Women in Disguise in Naval Crews
Oh, Pretty Susan left her home
And sailed away so far.
She braved the tempests, storms and gales,
Feared neither wound nor scar,
And done her duty manfully
On board a Man of War.
—“Susan’s Adventures in a Man of War”
THERE ARE VERIFIED ACCOUNTS of more than twenty women who joined the Royal Navy or Marines dressed as men in the period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. Some of them served for years before their true gender was discovered. Undoubtedly there were others whose male disguise was never penetrated, and whose stories have therefore gone unrecorded.
I have chosen to refer to women in naval crews as women seamen—an odd usage, but more accurate than the term women sailors, since the word sailors covers all those who work in ships, whatever their rank. Furthermore, in the age of sail the term sailors was usually applied to the crews of merchant ships, while seamen was used for naval crews.
There are three major questions about women seamen:
1. How were they able to pass as male on board a crowded ship where there was no privacy?
2. Why did they volunteer for the navy or marines and go to great efforts to remain on board when many of the men had to be forced on board and deserted whenever they got the chance?
3. How were they viewed by their fellow seamen, by their officers, and by society as a whole once their true gender was revealed?
Before addressing these questions we need to look at a few accounts of these women in order to have a context in which to discuss them.
FOUR WOMEN SEAMEN
The Gentlewoman Anne Chamberlyne
One of the earliest known cases of a woman seaman is that of Anne Chamberlyne, who in 1690 joined her brother’s ship and fought in the battle against the French off Beachy Head. Unlike most women seamen, who were of the lower classes, she came from the gentry. A tablet to her memory was placed in the wall of Chelsea Old Church (All Saints), Cheyne Walk, London, with other Chamberlyne family memorials. It was destroyed, together with that entire section of the church, during World War II, but a record of its Latin inscription has been preserved.1 Here is a translation:
In an adjoining vault lies Anne, the only daughter of Edward Chamberlyne, Doctor of Laws, born in London, the 20th January, 1667, who having long declined marriage [at age twenty-three], and aspiring to great achievements unusual to her sex and age, on the 30th June, 1690, on board a fireship in man’s clothing, as a second Pallas, chaste and fearless, fought valiantly six hours against the French, under the command of her brother.…
Returned from the engagement, and after some few months married to John Spragg, Esq., with whom, for sixteen more [months], she lived most amiably happy. At length, in childbed of a daughter, she encountered death, 30th October 1691. This monument, for a consort most virtuous and dearly loved, was erected by her husband.
Snatched, alas, how soon by sudden death, unhonoured by a progeny like herself, worthy to rule the Main!2
The Chamberlynes were a prosperous, scholarly, and somewhat eccentric family. Anne’s father studied law at Oxford; his monument notes that “he had seven children and wrote six books.” The books were coated with wax and buried with him. The brother whose ship Anne Chamberlyne joined, Captain Peregrine Clifford Chamberlyne, was not only an expert in navigation but also a linguist and doctor of law. Another brother, John, was gentleman of the privy chamber to both Queen Anne and George I, and among his published works were his translations of the Lord’s Prayer into one hundred languages.3
A fellow parishioner of Anne Chamberlyne at Chelsea Old Church was Mrs. Mary Astell (1668–1731), a classics scholar and an early advocate of women’s rights. She even attempted to found a college for women, a radical notion that was quickly quashed by her male colleagues. The two women were only one year apart in age, and in the same year that Anne Chamberlyne went to sea, Mary Astell published her essay “Defence of the Fair Sex.”4 In their respective searches for freedom from the strictures imposed on women of their day, they may well have influenced each other.
Another Gentlewoman
Another woman from the upper classes went to sea two years after Chamberlyne’s service. The parliamentarian Narcissus Luttrell noted in his diary on 19 November 1692, “A gentlewoman has petitioned the Queen, setting forth that the last summer she served in man’s clothes on board the St. Andrew, which was engaged in the fight with the French, and producing a certificate thereof, [since] she quitted herself well, she desired something to be given her.”5 It is interesting that her petition was addressed not, as was usual, to the king but to the queen. Perhaps she thought a woman would be more sympathetic. There is no record of whether or not she ever received her back pay.
The Woman Marine Known as William Prothero
A more typical example of the women who served in the ships of the sailing navy is the marine known as William Prothero, who served in 1760–61 in the appropriately named thirty-two-gun Amazon, Captain Basil Keith. Her service is confirmed in three sources: the captain’s log, the ship’s muster, and a personal journal. In Prothero’s case, as in many such cases, only her male alias is recorded; her female name was considered to be irrelevant.
The entry in the captain’s log for 20 April 1761 at Yarmouth was brief: “One of the marines going by the name of Wm. Protherow was discovered to be a woman. She had done her duty on board nine months.”6
The Amazon’s muster book records that Private William Prothero entered 1 December 1760 and was discharged 30 April 1761. (This record of her having served five months is probably more accurate than the estimate of nine months’ service given in the captain’s log. How much pay the men received was based on the data in the muster book, and the navy did not fool around in matters of money.) As is usual in such cases, the muster book avoids mentioning that Prothero was dismissed because she had been found to be a woman. The reason for discharge is simply given as “per Admiralty order.”7
The third mention of Prothero is found in the journal of J. C. Dickinson, a surgeon’s mate in the Amazon. He described her as “an eighteen-year-old Welsh girl who had followed her sweetheart to sea.”8 It is most unlikely that Prothero joined the marines for this reason; if her lover had been on board, she could simply have gone to sea with him as his woman. (We will return later to this dubious notion that women went to sea to find their lost lovers.)
The Woman Seaman Known as William Brown
During the Napoleonic Wars a black woman known as William Brown served in the navy for a dozen years, perhaps more. Once again, no one believed it important to record her real name. She joined the navy around 1804 and served at least until 1816, perhaps much longer. In September 1815 a London newspaper revealed the details of her naval career up to that time:
Amongst the crew of the Queen Charlotte, 110 guns, recently paid off [31 August 1815], it is now discovered was a female African who had served as a seaman in the Royal Navy for upwards of eleven years, several of which she had been rated able on the books of the above ship, by the name of William Brown. [She] has served for some time as the captain of the foretop, highly to the satisfaction of the officers.9
The most experienced and dependable of the able seamen were appointed to be “captain” of a particular section of the ship—the foretop (the upper section of the foremast), the maintop (the mainmast), the forecastle, and so forth—to lead the other seamen assigned to that section. A captain of the topmen not only had to be agile and unafraid of heights; he had to be experienced in working the sails, both from the deck and aloft. He also needed to have gained the respect of his fellow seamen, who must follow his lead without hesitation. The topmen’s job was extremely perilous, especially in stormy weather, when they had to take in sails high above the rolling deck in a roaring wind. Many a man fell to his death.
The news report about Brown continues:
She is a smart, well-formed figure, about five feet four inches in height, possessed of considerable strength and great activity; her features are rather handsome for a black, and she appears to be about twenty-six years of age. Her share of prize money is said to be considerable, respecting which she has been several days at Somerset Place [in London where the Pay Office was located].
In her manner she exhibits all the traits of a British tar and takes her grog with her late messmates with the greatest gaiety. She says she is a married woman and went to sea in consequence of a quarrel with her husband, who it is said has entered a caveat against her receiving her prize money. [A husband legally controlled his wife’s earnings.]
