Chapter 8 - The Crewing of British Coastal Colliers, 1870-1914

Summary

There is a large and diverse literature on the employment conditions and shorebased activities of the merchant seaman. One view, now rather out of favour, saw the mariner ashore as dissolute, easily led astray and a breed apart from civilized society. This view has been challenged, and seamen have been seen simply as “working men who got wet” with similar problems and experiences as any other group of wage labourers. Marxist and other writers have debated degrees of exploitation and how changes in technology, organization and capital intensity affected maritime labour. Recentiy there have been discussions about wage rates and the efficiency of labour markets, and Williams has shown the high level of concern, in government and outside, with the quality, skills and supply of merchant seamen in the mid-Victorian period. To review and criticize this body of literature adequately would require a whole essay in its own right, so this article cannot attempt that.

Two points emerge from a perusal of the extant literature. Firstiy, the vast majority of it deals with maritime labour conditions on sailing ships, and very little is devoted to exploring this topic on steamships. Even Sager, who sees the iron steamship as equivalent to an industrial factory bringing deskilling and alienation, devotes only one brief final chapter to employment circumstances in steam. The second point to emerge from the literature is that virtually all of it is about sailors in deep-water trades and almost none of it on coastal employment. Kaukiainen devotes some space to “peasant shipping,” by which he means essentially small sailing ships in the coastal trade. In this segment he believes working conditions were more egalitarian and democratic than in long, deep-water voyages because the crews were small, often related to one another or from the same village. Sager, too, believes small coastal craft were run on pre-industrial lines which minimized social distinctions and ensured close, informal working relationships. He, like Kaukiainen, is talking about small sailing craft in the coastal trade. No study has been made of the coastal steam sector of the market.