Naval Sailors in Outlander

Last time, I wrote about the portrayal of merchant sailors in the Starz television series Outlander. Today I'll be looking at their portrayal of common naval sailors.

In the Wooden World there was a common pool of labor from which all vessels drew. Many sailors, like Ashley Bowen, William Spavens, and Samuel Kelly, sailed on merchantmen and naval vessels. Christopher Prince and Jacob Nagle served on both American and British warships during the Revolution, as well as merchantmen. Olauadah Equiano sailed on merchantmen, naval vessels, and slavers.

The costumes of Outlander create a false distinction between the lower decks of merchantmen and men of war. Their material worlds are arbitrarily divided, creating a sense of different cultures. There were distinctions between the culture of merchantmen and men of war, but there were more similarities than the series suggests.

This inaccurate dichotomy is why I split the review of Outlander into two parts. Interestingly, the naval seamen are portrayed more accurately than the merchant seamen.

That's not to say it is without problems. As I've written before, sailors wore their hair short for most of the eighteenth century. In this series we see a lot of long hair and pigtails, and not a bob wig or bob style haircut in sight.

I don't usually talk about marines, but there's basically nothing about this uniform that is even remotely right, except that he's wearing red.

This guy is at least ballpark. His leather cap is just a fantasy item, but his blue jacket is decent. His sleeved waistcoat is buttoned weirdly, but bonus points for it peeking out from the cuffs of his jacket. His petticoat trousers are striped, which is not common, but also not unheard of, and the broad fall fly is correct for the period. His shirt is open and a black handkerchief hangs around his neck. Generally speaking, sailors wore their handerkchiefs over the collars of their shirts. Overall, he looks way better than most depictions of sailors from the period.

The officers are also only kind of correct. This midshipman's clothes hang like a potato sack, and he wears bizarre white canvas gaiters for some reason. The officers coats are clearly based on the original uniform in the collection of the National Maritime Museum for the 1748-67 regulations for officers uniforms, so it did come from a primary source. The problem is that this is 1766, and those long loose skirts and giant cuffs are no longer in fashion.

Captain Sir Edward Vernon, Francis Hayman, 1753-1756,
National Maritime Museum

As a counterpoint, you can see that Vernon wears his breeches tightly fitted, the cuffs are significantly shorter, and this was still ten years before Outlander takes place. Naval uniform fashion did not freeze for a generation. At least they went to an original source.

There is a tendency in mass media to portray sailors as unchanging. Sailing traditions of the nineteenth century are projected far back through the age of sail. Such is the case with the stitch through the nose.

When sailors died and were sewn into their hammocks, the last stitch was supposedly passed through the nose of the dead tar just to be sure he actually was dead. I have never seen a reference to this practice in the eighteenth century.

There are bright spots. The actual burial scene was done pretty well. I really enjoy that they included a working class woman in the lower decks of the Porpoise. Not only was the presence of women aboard men of war a fact of the eighteenth century, but it undermines the tired notion that women were bad luck at sea, which does not appear to have been a belief at the time. Overall, the material world is much better than in the previous episode.

But seriously, does nobody own a pair of stockings on this ship? Sure, sometimes sailors went barefoot, but this is ridiculous.

Merchant Sailors in Outlander

It has been a while since I dug into portrayals of eighteenth century common sailors in mass media. This is largely because there hasn't been much recently in the way of mass media that includes common tars. That changed last year with the third season of the Starz time-travel-costume-drama-bodice-ripper Outlander.

Based on the books by Diana Gabaldon, Outlander follows a 1940's woman in an eighteenth century world. A few episodes are drawn from Gabaldon's novel Voyager, in which the protagonists go to sea in the year 1766, sailing from Scotland to the West Indies in a merchantman. The main character, Clare Frasier, is pressed into service as a surgeon on a man of war during the passage.

