For the men on English East India Company vessels in the early seventeenth century, their multi-year voyages were rarely ‘smooth sailing’. Mortality on the first voyage (1601-3), for example, was about 60 per cent. Like most long-distance treks in the early modern period, the accounts of the English East India Company voyages are peppered with examples of shipboard disagreements -both physical and verbal, desertions, disease, and deaths. However, an examination of the ships’ logs from its first 4 major voyages (1601-11) also reveal extreme behaviours such as suicides, sexual deviance, mutinies, and a murder, all of which tested order aboard. These are indicators that for Tudor-Stuart seamen the 2-3 year round trip to the East Indies was one of the most challenging forms of maritime employment. Though the Company was a solicitous employer that was proactive when it came to the physical and spiritual health of its employees, experienced officers, shipboard healthcare, regular worship, good wages, and a diet that often included anti-scorbutics were not sufficient to ensure shipboard harmony on Company ships. For most breaches of discipline, officers chastened offenders with physical punishments, but there were occasions when order was so severely compromised that drastic measures were required. This chapter is not a legal study of these cases, but rather seeks to analyze what these offences and trials reveal about the human costs of the taxing multi-year voyages and the difficulties of maintaining shipboard order. In the voluminous publications about the East India Company, including a current renaissance of works on the Company, little attention has been paid to these topics during its foundational years. This is all the more surprising given how revealing some of these accounts are. This study on shipboard order hopefully adds a needed dimension to this scholarship.

Trying to maintain authority over those the Company deemed ‘the poore vngoverned Marriners’ was a tricky business. Officers were instructed ‘to comaund as you may be both loved and feared, not using aucthoritie to worke your private respect or revenge but […] endevouringe to bringe the longe and tedious voyadge to a profitable end, with care of the saffetie, health and comforte of your people’. In order to do this, officers had to strike a balance between the Company's profits and shipboard paternalism.

A decade ago, I was asked to design an undergraduate course around my own research interests. The biggest challenge was finding a textbook which dealt with the social history of English seamen throughout the early modern period. I never did find anything suitable, opting instead for articles and excerpts from books written by renowned scholars in the field. Clearly, there was a need for a volume which made these writings more accessible and tracked seafarers’ experiences over centuries. To fill this historiographical void, I asked some of the leading scholars from both sides of The Pond whose work had heavily influenced my own to summarise their findings. I hoped that, taken together, their contributions would offer a nuanced portrait of seafarers’ existence, as well as providing us with some sense of what has been accomplished in the field and what remains to be done. Given the broad swath of time that constitutes the early modern period, we've produced a two-volume set: volume I, covering the Tudor and early Stuart period (1485–1649), was published in 2012. It is now time for its companion for the later era (1650–1815) to join it on bookshelves.

The prospect of editing such a project seemed rather daunting. However, I was pleasantly surprised that so many eminent scholars were willing to volunteer for this project, without any prospect of impressment. I provided them with general guidelines concerning the scope of their chapters and the contributors have chosen the content based on what they deemed most important to share with readers. Each scholar has made their reputation by either exploring the ignored aspects of maritime history, or providing fresh perspectives on oftexplored topics, or both. Throughout their academic careers, some have kept their research within the confines of the maritime world while others have published widely in early modern history. What they have in common is that each has made a major contribution to the social history of early modern seamen. I thank them for graciously giving their time, sharing their expertise, and bearing with this project to the end.

The guiding principle for many social historians of the English/British maritime community is that the countless works that focus almost exclusively on those at the top of the maritime hierarchy – the Francis Drakes and Horatio Nelsons – are only part of the story. For those of us who are more comfortable rubbing shoulders with the swabbers than the admirals, it is gratifying just how many heretofore nameless men we can retrieve from the records. It is normally much easier to track down men of higher ranks which is why our knowledge has always been slanted in their favour. Nevertheless, it is possible to produce more balanced analyses of the men who served in various sectors of the seafaring labour force, whether they did so at the top, in the middle or lower down the shipboard hierarchy.

Now that both volumes are completed, it is useful to see how the men of the merchant marine, the navy, privateers and pirates fared over the entire period 1485 to 1815. In terms of health care, aid to naval veterans, shipboard diet and hygiene, there were gradual improvements during the early modern era. However, it is remarkable how enduring many of the challenges were in the English maritime community. A number of the struggles of Tudor-Stuart seamen still persisted centuries later – issues such as the quantity and quality of their provisions, the amount and manner of the payment of their wages, the state overriding their freedoms, lack of regulated training, manning issues, the threat posed by various diseases, and the challenges of being part of a maritime family. Although England and Britain changed during the early modern period, there was much about seafaring and seafarers’ existence that did not, despite the passage of time.

It is evident that Britain's growing empire and trade owed much to its blue water policy. Seamen's vital role was recognized, and increasingly, the state took responsibility for its veterans. This slow development began in the late Elizabethan era as the Crown begrudgingly bestowed pensions on a small number of needy individuals who had served in its naval campaigns.

