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Book
Review |
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Pérez-Mallaína, Pablo E., translated by Carla Rahn Phillips. Spain's Men
of the Sea: Daily Life on the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 304 pp, $19.95.
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First published in translation in 1998 and issued in paperback last year,
Pablo Pérez-Mallaína's Spain's Men of the Sea is
an outstanding contribution to the study of maritime life in the sixteenth-century.
As director of the Department of American History at the University of Seville,
the author has mined rich veins in the Spanish archives and other sources
to present a portrait of the transatlantic shipping industry and its people
(not all of them Spanish) that is at once orderly and intimate. The book is
divided into six chapters, each with between three and five subchapters: The
Land Environment of the Men of the Sea; The Origin and Social Condition of
the Men of the Sea; The Ship as a Place of Work; The Ship as a Place of Life
and Death; Discipline and Conflict; and The Mental Horizons of the Men of
the Sea. |
1 |
By men of the sea, Pérez-Mallaína means not only the common seamen, but everyone
within the hierarchies of ships and fleets: pages and apprentices; boatswains
and pursers; the officer corps of pilots (navigators), masters (merchants
or merchants' representatives), and captains responsible for the defense of
the ship; and the "ship lords," who were owners or part-owners of ships. He
also considers the officials aboard the royal warships charged with escorting
merchant fleets, a practice begun in the 1520s as the threat of attack by
corsairs intensified. These included constables, officials responsible for
financial transactions, gunners, and the admiral (second-in-command) and general
(supreme commander) of the fleet. Also accounted for are religious and lay
passengers. Among these passengers he includes stowawaysãknown as "raindrops"
(166)ãmany of whom were girlfriends or women of liberal affection. |
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Pérez-Mallaína's work is illuminating on many levels. Most obvious is his
nuanced depiction of mariners' lives, which he paints from a rich palette
of legal proceedings, accounts of voyages, sailors' testaments ("dramatic
expressions of poverty" (121) ), memoirs, letters, and contemporary literature.
In so doing he peels away several centuries of historical grime to bring into
high relief the stark reality of life on the Spanish Atlantic, people's motives
for going to sea, and the myriad paradoxes with which contemporaries contended
in their lives. |
3 |
In the author's deft rendering, the establishment of the route to the Americas
was not incidental to Spain's imperial expansion. It represented a revolutionary
moment in history, not simply for the obvious reasons having to do with the
confrontation of the Eurasian-African world with that of the Americas. It
also resulted in transformations in the working relationships between sailors,
masters, and merchantsãspecifically the increasing marginalization of common
sailors in the face of incipient capitalism, the efforts of merchants and
officers to assert themselves through collective action, and the increasing
systemization of the navigator's art. |
4 |
The decline of common sailors' status in this period was signaled by changes
in both remuneration and nomenclature. Whereas in the medieval period the
ship's "company" shared in the financial and physical welfare of the shipãhaving
a say in when it could sail and sharing in the profits of the voyageãby the
end of the sixteenth century they were for the most part poorly salaried "crew,"
(195) exploited solely for their physical strength and routinely cheated.
Inadequate pay and the attractions of the silver and gold of the Americas
help account for desertion rates that sometimes exceeded twenty per cent.
Somewhat higher on the social scale (both afloat and ashore) were the officers
who, seeking to secure prerogatives that would help differentiate them from
the mass of common sailors, established in the 1560s the Brotherhood of Our
Lady of the Fair Wind and the related University of Seafarers. At the same
time, there were new technological challenges to deal with. For navigators
this meant the application of cosmography (with a requisite knowledge of geometry
and mathematics) to navigation. Whereas in the past mariners had been dependent
on "personal knowledge about the coasts, winds, and currents," (232) now they
needed to master still imperfect tools such as the compass, cross-staff and
astrolabe. Reliance on these "novelties" was hastened in part by the desperate
need for pilots, which grew in direct proportion to the number of ships in
the trade, about 200 per year by century's end. |
5 |
Many of these themes have been addressed before, but Pérez-Mallaína brings
several strengths to his work that will appeal to students and researchers
alike. Foremost is his ability to visualize the physical world he describes,
beginning with the foreshore of the port of Seville (the nerve center of Spanish
western trade were the population grew from 40,000 to 150,000 during the sixteenth
century), the laborious route down the shallow Guadalquivir to Sanlìcar de
Barrameda, and crossing the treacherous sandbar that separated the port from
the Atlantic proper. Readers whose images of shipboard life are based on studies
(or movies such as Master and Commander)
about the latter centuries of the age of sail will be fascinated by the conditions
aboard these ships, where the majority of the passengers and crew slept on
the open deck, contendingãsometimes violentlyãfor space with fellow humans
as well as with chickens, pigs, goats and sheep, not to mention uninvited
shipmates like weevils and vermin. A characteristically helpful modern comparison
illuminates the wretched circumstances: the passengers and crew aboard a ship
of 106 toneladas "enjoyed a habitable space of between 150 and 180 square
meters [1,600-1,900 square feet], that is to say, the surface area of what
we would consider a good-sized urban apartment. Into that space between 100
and 120 persons crowded together for months at a time, without using water
for anything but drinking!"ãand only a liter a day, at that. (130-131) |
6 |
No bland statistician, Pérez-Mallaína animates his discussion of sailors'
wages with brief but illustrative tables comparing them with those of skilled
craftsmen and common laborers, and he shows the cost of various medical procedures
and prescriptions in terms of a sailor's daily wage. The least expensive of
these were salves and medicinal oils, which equaled the cost of a day's work,
while the most expensive was a concoction of "powders made of sandalwood,
emeralds, and coral for strengthening the limbs" (28.6 days of work). We also
learn that a doctor's visit cost less than that of a nurse (5.4 and 8.2 days,
respectively), while a shave, extracting a molar and "1 mass said in the house"
all cost the equivalent of 1.5 days of work. In sum, he observes, "A sailor
could not let himself fall ill, because medical treatment was almost as high
in price as it was ineffective." (117-118) |
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While the author
is willing to draw apt comparisons between life today and five centuries
ago, he does not hesitate to address and explain aspects of life otherwise
alien to modern sensibilitiesãfor example, the prevalence and acceptance
of nepotism and favoritism, the dramatic distinction in world view between
men of the sea and their rural contemporaries, and the pervasive influence
of religion as both as a positive spiritual force (largely ignored) and
as a source of laws and punishments that most would find petty. Indeed,
blasphemingã"For the life of God and his Holy Mother"ã netted a group of
seamen a month in the stocks in 1571. In appealing their punishment, the
sailors observed that "the prison that the law allows for similar offenses
is to be behind iron grills . . . and not the stocks, especially
on a ship that is already jail enough by itself." (129) |
8 |
Spain's Men of the Sea is a work of scrupulous scholarship leavened by an
unpretentious sense of humor and a keen awareness of the limitations of the
sources. Pérez-Mallaína's conclusions are further distinguished by his sympathetic
understanding of human nature and the mores of the time. Readers cannot fail
to come away with a new appreciation for the social dynamic of the world that
produced Spain's world-girdling enterprise of the sixteenth century. Viewed
strictly as a work of maritime history, the book is an excellent companion
to Six Galleons for the King of Spain whose author, Carla Rahn Phillips, has done a great
service in rendering this into easy, jargon-free English. |
9 |
Lincoln Paine
Series Editor, Praeger Explorations
in World Maritime History |