The sea chest represented the sailor's world ashore and his world afloat. Wrapped in the confines of this wooden box were his material possessions and many of his hopes and dreams. Packed with personal and pragmatic goods, the sea chest accompanied Jack Tar as he sailed the seven seas. But the same possessions that he carried with him tied the sailor to land. Tracing the personal items a sailor brought with him aboard ship, and then the items he returned with at the end of a voyage, we will again be reminded that America was once a maritime nation. Of course, not every sailor who went to sea had a chest. Seamen, especially those on smaller vessels and in the navy, often used a canvas bag to collect their belongings. That said, many mariners had sea chests. Ishmael's isolation from the rest of the world in Herman Melville's Moby Dick is in part symbolized by the fact that he stuffed his clothes into a carpet bag and not a sea chest, or even a sailor's canvas bag. When a young man began his maritime career, one of the first things he purchased was a sea chest. As a mere boy of fourteen, Charles Tyng went to sea in 1815 with a sea chest that would accompany him throughout his early years as a mariner. In his reminiscence of his experiences Tyng took pride that the same chest was “in the garret of the old house as a memorial” to his sailor's life. In 1849 Samuel Wood signed on for a thirty-month whaling cruise and spent fifteen dollars on a sea chest and some clothes. Sea chests varied in size and shape, ranging from as little as thirty inches wide by a foot high and a foot deep to almost four feet wide by nearly two feet high and deep. The larger chests were probably used in the nineteenth century during longer voyages and aboard whaleships. The chests were not simply rectangular boxes; many were trapezoid prisms with the bottom wider than the top. Whatever the shape and size, or whatever the nature of the container that held the seaman's belongings, the sea chest remains a useful symbol to represent the maritime connections to the sea and to the land.