She declares her intention of again entering the service as a volunteer.10
Brown not only reentered the service on 31 December 1815 but even rejoined her old ship, whose officers, surprisingly, were either unaware of the news story or chose to ignore it.
The Queen Charlotte’s muster book gives Brown’s place of origin as Edinburgh, her rating as AB (able seaman), and her age as thirty-two.11 Upon her reentry she received two months’ advance wages and made the small purchase of 1s. 7d. worth of slop clothes, and the very large purchase of 9s. 6d. worth of tobacco, an amount equal to almost a fourth of her monthly wages.12 (Many women seamen smoked or chewed tobacco, perhaps in an effort to appear manly.) In January 1816 Brown was appointed, not captain of the foretop, but captain of the forecastle, a less physically demanding job.13 Forecastle men were usually older and less sprightly than the men assigned to the masts.
It is unusual to find a woman in a naval crew as old as Brown; it was much more difficult for an older woman to pass as a man than it was for a young woman to pass as a boy. In the latter case the woman’s lack of whiskers could be explained by her youth. Brown apparently looked young for her age; recall that the 1815 news report put her age at twenty-six when she was in fact thirty-two. Perhaps being black also helped her to pass, since black men are often less hirsute than white men. She was also aided in maintaining her male role by the fact that she had been in the navy since she was twenty-one, and over the years her messmates had come to accept her as one of them.
On 29 June 1816 Brown, together with some other seamen, was transferred from the Queen Charlotte into the Bombay, and at that point we lose track of her, since there is no extant muster for the Bombay for that period.14
HOW WOMEN SEAMEN PASSED AS MEN
It was not difficult for a young woman in male dress to join the navy or marines in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period when England was almost continuously at war and the navy was usually desperately short of crews. Officers were not apt to inquire too closely into the background of a healthy young volunteer at a time when they were driven to accept almost any poor wretch whom the press gangs could grab, including the old, the sick, and the criminal. A typical complaint about the quality of recruits is expressed in a letter to the Admiralty written by Admiral Philip Cavendish, commander at Portsmouth, in July 1739:
The 524 men that were sent from the Nore in the Burford and Pearl, to man Mr. Vernon’s squadron, are distributed on board them, but surely there never was such wretches, many of them boys of fourteen or fifteen years of age,…and some upwards of sixty or seventy; but that is not the worst, for I believe there are above one hundred of them that must be turned away, being bursten, full of the pox, itch, lame, king’s evil, and all other distempers, from the hospitals at London, and will serve only to breed an infection in the ships; for the rest, most of them are thieves, housebreakers, Newgate birds [inmates of Newgate, a London prison], and the very filth of London.15
It is difficult for us today to appreciate how casually recruits were accepted into the navy. There was seldom any physical examination upon entry, nor was proof of identity required. Neither volunteers nor impressed men were “sworn in” or “signed on”; many were illiterate and unable to sign their names. They were simply lined up on deck, and a lieutenant listed each man in the muster book, writing down whatever name was given, spelled as he chose.16
Once a woman had taken her place among the crew on the lower deck of her ship, there was no routine situation in which she was required to undress. Seamen seldom bathed, and they slept in their day clothes. It was only when a seaman was flogged that he was ordered to be stripped to the waist, and it was in this situation that several seamen were discovered to be women.
Even when a man was sick or wounded, he received only the most cursory examination; only the afflicted part of the body was examined. The marine Hannah Snell spent many months in a government-run hospital in Cuddalore, India, in 1748–49, and the doctors treated wounds in both her thighs without ever realizing that she was a woman.17
Reports of women seamen do not tell how they managed to deal with urination and menstruation, but it was not as difficult as it might seem. To urinate a woman could go to the “head” (the toilet facilities at the bow of the ship overhanging the water) when no one else was there. Several accounts of women in male disguise in the army report that they attached a short tube to their under-clothing to use in urinating, but a woman seaman would find such a device difficult to use in rough weather.
The very fact that a ship was so crowded, and crowded with such a motley collection of people having various physical complaints, meant that the men tended to keep a psychological distance from one another. Their philosophy was to live and let live. They ignored, if they could, any strange behavior or evidence of sickness in their mates. Such circumstances aided a woman in hiding her menstrual periods. If someone noticed that a woman seaman was menstruating, he probably assumed that she was suffering from venereal disease, a common complaint of seamen. It is also possible that in some cases a woman’s periods stopped because of the bad diet and strenuous physical activity on board.
In several cases, after a woman seaman’s secret was discovered, she was sexually harassed. In the 1690s the seaman John Curtin wrote about the attempted seduction of a woman in disguise in his ship, the Edgar, a third-rate vessel of seventy-two guns, commanded by Captain Andrew Pedder. Curtin’s account is in the form of a crudely constructed ballad:
VERSE 2
This Maiden she was press’d, Sir,
and so was many more,
And she, among the rest, Sir,
was brought down to the Nore,
Where ev’ry one did think they had
Prest a very pretty colliers lad;
but yet it prov’d not so,
when they the truth did know,
they search’d her well below,
and see how things did go,
and found her so and so,
And then swore, the like was never known before.
VERSE 3
But at length a sailor bold, Sir,
that us’d to sport and play, Sir.
Did chance for to behold, Sir,
where this young Damsel lay, Sir,
Who thought she like a Maid did speak,
When he felt, she did begin to squeak,
by which he found that she
could not a sailor be,
he strove to feel her knee,
but she would not agree,
but strove from him to flee,
And he said that she was certainly a Maid.18
A similar case in a privateer was reported in a Liverpool newspaper on 20 May 1757:
A young person, five feet high, aged about nineteen, who entered in January last on board the Resolution privateer, Captain Barber, under the name of Arthur Douglas, proceeded with the ship from London to this port. [She] was, on Saturday last, discovered to be a woman by one of her messmates.… [To keep him from revealing her secret] she then promised to permit him to keep her company when they arrived there [in Liverpool]; but as soon as they came into port [she] refused his addresses.19
It appears that her rejected suitor then, out of spite, told the authorities about her.
A woman passing as male in a French naval expedition to the Pacific was sexually harassed by seamen after her true gender was discovered. In Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s circumnavigation (1766–69), Jeanne Baré, under the name of Jean Baré, acted as male servant and assistant to the expedition’s botanist, Philibert Commerson. She served without incident until, a year away from France, she was recognized as a woman by the natives of Tahiti as soon as she stepped ashore. After that, Bougainville reported, “it was difficult to prevent the sailors from alarming her modesty.”20
WHY WOMEN JOINED THE NAVY OR MARINES
A prime reason why a woman joined the navy or marines was to escape the restricted economic and social status assigned to women. It was, however, only the most daring and unconventional woman who was willing to take the extraordinary step of changing her gender role in order to gain the social and financial advantages of a man. While the life of a male seaman was generally more restricted than that of a man of the same class in civilian life, a woman seaman found social freedom in the navy that she could not find on shore. On land she was banned from most profitable jobs and from many recreational and social activities. On shipboard a woman seaman was able to join the men as an equal in both work and play. She was no longer treated with condescension by her male peers.
