Maritime communities and life at sea in the Age of Sail

A major aspect of our project involves counting: the number of ships, the volume of trade, and the quantity of duties paid. But we’re also interested in the impact of this maritime trade on people and communities. One of the key communities was, of course, the people who sailed on these ships.

Many – perhaps the majority – of the voyages we are recording in this project were short and relatively straightforward. But not all maritime trade in the period was coastal or close at hand. Take the East India Company, for example. This London-based organisation brokered British trade with Asia for over two centuries – the Company’s commercial career, from 1600 to 1833, maps neatly on to the time frame of our project.

The outbound voyage to Asia was some 12,000 miles long and could take up to five months. Even for sailors, this represented a significant undertaking. Thomas Machell cannot have been alone in regarding the first day of his service, undertaken as a midshipman in the Worcester, as ‘a memorable day in my life for on that day I commenced a new era’. It was even more discombobulating for travellers who were not involved in the day-to-day handling of the ship. As he prepared to set sail on board the Sir Edward Hughes, Samuel Hudson was uncharacteristically lost for words. The scene that greeted him ‘on entering a vessel of such burthen was astonishing’. Unaccustomed to the situation, Hudson fancied himself ‘an inhabitant of another world’.

Peter Monamy, An English East Indiaman (c. 1720, oil on canvas, BHC1011, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)

The lived experiences of travellers on board East Indiamen – those wooden worlds that carried officials, soldiers, and their families to the East India Company’s Asian empire – is the subject of John’s latest book, which will be published by Oxford University Press later this year (find out more here). At the outset of the research for the book, it was quite a struggle to imagine travellers’ experiences on board. Scenes of shipboard life—with its sickness and boredom, cramped living conditions, limited dining fare, and severely restricted privacy—were an historical abstraction. A global pandemic changed all of that, making at least some of the themes explored in the book feel uncomfortably familiar to all of us…

As they traversed the ocean, travellers like Machell and Hudson reflected on who and what they had left behind, looked forward to new challenges, and evaluated the sights and smells, sounds and tastes, and hopes and expectations that regaled their senses and played on their minds as they sailed along the way. Contrary to some contemporary accounts and many later histories, the lives of the people carried by these ships did not go on ‘stand-by’ during these voyages.

Lengthy sea voyages – such as those required by Britain’s expanding commercial and political links in our period – were undoubtedly dull, dreary, and occasionally deadly. But they could also be exciting, enlivening, and enlightening. Confined by the physical constraints of their ship, travellers frequently struggled with the material and social limitations of life on board. In other ways, however, these journeys opened perspectives on the world and its inhabitants that few of their contemporaries in Britain could ever hope to experience. Small outcrops of land in the midst of vast oceans, encounters with the human societies on their islands and along their shores, and the array of animals in their depths and in the skies overhead helped to make travellers sensitive to the novelty and variety of the wider world into which they were sailing.

The ship’s passage – no matter how far from home it sailed – played a crucial role in shaping the responses and experiences of those individuals surrounded by its wooden walls. The words of these travellers contribute to our understanding of the place of long-distance voyages and maritime trade in wider histories of Britain and the British Empire in this period.

Robert Salmon, The East Indiaman Warley (1804, oil on canvas, BHC3707, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)