Origin of a Myth: The Last Stitch

Outlander, Season 3 (2017).

Follower Justin Anderson e-mailed me a short time ago with a specific request:

I'm curious if you have any insights into the origins of the idea that burial shrouds had a final stitch which passed through the nose? I see you mention it briefly in a post, but I can't find anywhere else where this is being discussed online with any real knowledge or academic care.[1]

It's a very prevalent tale, often shared in fiction. Both the Aubrey-Maturin and Hornblower books included it, as do their film and TV adaptations. Outlander includes a poignant scene with the same scenario.

Fiction follows the lead, in this instance, of non-fiction. The Royal Australian Navy regards the last stitch as fact. The same is true of Cdr. Connell and Vice Adm. Mack's treatment of burial at sea in Naval Ceremonies, Customs, and Traditions:

According to a very old custom in preparing a body for burial at sea, the sailmaker, when sewing the canvas shroud, takes the last stitch through the nose of the deceased.[2]

The most common version of the story goes that dead sailors were stitched up in their hammocks, weighted down with shot to drag them to the bottom (all of which is true). The last stitch of the canvas would go through the nose, supposedly because the pain would awake the sailor in case someone screwed up and he wasn't actually dead.

Certainly some sailors must have been sewn up and thrown over before they were fully dead. Evidence of this can be found in the recollections of Carl Peter Thunberg, who later remembered such an incident during a voyage to Angola in the 1770's:

Five men had been reported dead, all of them had been sewed up in their hammocks, and two had already been thrown overboard, when the third, the instant he was put on the plank, called out, 'Master Boatswain, I am alive still!' to which the Boatswain with unreasonable jocularity replied,-'You alive, indeed! what, do you pretend to know better than the surgeon?[3]

At a practical level, sewing through the nose seems odd to me. Does the sailmaker stop sewing when they reach the nose, leaving the forehead bare? Does he go back after sewing to and along the top, and then pinch around the canvas until he finds the nose so he can sew through it? Also, if a sailor suffers so much trauma as to pass into unconsciousness that was mistaken for death, it seems unlikely the pinch of a needle would revive him.

Most importantly:

There is no evidence for putting the last stitch through the nose in the eighteenth century. 

I've found no sources that mention this practice at all through the entirety of my period of study.

This reminds me of a seeming non-sequitur (that I swear is relevant; bear with me).

Samurai on horseback, wearing armor and horned helmet, carrying bow and arrows,
1878?, Library of Congress.

A historian of Eastern Asia (whose name escapes me) was talking about our popular understanding of samurai, especially the strict and reverential treatment to an unbending and universally agreed upon Bushido. That understanding is really only true for the tail end of the history of the samurai, when there was a relative peace throughout the empire and the samurai didn't have as fighting much to do. That, and after the Meiji Restoration, they emphasized 'traditional' practices (some of which they had invented) in order to preserve their quickly dissolving subculture. Because this was the period in which those practices were most likely to be recorded, documented and saved, and the period that is closest in time to ours, and especially because the samurai themselves were projecting these practices back in time and casting them as immemorial, they were accepted by historians and society as a whole as timeless.

This is also true of sailors. Most myths and misunderstandings about common sailors are backward projections by Victorian sailors. The advent of steam was rapidly eclipsing sail, and so sailors clung to what they believed to be immemorial practices that were actually quite recent. Superstition, canvas hats, the belief that women are bad luck, bell bottomed trousers, sea shanties, tattoos, an impermeable barrier between officers and crew, and all the rest were far more common in the nineteenth century than the eighteenth, and some didn't apply at all to that earlier era. By contrast, practices that were common among eighteenth century sailors fell out of favor by or through the nineteenth: frying watches, carrying sticks, short cut hair, carved or stamped leather buttons, and others.

So it's possible this was a Victorian practice, rather than a Georgian one. Where does the story come from? Was it actually a myth?

There was a good discussion of this a few years ago on the Authentic Pirate Living History 1690-1730 Facebook group, which is a surprisingly academic font of knowledge, frequented by some great maritime historians. I've also found a reference or two to the last stitch through the nose in the nineteenth century. All of the sources found by both that group and myself lean toward the fictional, and below you'll find a mix of their discoveries and mine.