One reason this flew under my radar is that Outlander is written for female audiences. I've never read the books, but many (probably most) of my female friends have. The television series has stirred up quite a lot of controversy over their costuming decisions, much of which revolves around female dress. The writers over at Frock Flicks have spent quite a lot of time sifting through the debates.

Today I'm going to look at their portrayals of maritime material culture and life among merchant sailors.

The first we see of the Wooden World is at the end of episode eight, when a young boy is kidnapped by Portuguese sailors. The sailors themselves are only seen at a distance through a spyglass, but we do get a good look at the Portuguese ship. I gotta say, they did pretty well.

Vascello di Secondo Rango Portoghese Tenente Generale Salutando con Canone e alla Voce,
artist unknown, 1780, National Maritime Museum

I've seen far worse. The high stern with overly ornate cabin windows gives the vessel the feel of an earlier age of shipbuilding, and the rigging hangs too loose. The ship is also remarkably drab, with brown saturating everything. It is not clear to me whether they intended the ship to be unpainted, which would be even worse. But for a prop that is on screen for a total of fourteen seconds, it's not as bad as it could be.

In episode nine, the series really puts to sea. We are introduced to the brig Artemus, and here is where the production team starts running into problems. Filming at sea is very difficult and very expensive. Steven Spielberg stated he was 'naïve' to shoot the 1977 film Jaws at sea, even though he was happy with the results. Even the most historically accurate age of sail film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World only did a few shots at sea, and most of the shooting on sound stages and in water tanks. The crew of Outlander had to build ships with green screens to stay on schedule and in their budget.

The Artemus shows the compromises the crew made in constructing a vessel of the period.

She is boxy and looks a bit like the Lego pirate ships I had as a kid. She's pierced for guns along the weather deck, but is just sheer walls of wood along the aft cabin. Her bulwarks are high for a merchantman of the period. Probably this was so that the crew could film on-deck shots without having the worry as much about the background, reducing the cost and time involved in creating a CGI seascape.

The sailors on the merchantman are less than impressive. Some wear odd shawls, there's lots of brown and beige, and almost no blue in their slop clothes. Few of them wear trousers or petticoat trousers. Most wear loose fitting breeches. Boots abound, as do cocked hats made of straw, neither of which appear on sailors of the mid-eighteenth century in sources I have found. These merchantmen look more like a costumer's compromise between Hollywood pirate films and Peter Weir's Master and Commander. Also, what's up with that leather jerkin? And why does nobody button up their damned waistcoats?

Perhaps the strangest choice was to equip a sailor in these odd leather wraps around the forearms. They don't seem to have any purpose other than looking olde-timey.

Bigger issues come with the plot. The sailors are portrayed as superstitious because someone didn't touch a horseshoe that was hastily and sloppily nailed into one of the bitts by the mainmast. The crew are so convinced that they are cursed that a riot breaks when they attempt to murder the man they believe responsible. I'll be writing soon about sailors' superstitions and religious beliefs, but I've never read anything like this for the period. A relatively secular form of superstition did exist, but its power was negligible, and it was not nearly so widespread as Hollywood would have you believe.

The sailors are portrayed as ignorant and dirty. Their clothes hang loose, and when the common sailor gets to speak, he is usually shouting some poppycock about curses. I was entirely unimpressed by their portrayal of the lower decks.

Thankfully, as we will see next time, they do a bit better with naval seamen.

Jack Tar in Mass Media: The American Revolution

One of the reasons I started this project was to clear up misconceptions about the appearance of common sailors in the period. This post will be something of a lark, a break from my examinations of period illustrations, prints, and paintings to critique depictions of sailors in my period in mass media. This blog is certainly not Frock Flicks (which, by the by, I highly recommend), but I think this should be a fun distraction. To keep from going too far afield, I'm focusing just on the American Revolution today. 

Snark and nitpicking ahead!

