Interpreting Crew Agreements
Indeed it was the state that did the work of record-generation and preservation. As part of understanding these records, one should know that the bureaucratic effort dedicated to merchant seafarers was unparalleled. The system for the engagement and discharge of British and Colonial merchant seafarers operated at a supra-industry and global level. No other state than Britain, the imperial, industrial and capitalist giant of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, treated shipping quite so seriously. The post 1850 industry was the ground for proving a widely articulated commitment to a liberal market economy, and none but this state had the resources to make it practical. One need only recall the infinite mobility of seafarers to realize that the system had to be spatially global and temporally continuous if the comings and goings of its subjects were to be recorded. The particular form in which the records have come to us is an expression of the political, social and economic circumstances in which they were created. The historicity of a document is a quality that all researchers, professional and non-professional, should strive to appreciate for our interpretations are only so good as their commensurability with the times we seek to explain. This is saying more than that historians should avoid anachronism: it means appreciating that reading a document entails giving attention to its historical nature. The source may then speak to us of its times and how they are different from ours. Three things contribute to this method: first, an appreciation of the document's genesis, or how it came to exist; second, a sense for how it has come to us across successive generations of interpreters and conservators, and third an awareness of matters external to the document and how they might bear upon its content, and thus influence our reading of the source.
This site seeks to leave its users better placed to use these skills in respect of just one category of record, the nineteenth and early twentieth century contracts of merchant seafarers. The multiplicity of documents contained within the category of the "Agreements and Accounts of Crew and Official Logs of Vessels of the British Empire", their multifaceted and historically layered character, is truly impressive. They allow us the opportunity to tell rich stories. These are stories of people in the past and we tell them with attention given to our means of exploration and modes of explanation of the times in which they lived and worked. Four decades ago Memorial University stepped in as sponsor of the collection, and not one of those decades has passed without historians and archivists re-evaluating the significance and use of the records. Users of this site have the benefit of some deeply considered ways and means of observing working people.
But, what we have just observed is that a bureaucrat assembled the collection, and that the Registrar General of Shipping and Seaman's work was an expression of a state commitment to the pre-eminence of British shipping. Those things imply the official character of the sources or, in a term that has a particular resonance for historians, their "top down" nature. For as long as these records have been at Memorial, however, academics have practiced and refined the art of using them for "history from below". They have, as the expression went in the 1970s and 80s, been "read against the grain". Now, however, university-based scholars lay claim to more subtle strategies of analysis, and family historians have given us some leads in using these sources for everyday life history. Our strategy for anatomizing "the Crew Agreement" using the foreign-going Agreement for the crew of the Juno [1871] and the home trade agreement for the Brio[1908]) treats these sources not simply as the artifacts of bureaucratic initiatives and capitalist activity, but as the product of working people's agency. Perhaps working through an example from Johnson's time on the Juno will make this clearer.
The red buttons on the Juno Agreement are the guide to the form and official function of the Agreements, while the green (appended to Henry Johnson) provide insights into the options and actions of individuals. Rather than persuading the user into a "top down" and "bottom-up" view of the dynamic of history, the buttons can be used to reflect on the interplay of the agents who make history, though it remains true these parties were differently placed in their access to the political, economic and cultural resources of history-making. In the red-button annotations there are indications of parts of the form that could be used by workers seeking redress for infringement on their rights in respect of pay and working conditions by masters and ship owners. In the green, meanwhile, are insights into practices adopted by owners, masters and workers who "knew the score" and who exercised resourcefulness in using the formal contract. Johnson's companions on the foreign-going part of the Juno's outward-bound passage are interesting in this respect. We have observed them above as the deserters who attracted the attention of the supervisor at Liverpool's mercantile marine office as he wielded his blue crayon. These are the shipmates who joined at Cardiff, though they are not to be mistaken for seamen from Cardiff. Several of the maritime nations bordering the North Atlantic are named as the birthplace of these seamen. They were in Cardiff because this was a port where vessels frequently wanted part or whole crews for foreign-going voyages. Vessels arrived in ballast, took on an outward-bound cargo of coal, and were then ready to sail foreign, only needing a full crew. The demand for seafarers in Cardiff produced by these conditions held up even in depressed freight markets. But the year we are treating was not one of trade depression, quite the reverse: 1870 was a boom year and these sailors had leverage in the market. Complain as shipowners might about having to provide advances or paying for labour still to be provided, and scrupulous as the Board of Trade was to record men whom it vilified as deserters, the arrangement made to recruit these men at Cardiff suggests their leaving the ship was both predictable and facilitated by pre-payment. There was, in short, no expectation on their part, or that of their employer, that they would remain with the vessel. In New Orleans there would be other options for work, and from the employer's perspective there was little to gain from having men on the payroll when the vessel waited in port pending a return cargo.
Johnson was a ship-mate of these men, but the moves he made as a seafarer were different from the Cardiff "deserters". On the Juno voyage he engaged in Liverpool, took no advance on his pay, remained with the vessel, and collected £18 8s in wages when he signed off at the end of the round voyage. We speculate on his return to his parent's Sandy Cove home before undertaking his next voyage. Maybe he went with every expectation of being employed again by the Juno's owners who were shipowners with interests in Liverpool, England and in Nova Scotia. By 1871 we know he had at least five years foreign-going experience, and that he had once served as a bos'un. He was surely on a career track to join other of the shipmasters who were celebrated in Sandy Cove. Less well remembered amongst its seafaring residents were men whose family heritage was in slavery. The Johnson household in 1871 had as a near neighbour, John Wesley, and his family. Wesley's origin, Africa, suggests that he or his ancestors had run from slavery in the southern states, perhaps before the American Civil War.[view census transcript]
