Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail
Stark, S. J., (1996), Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail, Constable, London.
Two things prompted me to hunt this book down. Firstly the drama-doc Trafalgar Battle Surgeon based on the memoirs of William Beatty, ships surgeon, which featured in passing a woman named Sarah, who I seem to recall was described as the wife of a gunner and whose duties included carrying powder and assisting in the surgery. And secondly the sheer volume of folk songs featuring women disguising themselves as sailors to follow their sweethearts to sea. Canadee-I-O by Nic Jones and In London So Fair by Eliza Carthy are two of my perennial favourites. It all made me wonder how many women were actually onboard all those ships during the age of sail.
A web search (and a detour through the time sink that is the Mudcat Cafe and Digital Tradition Archive which happens to have fifty songs tagged "transvestite") turned up Suzanne Stark's Female Tars and what a find it turned out to be. I adore Stark's concise but witty writing, her research is exemplary and she has a great turn of phrase. I can only wonder at the sheer volume of records she must have trawled through to find the scant evidence which underpins this book.
The first section on prostitutes, ratings wives and ships at anchor is gruelling. The immense number of prostitutes servicing the fleet at anchor is mind boggling with the 1801 census showing:
....a preponderance of females in both Portsmouth and Plymouth, even though the main industry in each town was the dockyards.... In the census of 1821, for example, there were 4,798 more females than males in the combined population of Portsmouth and Portsea, even though wives of seamen and soldiers awaiting transportation to their home parishes were not counted. (p 31)
The hardships these women endured is beyond belief. Sailors wives appear to have been scarcely better off than the prostitutes and almost certainly saw less of their husbands and less of their wages.
The second chapter titled "Women of the Lower Deck at Sea" primarily covers warrant officers wives and begins with a quote from none other than Admiral Edward Pellew himself:
"British women served at the same guns with their husbands, and during a contest of many hours, never shrank from danger, but animated all around them." (p 47)
Unfortunately serving at the guns did not earn these brave women a place on the ships muster books and therefore they usually received neither payment or victuals. This led to the peculiar situation whereby the wives of soldiers being transported on ships of war were victualed according to army regulations while the wives of warrant officers, who may have spent much of their married lives onboard a single ship, received nothing. The devious captain of HMS Ruby was cautioned for entering in the muster books two seamen's wives and a Mister Bromley and pocketing their pay. Mister Bromley "was in fact the captain's dog" (pp 50-51).
Beyond Admiral Edward Pellew's enlightened commendation these women unsurprisingly received no formal recognition for the role the played in battle. Despite petitions from women who had served not a single one received Queen Victoria's Naval General Service Medal. Others did though:
Daniel Tremendous McKenzie, was presented with the medal for having been born on the Tremendous during the battle of the Glorious First of June, 1794. His rank is listed in the medal role as "baby". His mother, if she was still alive in 1847, could not receive the medal". ( p81) *speachless*
Chapter three is devoted to women serving independently on ships whether dressed in skirts or slops. Stark gives short shrift to the notion of lovelorn women donning the blue to follow their sweethearts to sea. Instead she suggests more complex socio economic factors were the primary incentive. Life at sea, though unimaginably hard, offered a degree of freedom and autonomy, both personal and financial, that few other women could hope to attain at the time.
All the women recorded here are astonishing but "William Brown" stands out. Brown, whose real name is unknown, was a black African woman who served for at least a dozen years on naval ships during the Napoleonic Wars. She was rated able seaman and served as captain of the foretop (!). Somewhat improbably the muster book of HMS Queen Charlotte gives Brown's place of origin as "Edinburgh". As if prove Stark's theory and deal a blow to the romantic folk tradition Brown claimed in a London newspaper to have gone to sea "in consequence of a quarrel with her husband" (pp 86 - 88).
Stark concludes this chapter with a short summary of the relatively benign contemporary attitudes to female to male cross dressing and lesbianism in marked contrast to the capital intolerance of male homosexuality.
Having studiously debunked the alleged naval exploits of Hannah Snell and Mary Anne Talbot in chapter three Stark devotes the whole of her final chapter to the utterly remarkable story of Mary Lacy, alias William Chandler. Lacy's 1773 autobiography The Female Shipwright has recently been republished and it's on my reading list so I'll say no more about her here. She deserves a post of her very own.