Too often Jack Tar is depicted as a mid-nineteenth century sailor would have dressed. This is thanks in large part to Jack Coggins' 1969 book Ships and Seamen of the American Revolution and John Mollo's otherwise pretty good 1975 Uniforms of the American Revolution in Color, a portion of which I addressed in the past. The idea that sailors in the past wore sennit hats with a broad black ribbon around the crown and bound in white tape, or perhaps coated in tar or pitch, is emphasized with frustrating regularity in mass media. For example, this chap in HBO's John Adams, Episode 2: "Independence," around one hour and 25 minutes in.

Leaving aside that his trousers look to be cotton, the folded back lapels neatly buttoned, and the incredibly loose neckcloth that dangles over his chest, the hat gets my goat. I've seen nothing in any of the images I've examined to support such headware.


The show does redeem itself somewhat in the third episode, "Don't Tread on Me," about twelve and a half minutes in.

These outfits are more practical. The overcoats are fine, especially given the image of the "Sailor Sentinel" painted by Gabriel Bray in 1774. The biggest issue is what's missing. Nobody is wearing trousers or petticoat trousers. Only one sailor has a blue jacket that we can see. Only one or two of the tars have round hats, and every single cocked hat (of which there are three or four shades, as opposed to the overwhelmingly dominant black) has its point forward. The point is, almost none of these men look like sailors. Seconds later, we get a view of the foc'sle head.

This shot is improved insofar as one man is wearing a blue jacket, and another (if you look closely) is wearing a pair of trousers. It is unfortunate that the otherwise pretty well dressed Continental Navy officer is wearing his overcoat hanging off the shoulder like the heroine on the cover of a cheap paperback romance.

"Embrace me, my sweet!

In the image below our sailors wear jackets that still have those fairly uncommon buttoned back lapels, and one of those neckcloths is as short as a bowtie, but at least AMC's Turn manages to get a bit closer with a woolen cap, linen work cap, and neckcloths that are actually fitted around the neck. These guys actually look like sailors! This screenshot is from season one, episode three: "Of Cabbages and Kings," about 42 minutes in.

Before we give Turn too much credit, take a look at this abomination from season two, episode four: "Men of Blood."

What the actual hell? 

The filmmakers have a whole "privateer" crew that are dressed like they came out of Pirates of the Caribbean. J.L. Bell, of the Boston 1775 blog, covered this silliness over at Den of Geek: privateers and pirates are not simply a 1:1 comparison. At that, pirates of the late eighteenth century didn't dress like they were going to the Renaissance Faire; they dressed like sailors because they were damned sailors.

This "privateer" captain wears a black hat with the brim bound in a fancy tape and a nice cockade, which about the most accurate thing we see. Otherwise he has a black shirt (has anybody actually seen a black shirt on a mariner?), a strange black bandage or cap around his head, long and untamed hair and drapes down over his shoulders, and for some damned reason, a leather brace. Is he a right hand dominant archer? What the hell purpose does that serve?

In fairness, vambraces do make an appearance in a 1774 Gabriel Bray illustration of a sailor and marine (or possibly naval officer) ashore, but they look nothing like Captain Arr's brace here. That thin leather would do nothing against a cutlass blow.

TV shows aren't the only culprits for bad depictions of sailors.

Via Gamespot

This screenshot comes to us from the video game Assassin's Creed 3. Just like John Adams, we run into the problem of sailors looking nothing like sailors. Denim waistcoats abound, which make no goddamn sense. Were these men pressed from a 1980's biker gang?

Some sailors wear red sashes, something that is pretty much absent on British and American sailors, though more common among French. Many of these supposed tars wear gaiters and tall boots, which is unheard of. Not a single one of them wears a hat, save for the captain. The only nod to these men being sailors is that one of them wears a shirt with broad blue and white stripes running horizontally. This might make sense if they were nineteenth century Russians.

Overall, a pretty abysmal show on three of the most successful forms of mass media to depict sailors in this era. Can you think of a production that put up a better fight? How about movies, video games, comics, or other visual media that did just as poorly or worse? Let me know in the comments!