Hello Ann You don't say when this was, what his job was, or where the voyage commenced or ended, so it is difficult to answer this. Assuming this is sometime in the nineteenth century, and we're dealing with a merchant seaman on a sailing ship, the answer is that he may not have had much leave apart, possibly, from the odd Sunday or evening ashore. If it was a long voyage, they may not have called at any intermediate ports other than their destination. At their destination he probably had to work unloading and loading cargo, or carrying out maintenance on the ship during the day, so would have had little free time. He might have been allowed to go ashore on an evening or Sunday (the day on which the crew normally had some time to do things for themselves, like washing clothes, rather than working on the ship). However, masters continually suffered from losing crewmen who went ashore and didn't come back so they didn't allow them too much time off for fear of finding themselves without a crew. Often the absence was involuntary because the men were drugged/made drunk, kidnapped and shipped aboard another vessel by "crimps" in the practice known as "Shanghai-ing", but it seems that surprisingly often they could be persuaded to desert of their own accord. So masters were reluctant to crew off the ship, and if they did, they made sure that they didn't give them all the wages due to them, so that they couldn't buy too much drink - which rightly or wrongly, sailors were then seen as being prone to do. As a sailor your chap is very unlikely to have enjoyed anything like a paid "holiday" at any time: ship owners and masters took the view that crewmen were signing on board to work and they certainly weren't going to allow them to enjoy themselves at their expense! On large foreign-going vessels it wasn't terribly common for anyone except the master to make more than one voyage in the same vessel. This is a bit of a generalisation; of course there were some, but it was normal for crew to sign on board a vessel only for one round voyage and when they returned to the UK or a northern European port, they were usually concerned to find another ship as soon as possible because they were no longer being paid. At this time few if any merchant seamen (some masters and officers and all apprentices excepted) had anything like continuous employment. Some ports had a worse reputation for desertions than others and one would expect that the leash would be lengthened or shortened accordingly. If he was a mate, apprentice, or other responsible person like a bosun or carpenter he might have enjoyed more latitude for time off than an AB or OS would. Masters seem to generally have had an easy time of it in port - loading and unloading was left to the mates, and many accounts by apprentices give the impression that many masters spent a lot of time in port socialising ashore or on other vessels, assuming that they didn't have complicated paperwork like insurance claims to deal with. Of course at sea they were responsible 100% of the time, so they probably took the view that they were entitled to it. So in a six month voyage - say a run UK to Australia and back in a sailing ship - your man may have sampled a few beers or enjoyed other pleasures ashore in Adelaide or Newcastle or wherever but he would probably have had to have been back aboard that night. If he was RN, or if we are talking about the 20th Century, or a steamer, ignore what I've said as things may have been different; I don't know! Cheers Piers _____ From: Piers Smith-Cresswell [mailto:pierssc@yahoo.com] Sent: 10 July 2011 21:19 To: Piers Smith-Cresswell Subject: Re: [MAR] Query regarding time at sea _____ From: "Anndriscoll@aol.com" <Anndriscoll@aol.com> To: MARINERS@rootsweb.com Sent: Sunday, 10 July 2011, 18:49 Subject: [MAR] Query regarding time at sea Hi list, I have a statement of service at sea from the National Maritime Museum for my g.grandfather. My query is if for instance he joined a ship in January and his service on that ship was terminated in June of the same year, would he have been aboard the ship continually with no shore leave? Many thanks Ann ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to MARINERS-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message u'