Unlike most male recruits, a woman who joined the navy or marines usually improved her financial status. Although naval pay was low and slow in coming, when it did arrive a woman seaman could at least spend it as she chose; on land a woman was seldom in control of her own money. There was also the possibility of learning a trade not open to women. Mary Lacy, who served in the navy as William Chandler from 1759 to 1771, rose from carpenter’s servant to fully qualified shipwright. (See chapter 4.)21
In several cases economic need was the reason why a woman joined the navy or marines. In 1807 Elizabeth Bowden, a fourteen-year-old orphan, finding herself alone and destitute in the naval port of Plymouth, put on boy’s clothes and joined the navy.22
Jane Meace tried to join the marines in order to get the bounty money given to volunteers. Her case was reported in Lloyd’s Evening Post and British Chronicle for 1 December 1762:
UTTOXETER, NOVEMBER 25: On Thursday, the twelfth instant, in the evening, a young girl in men’s clothes, came to a recruiting party of marines at the Plume of Feathers and enlisted. [Recruiting sessions were usually held at a tavern, with posters distributed in advance advertising the date and place of rendezvous and offering a bounty to volunteers.] She wanted the whole bounty money in hand, being in want of clothing and other necessaries, but they would give her only one shilling till morning, but had the bowl of punch in and the point of war beat. The party [of recruits] lay that night in one bed with her [two or three per bed was the usual accommodation at an inn], and in the morning, one of the men laying hold of her coat over the breast to see how it fitted, her sex was discovered. She enlisted by the name of John Meace, but her proper name is Jane Meace, and [she] is well known in this country.23
A woman seaman had one great advantage over her male shipmates: she could gain her discharge at any time simply by revealing her true gender. When, in the words of contemporary reports, “her sex was discovered,” she was not even chastised, let alone prosecuted. She was simply discharged “per Admiralty order.” Few women seamen and marines, however, took this option. While the men deserted whenever they could, in almost every case a woman seaman, despite the hard work and bad living conditions, remained in the service until her gender was discovered and she was forced to leave.
The Restricted Role of Women in Society
In order to realize the extent of the advantages a woman gained in adopting a male identity, it is necessary to review the restrictions that society placed upon women. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, women, whatever their class, were usually constrained within a domestic setting, either in their own homes or as servants in the household of a more affluent family.
A single woman’s money, if she had any, was controlled by her father or brother, or even her employer, especially if she was in domestic service, as most employed women were. Education was primarily restricted to men, except for training in the domestic arts. Women were barred from most trades, they were consistently given the lowest-paying jobs, and they were paid less money than men doing the same work.
It was assumed that every young woman’s goal was marriage; spinsters were viewed as failures. Nevertheless, a single woman had more control over her life than a married one. William Blackstone, the eighteenth-century legal authority, summarized the status of a married woman: “By marriage,” he said, “the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage.”24 A married woman owned nothing; all her assets, including her earnings and the personal property she brought to the marriage—even her jewelry and her clothing—were vested in her husband, who could spend or sell her belongings as he chose. By law a wife had to obey her husband, and if she did not, her husband could beat her into submission.
A man could actually sell his wife to another man. Over two hundred authenticated cases were recorded in England between 1760 and 1880.25 Wife-selling was a substitute for divorce in a period when divorce was almost impossible for a lower-class man to obtain, and entirely beyond the reach of women. A wife sale was carried out in a traditional way: the wife, with a halter around her neck, was sold at auction at a market or inn or other public place where the event could be publicly witnessed.26 Newspaper reports of these sales usually treated them as a joke. The following example is representative:
ELEVEN OF MARCH, 1766. One Higginson, a journeyman carpenter, having last week sold his wife to a brother workman in a fit of conjugal indifference at the alehouse, took it into his head to hang himself a few days after, as the lady very peaceably cohabited with the purchaser, and refused to return home at his [her husband’s] most pressing solicitations.27
It was beyond the imagination of most eighteenth-century men to think of a woman as a responsible adult, capable of managing her own life. One of the few Englishmen to address the subject of the subjugated status of women was the physician William Alexander, who gave a lucid analysis of their situation in his book The History of Women, published in 1782. He wrote:
In Britain, we allow a woman to sway our sceptre, but by law and custom we debar her from every other government but that of her own family, as if there were not a public employment between that of superintending the kingdom and the affairs of her own kitchen which could be managed by the genius and capacity of woman. We neither allow women to officiate at our altars, to debate in our councils, nor to fight for us in the field; we suffer them not to be members of our senate, to practice any of the learned professions, nor to concern themselves much with our trades and occupations.
We exercise nearly a perpetual guardianship over them, both in their virgin and their married state; and she who, having laid a husband in the grave, enjoys an independent fortune, is almost the only woman among us who can be called free.28
Women Seamen Identified with Men
In view of the low status accorded them, it is not surprising that a few ambitious young women took on the male role. It took more than poverty and ambition, however, to provoke a woman to reject the role assigned to her by her culture. Cultural strictures are very strong; not many women in any society take the drastic step of acquiring a male identity in order to gain release from the prohibitions imposed on them.
The women who joined naval crews were a very small minority who, because of their special physical and emotional traits, were willing and able to adopt a male role. They were strong and athletic enough to perform the work assigned them: to clamber up the rigging and to take in sail in heavy weather, to pull heavy lines and to take their place among the men at the capstan heaving up the anchor. They joined in the rough games and tough badinage of their shipmates; they chewed tobacco, downed their grog, and acquired the rolling gait and the bellowing voice of the sailor. Indeed, a compelling reason why most of these women joined naval crews was their strong desire to adopt the sexual aspects of a man. Their transvestism was not just a means to an end; they enjoyed cross-dressing. Many if not most women seamen and marines physically and emotionally identified with men; they felt comfortable passing as male.
It was difficult for a woman to change her gender role in her own community where she was known, and equally difficult to switch her gender and then find work in a new place where she had no contacts or references. The navy or marines offered an opportunity for her to take on the role of a man in a setting where she was not known and where no proof of identity or previous experience was needed.
Once a woman had established a male identity in the navy, she usually continued to pass as a man when she returned to civilian life. In 1761, for example, a press gang in Plymouth picked up a woman dressed in men’s clothes who had previously served almost five years as a marine. She revealed her true gender only after she was confined in a prison cell to await assignment to a ship and became claustrophobic. She gave her name as Hannah Witney and said she was born in Ireland, “and would not have disclosed herself if she had been allowed her liberty.”29
Another case of a woman seaman who kept her male identity on shore was reported in the Naval Chronicle of 1807:
At the Public Office, Queen Square [London], an old woman, generally known by the name of Tom Bowling, was lately brought before the magistrate for sleeping all night in the street and was committed as a rogue and vagabond and passed to her parish. She served as boatswain’s mate on board a man-of-war for upwards of twenty years and has a pension from Chatham Chest. When waked at midnight by the watchman in the street, covered with snow, she cried, “Where the devil would you have me sleep?” She has generally slept in this way, and dresses like a man; and is so hardy at a very advanced age that she never catches cold.30
Some women seamen sought women as sexual partners. When Hannah Snell’s ship, the Eltham, was returning to England from India in 1750 and the crew were given shore leave at Lisbon, Snell, under the name of James Gray, and her fellow marine Edward Jefferies frequently went on shore “in quest of adventures”:
Amongst other frolics these two cronies pursued an amour together by contracting an acquaintance with two young women of the place that had no nun’s flesh about them. When they [Gray and Jefferies] set sail for England, the enamoured women would fain have quitted their native place to have had the pleasure of a voyage with their sweethearts, but the captain had given express orders that no women should be admitted on board on any pretense how plausible soever.31
Mary Lacy was candid about her own pursuit of various women. In the preface to her autobiography, however, where she explains her “motives for endeavouring to be as frequently as possible in the company of women in the way of courtship,” she offers the ridiculous disclaimer that she sought out women in order “to avoid the conversation of the men,” which was “very offensive to a delicate ear.”32
Although it is evident that many women seamen enjoyed the role of the randy sailor, their chroniclers were careful to assure readers that in the final analysis these women were “normal” heterosexuals who had joined up for socially acceptable motives.
