Ishmael's Rights, Part III

As I mentioned in a previous post in this series (linked below), to appreciate the psychology in Moby-Dick we need to keep in mind that the Pequod was not a naval ship.  Her crew were employees, not enlisted men subject to military discipline.  They had a contractual relationship with the ship's owners (including Ahab), and the captain and mates could not normally use violence against the crew with impunity.

A fascinating U.S. case on this subject, from 1806, is Thorne v. White (D. Pa. 23 F. Cas. 1132).  The opinion, by Judge Hopkinson, contains much more in the way of instructive material than I could possibly quote here.  As in many other cases brought by seamen, the issue was wages -- specifically, whether the bad conduct of the seaman bringing the case entitled the owners to withhold his pay for the voyage.  This gave Judge Hopkinson the opportunity to discuss at length how the behavior of sailors and captains must be weighed to determine who was most at fault.

It is the duty of seamen to bear even the ill-temper of the master, and to get out of his way, when instances of passion occur. ... Some of the maritime laws are particular in adjusting how a mariner shall demand [sic] himself when the master is enraged, and when he may stand on his defense.  A master must not pursue (as was done in the case before me) a mariner, who flies from him when enraged. ... When the crime of a sailor is too great for the master's authority to punish (which should be evident on the trial, to justify severe measures) the master and his officers are to seize the criminal, put him in irons, and not take the law into their own hands, but bring him to justice on their return.  But the contract for wages is not affected. ...

I have generally thought myself warranted to give a latitude of construction to the words "moderate correction," where chastisement was salutary and merited, and in this I have never been overnice.  The safety of a ship sometimes depends on promptly checking disobedience, and stimulating exertion.  Subordination is peculiarly essential to be enforced, among a class of men whose manners and habits partake of the attributes of the element, on which they are employed. ... [But] instances have not been rare in this court (and they have not been overlooked) where the most enormously cruel, and unjustifiable acts of tyranny, and wanton abuses of power, have been exhibited by masters of ships. ... The sea laws enjoin on the master a temperate demeanor, and orderly and decent conduct, towards seamen.  By several of these laws, he is finable for abusive expressions[!], or misconduct, towards mariners. ... When a mariner is incorrigibly disobedient, and will not submit, and offer to do duty and make amends, the master may discharge him.  He may correct and confine him on board the ship, or dock him of his provisions. 

There is much more worth reading, but I fear I have already tried the reader's patience.  One footnote, however, needs to be quoted in full, because in it the judge describes an earlier case that bears some similarity to the Town-Ho's story:

In a case wherein confinement on board the ship, of two disobedient seamen, appeared to me proper, and indispensable, and where frequent endeavors to reclaim were ineffectually tried, for almost the whole latter section of the return voyage, I held the confinement in irons, so justifiable and necessary for the safety of the ship, that I refused to allow wages for that part of the voyage.  The two seamen were influential characters, and atrocious leaders of a rebellious crew.  [As] they had not misbehaved on the former part of the voyage, I considered it to be a partial breach of contract, and not a forfeiture in toto.  These seamen complained, I thought without cause, of high-handed and cruel treatment.  I left them to their remedy at common law, by action for false imprisonment, or any other mode of redress.

Ishmael's Rights, Part I


Ishmael's Rights, Part II

Ishmael's Rights, Part II

In my previous post, I talked about the legal recourse that 19th-century whalemen had against mistreatment by their captains.  As it happens, the law did not require seamen (outside the Navy, at least) to suffer every sort of indignity imposed by a superior.  If a seaman felt that he had been punished unjustly, he could sue his captain or the ship once they returned to port.

We have a number of fascinating, reported decisions by U.S. courts from the early 1800s dealing with these issues.  One common theme was whether a seaman's misconduct was sufficiently egregious to justify imprisonment on board or ejection from the ship in port, such that he lost some or all of his wages.  A captain was entitled to eject a seaman if his conduct warranted it, but the captain was supposed to reinstate the seaman if he demonstrated a good-faith willingness to return and behave himself.*

Take the case of Relf v. The Maria, decided in 1805 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Pennsylvania.  (There was only one federal judicial district in Pennsylvania then, as opposed to the three it has now.) The seaman Relf claimed that his captain had (1) wrongfully discharged him from his ship, The Maria, and (2) wrongfully refused "to receive him on board again."  We aren't told exactly what Relf did, but he seems to have been bad news: "Relf showed every sign of a continued, refractory, dangerous and mutinous temper[.]"  He also evidently impeded the administering of discipline by the ship's officers, since the court observes that "[s]eamen ought to know that it does not lay [sic] with them, to interfere between the officers of a ship and any mariner they (the officers or any of them in command) choose to confine, or punish for disorderly conduct."

