Sources from the Public Record Office, Kew, London, are cited using the following abbreviations:
ADM = Admiralty Records in the Public Record Office
ADM 1 class, in-letters of the Admiralty Board
ADM 1/5253–5474, 1680–1839, Admiralty minutes of evidence and verdicts in court-martial, returned by the judge-advocate in each case
ADM 2 class, out-letters of the Admiralty
ADM 36 and 37, ships’ muster books
ADM 42, muster books for ships in ordinary (not in commission)
ADM 82, Chatham Chest Records; later became Greenwich Hospital Records
ADM 102, naval hospital musters, 1740–1860
WO = War Office documents in the Public Record Office
WO 116 class, Chelsea Hospital Out-pension Admission Books, 1715–1882
Most of the following references to Admiralty Records are to ships’ muster books (ADM 36, 37, and 42). It is remarkable how many of these eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century musters have been preserved, considering the fortunes of war, the erosions of time, and the Blitz. While it is pleasurable to work with the actual muster books, the pleasure is mixed with anxiety, for the musters are often out of sequence and the names are listed, not alphabetically, but in the random order in which the men lined up on deck for the lieutenant to list them. There are hundreds of entries, written carelessly in an obsolete style of handwriting; abbreviations are used, and the ink is faded. But what a thrill when, after combing seemingly endless columns, one finds the searched-for name.
Introduction
Epigraph from John Masefield, ed., A Sailor’s Garland, 2d ed. (London: Methuen, 1908), 292–93.
1. Julia Llewellyn Smith, “All the Nice Girls Now Are Sailors,” Times (London), 2 November 1993. To splice (repair) the main brace was the traditional naval term for issuing the crew an extra ration of rum or grog in bad weather or after they had performed an especially arduous task. The main brace was attached to the lower yard of the mainmast and was hauled to bring the ship around to the wind—a difficult job.
2. In regard to the term female tars, used in the title of this book, tar, or Jack Tar, was a nickname for naval seamen. It probably derived from their use of tar to slick down their pigtails and to coat their outer garments against wet weather.
CHAPTER 1
Prostitutes and Seamen’s Wives on Board in Port
Epigraph from George G. Carey, ed., A Sailor’s Songbag: An American Rebel in an English Prison, 1777–1779 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), 147.
1. Sir John Mennes to Samuel Pepys, 19 April 1666, Calendar of State Papers Domestic (1665–1666), quoted in J. J. Keevil, Christopher Lloyd, and J. L. S. Coulter, Medicine and the Navy, 1200–1900, 4 vols., vols. 1 and 2 by Keevil, vols. 3 and 4 by Lloyd and Coulter (Edinburgh: E. and S. Livingstone, 1957–63), 2:91.
2. The Diary of Henry Teonge, Chaplain on Board H.M.’s Ships Assistance, Bristol, and Royal Oak, Anno 1675–1679, ed. G. E. Manwaring (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1927), 29.
3. William Robinson, Nautical Economy (London: William Robinson, 1836), reprinted as Jack Nastyface: Memoirs of a Seaman (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1973), 87–92.
4. Memoirs of Admiral the Right Honourable, the Earl of St. Vincent [John Jervis], ed. Jedidiah Stephens Tucker, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1844), 2:120.
5. [Edward Hawker], Statement Respecting the Prevalence of Certain Immoral Practices Prevailing in His Majesty’s Navy (London: Ellerton and Henderson, 1821), 3–5.
6. Bumboats were round-bottomed oared boats, privately owned, that brought produce and other items out to the ships in harbor. The derivation of the word bumboat is obscure. It may come from the Dutch word boomboot, a similarly shaped fishing boat. The nineteenth-century naval historian William Laird Clowes suggested that the name derived from bum, the buttocks, because of the boat’s clumsy shape. William Laird Clowes, The Royal Navy: A History from the Earliest Times to the Present, 7 vols. (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1897–1903), vol. 5, 1803-1815, 26 n.
7. See Suzanne J. Stark, “Sailors’ Pets in the Royal Navy in the Age of Sail,” American Neptune 51 (Spring 1991): 77–82.
8. James Anthony Gardner, Above and under Hatches, ed. Christopher Lloyd (London: Batchworth, 1955), 27.
9. William Richardson, A Mariner of England: An Account of the Career of William Richardson…[1780–1819] as Told by Himself, ed. Spencer Childers (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1970), 225–26.
10. Ibid., 226.
11. Edward Thompson, A Sailor’s Letters, Written to His Select Friends in England during His Voyages and Travels in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America from 1754 to 1759, 2 vols., 2d ed. (London: T. Becket, 1767), 2:24–25.
12. “Captain’s Orders, No. 21, Andromeda at Sea, August 1, 1788,” quoted in Letters and Papers of Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Thomas Byam Martin, ed. Richard Vesey Hamilton, 3 vols. (London: Navy Records Society, 1903), appendix A, 1:347.
13. A Seaman’s Life on Board a Man-of-War (Portsmouth: Griffin and Co., c. 1881), 5–6.
14. Linda McKee (Maloney), “Mad Jack and the Missionaries,” American Heritage 22 (April 1971): 35–36; David F. Long, “Mad Jack”: The Biography of Captain John Percival, USN, 1779–1862 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993), 67–72.
15. N. A. M. Rodger denies that the Georgian navy “was a floating concentration camp,” but his contention that leave was regularly granted is based on specific instances when officers did give leave. These exceptions do not prove the rule. Rodger does not account for seamen’s recurring complaints over lack of leave, nor does he explain why, if adequate leave was given, the navy allowed hundreds of prostitutes to come on board its ships. See N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986), 143–44.
16. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), 1:348. Johnson reiterated the idea several times. See 2:438, 5:514.
17. Michael Oppenheim, History of the Administration of the Royal Navy from Early Times through 1661 and of Merchant Shipping in Relation to the Navy (London: John Lane, Bodley Head, 1896), vol. 1, 1509–1661, 318.
18. Christopher Lloyd, The British Seaman, 1200–1860: A Social Survey (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970), 245.
19. See Michael Lewis, A Social History of the Navy, 1793–1815 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960), 419–21, 442, 413.
20. Lloyd, British Seaman, 258–64. Smallpox vaccination did not become compulsory until 1864.
21. Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood, recalling the time in 1780 when he was captain of the twenty-eight-gun frigate Hinchinbroke at San Juan, wrote, “I survived most of my ship’s company, having buried in four months 180 of the 200 who composed it. Mine was not a singular case for every ship that was long there suffered to the same degree. The transports’ men all died, and some of the ships, having none left to take care of them, sunk in the harbour.” A Selection from the Public and Private Correspondence of Vice-Admiral Lord [Cuthbert] Collingwood, ed. G. L. Newnham Collingwood, 2 vols., 5th ed. (London: James Ridgway, 1837), 1:10. See also Lloyd and Coulter, Medicine and the Navy, 3:171–72.
22. Between 1653 and 1797 an able seaman earned twenty-four shillings a month; an ordinary seaman, nineteen shillings; and a landman (after that rating was established), eighteen shillings. Deductions amounted to almost two shillings. These wages were less than merchant crews earned—a great deal less in wartime, when men in privateers often made excellent money and regular cargo vessels were competing with the privateers for men. Even soldiers earned more, although their expenses were higher: in 1797 a common soldier was paid thirty shillings a month. By 1806 an able seaman earned 33s. 6d.; an ordinary seaman, 25s. 6d.; and a landman, 22s. 6d. Even with inflation this was an improvement, but pay was still late in coming. See Lloyd, British Seaman, 248–50; Rodger, Wooden World, 125; and Brian Lavery, Nelson’s Navy: The Ships, Men, and Organization, 1793–1815 (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1989), 130.
23. Thomas Cochrane, The Autobiography of a Seaman, ed. Douglas Cochrane (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1890), 322–23.
24. W. Senior, “The Navy as Penitentiary,” Mariner’s Mirror 16 (1930): 313–14.
25. See Lewis, Social History, 127–33, and Lloyd, British Seaman, 122, 158–59, 213–19.
26. See Rodger, Wooden World, 159–61.
27. Beer supplemented or replaced water, which was usually foul. The rum ration was served morning and evening in the form of grog (rum mixed with water, and later lime or lemon juice). The half-pint rum ration was halved in 1824 and halved again in 1850. It was discontinued in 1970. See James Pack, Nelson’s Blood (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1983).
