The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. (Review article: history from below decks).
The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. Boston, Massachusetts, Beacon Press, 2000. 433 pp. $30.00 U.S. (cloth), $18.00 U.S. (paper).Here is history told from below decks, back alleys, prisons. We find that by the seventeenth century, New World sailors, slaves, indentured workers, market women, in slops and fustian (no lace finery here) had ideas of independence, of racial and social equality many years before such truths became self-evident to the framers of America's Declaration of Independence during a hot Philadelphia summer in 1776. Linebaugh and Rediker began their collaboration for this book in 1981, gathering evidence, giving papers, travelling to libraries, and after nearly twenty years, have produced a book that makes the historian marvel at its detail, design, and dogged persistence towards its point. Its reading is Marxist/sociological, largely the underdog's view, and as such it ignores the corridors of colonial power inhabited by Jefferson, Adams, Lee, Franklin, and others. Yet myopia can bring in its shortsightedness details which have escaped others with farsightedness. This iconoclastic vision, once it is folded into the established history, should provide a deeper and richer reading of the American Revolution.
Why hydra? The early captains of English industry from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries went back to the Classical Greek myth of Heracles' killing the many-headed Lernaean Hydra to explain the threat of the revolutionary proletariat to the established order. Heracles in his second of twelve labours must kill the swamp monster Hydra, with its body like a dog, and a venomous breath, and many heads that would grow back as soon as one was chopped off. The Greek myth fits. As the English rulers saw it, that other Eden -- America -- was difficult enough to colonize, and was no sooner planted but threatened by lawlessness and disorder from within. The authors tell us that the myth "expressed the fear and justified the violence of the ruling classes, helping them build a new order of conquest and expropriation, of gallows and executioners, of plantations, ships, and factories," but that for the historian, "the hydra became a means of exploring multiplicity, movement, and connection, the long waves and planetary currents of humanity" (p. 6). In this book "from below," the authors
... have attempted to recover some of the lost history of the multiethnic class that was essential to the rise of capitalism and the modern, global economy. The historic invisibility of many of the book's subjects owes much to the repression originally visited upon them: the violence of the stake, the chopping block, the gallows, and the shackles of a ship's dark hold. It also owes much to the violence of abstraction in the writing of history, the severity of history that has long been the captive of the nation-state, which remains in most studies the largely unquestioned framework of analysis. (pp. 6-7)
Here then, a Tendenzbuch, as fiery in its convictions as the brimstone of Cotton Mather was from his New England pulpit.
The book is indeed persuasive in places. Its concrete details and its lively style carry the day, and the authors' recoveries must now be set beside accepted views, though they raise further questions. How do the workers' grievances articulate with those of the landed colonists? Is it true that the revolutionary spirit rose first with workers? Why as the venue is the "Revolutionary Atlantic" is the story limited largely to the United States? What of Canada, what of the Caribbean, what of Anglo-South America? If indeed these movements were global, then why not flank the argument with examples not made in U.S.A.? If the book is jingoistic in its Marxist slant, it is gringoistic in its borders.
Linebaugh and Rediker organise things chronologically, beginning with the wreck of the Sea-Venture in 1609 off Bermuda, a shipweck that brought on a "disunion of hearts and hands," as William Strachey, shareholder in and secretary of the Virginia Company, noted. Relief from England's own domestic labour and political problems, stemming from enclosing common land, by establishing overseas an early English Atlantic capitalism reveals a pattern: 'expropriation, the struggle for alternative ways of life, patterns of cooperation and resistance, and the imposition of class discipline" (p. 15). But what of the English settlements in the Amazon River, the Orinoco, various islands of the Caribbean, and the Maritime Provinces of Canada, especially Newfoundland? As early as 1542 St. John's was a confederation of fishermen made up of Picards, Flemings, Normans, and Frenchmen soon joined by the English, with their own form of rough rule far from the Crown [for example, see S. E. Morison, The European Discovery of America, The Northern Voyages, A.D. 500-1600 (New York, 1971)]. Cod's rule is surely worthy a mention by the authors. What happened in the Virginia Company was not always the case. One of the many good touches in this book is its linguistic bent, as in the explanation of tilth and bourn, farming terms carried as baggage to the American utopia. Elsewhere too, the book offers lexical insights, even some poetic insights.
But as the thrust across the seas was driven substantially by industry and commerce, this book could benefit particularly from the work of D. B. Quinn and A. N. Ryan in England's Sea Empire (London, 1983) or the work of Stewart Schwartz and John Russell-Wood on comparable Portuguese ventures in Brazil. The authors refer to Michael Duffy's Soldiers, Sugar, and Seapower: The British Expeditions to the West Indies and the War against Revolutionary France (London, 1987), but could go further and consider the work of Kenneth Andrews, such as his Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630 (Cambridge, 1984). And what of Louis Wright's numerous books on middle-class economic motives in North American colonization?
