Sailors on a Cruise. (caricature)

This print is an illustration from ‘Greenwich Hospital, A series of Naval Sketches, Descriptive of the Life of a Man-of-War’s Man. By an Old Sailor’, an account of the nautical tales written by Matthew Henry Barker and published by James Robins in 1826 with illustrations by George Cruikshank.

The print shows a group of rowdy sailors and women on a fast-moving carriage driving through a dirt road. One man drives the carriage, while the man next to him plays the fiddle. Two women sit above them on the top of the carriage, drinking and smoking from a pipe. A sailor stands astride the top of the carriage holding a bottle in one hand and his hat in the other. The Union flag waves behind him. A long pennant features another Union flag and the name ‘Arethusa’. Other figures on the carriage drink and wave to passersby on the road. A few look on cheerily and wave their hats, while one woman in pink scowls disapprovingly at the party’s behaviour. Inscribed beneath the title and publication information: ‘G Cruikshank sc. / Pubd. By J. Robins & Co. Ivy Lane Paternoster Row. Sept. 1 1825’.

The title, ‘Sailors on a Cruise’ uses maritime vocabulary to poke fun at the rowdy and licentious lifestyle of British sailors ashore. In the early 1800s, a ‘cruise’ referred to the mission of a ship to search and intercept enemy combatants and their merchant ships. If the cruising ship captured an enemy vessel, the prize money would be split among the crew, making this a highly desirable and lucrative mission for sailors. In this print, the title implies these sailors received prize money from a cruise and are now boisterously celebrating ashore.

In ‘Greenwich Hospital, A series of Naval Sketches’, this print illustrated the chapter titled ‘The Arethusa’, in which Barker recalls the sailors of the ship Arethusa, nicknamed Harry-thusers, spending their prize money:

’Five on em’ bought a coach, horses and all, and then hired the coachmen for three days to drive about - but all hands kept upon decks, and left the inside empty; for what was the use of sculking under hatches in fine weather? So, d’ye see, they stowed the craft well with grog and ‘bacca - got all nug, with a fiddle forward, and an organ-grinder abaft, and carried on between Plymouth and Dock during the whole time they stopped on shore’ (page 116).