Abstract

"“A Sewing Bee on Deck”: Sailors’ Needlework Labor in the Maritime Atlantic World "

Emily Whitted, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (ewhitted@umass.edu)

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sailors utilized a ubiquitous tool in their daily tasks on board their sailing vessels: the sewing needle. Just as important as other maritime skills like unfurling sails and climbing rigging, harpooning whales, or navigating, sewing was an integral, but varied skill among sailors that the maritime business world anticipated their labor forces to possess to complete “ship’s duty.” Nineteenth-century descriptions of this labor often used gendered language, like “sewing bees” to imply that sailors were completing tasks normally done by women in domestic spaces on land. But at sea a sailor’s relationship with his needle took on new meanings. This paper scrutinizes both the economic and expressive impact of sailors’ needlework, examining its gendered depictions and its material legacy on the economic landscape of the maritime Atlantic World.

Utilizing extant material culture in maritime museum collections, as well as written accounts of sailors’ voyages, ship logs, and illustrations of sailors sewing while at sea, “A Sewing Bee on Deck” contributes to a wealth of scholarship discussing sailors and masculinity, as well as maritime labor. Among general seamen, strong sewing skills could help new sailors gain acceptance in the workforce, even crossing racial divides. Their labor included the creation and maintenance of their own clothing, the making and repairing of sails, ropes, and canvases, and the construction of useful items like ship logs and ditty bags. But sailors’ needles also proved tools of expression and economic liberty, as some turned to embroidery, tattooing, and scrimshaw carving for both pleasure and additional pay. By recasting the ship deck as a textile workspace, both economically bound and expressive, this paper traces how maritime businesses expected sailors in their employment to use their needles, and how sailors defied expectations to create employments of their own.