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Reality rarely lived up to expectations. The crew of a privateer that returned to port with thirty-five thousand pounds or more in prizes would have £12,600 to divide among themselves (subtracting court costs and the shares for the owners, captain, and mates). On a typical ship of around seventy-five or so hands, that could mean £168 per man—a lot of money at a time when common laborers earned thirty pounds a year. Most privateers came home empty-handed, however, and in nearly two decades of war the average tar probably received no more than eleven pounds for his troubles. Assuming he came home at all, that is: one out of every two or three was killed, captured by the enemy, or injured.

So many common seamen continued nonetheless to sign up with privateers that New York shipowners were obliged to offer five shillings per day for regular voyages (over three times the peacetime rate), while the government had to offer five pounds a month to recruit sailors for service on troop transports (a master’s rate in peacetime). That was good news for the three thousand or so seamen working on New York vessels by 1762.

The town’s artisans flourished as well. The East River shipyards, stretching up the waterfront toward Corlear’s Hook, did a booming business refitting merchantmen with the cannon and extra sail required for a Caribbean expedition and repairing those that returned to port with damages. Ropemakers, sailmakers, coopers, chandlers—all had steady employment now for the first time in recent memory. Cordwainers struggled to keep up with huge military orders for boots and shoes, a boon also for the city’s tanners, whose operations had been moved from Beekman’s Swamp to the Fresh Water Pond, where they were allowed to dig their tanning pits and draw water. British troops needed hats too, so officials winked at violations of the 1732 parliamentary law that limited colonial hatmaking. In 1755 New York’s bakers, on hearing that the army would need fifty thousand pounds of bread, jacked up their prices a hefty 14 percent. His Majesty’s forces likewise paid good money to cartmen for hauling supplies and gunpowder. Merchants, too, needed cartmen more than ever, and Mayor John Cruger, himself a powerful merchant, began to expand their ranks in 1756. Over his nine-year term Cruger licensed 386 new carters, a nearly tenfold increase. (Cartmen remained tightly regulated, though. The Common Council set standard rates on over a hundred commodities and listed them in chapbooks distributed throughout the city. Violators could be tracked down easily as each cartman had to put his number, using red paint, on his wagon.)

The presence of hundreds of military and naval officers, together with surging civilian demand, caused a burst of new construction that raised the number of houses in New York from 1,991 in 1753 to nearly twenty-six hundred by 1760. Housewrights, bricklayers, stonemasons, glaziers, plasterers, painters, and carvers commanded wages about 25 percent higher than prewar levels, and the demand for building materials led the city to allow manufacturers to set up brick kilns on the Common or on leased land farther north. Similarly, the influx of officers created a rich new market for the luxury goods produced by local carvers and gilders, watchmakers, furniture makers, painters, pewterers and potters, silversmiths, perfumers, glovers, seamstresses, hoopmakers, and mantua makers. During the war years, forty-one wigmakers and hairdressers found employment in New York, providing men with perukes and ladies with fashionable towers. Shoemakers offered goods “equal if not superior to any made in London,” and as word of the provincial demand for finery crossed the Atlantic, milliners and staymakers began arriving from London and Bath with the latest fashions.

Specialty shops around Hanover Square thrived on the demand for wines, tobacco, china, glassware, stationery, and teas. Much of this retailing continued to be done by women—widows