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"A Medium in Which I Seek Relief": Manuscripts of American Sailors 1919-1940

Sailors' Snug Harbor

“Wearily, we seek a haven”: A Brief History of Sailors’ Snug Harbor

By Dr. John Rocco, Professor of Humanities and MNST Coordinator, SUNY Maritime College

When Sailors’ Snug Harbor opened its doors in 1833 it became America’s first home for retired seaman. It also became one of this country’s oldest secular philanthropic institutions. Dedicated to the welfare of “aged, decrepit, and worn out” mariners, Sailors’ Snug Harbor was established in 1801 from the will of Robert Richard Randall. The fortune for such an endeavor had been left to Randall by his father Thomas Randall, a Revolutionary War patriot who greeted George Washington on his entrance into New York City in 1783. Thomas Randall accumulated his vast wealth as a privateer during the French and Indian War and helped create the Marine Society of the City of New York in 1770. Thomas Randall became an influential “merchant captain” and entrepreneur and helped found the city’s Chamber of Commerce. He also bought farmland in lower Manhattan that would eventually become the economic backbone of Sailors’ Snug Harbor.

Robert Richard Randall’s will was rumored to have been written by Alexander Hamilton, a friend of the family; legend has it that Hamilton advised Randall that his family fortune had come from the sea and thus it should return to the sea in the formation of the Sailors’ Snug Harbor. Randall’s will named prominent New York City officeholders as its executors including the Mayor, the President of the Marine Society, and the Rector of Trinity Church. The original plan was to have the Snug Harbor built in Manhattan on the Randall farm but the executors bought 140 acres of land in New Brighton on Staten Island overlooking the Kill Van Kull and used monies from leasing the Manhattan real estate to create one of the wealthiest charitable institutions in the world. The Manhattan property today is what we would call Greenwich Village including Washington Square Park.

Legal battles kept Sailors’ Snug Harbor from opening for over 30 years but when it did the Trustees were quick to create a unique site that integrated beautifully designed buildings and grounds with culture, entertainment, and onsite health care. The Trustees hired renowned architect Minard Lafever to design the main houses on the property and he produced a group of Greek Revival buildings that have been called the most important on the East Coast. The institution eventually evolved into its own mini-township and included a working farm with livestock; a church; a hospital; a power plant; and a graveyard. There is no firm number but estimates conclude that over ten thousand retired mariners spent their final years there and were buried at Sailors’ Snug Harbor.

Residents of the institution were called “inmates” and by the end of the nineteenth-century they came from every facet of the merchant marine world and included veterans of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the War of 1812, and the Spanish American War. Requirements for admission to Sailors’ Snug Harbor were firm: ten years or more as a crew member of ocean-going ships and at least five years of them under the flag of the United States. The head administrator was called “Governor” and the position was an important one in New York City. Sailors’ Snug Harbor’s third Governor was Thomas Melville, youngest brother of the author of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville. Thomas Melville has been called one of the most important leaders of Snug Harbor for modernizing the recordkeeping and expanding the population. Herman Melville and the Melville family spent many holidays at Sailors’ Snug Harbor during Thomas Melville’s tenure as Governor from 1867-1884.

Sailors’ Snug Harbor remained one of the most important charitable institutions in the United States until the years after WW II when the residential population began to decline. In 1965 the Snug Harbor site on Staten Island was declared a National Historic Landmark. The home for retired sailors moved to Sea Level, North Carolina in 1976. The work of the Sailors’ Snug Harbor Board of Trustees continues to this day helping retired mariners in need and keeping faith with the original Latin motto of Snug Harbor: Portum Petimus Fesse (“Wearily, we seek a haven.”).

Reprinted from https://snugharborarchivesblog.wordpress.com/about/

This page is referenced by:

Herman Melville and Sailors' Snug Harbor 35 image_header 2021-08-26T16:19:24-07:00
In a tantalizing twist, Herman Melville was intimately connected to Sailors' Snug Harbor and its library through his brother, Thomas Melville, who ran the institution from 1867-1884. According to John Rocco ("Wearily, we seek a haven"), Herman Melville spent many holidays at Sailors’ Snug Harbor during his brother's tenure as Governor.

At least one item in the Sailors' Snug Harbor Archives derives directly from Herman Melville: an 1813 edition of John Turnbull's A voyage round the world, in the years 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803, and 1804 . The volume is inscribed with Melville's signature, captioned "April 10th 1847 New York." As evidenced by the label on the cover, it is one of the twenty or so surviving books from the library at Sailors' Snug Harbor. Over the years it must have been borrowed by dozens of old salts who used the library in their waning years.

In A voyage round the world, John Turnbull recounts his four-year journey traveling to and trading on the island of Tahiti. As Digital Archivist Heidi Rempel notes, "It is a good example of the popular British 'Voyage' narrative that interested and influenced Regency and Victorian readers, who were eager to learn about places on the globe that were being explored by Europeans for the first time." To the eye of the twenty-first century reader, the text exemplifies colonialist and racist ideologies.

