York docks in late 1783 or 1784 searching for a job. At one brig he was told that the captain wanted a hand, and while waiting for the captain, Willcock helped the crew to heave ballast. Work was scarce at the time, and when the captain appeared Willcock told him he would take whatever wages were offered. The captain assured him that he would not lose for not bargaining and allowed Willcock to join the crew.46
Recruiting could also be based on long-standing relationships. Around the turn of the nineteenth century in smaller ports, like Marblehead, Massachusetts, captains of fishing schooners recruited their crews locally from among men they knew and who knew each other.47 In this situation relatives, friends, and neighbors formed tight-knit groups, relationships that occurred in merchant vessels as well. In 1762 the Prosperous Polly, out of Providence, Rhode Island, hired William Dunbar in Martinique. Dunbar, it turns out, was also from Providence and had known Captain Waterman for at least two years before he signed on. The crew list suggests that there were other connections on board. The carpenter's last name was also Waterman, and both the mate and the cabin boy shared the name Whipple. One sailor had been born in Ireland, had sailed out of Providence for at least two and a half years, and claimed to have know the captain for a somewhat longer period of time.48 As a young man, Nicholas Isaacs fell in with a captain from Mystic, Connecticut, and relied on this gentleman for years afterward for employment.49 In 1809, a friend of John Allen's family in Marblehead had an uncle in Portsmouth who needed a few more hands. Allen headed for the New Hampshire port, introduced himself to the captain, and signed on for the voyage.50
Parents and guardians sometimes made arrangements for a young man or boy. Simeon Crowell's stepfather insisted that the seventeen-year-old join a fishing schooner on the Grand Banks in 1795.51 The mother of eleven-year-old Frederick Jordan signed him on the schooner Mercy in the Pocomoke River, Maryland, for a voyage to New York in 1774.52 Earlier in the eighteenth century, John Fillmore chafed under his apprenticeship to a Boston carpenter. After many entreaties, his mother relented and allowed him to join a fishing vessel at age nineteen.53 James Jenks's father signed him aboard the Ocean in the opening decade of the nineteenth century upon the promise that Captain Thomas Roach would rein in Jenks's wildness.54 And in 1806 James Fenimore Cooper's friends and relatives interceded to make sure that his first voyage as a merchant seaman was relatively safe and under a good captain.55
3. This detail of a schooner near the Marblehead docks suggests the way the waterfront appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century. From Ashley Bowen Diary. Peabody Essex Museum.
Although these various forms of recruitment occurred between 1750 and 1850, personal connections may have been more important in the eighteenth than in the nineteenth century. Colonial American social relationships were based on deference and paternalism within a hierarchy. With the rising egalitarianism of the American Revolution, the concept of free labor spread. As commerce expanded and ports grew, the labor force became more anonymous. Since the employer-employee relationship did not depend on previous personal connections and would appear as strictly a business deal, the new labor context should have led to more independent contracts between the sailor and his employer. It did not. Instead, intermediaries like boardinghouse keepers became increasingly important in arranging work. Some boarding-house keepers ran large establishments that could accommodate more than one hundred men, while others merely rented out space to two or three sailors from their sparse living quarters. Often they were ex-sailors themselves, or the wives of men at sea.56
During the eighteenth century these men and women loomed large in the lives of sailors both at sea and at port. In 1762, a Frenchman in Port-au-Prince wanting to maintain contact with his landlady gave a letter to a sailor going to New York to deliver to her.57 Repeatedly, mariners who were suing for their wages in the 1770s and 1780s had innkeepers (the term “boarding-house keeper” does not appear frequently until after 1800) sign their bonds as surety in their court cases.58 Assistance in wage disputes remained central to the boardinghouse keeper's relationship with sailors in the nineteenth century. Around 1800 young Nicholas Isaacs found himself stranded in New York, striving to get back wages. After a lawyer would not take the case, in stepped Mr. Spiliard, a boardinghouse keeper, who said he could get a settlement of $80 (Isaacs claimed he was owed $400). Spiliard was as good as his word, although he then presented Isaacs with a bill for $70.59 Several years later, sailors from the ship Union gave Richard Jennings, who ran a New York boardinghouse, power of attorney to collect several hundred dollars in a court case involving an embargo violation.60
We know most about the boardinghouses during the nineteenth century, when they became the central clearinghouse for the hiring of seamen, and when they came under attack from reformers.61 By the opening decade of the nineteenth century, boardinghouse keepers were very important to the waterfront in big ports like New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. The more sailors that were needed, the more central the boardinghouse became. Even in smaller, more specialized ports like Providence and New Bedford, the boardinghouse was crucial. In 1807, Captain Elijah Cobb visited sailor boardinghouses in Norfolk, Virginia, paid the advance to the landlords, and took their “obligations to see each sailor on board, at sun-rise.”62 The New-Bedford Port Society in 1831 reported that there were twenty-one boarding-houses in the whaling port, each serving between twenty and two hundred patrons. By 1845 there were at least thirty-seven boardinghouses serving hundreds of sailors.63
In the 1820s and 1830s reformers began to portray the boardinghouse keeper as a corrupting influence upon seamen. The relationship between the sailor and his landlord, however, was more complicated and subtle than the reformers thought. Some boardinghouse keepers were not exploitative and offered a sort of home away from home to the sailor. Nathaniel G. Robinson wrote his sister in 1843, describing his young widow boardinghouse keeper in sympathetic terms, proclaiming that she ran “a first rate boarding place” in New London. He made a point to tell his sister that the widow was a Methodist and lived with her mother and two young children.64 Susan Gardner (Harose), who prided herself on the domestic and benign nature of her boardinghouse for American seamen in Le Havre, France, explained, “it is a great satisfaction to me to see all of these [sailors who had previously boarded with her] return the same as they would to a Mother's house.”65 The boardinghouse keeper passed on mail to friends and relatives.66 Sometimes the landlord would act as a bank, holding onto money or possessions while the sailor went on a voyage. The boardinghouse keeper also might aid the tar, even if he had nothing in his pockets or if he fell sick. A shipwrecked Ned Myers hunted up his old Liverpool landlady, and as Myers reported, “the old woman helped me to some clothes, received me well, and seemed sorry for my misfortunes.”67 At the Providence Marine Hospital in 1840, one-fourth of all the sailors checked into the facility were brought there by one man, Jesse A. Healy, a boardinghouse keeper.68
Even the more unsavory landlords were providing, for a price, what seamen wanted. They greeted the sailor as he came ashore, took his baggage, and offered him lodgings, drink, and whatever other services he required. When the sailor's money ran out, they extended credit until they could arrange for the sailor to sign aboard his next voyage. When the sailor needed anything for his “kit,” or sea chest, they provided it. When the sailor found himself in trouble with the law, they offered bail. While groggily getting his sea legs on his next voyage, many a sailor cursed his boardinghouse keeper as a landshark for taking him for all he was worth; but that sailor eagerly sought the same lodgings when he returned to port.69
Despite the large amount of money apparently passing through their hands, few boardinghouse keepers became very rich. George Gardner adamantly opposed his sister Susan's plan to open a boardinghouse after her sea captain husband died and she was stranded in Europe in 1825. Gardner wrote that it was “the last thing I should recommend” and argued that “it is a slavish business and very unprofitable.” He also confided that he had stayed in many boardinghouses and had seen the “low