The earliest reference yet ground was uncovered by Alan Gutchess, the current site director at the Fort Pitt Museum. Frederick Chemier's 'The Life of a Sailor' was published in 1831 in The Metropolitan magazine. The emphasis is mine: 'I have heard it said that it was customary to run the needle in the last stitch through the nose of the corpse; some may do it, but I certainly never remarked it myself.'[4] In a later edition published in 1850, Chemier expanded on this: 'I have heard it said, that it was customary to run the needle of the last stitch through the nose of the corpse. It may or may not be the case (sailors are very curious people in their fancies); certainly I never remarked it, neither have I heard it mentioned as a general occurrence.'[5]

It later appeared in Herman Melville's 1850 semi-autobiographical novel White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War, where he has an entire chapter titled 'The Last Stitch.': 'Small thanks I gets for my pains; and every one of 'em looks so 'proachful-like, with a sail-maker's needle through his nose.' There follows a discussion about whether or not to actually do the last stitch through the nose, with the author standing against it. The sail-maker is staunchly for it, citing 'no innowations' and 'it's a good old fashion.'[6] Again, the earliest mention yet found is from only 19 years before this novel was published.

It is possible that the practice was in place earlier than recorded, but we cannot project that without evidence. Among the many recollections by passengers, captains, and seamen of burial at sea, none mention the stitch through the nose in the eighteenth century.

The Burial at Sea, Sir Frank William Brangwyn, 1890, Glasgow Museums Resource Centre (GMRC) via The Athenaeum

In the 1881 The Boys' & Girls' Book of Travel and Adventure, an unnamed author wrote:

The thing that the sailmaker had wanted to do, was the old custom of his trade afloat, namely to take the last stitch of yarn through the nose. Without that, it used to be firmly believed that those who were buried at sea could never rest, but some time or somewhere must come up again from the deepest water.[7]

It is not clear to me if this is intended as a fictional account.

In 1894 the Journal of American Folk-Lore published a paper (but didn't cite the author) titled 'Burial Custom Formerly Observed in the Naval Service.' The very title suggests that this was not currently being practiced, and the author claims to have heard this story from a patient at an asylum. In the introduction the author was already starting to note inconsistencies in the tale. Nonetheless, he took it at face value: 'The sailmaker's mate, who performed this office, was well aware of the necessity for taking the last stitch through the tip of the patient's nose; without this precaution the body would not "stay down," however waited with shot, but would shake off the trammels of its sailor shroud, and reappear as a ghost to its former shipmates.' Even the author of this piece admits 'allusions to [this practice] in print are not very frequent.'[8]

Notably, Melville and the authors of Journal of American Folk-Lore and The Boys' & Girls' Book specifically state that the purpose of the last stitch is to prevent the ghost of the sailor from haunting the ship, rather than checking to see if he is alive. Chemier gives no stated motivation. None of these accounts claim to be an eyewitness to the practice, and Chemier is explicitly incredulous.

The only reliable account I've found of this in actual practice is from Cyril Corbet's journal, in which he wrote on March 21, 1874:

The ship's steward, a man named Frederick Garrett, was found dead in his hammock this morning...I never knew before to-day, that in sewing a dead man up in his hammock, before chucking him overboard, they put the last stitch through his nose; at least, Smith-Dorrien tells me so,-he is my authority.[9]

Even in this, which seems pretty likely to be a real story, Corbet is incredulous.

Burial at sea for two casualties of a Japanese submarine attack on the US aircraft carrier USS Liscome Bay, November 1943,
National Archives and Research Administration, via Wikimedia Commons.

The last reference I have found to the practice is the 1960's. In a 1996 letter to the editor of The Independent, a merchant mariner stated that he watched a bosun push 'the large triangular-shaped needle right through the nose. I winced, and he looked up at me and said "That's the law of the sea, the last stitch through the nose, if that don't wake him up I know he's dead."'[10]

I do not mean to diminish the value of stories. The myths and legends of the sea do have real meaning to the sailors of the present. As a historian, it is nonetheless my responsibility to explore the realities of life in the past. Death has always been significant in the lives of sailors, and how we have dealt with mortality has changed over time.

In short:

The last stitch was not practiced in the eighteenth century, was never widespread in the nineteenth century, was always portrayed as an immemorial practice from the time of its invention, and was explicitly about ghosts until the twentieth century.