One acceptable motive was patriotism. The seaman-balladeer John Curtin tacked a patriotic motive onto the story of the Edgar’s woman seaman. Although at the beginning of the ballad he noted that the woman was forced on board the Edgar by a press gang, in his closing verses he said that, after learning that her lover had joined the army to fight for his king, she decided in a burst of patriotic fervor “to go to sea so that she might serve the King as well as he.”33
The Lost-Lover Theme
By far the most frequently given reason for a woman enlisting in the navy or marines, and the most patently absurd, was that she was seeking her male lover who had either run off to sea or been forced on board a ship by a press gang. This ubiquitous motif, which I call the lost-lover theme, is found wherever women seamen are mentioned. It was a popular theme of British ballads from the sixteenth century into the twentieth; variations were still being sung in the 1930s, not only in Great Britain but also in seafaring communities in Labrador and Nova Scotia.34
The earliest example that I have found of a “lost-lover ballad” is “The Marchants Daughter of Bristow,” first printed in the 1590s. The basic elements of its plot were repeated in numerous later ballads. When Maudlin, the merchant’s daughter, falls in love with a young man, her family and friends reject him as a social inferior, and her father forces him to break off the relationship and to leave England. The night before his departure he comes to Maudlin’s window and, in a serenade, bids her farewell. “In tears she spends the doleful night, wishing herself (though naked) with her faithful friend,” but by morning her tears are dry, and she has concocted a plan to dress in “ship-boy’s garments” and to follow her lover to sea. After many adventures at sea and on land, Maudlin finds him in Italy, and the happy couple return to England, inherit her father’s money, and live happily ever after.35
While in many later ballads the lovelorn woman is not a rich man’s daughter, she always goes to sea in male disguise in order to join her sweetheart, and she is always pretty and frail, with delicate lily-white hands. In contrast, the young women who actually joined the navy cannot have been so very fragile. On the contrary, they must have had the build and demeanor of a sturdy boy, or they would not have succeeded in their male impersonation.
A representative example of these ballads is “Young Henry of the Raging Main”:
VERSE 4
Cried Henry, “Love, don’t be distracted,
Perhaps you may be cast away.”
“Tis for that reason,” cried young Emma,
“That behind I will not stay.
I’ll dress myself in man’s apparel,
So, dearest Henry, don’t complain,
In jacket blue, and tarry trousers,
I will plough the raging main.”
VERSE 5
Then on board the brig Eliza,
Henry and his Emma went;
She did her duty like a sailor,
And with her lover was content.
Her pretty hands, once soft as velvet,
With pitch and tar appeared in pain,
Though her hands were soft, she went aloft,
And boldly ploughed the raging main.36
This broadside ballad is probably based on an actual case of a woman seaman who served in the brig Eliza. Broadside ballads—single sheets of crudely printed text, usually illustrated with a woodcut—were hawked on city streets for as little as a farthing each (a quarter of a penny). The poorer classes who could not afford newspapers, which cost a penny or more, got much of their news from ballad sheets. Some ballads related traditional folklore; others covered current events such as naval victories or public hangings. There was no attempt made to distinguish fact from fiction.
The lost-lover theme became so embedded in the folk tradition of the culture that when an actual case of a woman seaman was reported, the theme was often tacked on. In fact, one woman used it herself, apparently to avoid discussing very different motives. The Annual Register of 1771 reported:
A person by the name of Charles Waddall, of the Oxford man-of-war lying at Chatham, was ordered to receive two dozen lashes for desertion; but when tied up to the gangway the culprit was discovered to be a woman. She declares that she has traveled from Hull to London after a man with whom she was in love, and hearing he was on board the Oxford at Chatham, she entered at the rendezvous in London for the same ship the ninth instant. On the seventeenth of this month she came on board, but finding that her sweetheart was run away, in consequence thereof, she deserted yesterday.
[Upon being discovered to be a woman,] she was immediately carried before Admiral Dennis, who made her a present of half a guinea; Commissioner Hanway [the commissioner of Chatham Dockyard] and most of the officers of the yard made her presents also.37
She did not explain why she continued to maintain her male role after she learned that her lover was not on board, even when she was ordered to be flogged. The story is murky.
There is much about the lost-lover theme that is pure nonsense. Most sailor’s sweethearts came from seafaring communities and would have known that a woman could usually go to sea with her lover in her own right; there was no need to adopt male disguise and join the crew. They would also have known that if a woman did join up, even if she were assigned to her lover’s ship she might be transferred to another vessel at any time.
Unlikely as it was that a woman seaman had gone to sea to be with her lover, readers expected accounts of these women to include the lost-lover theme; it reassured them that the heroine was heterosexual even though it was added to the story in such a clumsy way that it was hard to believe.
A good example is found in the 1750 biography of the marine Hannah Snell. At about the age of twenty, while living in the sailor’s town of Wapping on the outskirts of London, she is supposed to have married one James Summs, a Dutch sailor who deserted her when she was seven months pregnant. Conveniently for the plot of the story, the baby died at the age of seven months. Snell then put on male clothes and set off to find her husband and seek revenge. She did not, however, look for him among the ships nearby but set off overland on foot for distant land-bound Coventry, where under the name of James Gray she joined the army.38 Official records confirm that Snell did live in Wapping and did join the army in Coventry, but it is unlikely that she ever had a husband named Summs or gave birth to his baby.
FURTHER CONFUSIONS OF FACT WITH FICTION
There are three eighteenth-century biographies of women who claimed to have gone to sea in ships of the Royal Navy: the biographies of Hannah Snell and Mary Anne Talbot have always been, and still are, accepted as the prime sources of information about English women seamen and marines, but Mary Lacy’s autobiography, after an initial success, has been forgotten. This is unfortunate, for Snell’s biography is packed with fictional embellishments, and Talbot never went to sea. Only Lacy’s book, discussed in chapter 4, is a reliable source.
The Muddled Biography of Hannah Snell
Hannah Snell, who could read a little but could not write, dictated her story to a literary hack hired by the newspaper publisher Robert Walker, or perhaps to Walker himself, in 1750, soon after she returned from her stint in India with the marines. She was quite a celebrity at that time, and so he rushed two versions of her biography into print, one of 46 pages and the other of 187 pages. Unfortunately, the biography’s author could not leave well enough alone; he turned Snell’s remarkable adventures into a pretentious literary exercise, full of extraneous fictional material and flowery classical references. The many later accounts of Snell’s story picked up the fiction along with the facts.39 I have checked ships’ muster books and pension records in order to extricate the actual events from the welter of misinformation, and the following facts emerge.
