Consecrating the Atlantic: Christian Approaches to Ship Life in the Eighteenth Century

Stephen R. Berry

This paper compares the shipboard religious activities of four transatlantic religious movements – Anglican, Quaker, Pietist, and Evangelical Christian. British voyages combined divergent and sometimes competing Christian traditions in a relatively open, non-institutional atmosphere that revealed the particular mentalities of the participants and their belief systems. Each group developed a specific approach toward shipboard life that accentuated certain aspects of the tradition while downplaying others. Anglicans continued to value the Book of Common Prayer, but aboard ship, the emphasis shifted. It moved from a book that created shared public worship to one that stimulated common practices of individual devotion. Moravians sought to maintain the devoutness and spiritual rigor that kept their communities free of corruption from outsiders. This desire for purity tempered their missionary zeal, at least how they pursued that impulse on board ship. Quakers sought to maintain quietness of spirit, but the ship also allowed room for increased public testimony, particularly by female itinerants. Evangelicals attempted to combine aspects of all these approaches, flourishing best in the kind of deregulated religious environment that ships epitomized. This research argues that the process by which North America developed an increased reliance on individualism and a functional religious pluralism incubated onboard Atlantic sailing vessels.

[WP #0605]