28. Charles Vinicombe Penrose, Observations on Corporal Punishment (London: Bodmin, 1824), 51–65, quoted in Eugene L. Rasor, Reform in the Royal Navy: A Social History of the Lower Deck, 1850 to 1880 (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, Archon Books, 1976), 97.
29. “A Booke of Orders for the Warre both by sea and land written by Thomas Audley at the Comand of King Henry the viij,” Harleian Collection, British Library. The quotation comes from the section “Orders to be used in the Kinges majestes navie by the see,” which is probably not by Audley. It dates from before 1553. Since this section refers to the king’s navy, it predates Mary’s reign (1553–58). See C. S. L. Davis, “Naval Discipline in the Early Sixteenth Century,” Mariner’s Mirror 48 (1962): 223.
30. Regulations and Instructions Relating to His Majesty’s Service at Sea, Established by His Majesty in Council (1731), p. 31, article 38.
31. Regulations and Instructions (1756), p. 200, article 11, “Rules for Preserving Cleanliness,” item 5.
32. Ibid., items 1–4.
33. William Henry Dillon, A Narrative of My Professional Adventures, ed. Michael Lewis, 2 vols. (London: Navy Records Society, 1952), 1:96.
34. “Captain Richard G. Keats’ Orders for H.M.S. Superb, 1803–1804,” Mariner’s Mirror 7 (1921): 317.
35. Robert Wauchope, A Short Narrative of God’s Merciful Dealings (London: Privately printed, 1862), quoted in Evelyn Berckman, The Hidden Navy (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1973), 24–26.
36. The Life, Journals, and Correspondence of Samuel Pepys, ed. John Smith, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1841), 1:111–12.
37. For two descriptions of payday, see Robinson, Jack Nastyface, 95–101, and John Harvey Boteler, Recollections of My Sea Life from 1808 to 1830, ed. David Bonner-Smith (London: Navy Records Society, 1942), 196–97.
38. Every man in a ship that captured an enemy vessel, or prize, received a share of the proceeds from the sale of the vessel and her cargo. The size of the share allotted was based on rank. Officers could grow rich on the percentage they got from a prize, while a seaman’s share seldom amounted to more than a few pounds. Still, the hope of prize money loomed large in most seamen’s dreams because of those very rare occasions when seamen had received a large amount. One of the greatest prizes was the Spanish treasure ship Hermione, captured off Cadiz in 1762 by two British frigates; each captain got £65,000 and every seaman got £485, over twice the yearly wages of an ordinary seaman. Lloyd, British Seaman, 252–54.
39. “New Sea Song,” in C. Harding Firth, ed., Naval Songs and Ballads (London: Navy Records Society, 1908), 239–40.
40. Diary of Henry Teonge, 36–38.
41. “The Sea-Martyrs; or, the Seamen’s Sad Lamentation for Their Faithful Service, Bad Pay, and Cruel Usage,” in Firth, Naval Songs, 141. For information on the Suffolk mutiny, see Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs from September 1678 to April 1714, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1857), 2:144.
42. Rodger, Wooden World, 134.
43. “Boscawen’s Letters to His Wife, 1755–1756,” in The Naval Miscellany, vol. 4, ed. Christopher Lloyd (London: Navy Records Society, 1952), 197. In the previous day’s letter Boscawen noted that he was sending the money to the wives through his own private agent “Messrs. Child” (196). And in a letter from Plymouth dated 26 April 1755 he wrote, “You will like my west-country men that have been sent from Penzance, several of them have been with me today to desire me to send their wives their advance money, which I have done by the hand of Mr. Veale” (176–77).
44. The actual title of the act is “An Act for the Better Relief of the Poor of This Kingdom,” 13 and 14 Car. 2, c. 12 (1662). It was better for the taxpayers, not for the poor.
45. House of Commons Journals 31 (1767): 248.
46. The History of Portsmouth (Portsmouth: J. C. Mottley, 1801), 93–94; “Order for Purchasing Houses and Making a Workhouse for the Poor of the Parish of Portsea” (1729), quoted in Robert East, ed., Extracts from Records in the Possession of the Municipal Corporation of the Borough of Portsmouth (Portsmouth: Henry Lewis, 1891), 737.
47. Richard Nicholls Worth, History of Plymouth from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Plymouth: W. Brendon and Son, 1871), 198.
48. Llewellynn Jewitt, A History of Plymouth (London: Simpkins, Marshall; Plymouth: W. H. Luke, 1873), 610–11; Worth, History of Plymouth, 195–97.
49. Jewitt, History of Plymouth, 611 n.
50. Worth, History of Plymouth, 202.
51. From the Vagrancy Act of 1597 (39 Eliz. 1, c. 4) to the Vagrancy Act of 1792 (32 Geo. 3, c. 45), “rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars” were to be publicly whipped and then passed to their home parishes. See Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government: English Poor Law History, Part 1, The Old Poor Law (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1927), 351–55. According to the act of 1792, women were not to be publicly whipped, but there were cases of public whippings after that date. Flogging of women in private was not abolished until 1819 (59 Geo. 3, c. 12). See Webb and Webb, English Local Government, 382–83.
52. Leeds Intelligencer, 6 March 1787, quoted in ibid., 364–65 n. 4.
53. “Oh! Cruel,” in Firth, Naval Songs, 324.
54. “The Seamen’s Wives’ Vindication,” in ibid., 145.
55. Marriage Act: 26 Geo. 3, c. 33 (1754).
56. Alexander Keith, Observations on the Act for Preventing Clandestine Marriages (London, 1753), quoted in John Ashton, The Fleet, Its River, Prison, and Marriages (New York: Scribner and Welford, 1888), 359–60.
57. “Report of the Committee on Sir John Fielding’s Plan for Preventing Burglaries and Robberies,” Parliamentary History 16 (10 April 1770): 929.
58. Vagrancy Act: 3 Geo. 4, c. 40 (1822). The Vagrancy Act of 1744 (17 Geo. 2, c. 5), which was the basis for subsequent acts, divided vagrants into three categories. The least serious offenders were classed as “idle and disorderly”; next came “rogues and vagabonds,” which included beggars; and last were “incorrigible rogues and vagabonds”—hardened criminals.
59. Vagrancy Act: 5 Geo. 4, c. 83 (1824).
60. A great deal has been written about the Contagious Diseases Acts. For a brief summary of their effects on prostitution in naval ports, see Rasor, Reform in the Royal Navy, 87–96. For Plymouth background, see Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 71–73, 153–67.
61. An Address to the Officers of His Majesty’s Navy by an Old Naval Surgeon (Dublin: Curry, 1824), quoted in Lloyd and Coulter, Medicine and the Navy, 3:198. In the 1821 census the population of the parishes of Portsmouth, Portsea, and Alverstoke (including Gosport) totaled 55,990. The Portsmouth Guide (Portsmouth: Hollingsworth, 1828).
62. The census of 1821 lists 2,881 males to 4,388 females in Portsmouth and 17,544 males to 20,835 females for Portsea, for a combined total of 20,425 males to 25,223 females, or 4,798 more females than males. Portsmouth Guide.
63. Unpublished journal, “Samuel Stokes, 1806–1807 and 1809–1815: His Life in the Merchant and Royal Navies,” excerpted in Henry Baynham, From the Lower Deck: The Royal Navy, 1780–1840 (Barre, Mass.: Barre, 1970), 130.
64. Vagrancy Act: 17 Geo. 2, c. 5, sec. 9 and 28 (1744); orders of 1756 quoted in Webb and Webb, English Local Government, 367–68.
65. Quota Acts: 35 Geo. 3, c. 5 and 69 (1795). See Lloyd, British Seaman, 198–200.
66. The Private Correspondence of Admiral Lord Collingwood, ed. Edward Hughes (London: Navy Records Society, 1957), 86.
67. Lloyd and Coulter, Medicine and the Navy, 3:357.
68. Ronald Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality (Toronto: Macmillan, 1969), 226.
69. A moistened vaginal sponge attached to a ribbon was suggested in Practical Hints on How to Enjoy Life and Pleasure without Harm to Either Sex (1826). Charles Knowlton (an American), in The Fruits of Philosophy (London: James Watson, 1834), suggested the use, within five minutes after coitus, of a douche of dissolved alum, or sulfate of zinc, or saleratus (sodium bicarbonate), or chloride of soda, or vinegar. Pearsall, Worm in the Bud, 215–16.
70. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 537; Norman E. Himes, Medical History of Contraception (New York: Schocken, 1970), 195, 197–200. Himes quotes (188–90) the sixteenth-century Italian scientist Fallopio (for whom the Fallopian tubes are named), who in his book on syphilis urged the use of a linen sheath to prevent infection. Gabrielle Fallopio, De morbo Gallico liber absolutismus (Patavii [Batavia], 1546), 52.
71. Walkowitz, Prostitution, 214–15, 313 nn. 5 and 18.
72. Lester S. King, The Medical World of the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 313. King gives the ingredients of two medicines used to treat gonorrhea, which he found in a British (probably Scottish) dispensary ledger of 1787–88. The first, prescribed for a thirty-two-year-old woman, combined calomel, sugar of lead, white vitriol, crab’s eyes, opium, and gum arabic; the second, for a fourteen-year-old girl, consisted of oil of sweet almonds and mucilage gum arabic, followed the next day by opium and extract of lead in gum arabic.
73. See Walkowitz, Prostitution, 152–55, 193–201. The social background of Plymouth prostitutes in the 1870s that Walkowitz describes was very similar to that of the prostitutes of Plymouth and Portsmouth in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
74. G. J. Marcus, Heart of Oak: A Survey of British Sea Power in the Georgian Era (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 143–46; F. H. Edwards, Crime and Law and Order in Mid-Victorian Portsmouth: The Portsmouth Papers No. 55 (Portsmouth: Portsmouth City Council, 1989), 3.
75. Henry Whitfeld, Plymouth and Devonport in Times of War and Peace (Plymouth: E. Chapple, 1900), 402, 405.
76. [Hawker], Statement Respecting the Prevalence of Certain Immoral Practices, 34 n.
77. Walkowitz, Prostitution, 306 n. 7.
78. Samuel Leech, Six Years in a Man of War (Boston: J. M. Whittemore, 1843), excerpted in Baynham, From the Lower Deck, 94; Robinson, Jack Nastyface, 89.
79. John Fielding, “Plan for Preserving Those Deserted Girls in This Town Who Become Prostitutes from Necessity,” added to An Account of the Origin and Effects of a Police Set on Foot by His Grace the Duke of Newcastle in the Year 1753 upon a Plan Presented to His Grace by the Late Henry Fielding, Esq. (London: A. Millar, 1758), quoted in R. Leslie-Melville, The Life and Work of Sir John Fielding (London: Lincoln Williams, c. 1934), 123.
80. A pamphlet published by the Fund of Mercy (London, 1813) took the information from the Times (London) of 7 November 1812. Quoted in Ford K. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 25.
81. William Tait, Magdalinism: An Inquiry into the Extent, Causes, and Consequences of Prostitution in Edinburgh (Edinburgh: P. Rickard, 1840), 24.
82. Michael Pearson, The Age of Consent (Newton Abbot, Devon: David and Charles, 1972), 25.
83. George Pinckard, Notes on the West Indies: Written during the Expedition under the Command of the Late General Sir Ralph Abercromby, 3 vols. (London, 1806; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1970), 1:36–38.
84. Robert Mercer Wilson, “Remarks on Board His Majesty’s Ship Unité of Forty Guns,” in Henry George Thursfield, ed., Five Naval Journals (London: Navy Records Society, 1951), 131–32.
85. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians, 22.
86. Ibid., 329–40.
87. See Jewitt, History of Plymouth, 616–17; Walkowitz, Prostitution, 298 n. 28.
88. Between 1874 and 1877, of 1,310 prostitutes in Rescue Society homes, 1,080 had formerly been in domestic service. Twenty-fifth Annual Report of the Rescue Society (London, 1877), 14, cited in Walkowitz, Prostitution, 260 n. 13.
89. James Beard Talbot, The Miseries of Prostitution (London: James Madden, 1844), 69.
90. A handwritten note on the Admiralty library’s copy of [Hawker], Statement Respecting the Prevalence of Certain Immoral Practices Prevailing in His Majesty’s Navy, 2d ed. (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1822), quoted in Lloyd and Coulter, Medicine and the Navy, 4:197.
91. [Hawker], Statement Respecting the Prevalence of Certain Immoral Practices (1821 ed.), 1.
92. Ibid., 39.
93. For a description of the way U. S. Navy officers also ignored homosexual incidents on board their ships see the autobiographical novel by Herman Melville, White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War (New York, 1850; reprint, New York: Grove, 1956), 353–54.
94. [Hawker] Statement Respecting the Prevalence of Certain Immoral Practices (1821 ed.), 27–28.
95. Ibid., 22.
96. Ibid., 34–35 n.
97. Anselm John Griffiths, Observations on Some Points of Seamanship with Practical Hints on Naval Oeconomy (Cheltenham, England: J. J. Hadley, Minerva, 1824), 43, 45, 46. On the matter of shore leave, Griffiths practiced what he preached; he had given shore leave to his men even during the late wars, and few deserted. Griffiths, Impressment Fully Considered (London: Norie, 1826), 158.
98. Griffiths, Observations, 49.
99. Ibid., 43–49.
100. Regulations Established by the King in Council; and Instructions Issued by the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty Relating to His Majesty’s Service at Sea (London: John Murray, 1826).
101. For information on the series of naval reforms from 1815 to the 1860s, see Lloyd, British Seaman, 271–84, and Michael Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 1814–1864: A Social History (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965).
102. David Hannay, “Odds and Ends of the Old Navy,” Mariner’s Mirror 4 (1914): 181.
CHAPTER 2
Women of the Lower Deck at Sea
Epigraph from ADM 1/432, Pellew to secretary of the Admiralty, dispatch from the Queen Charlotte, Algiers Bay, 28 August 1816.
1. In his anonymous pamphlet against the practice of permitting prostitutes on board naval ships, Admiral Edward Hawker claimed that in 1808 a captain took nine women common to the ship’s company to sea; but Hawker got the information secondhand, and he failed to name either the ship or the captain. [Edward Hawker], Statement Respecting the Prevalence of Certain Immoral Practices Prevailing in His Majesty’s Navy (London: Ellerton and Henderson, 1821), 9.
2. Thomas Walsingham (1360–1420), Historia brevis (London, 1574), quoted in Nicholas Harris Nicolas, A History of the Royal Navy, from the Earliest Times to the Wars of the French Revolution, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1847), 2:265–66.
3. Nicolas, History, 2:280–84. Nicolas does not attribute the drowning of the women to the sailors’ superstitious fears, but it seems obvious to me; otherwise it is hard to account for such an extreme action. This is the earliest example I have discovered of the superstition that a woman at sea brought forth deadly storms. It was prevalent by the seventeenth century. The closely related belief that female witches had power over the winds was found throughout Northern Europe from pre-Christian times. Pomponius Mela, writing around A.D. 40, noted that the Druids in Gaul believed in the power of women over the winds. Fletcher S. Bassett, Legends and Superstitions of the Sea and Sailors (Chicago: Belford, Clarke, 1885), 110. Even at the late date of 1969 there was concern that a visit by Britain’s Princess Anne to a North Sea oil rig might bring on bad weather. Margaret Baker, Folklore of the Sea (Newton Abbot, Devon: David and Charles, 1979), 95.
4. The Autobiography of Phineas Pett, ed. W. G. Perrin (London: Navy Records Society, 1918), 163.
5. Admiralty journals, entry for 4 February 1674, Pepysian Library, Magdalene College, Oxford, quoted in J. R. Tanner, “A Fraud in the Navy,” Mariner’s Mirror 8 (1922): 148.
6. Memoirs of Admiral the Right Honourable, the Earl of St. Vincent, ed. Jedidiah Stephens Tucker, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1844), 2:120.
7. Regulations and Instructions Relating to His Majesty’s Service at Sea (1731), p. 31, article 38; Regulations (1808), p. 144, article 13.
8. John Harvey Boteler, Recollections of My Sea Life from 1808 to 1830, ed. David Bonner-Smith (London: Navy Records Society, 1942), 94–95.
9. ADM 1/5295, court-martial of Captain Marriot Arbuthnot of the Guarland “on several Articles exhibited against him by Mr. William Mackenzie, Purser of the said ship,” 13 March 1755. The court ruled that the charges of misuse of the beer and water supply were “premeditated, malicious, frivolous and groundless…except the Eighteenth Article, namely carrying women to sea.”
