Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [105]
Other New Yorkers flourished by processing imports from the West Indies, above all sugar. In 1730 Nicholas Bayard announced in the Gazette that he had erected, virtually next door to City Hall, a “Refining House for Refining all sorts of Sugar and Sugar Candy, and has procured from Europe an experienced artist in that Mystery.” In time, Livingstons, Roosevelts, Van Cortlandts, and Rhinelanders would follow him into the business of turning brown sugar into clean white loaves of table sugar, suitable for export to Europe or the West Indies. By the early 1720s, moreover, sixteen distillers were turning molasses into rum (much of the raw material having been smuggled in from Martinique). In addition, after 1715, New Yorkers began importing tobacco for conversion into snuff, a process that involved the grinding and flavoring of dried tobacco leaf.
The movement of these exports and imports would have been impossible without the labor of “Jack Tar,” the seafaring man who loaded, sailed, and unloaded the city’s growing merchant fleet. Mariners had been a familiar presence on Manhattan ever since the West India Company first set up shop, but never in such quantities: by the second or third decade of the eighteenth century, not counting the masses of transients who drifted from port to port in search of work on the docks or merchant vessels, perhaps one out of every four or five adult male residents of New York earned his livelihood as a mariner. It was a notoriously hard existence—periodic bouts of unemployment punctuated by long, isolating voyages on ships where the dangers, atrocious conditions, harsh discipline, strict division of labor, and exploitative wages prefigured the industrial factories of a later era. Since most men quit (or died) after fewer than ten years at sea, the average age of crews tended to fall somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. No other trade or occupation in the city developed a stronger sense of collective identity and interest, however. More than once, crowds of “Brother Tars” in their distinctive attire—baggy breeches (tarred to keep out water), checked shirts, “fearnought” jackets, Monmouth caps—swarmed out of waterfront gin mills and rookeries to confront a tyrannical captain, dishonest “crimps” (the recruiting agents who filled out crews for merchants), or a press gang from one of His Majesty’s warships. Their fine disdain for thrift, sobriety, polite speech, and organized religion constituted a standing challenge to the values of respectable society. “A merry life and a short one”: that was the sailor’s motto.
Because the perils of the sea threatened the owners as well as crews of ships, access to reliable marine insurance was a matter of increased importance in the city. Rather than rely solely on underwriters in London or Amsterdam, a few prominent New York merchants began to insure voyages on their own, forming consortiums of wealthy residents willing to share the risks at an attractive rate of interest. Similarly, the need for access to capital promoted the expansion of private banking. One lawyer went so far as to advertise his services as an intermediary, inasmuch as “many Persons in this Province have often Occasion to borrow Money at Interest, and others have sums of Money lying by them which they want to put out.” All transactions, he added, would be managed with the “greatest Secrecy and Integrity.”
Indeed the legal profession too was changing significantly in these years. Until quite recently, all but a few of New York’s two dozen or so lawyers had been self-taught “attorneys” rather than formally trained “barristers.” Their knowledge of the law was often rudimentary, most of their work consisted of collecting debts or making out conveyances, and even the busiest of them doubled as tavern keepers, ferry operators, and tradesmen. Now, however, the demands of an increasingly complex international economy, together