Paul A. Gilje's To Swear Like A Sailor

In Paul A. Gilje’s book, To Swear Like a Sailor, Gilje explains how maritime culture shaped our country, but more importantly how life at sea was just as much affected by life on dry land as life and literature on land affected sailors. This is especially since “the majority of Americans lived close to saltwater.” He uses examples from writers like Mark Twain, Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, and even Edgar Allan Poe as sources. But stories such as Moby Dick, The Narrative of Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Red Rover and “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge) were not the only sources of information Gilje reminds us of. Sailors themselves would “spin yarns,” keep logbooks and journals, and sometimes sell their works and

According to Gilje also, sailors read a great deal. For many, “to learn how to read was to study the Bible.” Many sailors were devout Christians with devout roots; others felt the Bible related to them and the similar hardships they endured; others “might pick up a Bible simply out of boredom.” Although mariners were “curious about the world around them” and were viewed “a symbol for [our] republic” views on sailors would tear a rift in our country: Federalists viewed them as selfish and in “pursuit of their own interests” while Republicans viewed them as “valuable citizens [with] rights that needed to be protected. However, after the War of 1812 (with the Atlantic as no man’s land) “American sailors became more stylized and Romanticized.”

Stories about sea life and lands far away were “important art form[s] for seamen who took great pride in their ability to weave together an elaborate tale” and mariners would tell them to whomever would listen. Without these personal accounts, the U.S. would be in the dark about affairs going on around the world and our ever-changing world would leave mariners lost in