Did concepts such as personal space or privacy exist on a ship during the age of sail?

by ughhhhh420

Whenever I see replicas of old sailing ships they seem tiny, yet had crews in the hundreds. Was everyone on these ships just hotbunking hammocks?

Stalking_Goat

The answer is "yes and no". Glad to be of assistance.

A serious answer depends on realizing that, on any big ship, civilian or military, there was a class division: officers and men.

The men lived in hammocks on naval vessels, and there's no need to share them because when you're not sleeping, you can just unhook your hammock and roll it up. Someone else might hang their hammock in the same spot while you're working, but it's not really hot-bunking. Men would sleep wherever they could, especially on the gun decks, which had open space between every gun to allow the crews to operate them.

In cargo vessels, the men slept in an open room in the very front of the boat, which due to its shape wasn't very useful for cargo. Hammocks or cot-size beds would be used depending on the time, nationality, preferences, etc. Remember that military vessels needed vastly larger crews than cargo vessels, mostly because each cannon requires a bunch of men to fire it, and the ship with more cannons usually wins. (Unless a ship boards another, in which case having more armed men was similarly decisive.) Thus my favorite whaling vessel, the 232-ton bark Matilda Sears, generally had a crew of 30-35; compare that to the brig USS Nautilus, smaller at 185 tons, but with more than 100 crew aboard. So it was a much simpler task to find everyone a spot to sleep on a cargo vessel.

But military and civilian vessels both had communal sleeping areas for the crew. Officers, both military and civilian, tended to have private quarters. These were generally in the rear of the vessel, so as far away from the enlisted as possible; socialization between the officers and men was discouraged in both military and civilian vessels, although civilian vessels it could depend on the personality of the captain. The officers quarters were very small by any modern standard, but they did at least have a little room with a door that they could close when they didn't want to talk to anyone.