A survey of a wide range of new research on many aspects of life at sea in the early modern period.

Investigates the lives of common sailors engaged in commerce, exploration, privateering and piracy, and naval actions during Tudor and Stuart periods.

The age of maritime expansion and the Anglo-Spanish War have been analyzed by generations of historians, but nearly all studies have emphasized events and participants at the top. This book examines the lives and experiences of the men of the Elizabethan maritime community during a particularly volatile period of maritime history. The seafaring community had to contend with simultaneous pressures from many different directions. Shipowners and merchants, motivated by profit, hired seamen to sail voyages of ever-increasing distances, which taxed the health and capabilities of 16th-century crews and vessels. International tensions in the last two decades of Elizabeth's reign magnified the risks to all seamen, whether in civilian employment or on warships. The advent of open warfare with Spain in 1585 resulted in a privateering war against the Spanish Empire, seen by some seamen as one of the few boons of the conflict. The other major development was the introduction of impressment, a deeply resented aspect of any naval war and one that brought great hardship to seamen and their families. The relationship between the Crown and its seafarers was a pull-haul between a state beset by financial problems of fighting a protracted war on several fronts and employees forced to work in dangerous conditions for substandard wages. The stresses of the war years tell us much about the dynamic of the maritime community, their expectations, and their coping strategies.

This book will long stand as the foundational study of church missions and ministry to men and women of the sea. International in scope, it covers in detail the efforts, particularly during the past two centuries, to serve the spiritual and moral needs of seafarers. The author, himself a former seafarer and seafarers' chaplain, spent more than fifteen years of painstaking research to compile this fascinating and authoritative book.

During the late 1770s, Boston's townspeople were struggling to rebuild a community devastated by British occupation, the ensuing siege by the Continental Army, and the Revolutionary war years. After the British attacked Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, Boston's population plummeted from 15,000 civilians to less than 3,000, property was destroyed and plundered, and the economy was on the verge of collapse. How the once thriving colonial seaport and its demoralized inhabitants recovered in the wake of such demographic, physical, and economic ruin is the subject of this compelling and well-researched work. Drawing on extensive primary sources, including ward tax assessors' Taking Books, church records, census records, birth and marriage records, newspaper accounts, and town directories, Jacqueline Barbara Carr brings to life Boston's remarkable rebirth as a flourishing cosmopolitan city at the dawn of the nineteenth century. She examines this watershed period in the city's social and cultural history from the perspective of the town's ordinary men and women, both white and African American, re-creating the determined community of laborers, artisans, tradesmen, mechanics, and seamen who demonstrated an incredible perseverance in reshaping their shattered town and lives. Filled with fascinating and dramatic stories of hardship, conflict, continuity, and change, the engaging narrative describes how Boston rebounded in less than twenty-five years through the efforts of inhabitants who survived the ordeal of the siege, those who fled British occupation and returned after the war, and the influx of citizens from many different places seeking new opportunities in the growing city. Carr explores the complex forces that drove Boston's transformation, taking into consideration such topics as the built environment and the town's neighborhoods, the impact of town government on peoples' lives, the day-to-day trials of restoring and managing the community, the effect of the postwar economy on work and daily life, and forms of leisure and theater entertainment.

This brilliant account of the maritime world of the eighteenth-century reconstructs in detail the social and cultural milieu of Anglo-American seafaring and piracy. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.