The court ultimately ruled against Relf, finding that his bad behavior justified his being ejected and not received back (although he still received his wages earned up to that point).  Yet along the way, the court explains that there were limits on what captains could do to their crews.  If conditions passed a certain threshold, a seaman could desert the ship and still be entitled to all his wages: 

When any charge of a criminal nature is alleged, I am, and always have been, ready to examine into it, and pursue the proper measures.  The officers of ships are amenable for improper conduct .... I have been too frequently called on to protect seamen against their oppression.... [A] seaman is justifiable in leaving a ship, if obliged to do so, by continued cruelty and oppression.  I have, under the clear and direct injunctions of the maritime laws, ... often compelled the payment of wages for the voyage, when such circumstances were in proof.  But it does not apply in this case.

*Another interesting background rule, noted in Justice Story's annotations to Abbott on Merchant Ships and Seamen (discussed in my previous post), was that if a seaman absented himself from his ship for more than 48 hours, he forfeited his entire wages "and all his goods and chattels on board the ship[.]"  This law actually serves as a plot point in Melville's Redburn. 

Ishmael's Rights

One of the challenges Melville faced in writing Moby-Dick was making the reader believe that Captain Ahab had the ability to enlist the crew in his "vengeful errand."  Whalemen, as Melville shows us, were a bunch of rowdy roughnecks.  They could be suddenly violent -- as in the fight between Daggoo and the "Spanish sailor" in Chapter XL -- and they could be needlessly cruel -- as when Flask wants to "prick" a giant abscess in the dying whale in Chapter LXXXI. 

Yet Ahab managed to persuade them to join enthusiastically in his profitless hunt for the white whale and to keep at it for months. 

Modern readers, I think, tend to underappreciate Melville's artistry in this regard, because we project onto nineteenth-century whaleships the discipline we're familiar with from stories about the navy.  Books and movies such as The Caine Mutiny and Mutiny on the Bounty (not to mention Melville's own Billy Budd) have accustomed us to the navy's iron rules against resisting officers.  We just assume that the same rules governed merchantmen and whalers.  And thus Ahab's feat of leadership seems not so wonderful to us.

Captains in the merchant service and the fishery, however, were not entitled to the same kind of unquestioning obedience that naval commanders could expect.  A seaman aboard a merchant ship or whaler was not bound to take whatever the captain dished out, on pain of flogging and ultimately death.  On the contrary, seamen could lawfully resist unreasonable acts by their superiors, and they could, and sometimes did, successfully sue violent or crazed captains for damages.

I have beside me a copy of the "third American edition" of Charles Abbott's Treatise on the Law Relative to Merchant Ships and Seamen, published in 1822, "with the copious annotations of Joseph Story, One of the Judges of the Supreme Court of the United States."  Abbott's Chapter Four, "Of the Behaviour of the Master and Mariners," is particularly instructive as regards Moby-Dick.  As Justice Story explains in his copious annotations, for any substantial ship involved in the merchant service, the coasting trade, or the fisheries, U.S. law required that "a contract for service ... be made in writing or in print by the master with the mariners."  We see Ishmael and Queequeg sign such an agreement in Chapters XVI and XVIII.

More importantly for present purposes, Mr. Abbott informs us that "the master [i.e., captain] has authority over all the mariners on board the ship, and it is their duty to obey his commands in all lawful matters relating to the navigation of the ship, and the preservation of good order.... In case of disobedience or disorderly conduct, he may lawfully correct them in a reasonable manner; his authority in this respect being analogous to that of a parent over his child, or of a master over his apprentice or scholar." 

"But," lawyer Abbott goes on to warn his readers, "it behoves the master to be very careful in the exercise of it [his authority], and not to make his parental power a pretext for cruelty and oppression."  In administering discipline, the captain is advised to consult with "the persons next below him in authority, as well to prevent the operation of passion in his own breast, as to secure witnesses to the propriety of his conduct." 

The law as outlined by Mr. Abbott had more than mere moral suasion behind it.  A captain's use of unlawful force could subject him to liability:  "For the master, on his return to this country may be called upon by action at law, to answer to a mariner, who has been beaten or imprisoned by him, or by his order, in the course of a voyage; and for the justification of his conduct, he should be able to shew not only that there was a sufficient cause for chastisement, but also that the chastisement itself was reasonable and moderate, otherwise the mariner may recover damages proportionate to the injury received."

Now, in referring to the master's "return to this country," Mr. Abbott was referring to England, he being a barrister at law and a member of the Inner Temple.  But Justice Story's learned annotations show us that the same law obtained in the United States, and was exemplified by cases decided in the U.S. courts, as I shall show in my next post.