A document defying easy
characterization lies in folder five of the James Card Papers at the Rhode
Island Historical Society. In it William Pearce, a sailor aboard the sloop Rising Sun, testifies that Captain James
Card paid him fifty pounds in old tenor “in full satisfaction” of striking and
beating him twice while Pearce served on the Rising Sun’s voyage between Rhode Island and the Bay of Honduras in
1765. As a result of the payment,
Pearce pledged not to bring a suit against Captain James Card and further
declared that he freely forgave Card for the abuse he received at Card’s hand. Thus,
the price of abusing Pearce and securing his silence in court was approximately
the value of two and a half months of the average sailor’s wages.[i] Admiralty law protected Captain Card
from repercussions, yet Captain Card paid the object of his wrath to keep him
quiet. The paradox inherent in the William Pearce document illustrates how
individual concessions supported shipboard hierarchies.
In the waters between Europe,
Africa, and the Americas, captains abused sailors, which expressed the power of
colonial hierarchies. Captains hoisted sailors by their ankles, turning rigging
into an instrument of torture. Captains
whipped sailors with the stinging cat o’ nine tails. Captains struck the
sailors in their employ and pushed their sailors off the quarterdeck on to the main
deck below. As long as their abuse did not leave lasting damage, admiralty laws
allowed captains to perpetrate violence against their sailors with impunity. These
laws underpinned and reinforced the hierarchies that defined early-Americans’
lives. Yet, Captain Card paid William Pearce not to bring suit against him. The
legal reality makes it all the more surprising that Captain Card compensated
Pearce for the abuse he endured.
Perhaps Captain Card simply felt
guilty and desired absolution. Yet, he required Pearce to refrain from bringing
charges against him, which suggests more self-centered motivations. The simplest
explanation is that William Pearce had a family member or benefactor with
powerful connections in the merchant community whose wrath Card wished to
avoid. However, there are at least two other possible explanations. Captain
Card may have compensated Pearce because hierarchical relationships entailed
reciprocal responsibilities. Though the power dynamics inherent in the
master-seaman relationship limited a sailor’s recourse if a captain failed to provide
for his sailors, captains were
legally and culturally responsible for their sailors’ well being. Wide scale abuse
might have been viewed among land-dwellers as a failure to perform the
captain’s half of the social contract. Alternatively, while impressment cooled
after the 1763 Treaty of Paris, finding experienced, skilled, and effective
sailors proved a perennial problem for mercantile captains. Captain Card may
have paid Pearce to stave off threats to his reputation among the sailors he
wished to employ. The latter explanation seems the most compelling given that
the social world of sailors invited intelligence-gathering and sharing while in
port.
William Pearce’s paradoxical pledge
is one of many maritime documents including wage disputes and successfully
defended mutinies that illustrate how long-distance trade and the maritime
environment challenged landed systems. Card’s concession shows that human
relationships and market forces limited the power of cultural hierarchies. On a
systemic level sailors followed their masters’ orders, could be abused by their
masters without recourse, and found it difficult to successfully sue when
captains violated contracts or failed to pay the wages due them. But studying
the hierarchical systems that ordered colonial society encourages us to ignore
the concessions some men gained from their masters. The case of Captain Card
and William Pearce shows how the clash of the market and landed cultural systems
allowed sailors like Pearce to carve out spaces for themselves amidst a rigid
social order. It also illustrates that in port captains sensed the broader
implications of their actions. While in the Bay of Honduras his power was
uncontested and, thus, Captain Card made no concessions. But after arriving in
Newport, Card recognized that Pearce could damage his reputation as an employer
and an honorable trader.
Even rigid colonial hierarchies provided
outlets for discontent to prevent large-scale social upheaval. This phenomenon
played out repeatedly in the maritime Atlantic when captains gave their sailors
bonuses to lengthen the voyage, ignored their mutinous oaths, or, as in the case
of Captain Card, compensated a sailor for violence perpetrated against him.
Documents like Pearce’s testimony do not reject colonial hierarchies but they
illustrate its limitations. For individual sailors like William Pearce, those
limitations made all the difference.
Transcription:Newport May 3, 1765“Then rec’d of Capt.
James Card Junr fifty Pounds old
Tenor in full satisfaction for his striking me in the Bay of
Honduras & also for his Beating me this
Day on Bourd the Sloop Rising Sun for Which aforesaid Sum Received I promise
that I will not Commence any Action or Suit in the Law against the Said James
Card Junr. but do freely
forgive him for the abused recd as above saidWilliam PearceWitness Martin
Howard”
Post by NERFC Fellow Hannah Knox Tucker
[i] After 1750 £1,000 Old Tenor = £100
Sterling. John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America,
1600-1775: A Handbook, (Williamsburg, VA: University of North Carolina
Press, 1978), 133. Sailors made approximately £2 per month, Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea:
Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), 304-305.