---
[1] E-mail to the author dated February 29, 2020.
[2] Connell, Cdr. Royal W. and Vice Adm. William P. Mack, Naval Ceremonies, Customs, and Traditions, sixth edition, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2004, page 70.

[3] Thunberg, Carl Peter, Travels in Europe, Africa, and Asia, made between the years 1770 and 1779, Third Edition, London: F. and C. Rivington, 1796, page 118, Yale University via the HathiTrust Digital Library, accessed August 1, 2018, <https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008726012>.
[4] Chemier, Frederick, 'The Life of a Sailor,' in The Metropolitan: Monthly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts, Volume 1, London: James Cochrane & Co., 1831, page 394, via Google Books, accessed March 17, 2020, <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Metropolitan/6CIAAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=stitch%20through%20the%20nose>.
[5] Chemier, Frederick, The Life of a Sailor, London: Richard Bently, 1850, page 75, via Google Books, accessed March 17, 2020, <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Life_of_a_Sailor_By_a_Captain_in_the/ljJkAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=stitch+through+the+nose+burial&pg=PA75&printsec=frontcover>.
[6] Melville, Herman, White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1850 page 395, via Google Books, accessed March 17, 2020, <https://www.google.com/books/edition/White_Jacket/2o-fYxQSTIoC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=stitch%20through%20the%20nose>.
[7] 'Committed to the Deep: An Incident of Personal Recollection of Life at Sea,' in The Boys' & Girls' Book of Travel and Adventure, London: Strahan and Company Limited, 1881, page 285,  via Google Books, accessed March 17, 2020, <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_boys_girls_book_of_travel_and_advent/wCUCAAAAQAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1>.
[8] 'Burial Custom Formerly Observed in the Naval Service' in Journal of American Folk-Lore, Volume VII, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1894, page 68, via Google Books, accessed March 17, 2020, <https://books.google.com/books?id=hiidAAAAMAAJ>.
[9] Corbet, Cyril, "Venus" at the Isle of Desolation: My Private Journal During the "Transit of Venus" Expedition in 1874, Southampton: Alfred Randle, 1875, page 126, via Google Books, accessed March 17, 2020, <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Venus_at_the_Isle_of_Desolation/Hf3-ctyhN90C?hl=en&gbpv=0>.
[10] Craig, Tim, 'Letter: Stitch that would waken the dead,' The Independent, January 15, 1996, accessed March 17, 2020, <https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/letter-stitch-that-would-waken-the-dead-1324156.html>.

Sailors' Funerals

Death was ever present in the minds of people of the eighteenth century, and the dangers of the sea made it especially so among seamen. Much has been written on eighteenth-century funerary practices afloat and ashore. Burial at sea has featured prominently in mass media.

Outlander, Season 3 (2017)

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

Hornblower: The Examination for Lieutenant (1998)

It is easy to see why this tradition is well remembered. In the words of Commander Royal W. Connell and Vice Admiral William P. Mack (both United States Navy, retired) in their book Naval Ceremonies, Customs, and Traditions: 'Arguably the most powerful ceremony of the sea is that which consigns mortal remains to the deep.'[1] There have been changes to the ceremony over the centuries, but it is remarkable how little has changed. Hessian soldier private Johann Conrad Döhla witnessed the ceremony on his voyage to America in 1777:

As soon as someone on the ship dies, whether he is a soldier, sailor, or anyone else, he is fastened onto a piece of wood or a board and then a sack filled with sand or a stone, or a piece of iron, or a cannonball, is fastened on the piece of wood or board so that the dead body, which later will become food for the fish, is immediately pulled under the water.[2]

As Commander Connell and Vice Admiral Mack point out 'it is seldom necessary nowadays to bury at sea,' but 'if the deceased is buried at sea, the body is sewn in a canvas shroud or placed in a coffin that has been weighted to ensure sinking.'[3]

The ceremony was often brief. In his The Slave Ship: A Human History, Marcus Rediker states this was because 'seamen were "plain dealers" who did not care for elaborate rituals.'[4] Given the eighteenth century sailors apathy toward traditional religion, this seems likely. This brevity is reflected in the Diary of John Harrower, an indentured servant sent to America in 1773:

Sunday, 27th. Wind at N. V. at 4 AM Tack'd ship. At same time the man who was bade with the flux was found dead in his hammock, at 8 he was sewed up in it and at 9 AM he was burried in the sea after reading the service of the Dead over him, which was done by the Mate.[5]

