The sea has seldom been a barrier to the movement of people or trade. It has served as a means of long-distance communication and a source of food whenever reliable vessels could be constructed and crewed by competent seafarers. When Captain Cook met with the Polynesian priest navigator Tupaia in Tahiti during 1769 he was told of 130 distant Pacific islands which Tupaia knew from his voyaging and ancient oral history. Tupaia drew a chart showing seventy-five of these that would be of interest to Cook. They were distributed 2,500 miles east and west from the position of Tahiti, and he described some of their products and people. Tupaia knew the relationship between sea, ship and crew in traversing such distances with accuracy and safety.

This chapter focuses on these three components with emphasis on the crew in the period from the mid-19thcentury to the present. It considers seafarers on merchant vessels, and then, because of their different functions, the crews of fishing craft. The period includes the great changes in technology and organisational structures that came about in the transition from sail to steam, and the intervention by nation-states and international bodies in the regime of labour at sea.