What a pleasure it is to follow Peter Earle via the archives into a time when, to quote an 18th-century writer, "it was a wonder how any man can be such a lubber as to stay on land". Earle's Sailors complements Nicholas Rodger's The Wooden World in providing the first social history of the merchant marine. It is a masterly overview of life before the mast, both military and civil, in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Both demolish much mythology about life afloat in this period; of hell ships with half-starved sailors cowed by the captain's brutality. Earle draws on a sample of 1,900 officer and sailor witnesses whose depositions - usually in actions to recover money due from parsimonious or cheating owners or skippers - are richly detailed. By working also with inventories of sailors' personal effects and the wills they made to disperse them, he paints a surprisingly full picture of the "rambling Jacks" whose peripatetic life built Britain's commercial fortune.

In the 1740s, Sir John Fielding noted that the whole East End formed practically another country, inhabited by seamen, "whose manner of living, speaking, dressing and behaving are so very peculiar to themselves". A man could sign on with one of the 6,000 British-owned vessels. He could join a crew of 100 on a big East Indiaman, chartered for a two-year cruise to Britain's new oriental trade entrepots , or he could become one of the half-dozen or so hands who sailed on the round trip to the American colonies, or take the riskier, year-long slaving voyage to West Africa.

Surprisingly few seamen died in shipwreck, but in the slavers, trading to "the white man's grave" of the Gulf of Benin, the mortality rate was one in four. Their chances were slightly better (one in 10) in the East Indiamen, which often carried a surgeon. Whaling, apart from the domestic coastal trade, offered the best chance of survival, with only two seamen lost out of 2,500 studied. Pay was always in arrears, and stopped if a ship was lost. Moneys due were only added up back in Britain and slaving thus offered the rare compensation of half the wages paid on delivery, as well as the opportunity to sell slaves, ivory and gold dust on a freelance basis and invest the cash in part of the Virginia tobacco crop.

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The lower-deck entrepreneur on an Indiaman had even more opportunities, bringing back silks, spices and jewellery; the English black market enabled some of them to establish businesses. Such private enterprise was necessary when owners proved duplicitous, making outrageous deductions from a sailor's 25 shillings a week for breakages or spoilage, such as "a new St George's ensign you wore out with sleeping in it..." - or simply refusing to pay up. In that case seamen would "join all in one suit" to sue various employers and engage a single attorney on contingency to act for them. The majority of suits proved successful.

John Crossland is a freelance writer specialising in naval history.

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