The era from 1650 to 1815 was an enormously important period in the development of sea power; maritime matters were intimately connected with Britain's imperial and commercial ambitions. It would be impossible to overstate the import of affairs at sea to the engine of state. Certainly the battles and endeavours at sea during this time are the stuff of legends – whether that was Nelson's victories or those of the most infamous names in pirate lore. Whether English, and later British, seamen were serving Britannia aboard naval ships or in more self-serving undertakings at sea, the growth in British sea power during this long eighteenth century is apparent.

Prior to this period, a number of changes allowed for European and, consequently, British, expansion. If we were to focus on military technology and operational considerations, we would acknowledge that the prime means of, and reason for, change was the rise in Europe in the sixteenth century of the large, specialised, sailing, cannon-armed warship, built and maintained just for war, rather than also acting as a peacetime trader. These ships, able to take part in sustained artillery duels at close range, were expensive to build, administer and maintain. As a consequence of this cost and the related need for political support and organisational sophistication, the number of potential maritime powers was restricted, and, by the late seventeenth century, the powerful naval state was no longer coterminous, as it had earlier been, with the commercial territory or port.

The growth of English naval power in both the sixteenth century and the early and mid-seventeenth had equipped England with an important navy and a tradition of maritime power that subsequently affected political assumptions and views about the necessary identity and desirable policies of Britain (the correct term after the Parliamentary Union of 1707 with Scotland) as a military power. Thus, Britain became the leading naval power in Europe, and thus the world, in the period 1690–1715, a position it was to sustain until the Second World War.

The Tudor-Stuart era was formative and turbulent for its seamen. The stresses of cycles of war and peace and the push for European ‘out thrust’ had an impact of all forms of maritime employment.

English, and later, British, maritime expansion has been analysed by gener-ations of historians but until relatively recently, the focus has been placed on events and participants ‘at the top’. The adventures of the famous and infamous captains like Drake and Frobisher are only a small part of the story: we must understand the experiences of all the men on those ships if we hope to grasp the ‘big picture’.

Historians such as K.R. Andrews and G.V. Scammell did much to establish and advance the field. In his seminal article, ‘The Elizabethan Seaman’ (1982), Andrews gave credit to Scammell's pioneering work, ‘Manning the English Merchant Service in the Sixteenth Century’ (1970) for laying the groundwork for this field of study. Andrews claimed the subject ‘cried out’ for a large-scale study. Over the past two decades a number of scholars have taken up the torch and the research has not been limited to the Elizabethan period. The endeavour has been assisted by the popularity of ‘history from below’.

Once there was a will to rescue these men from the dim past, scholars had to be creative in findings ways to do it. Official records of the time make little mention of the men who crewed the vessels which opened the global market-place to England and allowed for fledgling colonies – the fragile beginnings of Britain's great empire.

The Elizabethan maritime community was experiencing great stresses and strains but so too was it flourishing. The age of European commercial and geographic expansion defined much about English seamen's circumstances in the late sixteenth century as did the naval and privateering war with Spain. Even in the face of these new demands and opportunities, for the most part, seamen and the state tried to preserve the status quo. In some ways, these ‘craftsmen of the sea’ were typical of early modern labourers:1 they fought tenaciously to protect their customs and traditional practices whether or not change was in their best interest. The fact that much remained the same about seamen's experiences for centuries is a testament to the longevity of those customs. This is not to say that change did not creep in, as seamen were faced with a host of challenges in a Europe fractured by competing religious and commercial interests as well as their introduction into a much more global, hazardous and volatile workplace.

The maritime community at sea

When I was writing my Master's thesis, I was castigated by one of my profes-sors for painting the English seafaring community as an ‘amorphous blob’. We historians like to put people into tidy categories but we recognize that these are often artificial constructs. Such is the case with this group of maritime labourers. Although some seafarers were very specialized, there was a high degree of traffic between the various sectors of the maritime community.

As English ships sailed farther and farther from home waters, Tudor seamen dealt with an increased problem of shipboard morbidity and mortality. These men typically did a risk versus remuneration assessment of their intended voyages, calculating whether a high probability of sickness, injury or death on a voyage which might last years was worthwhile financially. This is true for all seamen except those impressed into the navy; those forced to serve the monarch were denied their customary freedom to assess the hazards inherent in any given voyage. Certainly merchant companies that had to compete for manpower, particularly during wartime, were more conscientious about retaining employees and they usually lacked the ability to compel men to serve.

Thousands of seamen were lost in the Tudor period, primarily to disease rather than shipboard or battle injury. The English commercial companies made the most strides to improve the lot of Elizabethan seamen in order to attract and preserve the labour force. Such efforts were, at best, minimally successful. However, recognizing that the status quo was unacceptable was important and the search for remedies had a favourable impact on employer-employee relations.

Naturally the Crown needed healthy seamen during wartime. Efforts at improvement came from seamen whose careers were characterized by horizontal movement between naval and non-naval employment. The Crown was resistant to change, overwhelmed as it was by the size of the problem, logistics and the desire to wage war on a budget.