Culture and traditions

Amara Quist: Good evening, and thank you for coming. For the past six years I've been working through the registers of the Seamen's Office at Port Ellery, a harbour town on the east coast. Between about 1840 and 1880, the office recorded every sailor who signed on to a ship there. Each entry gives a name, an age, a height and a place of birth, and then, under the heading 'marks', anything that might help to identify the man: scars, missing fingers and, in roughly one entry in five, a tattoo. Amara Quist: Now, these registers weren't kept for the benefit of historians, and they weren't kept out of curiosity either. The office needed to be able to identify a sailor who deserted his ship and, far more often, one who had drowned. A body washed ashore weeks after a wreck might carry no papers at all, and a mark on the skin was often the only thing that could give it a name. Amara Quist: When I started, I expected to find the designs everyone associates with sailors: anchors, mermaids, ships in full sail. There are anchors, certainly, and a fair few ships. But the most common tattoo in the Port Ellery registers isn't a picture at all. It's a set of initials, usually with a year beside them, pricked into the back of the hand or the inside of the forearm. I'd always assumed initials like these belonged to a sweetheart, and some of them do. When I checked them against the names in the entries, though, far more turned out to be the sailor's own. Amara Quist: Why would a man write his own name on his arm? I think the answer lies in the entries where the clerk copied down a whole word rather than a few letters, because time and again that word is the name of a parish: the parish where the sailor was born. One man from Stanwick parish had the name across his chest in letters an inch high. These were men who had seen shipmates buried in unmarked graves in foreign ports. A name and a parish on your skin meant that if the sea gave you back, somebody might send you home to be buried among your own people. It was less a decoration than an address. Amara Quist: I'm often asked whether a tattoo in this period marked a man out as a rough character. That's certainly how the newspapers of the day wrote about tattooed sailors, and I went into the archive half expecting to confirm it. But the clerks also recorded each man's rank, and tattoos were, if anything, slightly more common among mates and boatswains than among ordinary seamen. These were the men trusted with keeping discipline on board, not the ones who defied it. Amara Quist: Occasionally a clerk noted what a mark had been made with as well, and that tells us something about how they were done. Some had been pricked in with ordinary writing ink, and the clerks often describe those as faded or blurred on older men. Others were made with soot, mixed with the sailor's own spit, and those seem to have lasted far better. So the cheapest material gave the most lasting marks, which may be one reason, I suspect, that so many initials in the later entries are still described as clear. Amara Quist: We tend to think of a tattoo today as a statement of individuality, a way of saying who you are that nobody else can say for you. For the men in these registers, it seems to me, the purpose was almost the reverse. It said where you belonged, so that other people could return you there.