With long, solitary periods at sea, far from literary and cultural
centers, sailors comprise a remarkable population of readers and
writers. Although their contributions have been little recognized
in literary history, seamen were important figures in the
nineteenth-century American literary sphere. In the first book to
explore their unique contribution to literary culture, Hester Blum
examines the first-person narratives of working sailors, from
little-known sea tales to more famous works by Herman Melville,
James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Richard Henry Dana.
In their narratives, sailors wrote about how their working lives
coexisted with--indeed, mutually drove--their imaginative lives.
Even at leisure, they were always on the job site. Blum analyzes
seamen's libraries, Barbary captivity narratives, naval memoirs,
writings about the Galapagos Islands, Melville's sea vision, and
the crisis of death and burial at sea. She argues that the extent
of sailors' literacy and the range of their reading were unusual
for a laboring class, belying the popular image of Jack Tar as
merely a swaggering, profane, or marginal figure. As Blum
demonstrates, seamen's narratives propose a method for aligning
labor and contemplation that has broader applications for the study
of American literature and history.