His name proclaimed him a man of the people – Jack being a generic term for the common man. (The term Tar was added because of that substance’s common use in aspects of seafaring, from sealing sailors’ jackets to binding rope.) Yet, among them, he was an outsider, almost another species, who excited profound suspicion ashore. At a time when others of his class might never stir beyond their native valley, he roamed the world like one of the exotic creatures he encountered on his travels, returning home bearing fabulous tales (some of them actually true), curious objects and even stranger beasts. Although while at sea he was as poor as any rustic labourer, ashore he knew brief spells of wealth. Then, fired up with back pay and prize money, he would eat, drink, cavort and fornicate like a lord. Habitually profligate and with a terrifying thirst for alcohol, he was loyal to his ship, his country and his king, roughly in that order. Most of all, though, he was loyal to his mates, and it was this kinship that made him capable of the boldness that marked him in his golden age.
He was, simply, the most successful fighting man produced by his native land which, with its taste for booty, pugilism and foreign adventure is saying quite something. So profoundly did he believe in himself, and so deeply did he awe the enemy, that defeat was never contemplated and rarely experienced. His spirit earned him the respect, the admiration and, sometimes, even the love of his officers.
It bears emphasising, however, that it was not only in war that he was tested. Voyages of trade and exploration took him to the farthest corners of the globe. Jack joined in the discovery of a Pacific idyll, and helped to cast William Bligh adrift when the dream turned to nightmare. He ventured to lands of distant peoples and mystifying customs. In doing so, he encountered perils every bit as dire as those he faced in battle; for, if one thing about his existence is plain, it is that he was far more likely to be carried off by disease or shipwreck than a cannonball.
The dangers and hardships of his life were quite enough to deter most of his compatriots. Samuel Johnson spoke for baffled landsmen in general when he declared: ‘No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.’ One clergyman who ministered briefly to a man of war – and fled as soon as he was able – could not fathom how humans dwelt ‘in a prison within the narrow limits of which dwell likewise Constraint, Disease, Ignorance, Insensibility, Tyranny, Sameness, Dirt and Foul air; and to these subjoined the dangers of Ocean, Fire, Mutiny, Pestilence, Battle and Exile’.