The anthropologist Clifford Geertz tells the above anecdote to illustrate a crucial point: past events and the stories constructed about them are so complex that it is ultimately impossible to get to the bottom of their multiple meanings. There are always more turtles to uncover as one engages in the process of analysis, interpretation. Yet if definitive interpretations elude historians that does not absolve them from trying to make sense of the past as best they can by subjecting extant texts to analysis.

Jack Tar's Story has done this with the life narratives of antebellum American sailors. These memoirs and autobiographies were deceptive. On the surface, they seemed like straightforward recollections of what these men experienced during their seafaring years. But, as this book has shown, these narratives actually offered richly detailed, multilayered stories about their authors' experiences, including impressment, combat, incarceration, flogging, roistering, and religious conversion.