snatched a kiss from her lips in haste.
Then a great big Dutchman rammed my bow,
And said, “Young man, dis bin mein frow.”
Then take a warning, boys, from me,
With other men's wives don't get too free.48
Scrimshaw representations of this more sordid side of gender relationships are not as numerous. The Nantucket Historical Association has one piece that has a properly dressed woman on one side and a partially clad woman on a couch and in the arms of a man on the other. The woman in the more risqué engraving is succumbing to the man as the verse attached makes clear:
An easy yielding maid,
By trusting is undone;
Our sex is oft betrayed,
By granting love too soon.
If you desire to gain me,
Your sufferings to redress;
She said, o kiss me longer,
Before you shall possess.
But his kiss was so sweet, and so closely prest
That I languish'd and pin'd till I granted the rest.49
Seamen's journals sometimes contain interesting depictions of shore life, including dancing girls.50 Alfred Terry decorated the front of his log with an alluring picture of a Mrs. N. H. Chamberlin, with “27 South Hudson Street” scrawled below the naked torso. Although the exact date and circumstances of the drawing are unknown, Terry was deeply smitten with her charms.51 And throughout the period under study here, a few books contain Hogarthian scenes of women with ample breasts bulging from low-cut bodices in close proximity to Jack Tars.52
Sailors may have approached the subject of loose women with a certain degree of equanimity, but they could also view women as evil, out to take Jack for everything he was worth. Joseph G. Clark explained that the waterfront was rife with women seeking to lead a sailor astray for his money. “Degraded and unprincipled females, by feigned smiles and hypocritical and special graces” attracted the favor of a seaman, “extorting from him valuable presents, or otherwise making large draughts upon his funds.” These women used men up, “relinquishing their victim only when the last dollar is transferred to their hands.” At that point, they dumped the sailor “without even an apology or its equivalent.”53 This type of woman enticed young Horace Lane into a life of dissipation.
Although the image of the woman as exploiter appears in the eighteenth century, it may have become more poignant in the nineteenth century with greater urbanization and a perception that cities harbored many opportunities for sin. Stuart Frank, for example, argues that most eighteenth-century sailor ballads placed the seaman ashore in the midst of bucolic splendor courting a milkmaid or some other rural lass. In the nineteenth century, however, increasingly Jack Tar appeared in cities enticed by women aiming to take advantage of the sailor.54
The sailor's attitude toward his exploitation by women was mixed. Whaler Ezra Goodnough repeatedly described how at Mahe in the Indian Ocean he and his shipmates went “to see the ladies and it was a great time among the women.” He referred to the prostitutes as “our sweethearts” and his own special girl as “my wife.” His expectations of this relationship were pragmatic. He explained that he had to get his girl a new dress when he returned to Mahe because “if I do not get her a new dress she will not remember me.” Although the women in Mahe had to be paid to remember, “that is more than the girls at home do” since “they will not think of a poor Devil either for love or money.” From this perspective Goodnough asserted, “there is plenty of girls i can get that are not particular wether they are married or not” and concluded “them are the ones for me[.] they are the comforts of life.”55 Goodnough was not alone in this approach to women. In the song “Sailor's Money” the tar willingly allows his landlady and her daughter to take his last penny—suggesting that the money was nowhere near as important to him as the pleasures it purchased.56 Songs like “New York Girls” and “Charming Jane Louisa” are “played for laughs, with self-deprecating, first-person humor” in which the sailor mocks his own gullibility.57 Horace Lane actually fell in love with one of the girls he met in French Johnny's. When he returned to port some time later, he discovered that “she learned to drink and swear and died wretched in Philadelphia.”58 In the song “Jack's Revenge” the sailor outsmarts the woman concerned only with profit. The sailor returns to his Kitty, pretending to be broke and down on his luck. Kitty tells him, “Begone from my sight, now you've spent all your money.” The sailor, of course, shows her his bag full of money and leaves, despite her cries that she really loves him.59
8. Alfred Terry must have been captivated by the charms of Mrs. N. H. Chamberlin when in New York. The opening page of Terry's journal kept in the South Pacific contains this drawing. Interestingly, there is almost a Polynesian look to the depiction of this New York woman. “Mrs. N. H. Chamberlin.” Alfred Terry, Journal from the whaleship Vesper, 1842–1848. Mystic Seaport.
The odd combination of images that may have played in the sailor's mind is suggested by the frequent reference to the madam of a bordello with the word “mother.”60 Of course this practice was not limited to the waterfront, and no doubt was in part based on the fact that such women were usually older than the employees rendering sexual favors. The irony was not lost upon waterfront customers. Moreover, the mobile maritime population sought out women who could provide services and fulfill some functions of being a mother, offering comfort and a bed, even if that included behavior not associated with more sentimental depictions of motherhood. The peculiar waterfront orientation of the mother label with houses of prostitution is suggested by the tongue-in-cheek reportage of an anti-prostitution riot in New York City in 1793. One newspaper proclaimed that the mob had attacked “Mother Carey's nest of CHICKENS” during the riot. Everyone in a port like New York would understand the joke; Mother Carey may have been the name of the keeper of this house of ill repute, but Mother Carey's chicken was also the common name of a sea petrel sighted on every cruise in the Atlantic.61
Although sailors could joke about their relationships with women ashore, there was also a dark side. A sailor could go to sea to escape from women who sought to control him. In this case going to sea meant liberty from tiresome shoreside attachments. The sailor sometimes viewed a wife as a tyrant who henpecked her husband, preventing him from enjoying himself. John Palmer copied a song into his Revolutionary War journal that claimed that a man who was married may as well be hanged because “His Wife at his Elbow Like an Emperor will Stand,” ordering him about. A wife needed constant praise and presents. Moreover, women would not allow the sailor to spend his money and go to the tavern to drink with his shipmates. This ballad Palmer labeled a “true song” and concluded:
So a Bachelors Life I Do think is the Best
be him Drunk or be him Sober he may take his Rest
No Wife to Controle him Nor Children to Cry
O Happy is the man Who A Bachelor Dies.62
Going to sea also allowed a man to escape from a woman who would eventually betray him. Ultimately this view of women gave vent to expressions of misogyny. Charles Babcock wrote his brother Henry that his girlfriend was not to be trusted. Charles went on to exclaim that no woman could be trusted out of the man's sight for more than a week.63 In a similar vein, Ebenezer Clinton copied the following lines on the
