Abstract
Sara Caputo's brilliant debut book works in threes. Not only does it have three parts (‘The State’, ‘The Nation’ and ‘Displacement’), but its main title's three words connect directly to its three central claims. Foreign Jack Tars is, at first glance, an oxymoron. Jack Tar was one of the core symbols of Britishness in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars; how, then, could such a thing as a foreign Jack Tar exist? To answer that question, Caputo uses muster books, letters and official documents from archives spread across five countries, in several languages, all of which she situates expertly in multiple historiographies.
Her first claim is superficially the simplest: there were a lot of ‘foreigners’ in the British navy. Drawing on her own dataset of more than 4000 muster book entries, as well as data from other historians, she concludes that between one-twelfth and one-seventh of the British lower deck during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars was foreign born. The uncertainty derives from the nature of the data, which lack consistency; but the other reason she hesitates to settle on a single number is that her dataset was designed to look for extremes. She sampled frigates stationed abroad (in the East Indies, at Jamaica and at the Cape of Good Hope, specifically) in the hopes of finding the maximum number of foreigners, not in the hopes of finding a representative sample of all ships of all sizes on all stations. Her most interesting finding is that, even on stations far away from Europe, the largest single group of foreigners was continental Europeans – larger even than Americans.
Caputo quickly summarises her data and moves on: she is clearly more interested in exploring the uncertainties and experiences that the state-supplied data obscure. In fact, she spends much of the book questioning her own database's methodology. The muster-book definition of a foreigner – a sailor born somewhere other than Britain – is unsatisfactory, she makes clear. This is not an internal contradiction. Rather, Caputo's scepticism forms the core of her second major claim: that ‘foreigners’ are better defined ‘socially, and through mobility’ (201). Put another way, a foreigner was someone who was far from home and labelled as such. Chapters three and four discuss the ways in which language, religion and race could create foreignness, while chapters five and six are case studies of foreign sailors from the Two Sicilies and the nations that border the North Sea.
Bracketing these discussions is Caputo's third major claim: because the navy needed Jack Tars, it was constantly willing to break its own rules (and the law) to get them. Foreigners were theoretically protected from impressment, but individual officers frequently ignored that regulation, as ample archival sources make clear. Again and again, she uncovers evidence of ad hoc arrangements, accommodations of dubious legality and regulatory compromises, all of which were geared toward the same goal: finding able-bodied, skilled men. It was one of the navy's greatest strengths that it was willing to act pragmatically above all else, but Caputo shows the human costs of that pragmatism.
Caputo argues persuasively that the transnational labour market needs to be integrated into the impressment debate. She has two contributions to make in this often-fraught arena. First, because her subjects were exceptions to the rules of impressment, she has very little patience for the volunteer/pressed sailor dichotomy. She uncovers evidence of sailors being entered into British naval service en bloc as part of diplomatic agreements. Were they pressed? Did they volunteer? Neither question makes any sense for those men. Occasionally the British used enslaved labour on loan from plantations in the West Indies. Such men were coerced, to be sure, but they were not pressed in the same way that an unlucky British-born sailor on a merchant ship was. She argues we need to step back from the press gangs and think more wholistically about British naval recruitment.
Caputo situates the British navy as a player not just in the British maritime labour market, but in the international labour market. There were innumerable reasons why a sailor might end up in the British navy, some of them related to material conditions, others to cultural or ideological beliefs, and still others to circumstances beyond the sailor's control. Crucially, though, the British navy did not recruit solely from Britain. Its global reach meant that it was an important actor nearly everywhere skilled sailors could be found – and especially, Caputo finds, on the European continent. Foreign Jack Tars should fundamentally change how we conceive of the lower deck in this period. It was diverse, and it was, as she puts it eloquently, ‘a nodal point where various currents of global mobility encountered each other’ (234).
This book should mark the beginning of a new era in the history of the lower deck. Other historians should follow her methodological example (no easy task, to be fair), and there are places where they might profitably extend and engage with her arguments. Her rejection of the volunteer/pressed dichotomy derives from her book's emphasis on a minority group – foreigners. What insights might historians gain if they also reject that dichotomy but focus on other elements of the lower deck? Caputo also has lots to say about American sailors in British service, but she stops short of trying to resolve the long-running dispute in the historiography about the scale and significance of impressment before the War of 1812. It is a sign of a quality work of scholarship that it leaves the reader with an exciting new research agenda.