Snell was born in Worcester in 1723, the daughter of a cloth dyer and hosier. At the age of twenty, after the death of both her parents, she went to live with her sister and brother-in-law, Susannah and James Gray, at their house in Wapping. After several years with them, for reasons we do not know, she borrowed her brother-in-law’s clothes as well as his name, and on 27 November 1745 she joined Colonel John Guise’s Sixth Regiment of Foot (Royal First Warwickshire) at Coventry, not far from her birthplace, and served in the army for a period somewhere between four months and two years. She then deserted.40 Apparently she continued to go by the name of James Gray, and at Portsmouth in 1747 she enlisted under that name in Colonel Fraser’s Regiment of Marines and was sent to the sloop Swallow, Captain John Rowsier. Soon after she went on board, the Swallow sailed for the east coast of India in Admiral Edward Boscawen’s fleet.41
According to the muster book of the Swallow, the fleet reached “Cudalowe” (Cuddalore), India, in August 1748, and Snell and the other marines on board were sent on shore to join the long and unsuccessful siege of the French fortifications at Pondicherry. Snell was in the thick of the battle, which continued for several weeks, and she was severely wounded in both thighs. She was sent to the hospital at Cuddalore, where she remained for almost a year, and throughout this period the doctors who treated her never discovered that she was a woman. There may not be any truth in the biographer’s claim that in order to avoid discovery, she herself removed shot from her groin with the help of an Indian nurse; but there is no doubt that she was determined to keep her male status.42 She was released on 2 August 1749 into the pink Tartar, where she served as a seaman while waiting to be assigned to a larger vessel, a not unusual procedure.43
On 13 October 1749 Snell was transferred from the Tartar to the Eltham, and in that ship she returned to Portsmouth. The Eltham reached Spithead on 25 May 1750 and was paid off. At this point Snell revealed her true identity and was discharged “per order of Admiral Hawke.”44
According to the biography, upon returning to civilian life Snell continued to dress as a man, “having bought new clothing for that purpose.”45 The press got hold of her story—probably from Snell herself—and she became a celebrity. The two versions of her biography were bestsellers, she sat for several portraits, and she received a lot of press coverage, including a report in doggerel:
Hannah in briggs [breeches] behaved so well
That none her softer sex could tell;
Nor was her policy confounded
When near the mark of nature wounded [shot in the groin].
Oh, how her bedmate bit his lips,
And marked the spreading of her hips,
And cursed the blindness of his youth
When she confessed the naked truth!46
Her popularity was so great that she decided to go on the stage, and she worked at several London theaters, including the New Wells in Clerkenwell, where she joined tumblers and tightrope walkers in entertaining audiences as large as seven hundred. Dressed as a marine, she sang a ditty telling how she “ventured on the main, facing death and every danger, love and glory to obtain.” She then led a group of young actresses, also in marine uniform, in a series of regimental marches.47 The audiences loved her.
Eventually, however, Snell’s popularity dimmed, and she left the stage and lived on a pension provided by Chelsea Hospital, the London hospital for army pensioners. This was for her service in both the army and the marines. (The marines were under army jurisdiction until 1747.) The entry in the admission book for 21 November 1750 reads, “2nd Mar. [Marines] ffrazer’s [regiment], Hannah Snell, age 27. Time of service 4 1/2 months in this & Guise’s Regt.” (The length of service is wrong; Snell served in the marines from 1747 to 1750, a period of over two years.) “Wounded at Pondicherry in the thigh of both leggs, born at Worcester, her father a Dyer.”48
The biography suggests that Snell planned to open a sailor’s tavern in Wapping called the Woman in Masquerade, but it is doubtful that she had the money to do so; I could find no license for a tavern of that name nor an owner named James Gray or Hannah Snell anywhere in the London districts along the Thames.49 It appears that at some point she left London and reverted to living as a woman. Newspapers reported in 1759 that she married Samuel Eyles, a carpenter, at Newbury, Berks County, and had a son by that marriage. According to one news report, she lived for a time with her son in Stoke Newington, a village that is today part of London. It was reported in 1772 that at age forty-nine, following the death of her first husband—or her second, if you believe that she had earlier married the Dutch sailor—she married Richard Habgood of Welford, Berks.
Snell’s life ended tragically. In the 1780s she was judged insane and committed to Bethlehem Hospital—popularly known as Bedlam—in London. She died there on 8 February 1792 at the age of sixty-nine.50
The Spurious Autobiography of Mary Anne Talbot
Since its first publication in 1804, the so-called autobiography of Mary Anne Talbot (1778–1808) has been cited as a historical source in almost every work that touches on the subject of female sailors. Talbot was a well-known character in London in the early years of the nineteenth century, but her claim to have served in the navy and in French and American merchant ships was fabricated. Her story is embellished with the names of actual vessels and their captains, and in most instances official documents confirm that these ships were where the autobiography says they were. But in no case was there a seaman on board who could have been Talbot.
The earliest report of Talbot’s alleged sea adventures appeared in the Times (London) of 4 November 1799. It is an interview at Middlesex Hospital “with a young and delicate female who calls herself Miss T——lb——t.”51 (It would be interesting to know why the Times suggested that Talbot was not her real name.) She told the news reporter that she was being treated for a shattered knee, which she claimed was an unhealed battle wound. She also gave the Times reporter a list of battles she claimed to have fought in that are completely different from her later claims. The Times reported that she had followed her lover, a naval officer, to sea.
Talbot’s “autobiography” was published in 1804 in Kirby’s Wonderful and Scientific Museum; or, Magazine of Remarkable and Eccentric Characters, a compendium of anecdotes and biographies, including that of Hannah Snell. (The Kirby version differs in many respects from the Times interview and does not include the lost-lover theme.)52 Talbot’s story proved so popular that Kirby printed an extended version in a separate volume in 1809, a year after her death, under the title The Life and Surprising Adventures of Mary Anne Talbot in the Name of John Taylor, a Natural Daughter of the Late Earl Talbot…Related by Herself.53 Most later accounts were taken from this book.54
The autobiography was written by a literary hack hired by Robert Kirby, or perhaps by Kirby himself. Talbot was working for Kirby as a domestic servant when he first published her story, and she may have dictated some of it to him or his hireling. Although the book claims that Talbot spent nine years at an upper-class girls’ boarding school, it is doubtful that she was more than barely literate. The autobiography follows the literary convention of the day whereby the heroine must be descended from at least the gentry and, if possible, from the aristocracy. Talbot claims, “I am the youngest of sixteen natural children whom my mother had by Lord William Talbot, Baron of Hensol.”55 This is extravagantly unlikely. What is known of Talbot’s life in London shows her to have been of the underclass.
To give an idea of how fact and fiction are mixed in the 1809 autobiography, here are a few of the details. The evidence that proves the material to be fiction is given in parentheses.
