“For quarter, for quarter,” the Spanish lads did cry,
“No quarter, no quarter,” this damsel did reply;
“You’ve had the best of quarter that I can well afford,
You must fight, sink, or swim, my boys, or jump overboard.”
So now the battle’s over, we’ll drink a can of wine,
And you will drink to your love, and I will drink to mine;
Good health unto the damsel who fought upon the main,
And here’s to the royal ship, the Rainbow by name.
—“As We Were A-Sailing”
THE BRITISH ROYAL NAVY in the Age of Sail—ruler of the waves and protector of the world’s largest empire—has always been accounted a strictly male preserve, Britain’s strongest bastion of male exclusivity. The belief was ancient and ubiquitous that women had no place at sea. They not only were weak, hysterical, and feckless and distracted the men from their duties, but they also brought bad luck to the ships they traveled in; they called forth supernatural winds that sank the vessels and drowned the men.
Despite this superstitious prohibition, there were women living and working in naval ships from the late seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, although their presence on board was officially ignored and even hidden.
It was not until 1993 that Great Britain, following the lead of other countries including the United States, integrated women into the regular navy as full-fledged sailors. Officially, women were first brought into the Royal Navy in 1917, but only as an auxiliary force: the Women’s Royal Naval Service. The Wrens were recruited to release men from shore duty; in fact, their peculiar motto was “Never at Sea.” In 1919, at the close of World War I, the Wrens were disbanded, but in 1938 they were reinstituted and proved their prowess and courage from World War II up to 1993. Although in 1990 some Wrens were assigned to sea duty, they continued to be, as they had always been, denied many of the responsibilities, opportunities, and benefits offered by the regular service. To cite one odd example, Wren officers’ uniforms were without the gold braid used on the uniforms of the regular naval officers. Gold was deemed too expensive for use by a women’s auxiliary.
The idea of women serving in the navy has always been resisted. A Times (London) article of 2 November 1993, issued on the day the Wrens were incorporated into the regular navy, noted, “The Wrens have always suffered from a public image problem. For nearly 80 years…as far as the public was concerned, the girls in navy blue were either frustrated lesbians or uniformed nymphomaniacs attempting to splice not only the mainbrace but also every petty officer aboard.”1 Few of the people who today are opposed to women serving in naval ships are aware of the three-hundred-year-old tradition of women living on board. The sea service of women of earlier centuries was, of course, very different from that of the women in the twentieth-century navy. Women on board naval ships in the Age of Sail played a variety of widely divergent roles that divide into three main categories, discussed in the first three chapters of this book.
The largest category was composed of the hundreds of prostitutes who shared the quarters of the crew on the lower deck whenever a ship was in port. To understand why the navy unofficially condoned this practice, and to discover what led the prostitutes to this appalling fate, requires not only knowledge of naval history but awareness of the situation of women in the society as a whole.
Second, there were the wives of warrant officers, many of whom spent years at sea; the ship was often their only home. These women were active participants in battle, nursing the wounded and carrying powder to the guns. They too were ignored by the Admiralty; their names were not entered on the ships’ books, and they received no pay and no food rations. (Wives, daughters, and guests of captains and admirals also traveled in naval ships, but their reasons for going to sea were different, and so were their experiences on board. Their role is not discussed in this book.)
The third group was composed of women in male disguise who actually served in naval crews or as marines. Reports of such women have always titillated the public, but no one, including the women’s own officers, took them seriously once their true gender was discovered. Accounts of their exploits were embellished with themes from a popular genre of fiction in which the heroine goes to sea to find her lost lover. No one tried very hard to answer difficult questions about the real female tars, questions such as what induced them to join the navy when most of the men in naval crews had to be forced on board by press gangs.2
The final chapter of this book is devoted to the autobiography of the redoubtable woman seaman and shipwright Mary Lacy, who served in the Royal Navy for twelve years. Her detailed account of her life in the navy during and following the Seven Years’ War provides insights into the reasons why women such as she joined the navy and were so determined to continue to serve despite severe hardships, insights impossible to come to from the other meager sources available.
The primary aims of this study are to disentangle myth from fact in the stories of the women who lived on the lower deck of the ships of the sailing navy, to discover why these women chose to participate in the harsh life on board, and to place them within the social context of the limited roles open to lower-class British women in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
I have modernized the spelling and punctuation of contemporary quotations except in a few instances where the original form provides special insight into the culture of the time.