A Foreign-Going Seafarer on the Move
Our point here is to foreground Crew Agreements and the accompanying Official Logs and to stress the difference of this type of record from the census discussed above. An emphasis upon the process that generated Agreements and the kind of interpretation seafarers' records are able to sustain underpins this section of the "More than a List of Crew" website. We recommend reading it in connection with the sample foreign-going Agreement of the Juno. The annotations provided in this digitalized document are colour-coded to distinguish between information formally elicited from, and provided to, foreign-going seafarers (red), and the data collected that was particular to Henry Johnson (green). Johnson's data is glossed so that it suggests how the reader-researcher with questions of their own about other seafarers might find answers.
At the point of their opening their contract (the Crew Agreement) crew members were required to provide answers to questions about a previous voyage. Details of the vessel (the name and port of registry) on which he or she had made this voyage and the year it ended were needed for columns 5 and 6 of the "Particulars of Engagement". This information was not casually obtained. Normally a certificate of discharge was issued to each seafarer as he or she left a vessel on a foreign-going voyage. This "discharge" provided an official record of the particulars of the vessel and voyage together with the master's grade for the conduct and proficiency of the seafarer. It was taken forward to the next employer. Legislation obliged the seafarer to produce the certificate at the next occasion of signing on.
Conspicuous blue crayon crosses on the Juno Agreement are evidence of administrative procedures. These crosses were probably made at the Liverpool Mercantile Marine Office as a superintendent checked off the men whose period of employment terminated earlier than the formal voyage ended. Most noticeable are the crop against the names of the crew who "ran" from the vessel in New Orleans. Their hasty departure was officially unsanctioned and their want of the discharge certificate for the voyage might well indicate this to a subsequent shipping employer.
When Juno's bo'sun for the westbound part of the voyage, Thomas O'Neil, departed the ship in New Orleans, he did so by official sanction. Out of a concern to be employed as a bo'sun again, O'Neil would have been scrupulous about collecting discharge papers that could vouch for him having already served in the semi-managerial capacity, the best paid of all non-officer jobs. Henry Johnson made the round voyage (Liverpool-Cardiff-New Orleans-Liverpool) as an Able Bodied Seamen [A.B.], and received his papers at its end (January 1871). Did he store the flimsy certificate along with his previous discharge issued at St. John's [sic], New Brunswick in July 1870? The thin paper on which discharges were printed worked against their preservation, but Johnson, like every other seamen on a British or Colonial vessel, knew that he might be called upon to justify being paid the premium an A.B. commanded over an Ordinary Seaman. It was best done by producing the documents that attested to four years of sea-going. Looking like a "sailor" was beside the point when a complex and extensive referencing system existed in the industry.
Researchers in the Crew Agreement collection of the MHA sometimes encounter a handful of certificates that were made out for, but never collected by, several of the crew of a vessel. Uncollected certificates were important enough to be dispatched by the master to the RGSS with the Log and Agreement: a pin still holds some of them together. To date, however, the collection has not produced multiple certificates belonging to an individual. "More than a List of Crew" researchers have paid close attention to the Agreements reporting the death of a crew member. We have discovered several inventories listing discharge certificates, but no case where the deceased seafarer's actual collection of discharge certificates was among his personal documents. Beginning in 1900 Continuous Discharge Books replaced individual certificates, satisfying the need for a more durable form of record. Even then their survival is uncommon. Any family historian with access to a collection of certificates or a discharge book predating the 1920s has a rare source. But even without them much can be done from the details transcribed into the “ship last served” columns in the Eng. 1, the form that was the standard foreign-going Agreement from the 1860s. We lacked a single "discharge" for Henry Johnson: yet, his sea-going career over a period of twenty years was traceable because this part of the Agreement fed a paper trail that was important to our research.
Before we explain how to compile a career record, it is worth considering that for no other group of workers beyond professionals, and except for military, could the historian even attempt this. Most seafarers belong with the class of working people whom history has left largely unrecorded. The fact is that over 250,000 individuals annually went to sea in British and Colonial registered vessels during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Neither in their lives before or after, would they go through similar processes of documentation. Moreover, life-long seafarers like Henry Johnson were common, but not so much as might be imagined. The population of seafarers, constituted mostly by young men, was in near constant turnover. Consequently successive generations were brought into the scope of a form of state record keeping. For a period of their lives these men and the few women were the subject of an official record that followed them as they moved from job to job.