According to the autobiography, Talbot was born in London in 1778. Her mother died at her birth, and for most of her childhood years she was placed under the control of a series of legal guardians. In January 1792, when she was fourteen, Talbot was passed along to army captain Essex Bowen “of the Eighty-second Regiment of Foot,” who seduced her. “Intimidated by his manners,” she says, “and knowing that I had no friend near me, I became everything he could desire.”56 Later that year, when Captain Bowen was ordered to the West Indies, he dressed her as a boy and took her along as his servant under the name of John Taylor. (There is no officer named Essex Bowen in the army lists of 1791–96, but strangely enough there is a Lieutenant Essex Bowen in the navy lists.57 Perhaps Talbot’s biographer ran across this officer’s name when he was checking on naval reports from which to cull ships’ names. The Eighty-second Regiment was not in existence in 1792 and was not sent to the West Indies until 1795, three years after Talbot claimed to have gone there with the regiment. Furthermore, the Crown transport in which Bowen and Talbot were supposed to have sailed to the West Indies did exist, but in 1792 that vessel was on her way back to England from India.58)
Next the autobiography reports that Bowen, still with Talbot in tow, was sent to Europe. They both fought at Valenciennes (23 May–8 July 1793), and Bowen was killed. Talbot then deserted from the army, walked to Luxembourg, and there joined the crew of a French privateer that was soon captured by the English. Still using the name John Taylor, she was taken into the crew of the seventy-four-gun Brunswick and was wounded in the battle of the Glorious First of June, 1794. (There is no John Taylor listed in the muster book of the Brunswick in 1794 who could be Talbot.)59 When the Brunswick returned to Spithead, Talbot was sent to Haslar Naval Hospital in Gosport. (The name John Taylor is not among those sent from the Brunswick to Haslar, nor does the name appear in the hospital muster.)60
Adventure quickly follows adventure. Leaving Haslar, Talbot was assigned to the bomb Vesuvius, Captain Tomlinson, and soon after she went on board, the vessel was captured by the French in the English Channel. She then languished in a French prison for several years. (The Vesuvius was in the West Indies at this time and was not captured by the French.)61 After her release Talbot served first as steward and then as mate of the schooner Ariel, an American merchant vessel out of New York; she stayed with the captain’s family on shore and was courted by the captain’s niece.62 Finally, having returned to London, she was picked up by a press gang, and rather than spend more time in the navy, she revealed her gender. She was eighteen. So ends Talbot’s tale of her life at sea.
The autobiography then describes Talbot’s dissolute life in London where she frequented sailor’s taverns in male dress, worked at various occupations including that of actress, suffered chronically from an injured leg, multiplied her debts, and established an intimate long-term relationship with a woman who even stayed with her in debtors’ prison and supported her by doing needlework. Mary Anne Talbot died of general debility on 4 February 1808 at the age of thirty.
According to the autobiography, Talbot became such a celebrity in London that another woman tried to pass herself off as Mary Anne Talbot, but the “real Talbot” exposed her as a fraud.63 This is an odd twist to the story, considering that Talbot herself was not what she claimed to be. The most surprising thing about the Life and Surprising Adventures of Mary Anne Talbot is that it has for so long been accepted as a historical account.
SOCIETY’S ATTITUDE TOWARD WOMEN SEAMEN AND MARINES
When a seaman or marine was discovered to be a woman, she was not reprimanded, let alone convicted and punished for having duped the navy by enlisting under a false identity. On the contrary, she suddenly gained the kindly attention of her officers. Previous to the revelation of her gender, when she was merely one of hundreds of seamen, she was below the notice of her ship’s commissioned officers unless she misbehaved, in which case she was severely disciplined. But as soon as it was discovered that she was a woman, the officers’ attitude toward her changed; they were fascinated by her and treated her with gentle solicitude, and often she was lauded in the press for her bravery and patriotism.
We have already noted the case of the woman seaman Charles Waddall, who was convicted of the very serious offense of desertion and ordered to be flogged.64 As soon as it was realized that she was a woman, her punishment was canceled, and the most exalted of her superiors, including the admiral and the commissioner of Chatham Dockyard, rallied around to help her. They even gave her money from their own pockets.
A similar case was that of seventeen-year-old Margaret Thompson, who entered the navy under the name of George Thompson at Deptford in 1781.65 A theft was committed on board her ship, a general search was made, and when women’s apparel was found in Thompson’s sea chest, the officer on duty assumed that she had stolen the clothes when last on shore. She was brought before the captain, who ordered that she should receive three dozen lashes. At this point she revealed that she was a woman.
The romantic, breathless style of the news report about Thompson is representative of such accounts: “Judge what astonishment pervaded the mind of everyone on board who little expected to find in the person of George Thompson a blooming youthful girl.… The resolution with which she performed the most arduous tasks, mounting aloft with amazing intrepidity in the midst of danger, even when the most experienced seamen appeared daunted, astonished everyone.” Although the public were entranced by the vision of a “blooming girl” dressed as a man scampering up the rigging, they wanted to be reassured that there was no sexual deviation from accepted standards. This reassurance was, as usual, provided in the form of the lost-lover theme: “Being questioned by the Captain who she was and what could have induced her to take so extraordinary a step, she replied her name was Margaret Thompson, she had left her uncle, who lives in Northumberland Street [London], to see her sweetheart, who quitted England three years since, and is now resident at Bombay.”66
The Long-Held Tolerance of Female Transvestites
To discuss society’s attitude toward women seamen is primarily to discuss society’s attitude toward female transvestites. Whenever a seaman was discovered to be a woman, it was not her sea adventures that people wanted to hear about; it was why she had adopted a male role.
Attitudes toward female transvestites in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were complex. The public liked to toy with the idea of a woman pretending to be a man, but she was not taken seriously; her cross-dressing was not viewed as a serious attempt to compete with men on any level—economic, social, or sexual. The public enjoyed hearing about a woman who had taken on a male role, but they liked to be reassured that she eventually reverted to her true gender. An account in the Annual Register for 1782 makes a point of noting that a former seaman emerged as an “elegant woman” as soon as she could afford to do so: “In September last, at Poplar [London], Mrs. Coles, who during the last war served on board several men-of-war as a sailor, after her discharge, upon a small fortune devolving to her, resumed the female character and was from that time considered as a very polite and elegant woman.”67
Women passing as men were viewed very differently from the way transvestite men were judged. A man dressed in women’s clothes was a threat to men in general; he lowered the dignity and prestige associated with maleness. A woman passing as a man did not undermine the superior position of men; she was dismissed as an inferior imitating a superior. Far from being intimidating to men, she was merely amusing, just as a child dressing up as an adult is amusing.
Moral standards in eighteenth-century England were greatly influenced by Christian doctrine, and although the Bible forbids cross-dressing in either sex (Deuteronomy 22:5), the early church fathers taught that a woman gained spirituality by assuming the superior role of a man.68 St. Jerome wrote, “As long as a woman is for birth and children, she is different from man as body is from soul. But when she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, she will cease to be a woman and will be called man.”69 There have been a number of female transvestite saints; Joan of Arc is the best known.70 There are no male transvestite saints.
The Popularity of Breeches Parts
In England the fondness for female transvestites continued through the centuries. For example, from the seventeenth century onward, English theater audiences loved to watch pretty young actresses play the part of a man. There was hardly an actress of any note who did not play “breeches parts,” as these roles were called.71 Plays also often included the role of a woman appearing in male disguise. The best known is William Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer, in which a young woman, who is in love with the hero, Captain Manley, poses as a naval lieutenant and follows Manley to sea.72 This play, first produced in 1676, is still performed today.