Hammocks were a common entombment for the dead. Richard Glover makes this explicit in his 1740 ballad Admiral Hosier's Ghost:

All in dreary hammocks shrouded, Which for winding-sheets they wore,
And with looks by sorrow clouded Frowning on that hostile shore.[6]

On a voyage to Angola, scurvy tore through the ship on which Carl Peter Thunberg was sailing. He remembered later:

Five men had been reported dead, all of them had been sewed up in their hammocks, and two had already been thrown overboard, when the third, the instant he was put on the plank, called out, 'Master Boatswain, I am alive still!' to which the Boatswain with unreasonable jocularity replied,-'You alive, indeed! what, do you pretend to know better than the surgeon?'[7]

On the slave trade, some sailors got no funeral at all. Both Rediker and Peter Earle, in his book Sailors: English Merchant Seamen, 1650-1775, quote a sailor from a 1744 slaving voyage aboard the Florida:

We conceal the death of the sailours from the negroes by throwing them overboard in the night, lest it might give them a temptation to rise upon us.[8]

The opposite was true on Olaudah Equiano's Middle Passage. As a young man, he witnessed the crew beat a sailor to death before 'they tossed him over the side as they would have done a brute.' This was a different kind of deterent, because it 'made me fear these people the more; and I expected nothing less than to be treated in the same manner.'[9] Robert Barker, a shipwright on a slaver, uses the term 'thrown overboard' to describe the method by which the bodies of slave ship sailors were disposed of. He implies a distasteful treatment of the dead on the slave trade.[10]

While common, the unceremonious dumping of slave ship sailors' bodies was not universal. In 1789 James Field Stanfield related through the heartfelt, if tortured, poetry of The Guinea Voyage the scene when his close shipmate Russel was committed to the deep:

Like the wild screaming of the midnight blast,
'Midst the torn cordage of the shatter'd mast,
With notes that pierce th' unwholsome welkin through,
The shrill-blown pipe convenes the remnant crew.
The remnant crew their o'ercharg'd bosoms smite,
And rise to join the melancholy rite.
With painful steps the burning deck they crowd,
Or pensive hang upon the slacken'd shroud;
Speechless they mark the foul presageful wave,
That, Ruffel parting, opes thy fluid grave!
The jutting hatch, a sable bier, is laid,
The pitchy pall throws a funereal shade,
His honour'd corse in awful form dispos'd,
Decent his clay-cold limbs his eyelids clos'd;
The ringlet dear, which once Maria grac'd,
Upon his breast by holy friendship plac'd;
The sinking iron slung with duteous pains,
In shrouded canvass wrapt his cold remains,
A rev'rent silence the sad prospect: draws;
The sacred liturgy, with solemn pause
Swells the sad sound, at whose inverted doom,
Plung'd in the abyss, he finds the liquid tomb![11]

More ceremony could be expected in the Royal Navy and aboard merchantmen. Aboard British warships, only the Anglican Book of Common Prayer was used in burials at sea. Below is an excerpt from the 1762 edition of that religious text, giving the precise language to be used when committing a body to the deep.

We therefore commit his Body to the Deep, to be turned into Corruption, looking for the resurrection of the Body (when the Sea shall give up her dead,) and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who at his coming shall change our vile Body, that it may be like his glorious Body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.[12]

As many ships were without clergy, this was read by the captain or officers, or, as related by Stephen R. Berry in A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life & Atlantic Crossing to the New World, even by passengers:

The German schoolteacher Gottlieb Mittelberger assumed all the duties of a minster. 'I held daily prayer meetings with them on deck, and, since we had no ordained clergyman on board, was forced to administer baptism to the children. I also held services, including a sermon, every Sunday, and when the dead were buried at sea, commended them and our souls to the mercy of God.'[13]

At first, burial at sea might have been distinctly British. Connell and Mack state 'In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries French men-of-war sometimes carried the remains of those who died at sea in the holds until the ships reached port. Old reports indicate that this was a very disagreeable practice and one that served solely the purpose of burying the deceased in consecrated soil.'[14] 'French and Spanish Roman Catholic mariners,' writes Berry,' usually transported the deceased in the hold of the ship so that they could be interred in consecrated ground.' He suggests that part of the reason for burial at sea may have been sailors fear of their shipmates 'body haunting the ship.'[15] On the other side of the coin, Earle states that 'most sailors had a superstitious aversion' to burial at sea for themselves.[16] I'm inclined to disagree with both of these historians, as neither provides strong evidence for sailors' feelings toward burial at sea, and sailors' superstitions are often overplayed. But then, neither claims superstition as the sole reason for this aversion to burial at sea.