When Melville acquired A voyage round the world in 1847, he was an up-and-coming writer in New York City. His first two books, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), based on his own adventures in the South Seas, had just been published. These novels were well reviewed by the literati and popular among the reading public. While adhering in some ways to travelogue and adventure fiction tropes, Melville also embedded critiques of western culture and Christian missionaries within the narratives (Rocco, "Herman Melville").

Twenty years later, when Thomas Melville became head of Sailors' Snug Harbor, Herman Melville's life had shifted dramatically. His more experimental works - including his monumental masterpiece, Moby-Dick - were not well received in his lifetime. In 1866 he took a monotonous day job as a customs inspector, where he worked six days a week until 1885. Perhaps Melville's trips to the opulent Snug Harbor grounds during this period were a diversion from his everyday routine, or an opportunity to reconnect with maritime culture.
Notes
- Learn more about Thomas Melville and other governors of Sailors' Snug Harbor in this digital timeline.
- The front matter and first chapter of John Turnbull’s A Voyage Round the World, in the Years 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803, and 1804 can be viewed on Maritime Digital Collections.
- Header image: Sailors' Snug Harbor Reading Room; Source: Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York
Richard Henry Dana: The Godfather Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea, published in 1840, was the first account of sea life written from the perspective of the common sailor. Dana broke through the illusion of romance surrounding the sea by describing the everyday hardships and challenges experienced by sailors. As Dana tells it, this included almost continuous manual labor, denial of holidays and time off, and occasional physical cruelty. Moreover, sailors had no redress for ill treatment or exploitation while at sea. These conditions were not visible in accounts written from the perspective of captains and officers. While bringing these harsh conditions into the light, Dana also conveyed the comradeship and natural beauty that help make the seagoing life endurable.

According to John Butler in Sailing on Friday (41), the conditions that Dana experienced were created by the intense demand for fast transport, as Eastern companies depended upon the cattle hides provided by west coast ranchers to make leather products. Likewise, the Californians relied on the goods carried by the eastern ships for survival. This geographic and economic landscape generated “a new breed of sea captain - fearless, hard-driving, and fierce in the use of power.” Frank Thompson, the captain of the Pilgrim, the ship on which Dana sailed, was a perfect specimen of this “new breed”; as Butler says, he “was moody and sadistic, a tyrannical commander, and an inept seamen” (42). In 1835, while the Pilgrim was in California, a new law passed Congress providing some protections for mariners, but the law was weak and difficult to enforce (43).

During Dana’s two years at sea he kept a journal, which eventually became the basis for Two Years Before the Mast, and read as many books as he could get his hands on. Because Dana was Harvard educated, it’s tempting to consider his literary interests exceptional; in fact, as Hester Blum points out in The View from the Masthead, sailors in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were highly literate. Reading was a popular pastime on ships, and books were frequently exchanged (20-21). Sailors were not only avid consumers of literature, they were producers as well. The popularity of Dana’s book ushered in a wave of similar publications, including Nicholas Isaac’s Twenty Years Before the Mast (1845), William Nevins’s Forty Years at Sea (1845), and others (10). As we can see in Cecil Northrop's unpublished 1919 manuscript "Two Months Before the Mast", Dana still loomed large for sailor-authors some eighty years later.

These sailor-authors “stressed that the principal merit a narrative could offer was truth,” leading to a distinct “aesthetic of mechanical precision” (Blum 40-41). While poetic or metaphysical subject matter might be explored in the text, the narratives were always grounded in the specifics of labor, including nautical terminologies and practices. The authenticity of these accounts was part of the appeal for non-specialists, who were invited to glimpse a way of life that was quite alien to them. The narratives also allowed sailors, who lived at the margins of society, to define their own identities, explicating their dignity, skill, and worth as people and workers to the world.

While Dana and his brethren aimed to influence the broader American public about the lives of sailors, they also influenced the trajectory of American sea fiction as a whole. According to Bert Bender in Sea Brothers, “Despite the enormous changes in American life between the time of Melville’s first sea books and London’s Mutiny of Elsinore… there is an obvious continuity in their work that derives from their shared sympathy with the common seamen” (9). Even the romantic father of sea fiction James Fenimore Cooper responded to these developments in his later years with the publication of Ned Myers: A Life Before the Mast. Myers was Cooper's friend from the Sterling; Cooper collaborated with Myers to write his story. (As an aside, Myers retired to the Sailors' Snug Harbor retirement home in Staten Island; SUNY Maritime is the repository for the Sailors' Snug Harbor records, a selection of which have been digitized).

Dana had a measure of class privilege unavailable to most sailors, and as Bender noted, he never planned to remain at sea. However, he continued to champion the rights of mariners, becoming a lawyer and a social justice activist. He defended runaway slaves and seamen abused by captains and joined the Free Soil movement, advocating for the abolition of slavery on the western frontier (Butts). In 1841 he published The Seaman's Friend, a manual that explains nautical terms and traditions. He also travelled to Cuba in 1859 and published an account of his trip, To Cuba and Back (Davis). Despite his other accomplishments, Dana will always be remembered first and foremost as the author of Two Years Before the Mast, a classic of American sea fiction. As we can see from the diaries and writings published on this site, he was still influencing sailor-authors well into the 20th century.