EARNINGS AND THE LAY 239 



ever, there seems to be small doubt that merchant seamen re- 

 ceived appreciably higher earnings than whalemen. The wages 

 paid by merchantmen at the port of Boston during the forties, 

 as reported in the Boston Shipping Listy ranged from $9 to 

 $16 per month, depending upon the destination and the prob- 

 able length of voyage. At the same time whaling hands, 

 sailing from New Bedford, were making voyages which yielded 

 them only $3 to $8 per month. And again Mr. Enderby 

 provided corroborative evidence by calculating that the aver- 

 age earnings of sperm whalemen were not more than $7.05 

 per month, whereas merchant seamen were receiving from 

 $10.95 to $17.03 per month. ^^ 



Unskilled shore labor, too, exhibited a clear-cut advantage 

 over whaling. The landlubber who remained at home in order 

 to fetch and carry earned much more than his adventurous 

 cousin who found neither fame nor fortune in a whaling fore- 

 castle. Three different sets of figures, one applying to Mass- 

 achusetts and the remaining two to the United States, provide 

 an adequate background for this comparison. ^^ 



^2 Enderby, Charles, op. cit. As is indicated by these figures, there was little 

 direct competition between whaling and the merchant service in the hiring of 

 foremast hands. The seamen on the faster and more graceful merchantmen 

 professed great contempt for "spouters" and "blubber-hunters"; and a real 

 whaleman never thought of shifting his allegiance. Many men, too, went to 

 sea for reasons other than the amount of wages. The device of the lay, with 

 its tantalizing possibility of a lucky voyage, served to obscure the average 

 earnings and to prevent a clear-cut comparison between wages at Boston and 

 New Bedford. For the most part each industry possessed and recruited its 

 own labor supply. Only in busy seasons, when there was some competition for 

 those hands who were willing to ship in either service, was the size of whaling 

 lays affected by merchantman wages. 



1^ These figures were secured from the "Historical Review of Wages and 

 Prices," published in August, 1885, as Part IV of the Sixteenth Annual Report 

 of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor; from the Report on Whole- 

 sale Prices, Wages, and Transportation, Senate Report No. 1394, Second Ses- 

 sion, Fifty-Second Congress (commonly known as the Aldrich Report) ; and 

 from certain data regarding the wages of common laborers, 1829-1880, printed 

 as part of the Tenth U. S. Census. The mass of invaluable but unwieldy 

 material contained in the Aldrich Report and in the Tenth Census has been re- 

 arranged by Dr. Edith Abbott in a study published in the Journal of Political 

 Economy, Vol. XIII, No. 3. The wage data include these occupations: laborers, 

 yard hands, watchmen, teamsters, quarrymen, coal-heavers, helpers, and un- 

 skilled factory operatives. Unfortunately figures showing average wages with 

 board and room were not included for unskilled laborers. From evidence con- 

 tained in the wage tables for certain other occupations, however, it would seem 

 that for any given grade of labor the wages with board were from 33% to 

 50% less than those without board. 