A more significant reason that Berry points to for sailors wish to be buried ashore is the prevalence of sharks. Rediker agrees that 'the shark was the dread of sailors.'[17] John Atkins, who sailed aboard a slaver in the 1730's, was aghast at the sharks that swarmed around burials from slavers:

Their Voracity refuses nothing; Canvas, Ropeyarns, Bones, Blanketing, &c. I have seen them frequently seize a corpse as soon as it was committed to the sea; tearing and devouring that, and the Hammock that shrouded it, without suffering it once to sink, tho' a great Weight of Ballast in it.[18]

Alexander Falconbridge, a former slave ship surgeon sailing on the coast of Nigeria, witnessed what the sharks did to the bodies of the enslaved, and noted that sailors were not buried at sea on this part of the African coast:

The river Bonny abounds with sharks of a very large size, which are often seen in almost incredible numbers about the slave ships, devouring with great dispatch the dead bodies of the negroes as they are thrown overboard. The bodies of the sailors who die there, are buried on a sandy point, called Bonny Point, which lies about a quarter of a mile from the town.[19]

Perhaps this was the captain splitting the difference between frightening the enslaved with the callous disposal of the dead as mentioned by Equiano, and preventing the enslaved from knowing how their enslavers were being weakend as the sailor of the Florida attested to.

Private Döhla, the same Hessian who said bodies would 'later become food for the fish,' witnessed other sea life consume the dead:

It happens before one's eyes that, as soon as the dead body is thrown into the water, the fish or other creatures gather and tear him apart and consume him, and there are crabs that are so large that they can hold a man in their pincers and pull him under the water. These are called lobsters and are twelve feet long and as large around as a man's body, and one claw weighs over twenty pounds. I myself have seen an English soldier thrown into the water who was grabbed by a crab with his claws and pulled under the water.[20]

James Field Stanfield wrote of the sharks and other creatures of Africa that could rend the bodies of seamen:

If to the sea consign'd— the hallow'd corse
The briny monsters seize with savage force.
If to the fresh'ning flood the lifeless clay;
Rank alligators seize the quiv'ring prey.
Or when, more favour'd, on the burning land
The kindred dust is mix'd with solemn hand,
Fierce from his nightly watch and native wood,
Lur'd by the distant scent of morbid blood,
The tiger rushes by foul carnage led,
Front the fresh tomb tears up the reeking dead
Devours the mangled limbs — churns the chill gore,
The last avenger of th' insulted shore![21]

The uncertainty about where their bodies would wind up is reflected in the standard form of a sailor's will. Below is an example, repeated countless times, from the 1756 will of mariner Jonathan Hill:

I commend my Soul into the hands of Almighty God hoping for Remission of all my Sins thro the Merits of Jesus Christ my blessed Saviour and Redeemer and my Body to the Earth or Sea as it shall please God.[21]

"Will of Jonathan Hill, Mariner now belonging to His Majesty's Ship Trident 
of Gosport," National Archives (UK), 11 March 1756, PROB 11/821/151

Officers buried ashore, as you might guess, received a bit more ceremony with their funerals. James Wyatt, a privateer serving in the War of Austrian Succession, remembered just such a funeral:

When I came to our Ship, I found one of our Midshipmen (whose Name I have forgot) was drowned in Catwater, in endeavouring to swim ashore. He was buried very decently in the new Churchyard, in Plymouth; and those of our Men that made the best Appearance, and which we were sure would not run away, attended at the Funeral. Every one had a Pair of Pistols stuck in his Belt, a Hanger by his Side, and there were Swords cross'd on the Coffin Lid.[22]

Other burials could be hasty and sloppy. Christopher Prince, an American mariner pressed into British service in the opening years of the American Revolutionary War, related a harrowing near death experience when the people of New York believed he had succumbed to the smallpox epidemic that swept the continent:

I was placed under a sand bank, and there was a number of people over me throwing down sand that often covered me. I then struggled until I got my head above the sand and breathed. But they continued shoveling it upon me until I thought it would be impossible to get my head out and fetch my breath. And the last struggle I made, I was sure it would be the last, for my strength was nearly gone.[23]

When the diggers realized that Prince was still alive, they abandoned him on the beach, presumably still half buried.

