Black Jacks: African-American Seamen in the Age of Sail.

By Jeffrey Bolster (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. viii 310pp. $27.00).

Jeffrey Bolster's personal seafaring experience lends vibrance to his gorgeously detailed account Black Jacks: African-American Seamen in the Age of Sail. This deserving analysis of African-American sailors, who totaled twenty thousand men and composed one fifth of the United States' maritime labor force by the early nineteenth century, illustrates important ways of conceptualizing both early African-American and maritime history. Bolster's discussion focuses on the fluidity of the African-American sailors' work culture over time and distance, in and out of port. He describes the relative harmony of the sailors' interactions at sea and the emergence of tensions in port, creating a comprehensive account of the African-American maritime culture. He proceeds to analyze the implications of sailors' travels between otherwise isolated shoreside slave and free black Atlantic communities. He argues that sailors' networks were central to the formation of a larger "collective sense of self, economic survival, and freedom struggle" among early slaves and free blacks(2). Indeed they were central to the formation of "black America" itself (2). Bolster spins these ideas across a huge region and long time frame. The book covers much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and considers sailors' experiences both in North American ports as well as in motion throughout the vast Atlantic world.

Bolster must be commended for his examination of the African-American experience within maritime work culture aboard Atlantic sailing vessels. In a chapter titled "The Way of a Ship" Bolster argues that race was not as dividing within the Atlantic work culture as it was on shore. Factors reducing racial strife amongst interracial crews included long voyages, collective work, cultural symbols like the tattoo, and common cultural practices such as spinning yarns. Along the way Bolster illustrates with striking detail the feel of the shipboard experience, taking the reader from discussion of "rigging made slack by the oceans ceaseless swells," to the "hoarse" cry of shipmates calling out the watches, to men with "furrowed, leathery faces that came with years before the mast." Argued with grace and clarity, his analysis greatly enhances our understanding of issues of race and labor within the maritime work culture of this period.

Other parts of Bolster's book are more problematic. His discussion of mariner race relations ashore focuses on sailors incarcerated in London's Dartmoor prison. While this chapter convincingly and interestingly illustrates that African-American sailors formed their own culture within the prison's walls, and that race relations were more contentious than on board ships, it is doubtful whether this unusual setting was typical of wider patterns. Similar evidentiary shortcomings pervade his notion of "economic survival" networks. The illustration of the importance of sailors' wages to northern African-American communities is significant, yet one wishes he had provided comparative material for southern free black and slave mariners. Here, as elsewhere in Black Jacks, Bolster's narrative conveys more about northern sailors than southern ones, and more about free black sailors than slave sailors. His analysis of mariner networks is also unevenly argued. While he nicely illustrates how African legacies (which he defines as tangible skills, historical memories, and spiritual knowledge) helped cosmopolitan slave and free black sailors create a "sense of self", his argument is less effective in discussing how their roles as carriers of news created broader identities linking mariners with shoreside slaves and free blacks. Here Bolster's argument is a poor imitation of Julius Scott's impressive dissertation on the subject.

Bolster gives perhaps his most superficial treatment to networks engaged in "the struggle with slavery." After claiming that free black sailors were "angels of liberty" to southern slaves, he supports this idea mainly through rehashing well-known maritime connections in Denmark Vesey's Charleston plot. He puts forth an interesting argument that African-American mariners helped runaways, but then spends more time discussing southern whites' efforts to jail free black sailors than in illustrating the roles of these workers in actual escape networks. Overall, the book's breadth will be frustrating to those who want more details on specific aspects of his multifaceted thesis, particularly in regards to the functioning of sailors' networks.

Also disquieting is Bolster's unwillingness to fully credit earlier scholarship. The casual reader might readily assume that African-American sailors had never been studied before. The reality is far different. Bolster's account builds on a growing volume of significant maritime history. Martha Putney and James Farr have both written book length treatments of black sailors. Julius Scott, Marcus Rediker, and David Cecelski have all done relevant interpretive work on the subject. While Bolster cites these historians, and at times appropriates their ideas, he seems unwilling to fully interact with their work.

Finally, Black Jacks suffers from Bolster's implicit rejection of the concept of resistance as an organizing principal. Tellingly, Bolster manages to avoid even using the word "resistance" almost entirely. Although he details the changing identities of African-Americans on and off ships, he neglects to place them within the larger context of emerging class structures in the Atlantic world. While the reader gets a textured sense of sailors' masculinity, their African roots, their occupational identities, and so on, Bolster does not consider these identities as oppositionally constructed. The result is not only a lack of detail in "the struggles with slavery" but also a lack of any depth in his account of the ways in which sailors' actions, or the identities in which he is more interested, frustrated the plantation owners, ship owners, slave traders, and merchants who attempted to control sailors' labor. Without a compelling metanarrative to substitute, this leads Bolster to adopt a somewhat sanguine tone, and finally, to a less than forceful assessment of these workers' larger significance.

These criticisms notwithstanding, there is no doubt that Black Jacks will have a powerful impact on the field. Bolster's portrayal of maritime work culture is a significant contribution to our understanding of early African-American work settings. His imaginative research and use of sources, neglected in this review, set a high standard for future work in maritime history. Most importantly, as interest in the fields of both African-American and Atlantic history continues to surge, Bolster has written the best overall assessment to date of African-American seafarers. Black Jacks introduces Bolster as an important figure in these vibrant fields of research.

Thomas Buchanan

Carnegie Mellon University