In 1849 Herman Melville published Redburn, one of his most popular novels. It offered a revealing glimpse into why many antebellum youths went to sea and how it transformed them. Redburn told the story of a provincial, naïve boy who shipped on board a packet bound for Liverpool. As his first name suggested, Wellingborough Redburn was well born, “a gentleman's son.” Yet the death of his father caused his genteel family to slip into poverty. Like so many actual youths in antebellum America, Redburn shipped out to sea to escape a difficult life on land. The world, he said, was “bitter cold as December, and bleak as its blasts …” Although only a boy Redburn described himself as already “a misanthrope … with the warm soul of me flogged out by adversity.”

Redburn was running away from much more than hard times and despair when he became a sailor. His description of the parting scene with his mother and three sisters suggested the eagerness with which he fled a feminized domesticity: “So I broke loose from their arms, and not daring to look behind, ran away as fast as I could …” Redburn's older brother, so ill that he could barely walk with him to the dock, was a cautionary example of what happened to males who did not leave home and strike out on their own.