10. Collingwood to Purvis from the Ocean, 9 August 1808, in The Private Correspondence of Admiral Lord Collingwood, ed. Edward Hughes (London: Navy Records Society, 1957), 251–52.
11. Collingwood to W. W. Pole from the Ville de Paris, 1809, in ibid., 251 n. 2.
12. For information on the idlers, see Brian Lavery, Nelson’s Navy: The Ships, Men, and Organization, 1793–1815 (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1989), 195, 272–73. For the number of idlers and other ratings in various-sized vessels, see Michael Lewis, A Social History of the Navy, 1793–1815 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960), 272.
13. For a detailed description of the two-watch system, see Lavery, Nelson’s Navy, 194, 200–203. A few captains used a three-watch or even a four-watch system so that the men could sleep through the night. Admiral John Jervis used a three-watch system. Edward Pelham Brenton, Life and Correspondence of John, Earl of St. Vincent, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1838), 1:145. A four-watch system is mentioned in George Watson, Adventures of a Greenwich Pensioner (Newcastle: R. T. Edgar, 1927), 70.
14. William Richardson, A Mariner of England: An Account of the Career of William Richardson…[1780–1819] as Told by Himself, ed. Spencer Childers (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1970), 171, 176.
15. G. J. Marcus, Heart of Oak: A Survey of British Sea Power in the Georgian Era (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 224.
16. Memoirs of the Earl of St. Vincent, 1:193.
17. Ibid., 414.
18. Ibid.
19. The Wynne family came on board Captain Thomas Fremantle’s ship the Inconstant on 24 June 1796, just three weeks before Jervis’s 14 July memorandum complaining about the women of the lower deck. The Wynnes lived on board various ships of Jervis’s fleet until the fall. Betsey Wynne noted in a journal entry of 29 July 1796, off Toulon on board the Britannia, “Nothing can express how kind, gallant and friendly the Admiral was to us [when the Wynnes had visited Jervis’s flagship the Victory]. He said that he would wish us to stay in the Fleet all the summer, that when we were tired of Captain Foley [of the Britannia] we should go on board the Victory.” The Wynne Diaries, 1789–1890, ed. Ann Fremantle, 3 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1935–40), vol. 2, 1794–1798, 97–103, 212, 215–17.
20. Although both Nelson and Emma Hamilton acknowledged that Horatia was their child, Admiral Thomas Hardy, thirty years after Nelson’s death, was still trying to save Nelson’s reputation. He told an interviewer in 1835 the concocted story that Horatia was the daughter of the sailmaker of Nelson’s ship the Elephant and that she was born on board during the Battle of Copenhagen, 2 April 1802. Hardy claimed that Nelson had taken a fancy to the baby and had sent her to Lady Hamilton to raise. Dispatches and Letters of Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, ed. Nicholas Harris Nicolas, 7 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1844–46), 7:386.
21. Mary [Lacy] Slade, The History of the Female Shipwright (London: M. Lewis, 1773), 62.
22. Richardson, Mariner of England, 195.
23. Captain Frederick Marryat, who served in the navy between 1806 and 1815, gives a good description of skylarking in his novel Jacob Faithful (New York: D. Appleton, 1868), 361–62. In Cuthbert Collingwood’s ship, on blockade off Cadiz in 1797, the men danced on the main deck to bagpipes that members of the crew had made. This musical accompaniment ended, however, when rats ate the leather bellows. Collingwood to E. Blackett from the Excellent, 31 August 1797, in A Selection from the Public and Private Correspondence of Vice-Admiral Lord [Cuthbert] Collingwood, ed. G. L. Newnham Collingwood, 2 vols., 5th ed. (London: James Ridgway, 1837), 1:83–84.
24. Mordecai M. Noah, Travels in England, France, Spain, and the Barbary States in the Years 1813, 14, and 15 (New York: Kirk and Mercein; London: John Miller, 1819), 11–14.
25. Henry Wadsworth, journal excerpt, 2 April 1803, in Dudley W. Knox, ed., Naval Documents Related to the United States Wars with the Barbary Powers, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1940), 2:387.
26. Journal of Rear-Admiral Bartholomew James, 1752–1828, ed. John Knox Laughton (London: Navy Records Society, 1896), 312.
27. Dudley Pope, The Black Ship (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1964), 176–77.
28. A Spanish prisoner, taken by the Diligence, Captain Mends, reported that there were seven women on board the Hermione at the time of the mutiny, and that they were all murdered, but he was reporting from hearsay, and there is no substantiating evidence. David Hannay, Naval Courts-Martial (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 56.
29. Pope, Black Ship, 267.
30. ADM 1/5348, court-martial of Richard Redman [John Redmond], 13–15 March 1799.
31. William Henry Dillon, A Narrative of My Professional Adventures, 1790–1839, ed. Michael Lewis, 2 vols. (London: Navy Records Society, 1952–53), 2:329.
32. William O. S. Gilly, Narratives of Shipwrecks in the Royal Navy between 1793 and 1849 (London: John W. Parker, 1850), 10–23.
33. Ibid., 15. Captain Wallis’s official report of the wreck does not mention the newly impressed man’s wife, nor does he include in the list of the dead the names of the woman and child who died. Naval Chronicle 1 (1799): 333–35.
34. Richardson, Mariner of England, 169.
35. Ibid., 173, 176, 188.
36. Ibid., 196.
37. Admiralty ruling, 1751, in The Barrington Papers, Selected from the Letters and Papers of Admiral the Honorable Samuel Barrington, ed. D. Bonner-Smith, 2 vols. (London: Navy Records Society, 1937), 1:76–77. See also Lewis, Social History, 139–40, and Christopher Lloyd, The British Seaman, 1200–1860: A Social Survey (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970), 69, 252.
38. The Sergison Papers, ed. Reginald Dundas Merriman (London: Navy Records Society, 1950), 210.
39. J. J. Keevil, Christopher Lloyd, and J. L. S. Coulter, Medicine and the Navy, 1200–1900, 4 vols., vols. 1 and 2 by Keevil, vols. 3 and 4 by Lloyd and Coulter (Edinburgh: E. and S. Livingstone, 1957–63), 3:60.
40. ADM 1/3597, 10 January 1703, quoted in Reginald Dundas Merriman, ed., Queen Anne’s Navy: Documents Concerning the Administration of the Navy of Queen Anne, 1702–1714 (London: Navy Records Society, 1957–63), 235 n. 1.
41. Report of Rear Admiral George Byng and David Furzer to the Admiralty, 24 January 1703, quoted in ibid., 234–35.
42. Supplementary order, 9 March 1703, cited in ibid., 235 n. 2.
43. British Library, Add. MSS. 9333, 29, 62, cited in J. J. Sutherland Shaw, “The Hospital Ship, 1608–1740,” Mariner’s Mirror 22 (1936): 422–26; Admiralty Library, Thomas Corbett, chief clerk, to the secretary of the Admiralty, 1719, “Naval Precedents,” MSS., XIII, 69, cited in Merriman, Queen Anne’s Navy, 219.
44. Regulations and Instructions (1731), p. 137, article 1; ADM 36/114, muster book, Apollo, 1747; ADM 36/1448, muster book, Harwich, 1749; wreck of the Apollo listed in Isaac Schomberg, Naval Chronology, 5 vols. (London: T. Edgerton, 1802), 5:9.
45. Garlick to Sick and Hurt Board, 8 October 1759, F/20, in-letters, 1742–65, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, quoted in Lloyd and Coulter, Medicine and the Navy, 3:68.
46. Lloyd and Coulter, Medicine and the Navy, 4:63–64.
47. John Nicol, The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner, ed. John Howell (Edinburgh, 1822; reprint, New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1936), 170.
48. The Turkish sultan, “The Grand Signior,” to Mr. Smith, His Majesty’s envoy at Constantinople, 8 September 1798, translation, Naval Chronicle 14 (1805): 472–73.
49. Nicol, Life and Adventures, 170–71.
50. ADM 36/14817, muster book, Goliath, 3 August–30 November 1798.
51. Christina White to Nelson, Nelson mss., Wellcome Historical Library, London, quoted in Christopher Lloyd, Notes, Mariner’s Mirror 47 (1961): 301. See also Lloyd and Coulter, Medicine and the Navy, 3:147; ADM 36/12318, muster book, H.M.S. Majestic, 1 July–31 August 1798. The only seamen named White who was on board the Majestic at the Battle of the Nile was Thomas White from Stroudwater, Gloucestershire, who enlisted 1 July 1796 at age twenty-seven. He was not killed in the battle, nor did he die on board from his wounds. If he was indeed Christina White’s husband, he died after being discharged.