The romantic theme of a beautiful woman dressed as a sailor was so popular that it was even attached to the love story of Emma Hamilton and Horatio Nelson. In the early nineteenth century a most unlikely account circulated that during the time when Admiral Nelson was with Lord and Lady Hamilton at Palermo, he and Emma Hamilton would dress in the clothes of common sailors and slip out at night to make the rounds of the harbor taverns, “mingling in the sailors’ pleasures, listening to their songs, and generally retiring unknown, taking care to settle the score [the check] as they went out.”73
Society’s Tolerance of Lesbianism
In the period we are dealing with—the years between the 1690s and the 1850s—the concept of lesbianism scarcely existed in England. (The word lesbian did not come into common usage in England until the twentieth century. An obscure word that dates from the early seventeenth century, tribade (from the Greek “to rub”), was used by the literati to identify a woman who had sexual relations with other women, but few people had ever heard the term.)74
While it was perfectly acceptable for young women to hug and kiss and hold hands, such shows of affection were not associated with sexual desire. Indeed, what women did among themselves was dismissed as being of little importance. In England there were never laws against sexual acts between women while laws against male homosexual activity were severe.
Lesbianism was not condoned, but it was ignored or denied. Most people went to church and believed what the Bible told them, and the Bible, although far less condemnatory of lesbianism than of male homosexuality, did refer to “the vile passions of women” who “changed the natural use [of their sexuality] into that which is against nature.”75 The clergy, however, seldom mentioned this passage in their sermons, preferring to concentrate on the sins committed by women as prostitutes and seducers of men. The publishers of the biographies of Hannah Snell and Mary Lacy, while hinting at lesbian affairs, were careful to reassure their readers that their heroines were in the final reckoning heterosexual. As we have seen, Hannah Snell’s biographer added a fictitious marriage, and in the autobiography of Mary Lacy the publisher not only appended a fictitious marriage but also included a specific, although unconvincing, denial that there was anything sexual in Lacy’s relationships with women.76
Marriages between Women
In eighteenth-century England, if two women tried to marry and were caught, the license was denied, but they were not prosecuted. Several such cases are found in the registers of marriage brokers in London:
Married, 1734, December 15: John Mountford of St. Ann’s, Soho, Tailor, Bachelor, and Mary Cooper, ditto, Spinster. Suspected 2 women, no certificate.
20 May 1737: John Smith, Gentleman, of St. James, Westminster, Bachelor, and Elizabeth Huthall, St. Giles, Spinster, at Wilson’s. By the opinion after matrimony, my clerk judged they were both women. If the person by name of John Smith be a man, he’s a little short fair thin man, not above five foot. After marriage I almost could prove them both women, [although] the one was dressed as a man, thin pale face and wrinkled chin.
1 October 1747: John Ferren, Gentleman’s Servant of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, Bachelor, and Deborah Nolan, ditto, Spinster. The supposed John Ferren was discovered after the ceremonies were over to be in person a woman.77
The only time a woman who married another woman was prosecuted was when she was accused of other wrongdoing. For example, in 1777 a woman was tried and sentenced “for going in man’s clothes and being married to three different women by a fictitious name, and for defrauding them of their money and clothes.” It was her having taken their money and possessions that brought on punishment. “She was sentenced to stand in the pillory at Charing Cross and to be imprisoned six months.”78 This was a comparatively light sentence at a time when a person accused of a petty theft could be hanged.
The account of the marriage of the woman seaman known as Samuel Bundy published in the 1760 Annual Register illustrates the tolerant attitude of eighteenth-century society toward lesbian relationships. There is no expression of outrage at Bundy’s behavior as there would have been if the couple had been male; on the contrary, Bundy is viewed in a most sympathetic light.
Samuel Bundy, aged twenty, married Mary Parlour in a church in Southwark, London, in October 1759. The Register’s garbled report first claims that for five months of wedded life Parlour was unaware that Bundy was a woman, accepting Bundy’s explanation that illness prevented a consummation of the marriage. Later the article contradicts this statement, saying that “the wife soon discovered the mistake she had made, but was determined for some time not to expose the matter.” Bundy revealed the following biographical information to a newspaper reporter:
Seven years since [at age thirteen] she was seduced from her mother (who then lived, and still lives, near Smithfield [London]), by a limner [an itinerant portrait painter], who debauched her. The day after, to avoid the pursuit of her mother or any discovery of her, should any advertisements [about her abduction] appear, he dressed her in boy’s apparel and adopted her for his son by the above name. With him she was a year. At length, they separated, and she took one voyage to sea which kept her employed more than twelve months, in which voyage she performed the several duties of a sailor.79
When Bundy returned from sea, still passing as male, “she bound herself to a Mr. Angel, a painter, in the Green Walk near Paris Garden Stairs, in the parish of Christ Church, Surrey,” in Southwark. “Whilst with Mr. Angel, she was taken notice of by a young woman [Mary Parlour] who lived at the King’s Head in Gravel-lane, Southwark, to whom she was duly married at a neighbouring church.” The relationship prospered until Bundy had a dispute with her master and lost her job, whereupon “she was obliged to depend upon her wife for support.”80 When all Mary Parlour’s money was spent and Parlour had even pawned her clothes, in a burst of anger she confided to her neighbors that her husband was a woman and had defrauded her of all her earthly goods. To avoid prosecution, Bundy ran away and entered a man-of-war, the Prince Frederick, then at Chatham, but soon deserted. Next she joined the crew of a merchant ship, which she found much more to her liking, but she missed Mary Parlour so much, even though Parlour had betrayed her, that she returned to Southwark to see her, knowing that she would be arrested. Bundy was tried, found guilty, and sent to prison for defrauding Parlour of her money and clothes.
Despite Parlour’s earlier anger at Bundy, the two were reunited. The Register notes, “There [also] seems a strong love and friendship on the other side, as she [Mary Parlour] keeps the prisoner company in her confinement.” The article ends with an encomium for Bundy: “The prisoner makes a very good figure as a man; and in her proper dress cannot fail of being a very agreeable woman. She is a very good workwoman at shoemaking and painting; declares she never knew any other man than her seducer; has made herself known, sent for her mother, and appears to be a very sensible woman.”81
Society’s Intolerance of Male Homosexuality
In sharp contrast to the tolerance of intimacy between women, sexual acts between men, from the Middle Ages onward, were punishable by death. (Sodomy and buggery were the terms used for male homosexuality. The word homosexuality came into common usage only in the 1880s.) In the Middle Ages sodomy, together with other sexual sins such as incest, bestiality, and adultery, was tried in an ecclesiastical court, popularly referred to as the bawdy court. Sodomy was punished by torture and death. When, beginning with Henry VIII, civil courts took over the prosecution of sexual offenses, sodomy continued to be a capital offense, and so it remained until 1861.82
Sodomy was one of the few capital crimes in the Royal Navy. The Twenty-ninth Article of War states, “If any person of the fleet shall commit the unnatural and detestable sin of sodomy with man or beast, he shall be punished with death by the sentence of a court martial.”83
The English had such antipathy to sexual acts between men that even naming such an act was avoided when at all possible, and a great variety of strong adjectives were used to describe the crime or sin: foul, unnatural, detestable, horrid, abominable. This was true over a period of at least seven hundred years. “The Revelations to the Monk of Evesham,” written in 1196, referred to homosexuals as “leuyd doers of that foule synne the which oughte not be namyd.”84 Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634) wrote in his definitive work on English law, “Buggery is a detestable and abominable sin, amongst Christians not to be named, committed by carnal knowledge against the ordinance of the Creator, and order of nature, by mankind with mankind, or with brute beast, or by womankind with brute beast.” (Notice that carnal knowledge of womankind with womankind is not included.)85 William Blackstone (1723–80) wrote that “the very mention [of sodomy] is a disgrace to human nature,” adding that he would follow “the delicacy of our English law which treats it in its very indictments as a crime not to be named.”86 Similar views were expressed throughout the nineteenth century.