As Paul Gilje points out in his To Swear Like a Sailor: Maritime Culture in America, 1750-1850, 'the selling of the contents of a sea chest became a final ritual commemorating the death of a sailor aboard ship. After the burial at sea, the men would haul the chest on deck and then auction off each item with the intent of sending the money raise to the dead man's family.'[24] The practice was so common that muster books were printed with a column for deductions from pay that went toward 'Dead Man's Cloaths.'

ADM  36/6179, Nightingale Muster Book, 1754 Oct - 1756 Jun, photo by Alexa Price.

As Gilje states, 'this sale also became an effective way to distribute used goods among the crew. It also connected the sailor at sea to his family on land.'[25] Among sailors themselves, the chest and their late shipmate's possessions could also serve as a sentimental reminder.

Equiano, enslaved aboard the Preston, made friends with a young man named Richard "Dick" Baker. It was an unlikely pairing, but the dangers of the sea bred an unbreakable bond between them:

He was a native of America, had received an excellent education, and was of a most amiable temper. Soon after I went on board he shewed me a great deal of partiality and attention, and in return I grew extremely fond of him. We at length became inseparable; and, for the space of two years, he was of very great use to me, and was my constant companion and instructor. Although this dear youth had many slaves of his own, yet he and I have gone through many sufferings together on shipboard; and we have many nights lain in each other's bosoms when we were in great distress.[26]

In 1759, Equiano received terrible news:

I ran to enquire about my friend; but, with inexpressible sorrow, I learned from the boat's crew that the dear youth was dead! and that they had brought his chest, and all his other things to my master: these he afterwards gave to me, and I regarded them as a memorial of my friend, whom I loved and grieved for as a brother.[27]

Hardened men though they were, sailors mourned one another. Funeral rites could help them cope with their loss.


---
[1] Connell, Cdr. Royal W. and Vice Adm. William P. Mack, Naval Ceremonies, Customs, and Traditions, sixth edition, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2004, page 70.
[2] Döhla, Johann Conrad, A Hessian Diary of the American Revolution, edited by Bruce E. Burgoyne, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press: 1993, page 20.
[3] Connell and Mack, Naval Ceremonies, 71.
[4] Rediker, Marcus, The Slave Ship: A Human History, New York: Viking, 2007, page 38.
[5] "Diary of John Harrower, 1773-1776," The American Historical Review, Volume 6, Number 1, October 1900, page 73, via Internet Archive, accessed August 1, 2018, <https://archive.org/details/jstor-1834690>.
[6] Glover, Richard, "Admiral Hosier's Ghost," via Barlteby.com, accessed August 1, 2018, <https://www.bartleby.com/333/81.html>.
[7] Thunberg, Carl Peter, Travels in Europe, Africa, and Asia, made between the years 1770 and 1779, Third Edition, London: F. and C. Rivington, 1796, page 118, Yale University via the HathiTrust Digital Library, accessed August 1, 2018, <https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008726012>.
[8] Rediker, Slave Ship, page 246; Earle, Peter, Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775, London: Methuen, 2007, page 140.
[9] Equiano, Olaudah, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, edited by Vincent Carretta, New York: Penguin, 2003, page 57.
[10] Barker, Robert, The Unfortunate Shipwright: Or Cruel Captain, London: Robert Barker, n.d., c1760., page 23.
[11] Stanfield, James Field, The Guinea Voyage: A Poem, London: James Phillips, 1789, pages 23-24.
[11] The Book of Common Prayer, 1762, via Google Books, accessed August 2, 2018, <https://books.google.com/books?id=WgsVAAAAQAAJ&dq=book+of+common+prayer&source=gbs_navlinks_s>.
[12] Berry, Stephen R., A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life & Atlantic Crossings to the New World, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015, page 66.
[13] Connell and Mack, Naval Ceremonies, 69. Follower Adam Hodges-LeClaire points out that this may not have been the case by the mid to late eighteenth century. Boudriot, Jean, (trans., Robert, David H.), The Seventy-Four Gun Ship: A Practical Treatise on the Art of Naval Architecture, Volume IV, Manning & Shiphandling, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986, pages 155-157. This work is also without notes and citations, though the author suggests the Naval Ordinance of 1765 includes a detailed approach to burial at sea in the French Navy. I have not yet found the Ordinance and so cannot verify one way or the other.
[14] Berry, Path in the Mighty Waters, page 124.
[15] Earle, Sailors, page 140.
[16] Rediker,Slave Ship, page 38.
[17] Atkins, John, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies, Scarborough: Ward and Chandler, 1737, page 46, via Google Books, accessed August 1, 2018, <https://books.google.com/books?id=xak-AQAAMAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s>.
[18] Falconbridge, Alexander, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa, Second Edition, London: James Phillips, 1788, page 67, via Google Books, accessed August 1, 2018, <https://books.google.com/books?id=_lTrja-FFXEC&dq=account+of+the+slave+trade+on+the+coast+of+africa&source=gbs_navlinks_s>.
[19] Döhla, A Hessian Diary, page 20.
[20] Stanfield, Guinea Voyage, page 23.
[21] "Will of Jonathan Hill, Mariner now belonging to His Majesty's Ship Trident of Gosport," National Archives (UK), 11 March 1756, PROB 11/821/151.
[22] Wyatt, James, The Life and Surprizing Adventures of James Wyatt, London: W. Reave, 1753, page 12.
[23] Prince, Christopher, The Autobiography of a Yankee Mariner: Christopher Prince and the American Revolution, edited by Michael J. Crawford, Washington, D.C.: Brassey's Inc., 2002, pages 95-96.
[24] Gilje, Paul A., To Swear Like a Sailor: Maritime Culture in America, 1750-1850, New York: Cambridge University, 2016, page 266.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Equiano, Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, page 79.
[27] Ibid., page 80.

