A young boy’s adventure of serving on a merchant ship in the mid 1600’s begins only by chance when he must leave London at 12 years old and move to his grandfather’s house near the sea. These changes open an entirely new life for him where there is world travel, excitement, and a pathway to success. The adventures take him to lands he had barely begun to study in school yet once exposed he knew very soon that this would be the life for him. An amazing life where an opportunity presented itself and even at 12 years of age, he recognized it as something exciting, new, yet challenging, lonely at times, and frightening at times yet he able transcend his fears and excel. His will to perform every job to the best of his ability along with his insatiable thirst for learning allows him recognition at the highest level. This quest provides for further opportunity as it leads to a serendipitous meeting that changes his life even more. This book and its stories were created through my dreams where the question that begs for an answer “what would I have been if I lived in 1650”? With multiple dreams spawning this story, the next question to be answered is “Are these dreams just a collection of stories I have read or seen or if this of my actual past?”. Regardless of the answer, the adventures were all that a growing boy could dream about living in places he had never been in a time he had never known.

In the years before the Civil War, many Americans saw the sea as a world apart, an often violent and insular culture governed by its own definitions of honor and ruled by its own authorities. The truth, however, is that legal cases that originated at sea had a tendency to come ashore and force the national government to address questions about personal honor, dignity, the rights of labor, and the meaning and privileges of citizenship, often for the first time. By examining how and why merchant seamen and their officers came into contact with the law, Matthew Taylor Raffety exposes the complex relationship between brutal crimes committed at sea and the development of a legal consciousness within both the judiciary and among seafarers in this period. The Republic Afloat tracks how seamen conceived of themselves as individuals and how they defined their place within the United States. Of interest to historians of labor, law, maritime culture, and national identity in the early republic, Raffety’s work reveals much about the ways that merchant seamen sought to articulate the ideals of freedom and citizenship before the courts of the land—and how they helped to shape the laws of the young republic.

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