Workers employed in the seagoing transport of cargo or passengers. Often simply
referred to as “sailors,” merchant seamen are those maritime workers employed in
private-sector, commercial shipping—the merchant marine—and are divided into
licensed and unlicensed personnel, officers, and crew, respectively. Crews traditionally
are multiethnic in composition, depending upon the vessel’s nationality, and were
frequently separated in earlier periods along ethnic lines into watches (work shifts) and
departments (deck, engine, stewards). The folklore of the merchant seaman deals both
with the experience common to all ratings in the merchant marine and with boundary
maintenance between groups of different rating. The designation “sailor” itself is often
claimed to be the rightful epithet and heritage of the unlicensed, deck sailor.
Merchant seamen have a long history predating the world’s navies and other forms of
industrial or collective labor. Although merchant seafaring persists today amid newer,
faster, and cheaper modes of transport, its great romantic era was the 19th century, the socalled Age of Sail. In the transition from sail to steam propulsion in the latter part of the
century, organizational and structural change in this industry effected change in the
folklore and traditions. The deck sailor was displaced by an engine department, and the
worksongs of sailors that accompanied the routines of handling lines and sail have
disappeared along with the sailing ship.
While sailors are notorious for storytelling, the best-documented folklore of the
merchant seaman are the songs or chanteys, both fo’c’sle songs and halyard chanteys.
Fo’c’sle songs are the songs associated with the sailor’s leisure time in the crews
quarters, known as the fo’c’sle. (A contraction of “forecastle,” the fo’c’sle was
traditionally located in the forward portion of the vessel under the bow, while officers
resided aft.) Halyard chanteys, or simply chanteys, on the other hand, are songs that aided
in the performance of work routine—halyard referring to lines for “hauling the yards,”
the horizontal beams on a square-rigged vessel to which the sails were tied or “bent.”
Short-haul and long-haul chanteys were apportioned to lighter and heavier tasks,
respectively.
Technical nomenclature of merchant shipping is elaborate and provides a source for
word lore. Many popular expressions ashore can be traced to sailors and the technology
of seafaring. To “pay the devil,” for instance, or to be “between the devil and the deep
blue sea” refers to a dreaded and devilish maintenance task aboard leaky wooden vessels
in which “paying” meant caulking and the “devil” was the outboard seam between
planking just above the keel. To tell a “yarn” or simply “to yarn” as a common
expression for garrulous storytelling may also have had its origins among seamen, who
would spend leisure hours winding “rope-yarns” for stowage and telling stories.
Yarn spinning or storytelling is perhaps the most ubiquitous category of maritime
folklore, but while we know much about the recurrent themes of storytelling—the sailor’s
last ship, his adventures in foreign ports, lost ships, spectral ships, bully captains, and
bucko mates—the study of narrative has focused on only a few well-known folktales and
legend types, such as the Flying Dutchman, and the tall tale as a narrative form.
In addition to verbal folklore, merchant seafaring has evolved traditions of material
culture. Ship models, notably ship-in-bottle models, woodcarvings, and decorative uses of rope and twine, known as “fancy rope work,” are leisure activities among seamen as
well as maritime enthusiasts with little or no experience of seafaring.
Finally, merchant seafaring produced an extensive folklore of custom and belief.
Danish folklorist Henning Henningsen (1961) made a historical and comparative study of
one elaborate, customary shipboard practice known as “crossing the line.” Ships’ crews
performed this custom for the initia-tion of novice seamen into the craft and brotherhood
of seafaring. It took place on crossing the equator and involved a cast of characters in a
mock court setting, over which a costumed figure representing Neptune, the god of the
sea from classical mythology, presided.
The preponderance of superstitions, as with yarns, may be the landsman’s most
tenacious stereotype of the sailor. If superstition may be defined as apparently irrational
belief, the conditions of uncertainty and vulnerability that have always attended
seafaring, particularly as concerns weather, help explain the existence of this body of
tradition. The life of the common sailor was constantly at the mercy of the weather and
frequently that of strict and abusive officers. Superstition may have provided some
degree of control and counsel concerning these forces, even as the term raises
complicated questions about the psychology and rhetoric of belief. More simply,
however, many superstitions of the sea may be categorized in terms of luck and, as such,
have persisted into the modern era of seafaring. During World War II, for instance,
sailors would designate certain vessels of the merchant marine as lucky or unlucky
depending upon how well and whether or not they succeeded in making their destinations
when sailing through treacherous waters.
Although the United States continues to have a merchant marine and merchant
seamen, several factors have significantly reduced the population and changed the
composition of the merchant marine. These include high casualties from World War II;
the Cold War expulsion of merchant seamen from an industry that was radicalized during
the 1930s; the increased role of government during World War II in the training,
licensing, and certifying of a new cohort of merchant seaman; alternative modes for
transporting cargoes and passengers; and technological developments that have greatly
reduced manning requirements. Some of these factors have affected shipping globally,
but other seafaring nations have generally fared better than the United States in
maintaining a merchant marine in which traditions of the sea persist and adapt to new
conditions and cohorts.
Thomas Walker
References
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Doerflinger, William Main. [1951] 1990. Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman. Glenwood, IL:
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Henningsen, Henning. 1961. Crossing the Equator: Sailors’ Baptism and Other Initiation Rites.
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Rediker, Marcus. 1987. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and
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