Haven an a Heartless Sea: The Sailors ’ Tavern in History and Anthropology

Once a fixture on the waterfronts of seaports the world over, taverns providing merchant sailors with lodgings have nearly disappeared today in the wake of technological changes in maritime shipping. Though glimpses of sailors ’ taverns are scattered in bits and pieces throughout works of maritime history and diverse accounts of seafaring life, our knowledge of them is far from complete. In an attempt to furnish a fuller picture of tavern life, this paper opens with an overview of tavern life as described in popular histories, works of fiction, biographies, autobiographies, missionary tracts, and social historical writings. It concludes with an ethnographic framing of tavern on the basis of data earlier collected by this writer as a participant in and observer of tavern and shipboard life (Seltzer 1971, 1973). Then as now, attending to lives of sailors ashore also requires attending to the special nature of their working lives at sea