A couple of phrases recur throughout the book that bear mention. The first signals the book's Marxist bent, in viewing an earlier period's economics and politics through its latter nineteenth- and early twentieth-century perspective, a practice common to Communist ideology. "Motley crew," is seen here as the "Lumpenproletariat," and surprisingly the authors include skilled navigators in that category, when most early contemporary accounts rank them higher, as valuable as the ship's master. Hardly crew, certainly not motley. A second phrase looks backward to another bit of palimpsestic anachronism. One reading of history is to see European expansion first into Moorish Africa and then into the Americas as a Christian destiny, a reconquista against infidels and conquista of savages, ad maiorem gloriam Del, specifically a Catholic God. It is a view ably put forward by historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto as he explains Columbus' religious reasons for conquest. Similarly, a Protestant God, as Louis Wright informs us in Gold, Glory and the Gospel (New York, 1970) equally motivated those sailing under the cross of St. George to more northern latitudes. The gospel according to Linebaugh and Rediker is taken from a Biblical source. These Lumpenproletariat as "hewers of wood and drawers of water" is William Tyndale's Tudor translation of the Hebrew passages that refer to the Israelites' deliverance from Egypt and the Gibeonites' enslavement. The figure of speech, used again and again as the book's leitmotif, sums up what the authors see as a similar curse, punishment, and fate for the workers of America, who themselves are hydra ironically forced to drain their fens, build the ports, fight the battles, as they "built the infrastructure of merchant capitalism" (p. 49) that exploited and enslaved them.
One chapter deals with the fate of "a blackymore Maide named Francis," a short bit of data spun into a full chapter that goes into the etymology of the word "proletariat," Bristolian Baptists and Quakers, and John Bunyan. Another chapter deals with the Putney Debates of 1647, the rebellion in Naples that same year, Ireland in 1649-51, Barbados in 1649, the River Gambia in 1652, London 1659-60, Virginia 1663-76, years when "the worry of the ruling class had been overpopulation, hence the plantations, migrations, colonizations, and scarcely veiled suggestions of genocide', so that by the century's end "the rulers were fretting about the opposite" (pp. 140-41).
More focussed is the chapter, "Hydrachy: Sailors, Pirates, and the Maritime State." The authors see the ship as both the "engine of capitalism" and the "setting of resistance" (p. 144). In the 1690s the Royal Navy, we are told, "had become England's greatest employer of labor, its greatest consumer of material, and its greatest industrial enterprise" (p. 148). Indeed it was. Pirate ships were an exception, "democratic in an undemocratic age" (p. 162), whose contributions to the GNP generally went unrecorded. The authors find that "sailors were prime movers in the cycle of rebellion, especially in North America" (p. 214). In 1745, Admiral Peter Warren warned that the New England sailors had "the highest notions of the rights and liberties of Englishmen, and indeed are almost Levellers" (quoted p. 215). The Stamp Act riots of 1765 roused the Hydra further against Britain, headed, as General Thomas Gage noted, by "great numbers of Sailors headed by Captains of Privateers" (quoted p. 232). More than occasionally, the authors ring the changes on the bells of liberty, "tolling bells revived distant, deeper memories from the English Revolution" (p. 236). Such thick sauce flavours the book.
Perhaps the best chapter of the book is that on Edward and Catherine Despard, he, an Irisman and a colonel in the British Army, hanged in 1803 for treason, and she, his Central American black wife. The drama stirs our interest. Their story tells the shift from Colonel Despard's being a loyal soldier working in Jamaica, Nicaragua, and to Belize, where he came to stand up for the workers in the face of the owners. Creolised, he became a revolutionary, returned to England, only to be arrested at Oakley Arms tavern at a meeting of workingmen in 1802 for his efforts to overthrow the monarchy and bring in a republic. He was hanged as a traitor in the winter of 1803.
The rest of the book is given to the Atlantic Jubilee, and Jamaican Robert Wedderburn's futile hope that such an occasion held every fifty years, would right the social wrongs, especially slavery. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge espoused the cause, as did various preachers in America. The book contains a puzzling bit of geography: "Other ministers left North America with the British army and carried their revolutionary heritage to Nova Scotia, British Honduras, London, and Sierra Leon" (p. 298). Nova Scotia is indeed a part of North America. The British in the eighteenth century, moreover, expelled the French Acadians from Nova Scotia, and seeded the area with Loyalists shipped down east from Massachusetts. The authors otherwise (p. 405) allude to Jamaican Maroons being sent to Nova Scotia in the early 1800s, but do not amplify on this intriguing point, nor do the authors consider the considerable number of American Black slaves who escaped to southwestern Nova Scotia in the nineteenth century. If indeed the matter of the book is the "Revolutionary Atlantic," why is there nothing on Canadian history, notably the migration of workers from ships to railroads to factories as the country grew?
The authors conclude by summing up things in this history of the proletariat: "The commons, the plantation, the ship, and the factory" are the successive and characteristic "sites of struggle" (p. 327). The years 1600-40, we are told, saw the beginnings of capitalism, with workers as hewers of wood and drawers of water; 1640-80 as a time when the antinomian hydra revolted first in England, then in the colonies; 1680-1760 the time of consolidation of Atlantic capitalism based on maritime commerce; 1760-1835, the time when the motley crew revolted, produced the American Revolution, "and ended in reaction as the Founding Fathers used race, nation, and citizenship to discipline, divide, and exclude the very sailors and slaves who had initiated and propelled the revolutionary movement" (p. 328). As Francis Bacon would advise us in reading books, so with this lively and contentious one: some pans are worth the winnowing and careful reading, other pans more tendentious, to be skimmed. The book's ballast is generally sound stuff, though some of the studies on colonial history need to be updated to reflect recent scholarship, as in the cases of Captain John Smith's writings, those of Richard Hakluyt, and studies on pirates.
James Seay Dean University of Wisconsin -- Parkside
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