The reality behind the various images of women and the persona of the handsome sailor is complex and multifaceted. A sailor's liberty confronted women with difficult choices. Women left alone on shore sometimes sought solace in another man's arms. Men also turned to other women in some instances. Both males and females also engaged in more long-lasting relationships. Moreover, women learned to depend upon one another in a variety of ways. Finally, life on the waterfront sometimes reflected the sailor's gendered image of women and sometimes not. Users and takers could be men or women. There were also relationships based upon mutual love and appreciation.
The family remained important to many seamen.76 The poignancy of William Widger's dream attests to his attachment to his family, despite his fears. Throughout his stay in Mill Prison, Widger wrote to his wife and received letters from her in turn. Others at Mill Prison had similar experiences. William Russell, held as a prisoner during the Revolutionary War, dreamed of his wife, declaring in November 1781 that “Would to God, I could in a Dream be sent into the arms of my beloved and adored Wife.”77 Jonathan Deakins wrote to his “Loving Wife” in 1782 to inform her he was still alive, but admitted that knowing her low circumstances back in Marble-head made him even more miserable. He signed the letter: “I remain your Loving husband Till Death.”78 John Mitchell, the American agent for prisoners of war in Halifax in 1814, received several letters from men captured by the British who petitioned for special permission to return home to take care of a sick or needy wife and family.79
Scrimshaw images reinforce the impression of how important the family was to men at sea. The whaler scrimshander, or carver, often portrayed domestic scenes. He also etched in the outlines of women based on the latest fashions from Godey's Lady's Book, a domesticated and refined ideal of womanhood that was often absent from his life. Perhaps more important, the scrimshander created a variety of implements to be used in the home, including elaborate pie crimpers and swifts used to hold yarn in the absence of the husband's helping hands. Similarly, scrimshanders decorated busks to be inserted into corsets, holding in the woman's waist and shaping her breasts, as an intimate gift to their loved ones. It was as if the whaleman who carved and crafted whalebone while absent for years at a time hoped to recapture a lost world of domesticity by creating an offering for the women in their lives to be used in female work, or even fashioning the female body.
Relationships between men and women could be sustained over long periods of time, in part through exchanges of letters.80 Jacob Ball and Mary Timbrell started writing each other before they were married when he was a second mate. Their letters concerned mainly family and their daily activities. Jacob reported on his voyages, describing where he was to sail and under what circumstances. Once they were married Mary wrote of the purchases she made, money she obtained from the shipowner or the sale of items Jacob sent to her. She told him of the health of the children and other family news.81 Similarly, the correspondence between Elizabeth Hodgdon and Nathan J. Coleman began before and continued after they were married. Coleman sailed out of Boston as a mate on relatively predictable Atlantic voyages. Their letters included expressions of love as well as pragmatic matters. Elizabeth lived in Rochester, New Hampshire, before and after marriage. She also ran a school to support herself when her husband was at sea, earning about $14 a month.82 Cynthia Sprague and John Congdon each kept a journal to record their innermost thoughts, from his days as a second mate until she joined him on his voyages when he captained his own vessels.83
9. Whalers often traced their scrimshaw designs from magazines. These matching whale teeth depict two women in the latest finery, clothes that most women on the waterfront were not likely able to own. “Two women in finery.” Kendall Whaling Museum.
10. Making whalebone busks, to be inserted into the front of a woman's dress to hold and form her breasts, was another type of scrimshaw. The relatively primitive illustrations on this busk show a woman sitting at a desk, no doubt writing to the absent sailor below. The ship is placed in between the two, symbolizing the reason for their separation. Scrimshaw from the Hinsdale Collection. New Bedford Whaling Museum.
The intricate web of relationships between siblings and across generations often appears in this type of correspondence indicating that whatever transpired between a sailor and his romantic attachment ashore often fit into a larger complex of family relationships. Elizabeth Hodgdon wrote to her sister, Sarah, describing the death of a sailor who fell from the rigging at sea. The sailor had been an orphan raised in the Hodgdon household and may have been betrothed to Sarah since she wrote to Elizabeth shortly thereafter describing her despondency over the loss of her loved one, and expressing her hope that Elizabeth would never suffer a similar loss. In a less tragic vein, it is Elizabeth's job even before her wedding to write to Nathan's parents to inform them of his plans for his next voyage.84 Elizabeth Hammond, like her sailor brothers, moved from the family farm to seek employment in New Bedford. There, she met and married a sailor. We are left to wonder at the circumstances of this romance, but she did write to her parents asking them, on three days notice, to drop everything and attend the wedding ceremony before her betrothed sailed on a new voyage.85
In other words, relationships between males and females were seldom in isolation from the world around them. In some instances, such as for officers and captains in the whaling industry of the mid nineteenth century, agents of the ship owners even came into play. Although shipping agents occasionally assisted foremast men and their families, their main concern was aiding the trusted officers who protected their investment. These businessmen therefore repeatedly paid advances to wives and even parents who needed economic assistance. One shipping agent, in an effort to convince a captain to extend a cruise, even promised to keep potential beaus away from the captain's fiancée. The U.S. Navy regularized the policy of allowing seamen to allot half their pay to their wives. This practice extended in some instances to the regular merchant marine if Dana's account of Chips is to be believed.86
Officers and captains, however, had many advantages in their ability to protect their wives and families. They had greater economic wherewithal and more job security, and starting in the late eighteenth century captains formed marine societies in most ports. These organizations assisted them if and when they became incapacitated and provided for their widows and families in the event that they should die. Captains thus consciously developed a larger sense of community to help insulate their families from economic disaster as they confronted the hazards of their trade.87
Further down in society, poor workers along the waterfront had fewer options. Yet here, too, contrary to stereotypes, men and women struggled to sustain relationships over long periods of time.88 African Americans turned to the sea after the American Revolution to provide for their families and establish stable households. The pressures of the marketplace, and the poor wages earned by sailors, made this goal increasingly difficult to achieve. After 1830, most blacks with permanent families either sought to keep closer to shore through coasting (sailing on short voyages between various ports on the American seaboard), or obtained maritime-oriented employment on the waterfront.89
White sailors faced many of the same difficulties. The Reverend Thomas Tuckerman, a missionary to Boston's poor, kept a record of some of his visits to families in 1826. In brief vignettes, we can see husbands and wives working in and around the waterfront striving to make ends meet. Mr. and Mrs. Hutchings, both twenty-six years old, lived in a cellar in Friends Street. He supported his wife and two young children by digging mud from under the docks. The Grangers were in their thirties and had met two or three years earlier in Nantucket when he was a sailor. They moved to Boston, where he found work as a carpenter. Forty-year-old Mr. Hobson, a mackerel catcher who lived on Ann Street in Boston's North End, may have married a younger woman, for the couple had two children under the age of two. These couples appeared to be getting by. Others were not. James Cooke had been to sea for half of his twenty-eight years. After falling from a mast the previous spring and breaking his leg, he was unable to work. During his confinement his lungs started to go bad and he