“Throughout human history, people who took to the sea in Britain, on the Continent or in North America, did so usually because there was no other way of life open to them.” - Basil Greenhill, The Life and Death of the Merchant Sailing Ship, 1815-1895, 1980.

 ”The creditors sued, as they will . . . In Albany: unremitting black weather for the Melville household. The widow and her children were forced to sell much of their furniture and other effects and to escape in ignominy to a cheaper town . . . Then, perhaps, we can say his true life began . . . In 1869, he signed on as a lowly cabin boy on the St. Lawrence, a merchant ship bound for a four-month trip to Liverpool.” - Elizabeth Hardwick, Herman Melville, 2000.

Our genteel view of the nautical life is basically shaped by the yachting world’s reinterpretation of merchant and naval sailing. We use the vocabularly, boat part names, and flinty attitudes of what we imagine the old salts were like. But, just as a “forecastle” or ”bride deck” on today’s sailboat bears little resemblence to the ships of yesteryear, I suspect yachting attitude has only tenuous relation to the past. Yesterday’s sailor’s life was dominated by danger and poverty, and he entered the trade often out of desperation. Today’s yachtie inherits little from these men.

Melville captures some of the character, especially in Omoo and Redburn, and Richard Henry Dana illustrates the point almost by exception as the young scion seeking an education on the sea. By the time we get to humorous British author WW Jacobs, the transition from brutal fact to quaint folklore has begun.

I recently visited the Balcutha, a 19th century steel tall ship, one of the later types that survived the early years of steam by handling bulk low margin cargo hauled around Cape Horn.  Under-crewed, with little improvement to basic handling technologies from centuries earlier, and with commercial pressure to sail as fully-canvassed as possible through the most difficult passages in the world, the Balcutha and other ships like her would have been misery incarnate. And, speaking of forecastles, this one would not have provided much respite from slogging around the rigging above deck. With the innards of the windlass running through the middle of the low leaky space about the size of a small classroom, the crew of 20 hands would have only rested well beccause of exhaustion. They did each have their own bunk.