Or sailors from earlier times for that matter who could be relevant to this question. Did they try and prevent it with a balm of any sort? Or was it just more of a 'man up and deal with it' thing?
Ideally, sailors would deal with sunburn by not getting it. Traditional dress for sailors would include loose pants, long-sleeved shirts and broad-brimmed hats, and sailors would stay out of the sun under awnings and other shade if possible. When they inevitably did get sunburned, they could use a salve of some kind of grease (often "slush" from cooking kettles) to help with the pain/blistering. Many no doubt just burned until they became deeply tanned, in the manner of sailors today. Also, the thread u/kentonj linked elsewhere deals with long-term effects (on mobile, can't link to it directly).
Many are asking why answers have been deleted and the reason is simple: because they were not up to our standards. We're not looking for guesses, personal anecdotes or big chunk of quotes from external sites.
Remember the rules. As was explained in the excellent meta post on "What it means to post a good answer in /r/AskHistorians":
If you're choosing to answer a question in /r/AskHistorians, there are three questions you should ask yourself first in turn:
Do I, personally, actually know a lot about the subject at hand?
Am I essentially certain that what I know about it is true?
Am I prepared to go into real detail about this?
And also do not post hopelessly incomplete answers based on a skimming of a Wikipedia article just because nobody has yet replied after a few hours.
As a corollary to this question: Did sailors lose their sight more quickly as a result of more exposure to sunlight and water reflection?
And as a linked question, what was their life expectancy? Was it long enough that cancers were a common cause of death?