between the devil and the deep blue sea

In this book the author uses a huge array of historical sources (court records, diaries, travel accounts, and many others) to reconstruct the social cultural world of the Anglo-American seamen and pirates who sailed the seas in the first half of the eighteenth century. He tours the sailor’s North Atlantic, following seamen and their ships along the pulsing routes of trade and into rowdy port towns. He recreates life along the waterfront, where seafaring men from around the world crowded into the sailortown and its brothels, alehouses, street brawls and city jails. His study explores the natural terror that inevitably shaped the existence of those who plied the forbidding oceans of the globe in small brittle wooden vessels. It also treats the man-made terror (the harsh discipline, the brutal floggings and the grisly hangings) that was a central fact of life at sea. He surveys the commonplaces of the maritime world: the monotonous rounds of daily labor, the negotiations of wage contracts and the bawdy singing, dancing and tale telling that were a part of every voyage.