The "poor decayed seamen" of Greenwich hospital, 1705-1763

Wilcox, Martin

Abstract

The Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich, commonly known as Greenwich Hospital, is an institution both famous and oddly obscure. The broad outlines of its history are well documented, and the architectural history of its iconic buildings, which now form the centrepiece of the World Heritage Site of Greenwich, has been studied in detail, as has the development of naval hospital provision more generally in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 1 But the functioning of the institution in its early years has received relatively modest scholarly attention, and the lives of its pensioners almost as little. They appear in stereotyped form in countless cartoons, lithographs and prints from the eighteenth century onward, but little is known about who they actually were, what they had done before entering the Hospital or how they fared when they got there. This is somewhat surprising because the Hospital's comprehensive admissions and administrative records allow an unusually detailed insight into the lives and careers of eighteenth-century seafarers. Despite numerous recent attempts to demystify this group, notably by Nicholas Rodger, Marcus Rediker, Peter Earle, David Cordingly, Tim Clayton and, for the end of the eighteenth century, Roy and Lesley Adkins,2 "Jack Tar" remains a rather amorphous collective worker. Moreover, most research has focused upon the working lives of seafarers and very little on the end of their careers and what they did after leaving the sea. This paper, based upon a full database of the 8112 admissions to the Hospital prior to the end of 1763, including 3316 admitted after 1749 for whom full biographical data are available,3 is an attempt to redress the balance a little, add some statistical weight to many hitherto rather impressionistic judgements about the men who manned the "wooden walls," and to shed some light upon their later lives and the functioning of the institution in which some of them ended their days.

Citation

Wilcox, M. (2013). The "poor decayed seamen" of Greenwich hospital, 1705-1763. International Journal of Maritime History, 25(1), 65-90. https://doi.org/10.1177/084387141302500104

• Journal Article Type: Review
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2013
• Deposit Date: Jun 8, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 5, 2025
• Journal: International Journal of Maritime History
• Print ISSN: 0843-8714
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 25
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 65-90
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/084387141302500104
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/3634855