“Avast, ye mateys! Let me spin ye a yarn.” Did sailors really talk like that? What was the language of Jack Tar in the age of sail? And how peculiar of an argot was it? Did it have a special vocabulary and intonation? Was it comprehensible to others? Or was it a secret mode of communication whose meanings were open only to those who served in the forecastle? The answers to these questions must be tentative, complex, and in many ways unsatisfactory: real Jack Tars, it seems, may have selected when and where they were going to use their maritime vocabulary. Tentative, because unfortunately we will never know how sailors truly spoke. As Leigh Eric Schmidt explains in a somewhat different context, “The voices of the past are especially lost to us. The world of unrecorded sounds is irreclaimable, so the disjunctions that separate our ears from what people heard in the past are doubly profound.” It is left to the historian to “act as a kind of necromancer” to reconstruct those voices and conjure up lost language. Complex, because we need to separate our own modern reactions to that language from the reactions of contemporaries. What is strange and alien to us may not have been as strange and alien to the landsman in the age of sail – an age when the United States was truly a maritime nation. During that period the majority of Americans lived close to saltwater, many young men served some time at sea as sailors, and at least until the 1830s the most efficient mode of transportation was by ship. That world, in other words, knew and understood sailors and their language in a way we with our land-based mindset can only imagine. Moreover, both the British and the Americans praised the sailor for defending the nation in times of war and for carrying commerce in times of peace. Heralded in song and portrayed on stage, the honest Jack Tar became a familiar figure. Given this popularity, the written medium with which we as historians must work to make our magic and reconstruct the language of Jack Tar – novels, magazines, newspapers, journals, logbooks, and letters – sends mixed messages.