this Difference, they rob the Poor under Cover of Law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own Courage. Or as pirate Barnaby Slush said/Without Justice, there can be no true discipline, no Love, no Followers. So in essence the pirate ship was a school in social and economic democracy. Collectivism, antiauthoritarianism, and egalitarianism were the core values ate their hearts, that of the common seaman's ethos.
The court system of those times upheld the perogatives of capital-despite the legality of the matter- enabling merchants and masters to respond as profitably as possible to international opportunities. Most commanders of those times cared not how much or in what way they can get it all to themselves, and care not what little other people get under them, they were all out to gain what they can, either by hook or crook. The social isolation of the captain, like so much of maritime culture as a whole, thus resulted from two very different social dynamics: the search from above for corporate authority and the search from below for autonomy.
If I could do it over, I would have read this before I read the the Patrick O'Brien(Aubrey/Maturin) series. There is so much laid out in these pages that puts one not only in the sialor's soes but the ships as well. Extremely detailed and informative to the tasks at hand.
Dr. Samuel Johnson is one of my perennial favorites and he observed/No man wii be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being on a ship is being in a jail with the chance of being drowned...A man in jail has more room, better food, and more commonly better company.
Epidemics, and scurvy raged on royal ships, and the men were caught in a machine from which there was no escape, but desertion, incapacitation, or death.
Or piracy.

The parallels about the first worldwide commercial globalization process closely rhymes with the current new world order globalization process.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED !!!!!!!

P.S. The history of Power teaches us One thing, if it is Unchecked, It Will Be Abused. - Bruce Fein

First off, before you even think about buying this book, understand that is a socioeconomic study of the maritime profession from 1700 to 1750. The book was written by a Marxist who has succumbed to Hollywood's romantic characterization of the Pirate as a misunderstood individual who only wanted his unalienable rights which were withheld by the running dog lackeys of the capitalist pigs who ran the shipping business and the Navy. Even if he had to murder people to get it.

If you want a semi-legitimate justification of piracy, you may find enough here to keep you happy. Most of the study is a legitmate presentation of maritime economics and the danger of the trade in the early part of the 18th century. Yes, most ship owners and captains were capitalist pigs who would man a ship with a minimum crew and pray they lost no crew members to the many dangers that were common to shipping at that time. Not the least of which was piracy.

His arguements begin to fall down when he describes the commraderie and equalitarian brotherhood that pervailed on board a pirate ship. He intimates that slaves captured were treated as equals. (there is documentation to indicate otherwise including the sinking of a pirate ship which the crew members escaped, but the captured slaves were allowed to drown.

If you are reading this for the economic history of the shipping industry or for information of the quaint Naval custom of impressing their crew (both the Americans and British were known for grabbing able bodied saling men off the docks and encouraging them to join - they'd untie them when they were far enough out to sea) then this book is excellent.

If you are looking for information on a typical sailor's life, I'd suggest "Before the Mast" in conjuntion with this. But if you are looking for real information on pirates and piracy, This book does not provide much. there is is more accurate information regarding piracy in "Under the Black Flag" with a more varied discussion of the possible causes of the choice of piracy, backed by statements taken from court records of the time.

I would not recommend Between the Devel and the Deep Blue Sea as a history to most people as the author is attributing many modern sociological and psychological causes to historical events about which we have only in some cases, the account books for reference.

Rediker's Pirates of the Caribbean as a prototypical labor union is a caricature almost as ridiculous as Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean.

This text is interesting and engaging, but Rediker's bias ruins the credibility of his arguments. Rediker is a Marxist historian and therefore provides an extremely slanted view of seafaring men. His thesis is centered on the seaman as a member of the working class, and his struggle to rise in a capitalist system. One example of how his bias has clouded his analysis is in his discussion of alcoholism. Rediker assumes that the resort to alcohol is caused by alienation- this draws obvious parallels to Marx's own work focussed on the alienation of the workers (200). A particularly appalling example of his bias is when Rediker discusses the cruel treatment of seaman by their masters. Rediker then asserts that "when Karl Marx noted that the modern wage labor system could not have emerged without the bloody assistance of the lash, he may well have had the early modern shipping industry in mind" (213 n19). Clearly there is no basis for this statement save his personal beliefs.