Mortality

Detail from Admiral Hosier's Ghost, Charles Mosley,
1740, John Carter Brown Library.

Today I'm taking a very quick look at what historians have to say about mortality rates among common sailors.

The actual occurrence of death at sea was not uncommon, but how present it was depended widely on what trade a sailor was engaged in. In examining logbooks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Peter Earle came to the conclusion that 'well under one per cent of sailors died on any voyage in European water or on voyages to the northern American colonies or to the Arctic to hunt whales.' These percentages go up considerably for sailors working the routes to South America and the West Indies, and especially those sailing on East Indiamen.[1]

Denver Brunsman points to the high death rates in the West Indies as one of the motivations for employing press gangs in those waters. It was widely recognized at the time that, in the words of a Parliamentarian, 'the West Indies has been a sink where our seamen have perished.' Brunsman also states (truthfully) that 'the mortality rate on ships in the West Indian naval campaigns could approach 50 percent from disease alone.'[2] Fifty percent mortality from disease in the West Indies is an outlier, but it was a possibility.

Mortality rates aboard men of war were comparable to those in the merchant service, as N.A.M. Rodger demonstrated in his book The Wooden World:

In the 1740s Bristol merchantmen were losing only slightly more than average (5.5 per cent a year against 4.5) on voyages to the West Indies, and it has been calculated that at the same period British men-of-war in those waters were losing about 6 per cent of their authorized complements a year dead from all causes. Allowing for the usual turnover of ship's companies, the mortality as a percentage of the population exposed would have been lower.[3]

By far the most deadly trade for a sailor was the slave trade. As Marcus Rediker related in The Slave Ship: A Human History:

In surveying crew mortality for 350 Bristol and Liverpool slavers between 1784 and 1790, a House of Commons committee found that 21.6 percent of sailors died, a figure that was in keeping with Thomas Clarkson's estimates at the time and is consistent with modern research. Roughly twenty thousands British slave-trade seamen died between 1780 and 1807. For sailors as for African captives, living for several months aboard a slave ship was in itself a struggle for life.[4]

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[1] Earle, Peter, Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775, London: Methuen, 2007, page 130.

[2] Brunsman, Denver, The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-century Atlantic World, University of Virginia, 2013, page 106.
[3] Rodger, N.A.M., The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy, New York: W.W. Norton, 1996, page 99.

[4] Rediker, Marcus, The Slave Ship: A Human History, New York: Viking, 2007, page 244.