Sailors

To what extent did the demands of shipboard life and work shape the identity of sailors? In what ways did the particular intersection of language and environment—man-made and natural—influence their speech? How did the occupational and technical idiom of sailors influence their cognitive models of language and their use of language in general? This chapter is divided into six sections: sailors historically considered; sailor literacy; nautical terminology; slang, cursing, and swearing; sailors’ work songs; and sailor language in the works of James Fenimore Cooper. The chapter investigates who 19th-century sailors were and what defined them as seamen. It especially considers the central debate amongst historians over the exceptionalism of sailors. Were seafarers ennobled by constant contact with nature at its most sublime? Or were they simply laborers: “working men who got wet,” in David Alexander’s phrase? Were they a people set apart or ordinary people in often extraordinary conditions?