52. Charles M’Pherson, Life on Board a Man-of-War (Glasgow: Blackie, 1829), excerpted in Henry Baynham, From the Lower Deck: The Royal Navy, 1780–1840 (Barre, Mass.: Barre, 1970), 160.
53. Baynham, From the Lower Deck, 155.
54. Ibid., 161.
55. Edward Fraser, The Enemy at Trafalgar (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1906), 219–26; William Robinson, Nautical Economy (London: William Robinson, 1836), reprinted as Jack Nastyface: Memoirs of a Seaman (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1973), 57–61. Robinson, who got his information by hearsay, reported that Jeannette, who had gone to sea to be with her husband, had joined the crew in disguise, but this seems unlikely.
56. Fraser, Enemy at Trafalgar, 227.
57. ADM 37/4810, muster book, H.M. Sloop Swallow, Commander Edward R. Sibly, 1 May–3 June 1812: Joseph Philan (Phelan), entered 1 April 1809, age twenty-four, from Waterford, Ireland, discharged dead, “one of eleven men slain in the fight with the enemy, 16 June 1812.”
58. Annual Register 54 (1812): 93.
59. ADM 82/124, governors of Chatham Chest to the Admiralty, 11 August 1780.
60. ADM 82/124, list of persons admitted pensioners to the Chest at Chatham in September 1780: “Eleanor Moor: wound—a fracture on the cranium; ship—Apollo; when hurt—15 June 1780; annual pension—£4.0.0.”
61. Edward H. Cree, Naval Surgeon: The Voyages of Dr. Edward H. Cree, Royal Navy, as Related in His Private Journals, 1837–1856, ed. Michael Levien (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981), 36–119, esp. 40, 70, 79.
62. Queen’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions for the Government of Her Majesty’s Naval Service (1879), p. 211, article 640.
63. W. B. Rowbotham, “The Naval General Service Medal, 1793–1840,” Mariner’s Mirror 23 (1937): 366–67.
64. Queen Victoria to Theodore Martin, 29 May 1870, quoted in Theodore Martin, Queen Victoria as I Knew Her (London: William Blackwood, 1908), 69–70. The letter also stated, “The Queen [she referred to herself in the third person] is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Woman’s Rights,’ with all its attendant horrors on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.”
65. Rowbotham, “Naval General Service Medal,” 366, 360.
66. This was not the last time a woman was denied recognition for her service in the Royal Navy. In 1916 Kathleen Dyer joined H.M.S. Calypso as captain’s servant, by Admiralty order, and she served for two and a half years. She was, however, refused the Naval War and Victory Medal that was given to all other ratings who served in the ship during that period. A. Macdermott, Answer to Query, Mariner’s Mirror 25 (1939): 447.
CHAPTER 3
Women in Disguise in Naval Crews
Epigraph from John Ashton, ed., Real Sailor-Songs (London: Leadenhall, 1891), 60–61.
1. Anne Chamberlyne’s monument was on the wall to the east of the south door. The church archives contain a transcription of the inscription from her monument, but the only memorial to her now on view is a recently embroidered kneeling stool depicting sailors and their ship and the inscription “Anne Spragg, 1667–1691, a Maiden Heroine, she fought as a sailor.”
2. “Second Pallas” refers to Pallas Athena, the goddess of war. This translation, together with the Latin inscription, is found in Daniel Lysons, Environs of London, 2 vols., 2d ed. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1810), 2:68–70. See also Survey of London (London: London City Council, 1923), vol. 7, pt. 3, “Chelsea.”
3. Thomas Faulkner, An Historical and Topographical Description of Chelsea and Its Environs (London: T. Egerton, 1810), 60–64.
4. Lysons, Environs of London, 2:81–82. See also the listing for Mary Astell, Dictionary of National Biography.
5. Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs from September 1678 to April 1714, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1857), 2:620.
6. ADM 51/3765, captain’s log, Amazon, 1761.
7. ADM 36/4825, muster book, Amazon, 1 May–30 June 1761: “Wm. Prothero, Pte [private] entered 1 December 1760, discharged 30 April 1761, pr. Admty. Ord., slop cloaths, 16 shillings, 6 pence; tobacco 6 shillings, 4 pence.”
8. J. C. Dickinson, “A Naval Diary of the Seven Years’ War from Flookburgh,” Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society 38 (1938): 241.
9. Annual Register, 1815, 64. There were a number of blacks in naval crews, including slaves sent to sea by their masters. Despite racial prejudice on land, it appears that blacks were usually accepted within the society of the lower deck. For the autobiography of a black slave in the eighteenth-century navy, see The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African…by Himself, 2 vols. (London, 1789; reprint, New York: Negro University Press, 1969).
10. Annual Register, 1815, 64.
11. ADM 37/5680, muster book, Queen Charlotte, 31 December 1815–1 February 1816: “William Brown, AB, entered, 31 December, 1815, 1st Warrt., place of origin, Edinburgh, age, 32.”
12. In that era a captain of the foretop or forecastle in a first-rate ship such as the Queen Charlotte earned approximately £2 6d. a month. See Brian Lavery, Nelson’s Navy: The Ships, Men, and Organization, 1793–1815 (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1989), 326, appendix 6 (chart of monthly pay in 1807).
13. ADM 37/5680, 31 December 1815–1 February 1816.
14. ADM 37/5680, 1 June’31 July 1816: “William Brown, AB, on 29 June 1816, entered the Bombay, late the Trident.” (Vessels were often renamed.)
15. ADM 1/902, Cavendish to the Admiralty, 20 July 1739.
16. Ships’ muster books, brought up to date about every two months, were often the only record of a man’s service. The information was scanty: name, rank, date of hire, date of and reason for discharge, and occasionally a brief physical description. Sometimes a muster book also noted whether a man was pressed or a volunteer and gave the amount of any bounty he was paid. The navy was always careful about its money; specific items of clothing and tobacco purchased from the purser were always recorded and charged against future pay. By the nineteenth century more details were usually provided such as age upon entry and place and date of birth.
17. WO 116/4, Chelsea Hospital admission book, 14 February 1746–18 December 1754; The Female Soldier; or, the Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (London: R. Walker, 1750), reprinted in Menie Muriel Dowie, ed., Women Adventurers (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1893), 88–90. All subsequent citations to The Female Soldier refer to the Dowie reprint, pp. 55–131, which is more readily available than the 1750 edition.
18. John Curtin, “The Maiden Sailor,” in Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., The Pepys Ballads, 8 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1932), 6:176–77.
19. Quoted in Cyril Field, Britain’s Sea Soldiers (Liverpool: Lyceum, 1924), 99 n.
20. Lewis [sic] de Bougainville, A Voyage Round the World… in the Years 1766, 1767, 1768, and 1769, trans. John Reinhold Forster (London, 1772; reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1967), 300.
21. Mary Slade, The History of the Female Shipwright (London: M. Lewis, 1773). The name of the author is given as Mary Slade, supposedly the married name of Mary Lacy. Since it is doubtful that she married, I have used her maiden name throughout this book.
22. Annual Register, 1807, 463.
23. Quoted in Field, Britain’s Sea Soldiers, 99 n.
24. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (Dublin: P. Byrne, 1796), 1:468.
25. E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin, 1991), 409.
26. See the chapter “Sale of Wives,” in ibid., 404–66. See also Samuel P. Menefee, Wives for Sale (New York: St. Martin’s; Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1981).
27. Annual Register, 1766, 75.
28. In the end Alexander retreated from his daring position, adding a disclaimer to his exposition, suggesting that, after all, women were content with their lack of independence: “Thus excluded from everything which can give them consequence, they derive the greater part of the power which they enjoy from their charms; and these, when joined to sensibility, often fully compensate in this respect.” William Alexander, The History of Women from the Earliest Antiquity to the Present Time, 2 vols. (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1782), 2:505–6.