A male homosexual was a threat to the very concept of maleness. He undermined the comforting belief that men, by their very nature, were profound, virile, strong, and direct. A homosexual was stereotyped as effeminate; he, like a woman, was superficial, perverse, weak, and devious.
Englishmen, unlike other European men, did not approve of any show of affection between men. Admiral Sir Thomas Pasley, for example, in his journals covering the period from 1778 to 1782, mentioned his distaste for the way some French officers, prisoners in Pasley’s ship, expressed their gratitude for his kindness to them: “I had the honour,” he wrote, “of being not only hugged but kissed and slabbered by them. Nasty dogs! I hate a Man’s kiss.” Again he expressed his dismay when, at a party on board his ship, some Portuguese officers, including a chaplain, “grew warm with liquor before the day was over, and not a little amorous.” “I never was,” he said, “so hugged and squeezed in my life, absolutely bit in ecstasy by the priest. Beasts!”87
The Curious Case of Elizabeth Bowden
In the 1807 court-martial of William Berry, first lieutenant of the sloop Hazard, there is an interesting juxtaposition of a young female transvestite serving as chief witness against a man of twenty-two being tried for the capital crime of sodomy. The witness, fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Bowden, had served as a boy, third class, in the crew of the Hazard. When “she appeared in court dressed in a long jacket and blue trowsers,” neither the naval officers who served on the court nor the press gave any indication that they thought her clothing inappropriate.88 Not only was her transvestism ignored; no one even suggested that her having served in the navy under a false identity discredited her as a witness.
Elizabeth Bowden was born in Truro, Cornwall. After the death of both her parents, finding herself penniless and alone, she set off on foot from Truro to Plymouth to ask for help from an older sister who had left home some time earlier. When she reached Plymouth she could not find her sister, and according to a newspaper account, “she was obliged through want to disguise herself and volunteer into His Majesty’s service.”89
Early in February 1807 Mistress Bowden, under the name of John Bowden, was entered on the books of the Hazard, Captain Charles Dilkes, and she served for six weeks before her gender was discovered.90 How the discovery was made is not disclosed. When her officers learned that she was a girl, they did not send her ashore. “Since she made known her sex,” the Annual Register noted, “the captain and officers have paid every attention to her; they gave her an apartment to sleep in, and she still remains on board the Hazard as an attendant on the officers of the ship.”91 She was still on board at the time of the court-martial and was identified in the proceedings as a member of the crew.
The court-martial of Lieutenant Berry took place in the Salvador del Mundo on 2 and 3 October 1807 in the waters of the Hamoaze, off Plymouth. Berry was charged with having committed, on 23 August 1807 on board the sloop Hazard, “the unnatural and detestable sin of sodomy with Thomas Gibbs, a boy of the second class belonging to the said sloop, punishable by the Twenty-ninth Article of War.” He was further accused “of having frequently been guilty with the said Thomas Gibbs of that part of the Second Article of War relating to [moral] uncleanness or other scandalous actions.”92
The crime occurred on a lazy summer Sunday as the vessel was returning to Plymouth, with the men relaxing after their week’s work. Bowden was idling away her off-duty hours when the boy Gibbs, a servant to the gunroom mess, was called into Lieutenant Berry’s cabin. The cabin door was then shut. (Gibbs’s age is not given, but he was under fourteen; otherwise he would have been tried for sodomy together with Berry.)93 Bowden decided to see what was going on. She sneaked down to Berry’s cabin door.
The court record gives her testimony:
Elizabeth, alias John Bowden (a girl), borne on the Hazard’s books as a boy of the third class, was sworn and examined:
Prosecutor: Did you ever, during the time you have been on board the Hazard, look through the keyhole of Mr. Berry’s cabin door and see the boy Thomas Gibbs in any way in an indecent manner employed with his hands with the prisoner?
Berry: Yes, a little before we came in [to Plymouth harbor]. I looked through the keyhole and I saw Thomas Gibbs playing with the prisoner’s privates. I went up and called the gunroom steward and told him to come down and look through the keyhole and see what they were about. He did come down, but did not look in and called me aloft and told me to sit down.
Prosecutor: Have you frequently observed Thomas Gibbs go into the prisoner’s cabin, and the door shut, and the prisoner at the same time in the cabin?
Berry: Yes.
Prosecutor: Did Thomas Gibbs ever relate to you or in your hearing what passed between him and the prisoner? And what induced you to look through the keyhole?
Berry: Gibbs has never told me anything that has happened—he was called in several times, and I thought I would see what he was about.
Prosecutor: Are you sure that it was the prisoner’s private parts that you saw Thomas Gibbs have hold of?
Berry: Yes.
Court [one of the officers judging the case]: What light was there in the cabin at the time?
Berry: One candle.
The witness withdrew.94
The case against Lieutenant Berry was far from clear. John Hoskin, the gunroom steward, whom Bowden had summoned to Berry’s door, testified that the boy Gibbs was a thief and a liar; he had stolen from Berry and other officers and then refused to admit it. Berry denied all the charges. He said that Gibbs had brought the false accusations as revenge after Berry threatened to thrash him.
The court adjudged the charges fully proved, and on 19 October 1807 Berry was hanged at the starboard fore-yardarm of the Hazard.95 Nothing further is known about Elizabeth Bowden.
Society’s Attitudes Summarized
Although there were exceptions, society’s attitude toward the transvestism of women seaman was one of tolerant amusement. A woman’s cross-dressing was viewed as a harmless masquerade rather than as a serious attempt to storm the bastions of male dominance. While male homosexuality was a capital offense, there were no laws against sexual relations between women. The public liked the image of the delicate young woman who acquired a male role and went to sea to find her lost lover. More likely motives—that a woman joined the navy or marines in order to improve her social and economic status, to escape the tedium or unpleasantness of her situation on land, or because she identified with men—were ignored.
THE LAST OF THE WOMEN SEAMEN
The latest case I have found of a woman in male disguise joining the navy is that of William Brown, the black woman mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, who served from around 1804 to around 1816. After 1815, following the close of the wars with France and the United States, the British Royal Navy was greatly reduced in size. Without the need to raise huge numbers of men, officers could be discriminating in choosing their crews; they checked the background of newly entered men, so that it became much more difficult for a recruit to hide his, or her, identity. As the nineteenth century progressed, there were routine physical examinations upon entry, and regulations required the men to bathe and change their underclothes regularly. It became impossible for a woman to hide her gender.
This does not mean that women would not have continued to join the navy and marines if they could. There are several recorded cases of women passing as men in merchant ships and whalers in the mid-nineteenth century, but they do not concern us here.96