Over the past two decades many historians have examined the social lives of seafarers during the age of sail. Among the many insights they provide, three stand out: first, that the ship was an important site for the development and dissemination of anti-authoritarian ideals; second, that seamen were important carriers of revolutionary political consciousness to distant ports; and third, that the Atlantic basin, ceaselessly criss-crossed by marine commoners, was radicalized by this maritime traffic. In The Many-Headed Hydra, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker argue that:

They suggest further that seafarers embraced rebellious strategies because their experiences ashore and at sea were insufferable. On land, their rights were often restricted, their property expropriated and their labour exploited. At sea, many were press-ganged or shanghaied into service, others were bonded into debt-service agreements and all were subject to the capricious rule of an elitist officer class. But the “motley crews” that serviced capitalist expansion through seafaring found new opportunities to connect with each other as fellow subalterns, both on ships and on docks. “Sailors made the Atlantic a zone for the accumulation of capital, they began to join with others in faithfulness, or solidarity, producing a maritime radical tradition that also made it a zone of freedom. The ship thus became both an engine of capitalism in the wake of the bourgeois revolution in England and a setting of resistance.”