29. Annual Register, 1761, 170.
30. Naval Chronicle 17 (January–June 1807): 309.
31. Dowie, Women Adventurers, 97–98.
32. Slade, Female Shipwright, preface, iv.
33. Curtin, “Maiden Sailor,” 176–77.
34. Examples of ballads based on the lost-lover theme are found in almost any extensive collection of ballads in the English and Scottish tradition. For twentieth-century Canadian versions, see Helen Creighton, ed., Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia (Toronto, 1933; reprint, New York: Dover, 1966), “Caroline and Her Young Sailor Bold,” “Female Sailor Bold,” “Rose of Britain’s Isle,” and “Billy Taylor”; and MacEdward Leach, ed., Folk Ballads and Songs of the Lower Labrador Coast (Ottawa: National Museum of Canada, 1965), “Caroline and Her Young Sailor Bold,” “Willy Taylor,” “The Sailor Boy,” and “The Lady and the Sailor.” For an analysis, largely differing from mine, of female-warrior ballads, see Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
35. “The Marchants Daughter of Bristow,” pt. 1, in A Collection of Seventy-nine Black Letter Ballads and Broadsides Printed in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, between the Years 1559 and 1597 (London: Joseph Lilly, 1867), 66–77.
36. John Ashton, ed., Modern Street Ballads (London: Chatto and Windus, 1888), 254–55.
37. Annual Register, 1771, 71.
38. Dowie, Women Adventurers, 64–67.
39. The two editions of the original biography, of 46 and 187 pages, respectively, have the same title, publisher, and date: The Female Soldier; or, the Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (London: R. Walker, 1750). The longer version, with some abbreviated passages, is the one reprinted in Dowie, Women Adventurers, 54–131. An account of Snell appeared in Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 20, in July 1750, the same month the biography was published, and was picked up by other periodicals. The biography has been reprinted in various forms over the years in both England and the United States. These include The Female Soldier (London: William and Cluer Dicey, 1756); The Female Warrior; or, Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (London: Wilmott and Hill, 1801); The Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (York: J. Kendrew, 1809); and The Widow in Masquerade (Northampton, Mass., 1809). A facsimile edition of the shorter version of the 1750 biography was recently published with an introduction by Dianne Dugaw (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1989). Dugaw is primarily concerned with comparing Snell’s story with ballads about female warriors. She accepts the lost-lover theme as Snell’s motive for joining the army. She does not, in fact, question the veracity of any part of the biography.
Snell’s story appeared in numerous collections, including Kirby’s Wonderful and Scientific Museum; or, Magazine of Remarkable and Eccentric Characters (London: R. S. Kirby, 1804), 2:430–38; Eccentric Biography; or, Memoirs of Remarkable Female Characters (Worcester, Mass.: Isaiah Thomas, 1804), 295–307; John Timbs, English Eccentrics and Eccentricities (London: Chatto and Windus, 1875), 116–21; Ellen Creathorne Clayton, Female Warriors, 2 vols. (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1879), 2:16–23; John Ashton, Eighteenth Century Waifs (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1887), 185–90; and John Laffin, Women in Battle (London and New York: Abelard Schuman, 1967). The Dictionary of National Biography 613, is the only source that casts doubt on the veracity of Snell’s biography. It states, “The bombastic opening…, the impossible incidents of the floggings”—it was claimed that she received five hundred lashes in the army, a number that usually proved fatal, and then, without any time to recover, proceeded to walk several hundred miles—“and the circumstantial account of the last moments of Hannah’s criminal husband all attest the workmanship of an experienced literary hand, to whose identity no clue exists.”
40. WO 116/4, Wednesday, 21 November 1750, Chelsea Hospital admission book, covering period from 14 February 1746 to 18 December 1754; affidavit by Hannah Snell, dated 27 June 1750, in Dowie, Women Adventurers, 57. In this affidavit, reproduced in her biography, Snell swore before J. Blachford, the lord mayor of the City of London, that the experiences listed in the affidavit were true, and she signed it with an X (her mark). Her sister Susannah Gray was a witness. The affidavit lists Snell’s date and place of birth and the vessels she served in. It is noteworthy that the fictional material of the biography is not included in the affidavit; there is, for example, no mention of Snell’s Dutch husband James Summs.
41. There is a gap in Snell’s history. The affidavit says that she joined the army on 27 November 1745. The biography reports that she was discharged after about four months, spent a month walking to Portsmouth, remained in Portsmouth for a month before she joined the marines, and went on board the Swallow three weeks later. According to this schedule, she would have joined the Swallow around June 1746. The muster book of the Swallow, however, states that she came on board on 24 October 1747. Approximately a year and four months is unaccounted for. See Dowie, Women Adventurers, 70–71; ADM 36/3472, muster book, sloop Swallow.
42. ADM 36/3472, muster book, sloop Swallow; WO 116/4, 21 November 1750, Chelsea Hospital admission book, 1746–54, “Wounded at Pondicherry in the thigh of both leggs”; Dowie, Women Adventurers, 87–90.
43. ADM 36/1035, muster book, H.M.S. Eltham: “Jae. Gray [released] Cudelore Hopl. 2 Aug 1749, rec’d [into the Eltham] from Tartar 13 Oct. 1749.”
44. ADM 36/1035, muster book, H.M.S. Eltham, Jae. Gray, discharged 25 May 1750, Spithead, “per order of Adml. Hawke.”
45. Dowie, Women Adventurers, 127.
46. Ibid., 123.
47. Ibid., 124–27; “‘A New Song’ sung by Hannah Snell, alias James Gray, at the New Wells, Goodman’s Fields.” Broadside in the Madden Collection, Cambridge, Slipsongs, 2:333, no. 1406, quoted in Charles Harding Firth, ed., Naval Songs and Ballads (London: Navy Records Society, 1908), 200. It focused on the romantic crowd-rousers—love and glory, patriotism, and the lost-lover motif, and was based on a popular ballad about Susan and her sweetheart William. The following verses give the gist of Snell’s song:
All ye noble British spirits that midst dangers glory sought,
Let it lessen not your merit that a woman bravely fought:
Cupid slyly first enroll’d me, Pallas next her force did bring,
Press’d my heart to venture boldly for my love and for my King.
Sailor-like to fear a stranger, straight I ventured on the main,
Facing death and every danger, love and glory to obtain.
Tell me, you who hear my story, what could more my courage move?—
[King] George’s name inspired with glory, William was the man I loved.
When from William Susan parted, she but wept and shook her hand;
I, more bold (tho’ tender-hearted), left my friends and native land;
Bravely by his side, maintaining British rights, I shed my blood,
Still to him unknown remaining, watch’d to serve and do him good.
In the midst of blood and slaughter, bravely fighting for my king,
Facing death from every quarter, fame and conquest home to bring.
Sure you’ll own ’tis more than common, and the world proclaim it, too.
Never yet did any woman more for love and glory do.
48. WO 116/4, Chelsea Hospital admission book, 1746–54.
49. Dowie, Women Adventurers, 129. According to records at the Greater London Record Office, no license was issued to Hannah Snell or James Gray in or near Wapping between 1750 and 1758. “Licensed Victuallers Registers and Recognizancies” and “Register of the Inn-keepers, Alehouse-keepers, e.c. within the Tower Division” (includes the Thames-side parishes: Wapping, Wapping Wall, Limehouse, Poplar, etc.), 1750–58.
50. Universal Chronicle, 3–10 November 1759, 359; Lysons, Environs of London, 2:99–100; Timbs, English Eccentrics, 121; Dictionary of National Biography, 613–14.
51. Times (London), 4 November 1799, quoted in John Ashton, Old Times: A Picture of Social Life at the End of the Eighteenth Century (London: John C. Nimmo, 1885), 94.
52. For the 1804 Kirby volume, see note 39. The Times reported that “she personated a common sailor before the mast, during a cruise in the North Seas.” (There is no such cruise in the autobiography.) The Times goes on to say that after a lovers’ quarrel Talbot left the navy “and assumed for a time the military character” but returned to the navy and was wounded in the battles of Cape St. Vincent (14 February 1797) and Camper-down (11 October 1797). The autobiography says that she received her wounds at the Glorious First of June, 1794, three years earlier.
53. The Life and Surprising Adventures of Mary Anne Talbot (London: Robert S. Kirby, 1809), reprinted in Dowie, Women Adventurers, 133–96.
54. Most of the collections of biographies that include Talbot also include Hannah Snell; for example, Clayton, Dowie, Ashton, and Laffin (listed in note 39). An exception is the version in the 1804 collection Eccentric Biography, which is based on the 1799 Times interview. The Dictionary of National Biography, which devotes over a column to Talbot, expresses vague doubt of the story’s authenticity, although it states, “The nucleus of her tale…is probably true.”
55. Dowie, Women Adventurers, 139. As with Snell’s biography, I have cited Dowie’s reprint of Talbot’s autobiography rather than Kirby’s 1809 edition because it is more readily available.
56. Ibid., 143.
57. Records of Regimental Headquarters, Queen’s Lancashire Regiment, Warrington, Cheshire; David Syrett et al., The Commissioned Sea Officers of the Royal Navy, 1660–1815 (London: Scolar Press for Navy Records Society, 1994), 44: Essex Bowen was commissioned lieutenant, 28 February 1758; superannuated commander, 11 August 1798; died July 1811.
58. The Eighty-second Regiment of Foot had been disbanded in 1784 and was not reformed until autumn 1793. The Eighty-second Regiment remained in England until embarking for Gibraltar 31 August 1794, and they sailed from there to St. Domingo in 1795. Records of Regimental Headquarters, Queen’s Lancashire Regiment; ADM 36/11014, muster book, Crown transport, 1 March–31 May 1792.
59. ADM 36/11176, muster book, Brunswick, March–April 1794. The only John Taylor on board at the battle of the Glorious First of June, 1794, was a fourteen-year-old captain’s servant who had entered at Portsmouth 18 December 1793 and was discharged by request, together with his brother Isaac, on 4 July 1794. He was not wounded in the battle.
60. ADM 36/11176, muster book, Brunswick, June–July 1794; ADM 102/274, muster book, Haslar Hospital, June–July 1794.
61. ADM 36/12698, muster book, Vesuvius, Captain Thomas Rogers, 1793–95.
62. Lloyd’s Register, 1796: schooner Ariel, J. Field (captain), 137 tons, New York to London, American registry.
63. Dowie, Women Adventurers, 181–82.
64. Annual Register, 1771, 71.
65. Newspaper account quoted in Frank George Griffith Carr, “Women and the Sea from the Days of Genesis,” The Wren, June 1953, 6.
66. Ibid.
67. Annual Register, 1782, 221.
68. Deuteronomy 22:5: “A woman shall not wear that which pertaineth to a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whosoever doeth such things is an abomination unto Jehovah thy God.”
69. St. Jerome, Commentaries: Epistolam ad Ephesios, 3.5.658, quoted in Vern L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1976), 365.
70. Most of the legendary female transvestite saints became monks, and often they were discovered to be women only after their deaths. See Butler’s Lives of the Saints, ed. Herbert Thurston and Donald Attwater, 4 vols. (New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons, 1956), St. Pelagia, 4:59–61; St. Athanasia, 4:60–70; St. Apollinaris, 1:33; St. Eugenia, 4:612; St. Euphrosyne, 1:4–5; and St. Anastasia Patricia, 2:546–47.
71. Nell Gwyn, the mistress of Charles II (1660–85), played breeches roles, and so did Mrs. Jordan, the popular actress who lived happily with the duke of Clarence and bore him ten children. He became King William IV (1830–37). See Vern L. Bullough, Sin, Sickness, and Society (New York: New American Library, 1977), 79.
72. William Wycherley, The Plain Dealer (London: Thomas Newcomb, for James Magnes and Richard Bentley, 1677). There are many recent reprints, including one published by the University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, 1967) and a facsimile of the 1677 edition (Yorkshire: Scholar Press, 1971).
73. John Mitford, The Adventures of Johnny Newcome in the Navy (London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1819), 264 n. 134.
74. The scholarly seven-volume slang dictionary Slang and Its Analogues, ed. John S. Farmer and W. E. Henley (London, 1890–1904; one-volume reprint, New York: Arno, 1970) defines lesbian as “a fellatrix of women.” The 1878–1928 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary includes the word tribade while excluding lesbian. Its definition of tribade reflects the prejudice of its time: “A woman who practices unnatural vice with other women.”
75. Romans 1:26–27: “For this cause God gave them up unto vile passions for their women changed the natural use unto that which is against nature; and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust, one toward another, men with men working unseemliness.”
76. Slade, Female Shipwright, 191.
77. Quoted in John Ashton, The Fleet, Its River, Prison, and Marriages (New York: Scribner and Welford, 1888), 382.
78. Annual Register, 1777, 191.
79. Annual Register, 1760, 84–85.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid.
82. Statute 2 Henry 8, c. 6 (1533) made sodomy a capital offense for both parties, if both were over fourteen. In 1820 most of the two hundred capital crimes that had been on the books in the later eighteenth century were reduced, but sodomy remained a capital crime until 1861, although there were few convictions that drew the death penalty after 1830.
83. Articles of War, Article 29, Navy Act: Statute 22 Geo. 2, c. 33 (1749).
84. “The Revelations to the Monk of Evesham (Abbey),” in Edward Arber, ed., English Reprints, 8 vols. (London: English Reprints, 1869), 8:58–59.
85. Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (London, 1644; reprint, London: W. Clarke and Sons, 1817), cap. 10, “Of Buggery or Sodomy,” 58–59.
86. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4:215–16.
87. Thomas Pasley, Private Sea Journals, 1778–1783 (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1931), 215, 227.
88. Naval Chronicle 18 (July–December 1807): 342.
89. Annual Register, 1807, 463.
90. ADM 36/17099, muster book, Hazard, 1807; Annual Register, 1807, 463.
91. Annual Register, 1807, 463.
92. ADM 1/5383, court-martial of William Berry, first lieutenant of H.M. Sloop Hazard, on board His Majesty’s Ship Salvador del Mundo in Hamoaze, second day of October 1807, and by adjournment the third of the same month, “for an unnatural crime.”
93. Statutes 5 Eliz. 1, c. 17 (1562) and 22 Geo. 2, c. 33, s. 2 and 29 (1749). If the victim was under fourteen, the age of discretion for males, he was innocent; if both participants were over fourteen, it was a felony for both. See also Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4:216, and Leon Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750, 5 vols. (London: Stevens and Sons, 1948), 1:632.
94. ADM 1/5383, court-martial of William Berry.
95. Ibid.; Naval Chronicle 18 (July–December 1807): 342–43.
96. Anne Jane Thornton, passing as a man, served in several merchant vessels including the Sarah, Captain McIntire, of Belfast, in which she worked as cook and steward around 1835. Annual Register, 1835, 24–26; Interesting Life and Wonderful Adventures of That Extraordinary Woman Anne Jane Thornton, the Female Sailor (London: J. Thompson, 1835). Her name was used in a nineteenth-century ballad, “The Female Sailor Bold,” a version of which was still being sung in the 1930s, but it erroneously placed her adventures in 1865. Creighton, Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia, 96–97.
In 1848 Ann Johnson, under the name of George Johnson, served in the American whaling ship Christopher Mitchell, Captain Thomas Sullivan, for a period of seven months. Elizabeth A. Little, “The Female Sailor on the Christopher Mitchell: Fact and Fantasy,” American Neptune 54 (Fall 1994): 252–56. Georgiana Leonard shipped as George Welden in the whaling bark America, Captain John A. Luce, from New Bedford, on 15 November 1862. Her gender was revealed on 9 January 1863, when she was ordered to be flogged for having attacked the second mate with a knife. Suzanne J. Stark, “The Adventures of Two Women Whalers,” American Neptune 44 (Winter 1984): 22–24.
CHAPTER 4
The Story of Mary Lacy, Alias William Chandler
Epigraph from the oral tradition.
1. Mary Slade, The History of the Female Shipwright; to Whom the Government Has Granted a Superannuated Pension of Twenty Pounds per Annum, during Her Life: Written by Herself (London: M. Lewis, 1773), 191 pages. The preface is signed M. Slade, the surname being that of the man Lacy claimed to have married after she retired from the navy.
2. Mary Lacy, The Female Shipwright; or, Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Mary Lacy… Written by Herself (New York: Printed for George Sinclair by J. C. Totten, 1807), 35 pages; Mary Lacy, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Mary Lacy, printed and bound with The Life, Travels, Voyages, and Daring Engagements of the Celebrated [John] Paul Jones (New York: Printed for E. Duyckinck…by G. Bunce, c. 1809), Lacy section, 54 pages; Mary Lacy of Wickham, Kent, England, The Female Shipwright; or, Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Mayr [sic] Lacy… Written by Herself (Philadelphia: William M’Carty, publisher, Ann Coles, printer, 1814), 35 pages.
3. Henry Robert Plomer, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1726 to 1775 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), 155. Plomer identifies Lewis as a publisher of religious pamphlets for groups such as the Moravians (the United Brethren) and gives as an example the Rev. A. M. Toplady’s attack on John Wesley, An Old Fox Tarr’d and Feathered, which Lewis published in 1775. A manifestation of the Moravians’ wealth was their ownership of Lindsey House, a splendid mansion on fashionable Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, London, bought for them in 1750 by their leader, Count Nicholas Zinzendorf. Patrick O’Brian, Joseph Banks: A Life (Boston: David R. Godine, 1993), 31.
4. It was a common practice in mid-eighteenth-century charity and workhouse schools to put the children to work producing salable items for the profit of the institution. Many of these schools were little better than sweatshops. Phyllis Stock, Better Than Rubies: A History of Women’s Education (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978), 71–72. While Lacy’s schoolmistress slighted reading and writing in favor of household skills, she at least gave Lacy some of the profits of her labor. Girls in charity schools were taught only a little reading and even less writing and arithmetic, far less than boys, because while poor boys might go into a trade, girls were destined for domestic service, where literacy was not required.
5. ADM 36/6767, muster book, Sandwich, April–October 1759. On 10 April 1759, at Chatham, wages began for the warrant officers and the few seamen already on board.
6. For background information on the Seven Years’ War and the role played by the Sandwich, see William Laird Clowes, The Royal Navy: A History from the Earliest Times to the Present, 7 vols. (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1897–1903), vol. 3, 1714–1793,216–38; Julian Stafford Corbett, England in the Seven Years War, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1907), vol. 2; Ruddock F. Mackay, Admiral Hawke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), chaps. 12–17; Geoffrey J. Marcus, Quiberon Bay (Barre, Mass.: Barre, 1963); G. J. Marcus, A Naval History of England: The Formative Centuries (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), chaps. 10–11; and The Barrington Papers, Selected from the Letters and Papers of Admiral the Honorable Samuel Barrington, ed. D. Bonner-Smith, 2 vols. (London: Navy Records Society, 1937), vol. 1.
7. ADM 36/6767, April–October 1759; ADM 36/6768, October 1759–March 1760; ADM 36/6769, March–October 1760; and ADM 36/6770, October 1760–December 1761, muster books, Sandwich, list William Russel, gunner, and Jeremiah Paine, his servant.
8. ADM 36/6767 lists “Richard Baker and William Chandler, his servant, entered 9 May 1759.” ADM 36/6768 and ADM 36/6769 also list them. Chandler was discharged from the Sandwich 30 March 1761. ADM 36/6770.
9. At Black Stakes, a reach of the Medway a short distance above Sheerness, ships from Chatham took in their guns and completed fitting for sea. It is not on modern charts. Reginald Dundas Merriman, ed., Queen Anne’s Navy: Documents Concerning the Administration of the Navy of Queen Anne, 1702–1714 (London: Navy Records Society, 1961), 108.
10. In May 1759, as Sir Edward Hawke gathered his squadron together for the blockade of Brest and other ports on the Atlantic coast of France, he found there was a severe shortage of seamen in the ships of the line. On 13 May, therefore, he ordered that sixteen hundred men be transferred into the large ships from his frigates, sloops, and other smaller vessels. Mackay, Admiral Hawke, 201.
11. Admiral Geary, who had just been promoted rear admiral in June, was third in command under Hawke; Vice Admiral Sir Charles Hardy was second in command. Marcus, Quiberon Bay, 34 n. Richard Norbury was captain of the Sandwich.
12. “Qui voit Ouessant voit son sang.” Nigel Calder, The English Channel (New York: Viking, Penguin, 1986), 9.
13. ADM 36/6767; “Biographical Memoir of the Late Sir Francis Geary, Bart.,” Naval Chronicle 17 (1807): 182; Mackay, Admiral Hawke, 228.
14. Marcus, Quiberon Bay, 112 (quoting from ADM I/92, 13 October 1759).
15. Ibid., 131–33.
16. Ibid., 133.
17. Ibid., 140 (from ADM I/93, 15 November 1759).
18. Ibid., 141 (from ADM I/93, 16 November 1759).
19. Mackay, Admiral Hawke, 260–61.
20. Ibid., 261 (from ADM I/93, 26 December 1759).
21. At this time Admiral Edward Boscawen (in the Royal William) was in charge of the squadron, with Geary (in the Sandwich) second in command. Together with other ships including the Ramillies, ninety guns, until recently Hawke’s flagship, they were headed for Quiberon Bay when the hurricane struck. Boscawen noted that “it blew stronger than I ever felt in my life.” The Ramillies was wrecked on the section of the Devon coast where the Sandwich had spent such a parlous night on 11 November, three months before. The captain of the Ramillies, Wittewronge Taylor, all his officers, and seven hundred men were lost; only one midshipman and (as Lacy reports) twenty-five of the crew were saved. Clowes, Royal Navy, 3:231; Mackay, Admiral Hawke, 265.
22. Lacy does not name the hospital—she only says that she was put in “the fifth ward south”—but obviously it was Haslar, the huge naval hospital in Gosport, still a major facility today. I could not verify her stay, since there is no muster for Haslar for that period. The treatment of bleeding, although a dangerous one, was welcomed by Lacy; she reports that she received the bloodletting “with great relief.”
23. Although Lacy worked as a supernumerary in the Royal Sovereign beginning in the autumn of 1760, she was not listed in that ship’s muster until 1762. As William Chandler, she remained on the muster books of the Sandwich as Baker’s servant until 30 March 1761, when she was discharged “by request.” ADM 36/6768, October 1759-April 1760; ADM 36/6769, April-October 1760; and ADM 36/6770, October 1760-April 1761. It was not unusual for a man to work temporarily in a different vessel from his own until he could rejoin her and, meantime, to continue on the muster of his own ship. Lacy says she was a purser’s servant in the Royal Sovereign in 1762; the muster books for that year list William Chandler as captain’s servant. ADM 36/6799 and ADM 36/6800.
24. Geary came to the Royal Sovereign in the autumn of 1760. “Biographical Memoir of…Geary,” Naval Chronicle 17 (1807): 184.
25. ADM 36/6798, ADM 36/6799, and ADM 36/6800, muster books, Royal Sovereign, 1762, list Robert Dawkins, boatswain.
26. The word accompts is an obsolete form of accounts; that is, she was taught accounting procedures.
27. Compared with the starting age in other apprenticeships, sixteen was a late beginning for a seven-year stint. It meant that shipwright status could not be attained before the age of twenty-three. (The entrance age was lowered to fifteen in 1765 and to fourteen in 1769.) Lacy was twenty-three when she entered and thirty when she became a shipwright. N. Macleod, “The Shipwrights of the Royal Dockyards,” Mariner’s Mirror 11 (1925): 286.
28. ADM 42/1100, muster book, Royal William, April-June 1763, lists Alexander McLean, carpenter, and his servant William Chandler. Apprentices were referred to as servants. Macleod, “Shipwrights,” 286.
29. Shipwrights were paid 2s. 1d. a day. Chips money added a few pence. Shipwrights did very heavy work tearing up as well as building ships, so a twelve-hour day with four or five hours of overtime added on was very tiring indeed. They were supposed to be paid quarterly, but pay was always at least one quarter in arrears, often several quarters. Macleod, “Shipwrights,” 286.
30. The fire destroyed a large number of the dockyard buildings and the “fitted rigging of 23 ships in ordinary.” Jonathan G. Coad, The Royal Dockyards, 1690–1850, for the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (Aldershot, Hants: Scolar, Gower, 1989), 133, quoting from a letter from Portsmouth Dockyard: Commissioner Hughes to the Admiralty, ADM/B/183, 27 July 1770.
31. ADM 3/79, Admiralty minute book, 28 January 1772, 78–79. Present: earl of Sandwich, Mr. Buller, Lord Lisburne.
32. Answer from B.G.C. to Query 83, “A Woman Shipwright,” Mariner’s Mirror 6 (1920): 350.
33. I was unable to find a certificate of this marriage, but records are far from complete for that period. There was no central file of marriages until 1837, when the Registration and Marriage Acts of 1836 came into operation. Before that each Church of England parish kept its own records.
34. Clowes, Royal Navy, 3:326; Coad, Royal Dockyards, 133; David Lyon, The Sailing Navy List: All the Ships of the Royal Navy—Built, Purchased, and Captured—1688–1860 (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1993), 8.