Women Sailors & Sailors' Women Read online

  And as for affairs with local women, Captain Hervey may have been more promiscuous than most, but there were plenty of other sailors who had flings when they went ashore. Apart from the gossip contained in newspapers and in the letters and diaries of contemporaries, there is revealing evidence of naval officers’ extramarital affairs in some of their wills. When Admiral Lord Colvill drew up his will in 1767, he made special provisions for his three illegitimate children, Charles, James Alexander, and Sophia. The two boys had been born in England, but Sophia was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. 10

  An interesting source for the amorous activities of naval officers below the rank of admiral is a volume in the Public Record Office that details the deliberations of a body in charge of providing pensions for naval widows. 11 The full title of this body was “The Court of the Commissioners for Managing the Charity for the Relief of Poor Widows of Commission and Warrant Officers of the Royal Navy.” It was set up in 1732 and distributed money that had been deducted from the pay of naval officers. The commissioners met several times a year, and their decisions were duly recorded by a clerk. Usually they were routine, but occasionally, their lordships were faced with a dilemma when two wives applied for the pension of the same man. At the meeting on January 3, 1750, for instance, we find, “Two separate applications of Meliora and Elizabeth Warren claiming each the pension as widow of Thos. Warren late master of the Invincible. . . .” At the same meeting, Francis Picton claimed to be the lawful widow of John Picton, late second master of the sloop Mortar, but an application was also received from Sarah Picton, who provided proof that she too was his lawful widow. The commissioners also received a petition from Mary Squire and another woman, both claiming they had been married to Captain Matthew Squire, who had been lost on board HMS Saphire’s Prize.

  An examination of the records shows that between 1750 and 1800, there were twenty-two cases in which two wives applied for the pension of the same man. The dead men included three captains, five lieutenants, four masters, two pursers, six boatswains, one surgeon, and one carpenter. The charity commissioners’ method of deciding between the claims of two wives was to find out which woman had been the first to marry the sailor in question. As long as she could provide sufficient proof of the date of her marriage, she was awarded the pension, and the second wife went without. The records do not provide enough detail to indicate whether the sailors had married their second wife in a foreign port. The names of all the women concerned are common British names such as Mary, Margaret, Ann, Sarah, and Elizabeth, suggesting no more than that the sailors might have had a second bigamous marriage in Britain or in any overseas port with a British population or British descendants.

  The sailors’ reputation for casual flings in foreign seaports was well established by the eighteenth century, and there are frequent references to this in pictures and poems. During the wars against Revolutionary France, when the activities of the Royal Navy were constantly in the headlines, there was a spate of caricatures in which sailors were featured. A favorite subject was a picture of a cheery young sailor picking up a pretty girl as he came ashore. The caption invariably made use of a nautical phrase along the lines of “A man-of-war towing a frigate into a harbour.” The theme continued to be popular in Victorian times. A charming hand-colored engraving is entitled “The Signal for an Engagement” and consists of two pictures side by side. One shows a sailor in a British seaport with his arm around the waist of a pretty girl, a bonnet tied on her head with ribbons and bows. His other arm holds aloft a purse with his wages as his signal for engagement. The second picture shows a sailor in a tropical setting who is flirting with a dusky maiden adorned with feathers and what appears to be a lion skin. This sailor’s signal for engagement is a watch that he dangles before her eyes. 12

  Sea chanties and ballads made much of the sailors’ amorous activities in foreign seaports, and some specifically warned young women against falling in love with a sailor. Typical of the genre is one entitled “Advice to Young Maidens in Chusing of Husbands.” This began,

  You pretty maids of Greenwich, of high and low degree,

  Pray never fix your fancys on men that go to sea;

  and it went on to remind maidens that being married to a sailor was fraught with problems:

  Besides the many dangers that are upon the seas,

  When they are on the shore, they will ramble where they please;

  For up and down in sea-port town they court both old and young:

  They will deceive; do not believe the sailor’s flattering tongue.

  The poem ended by advising the maiden to fix her fancy on an honest tradesman who would always be around “to take a share in all the care.” 13

  Since the majority of sailors were young and unmarried, it was inevitable that they should look for female company whenever they stepped ashore. Jack Cremer, who spent many years as a common seaman in the navy in the mid-eighteenth century, described a lively encounter when his ship sailed into Port Mahon. He went ashore with the ship’s carpenter, and they headed for a Spanish brothel situated by an old church. They had plenty to drink and were soon chatting with “two fine, black, swarthy, good-looking girls.” 14 The girls had already been booked by two English officers, but Jack and his shipmate did not know this. The girls promised them an hour or two in bed, so they took them back to their ship. Their lovemaking was interrupted by the appearance of the two officers, who demanded the women. The officers drew their swords and a fight ensued, during which Jack grabbed hold of one of the officers around his neck and threatened to kill him. The women promptly disarmed the officers, and Jack and his mate won the day.

  On a more peaceable note, we find the naval surgeon Leonard Gillespie recording his liaison with a native woman in his journal. During his stay at the Naval Hospital in Martinique, he fathered two children by a local mulatto girl, whom he refers to simply as Caroline in his journal. It seems likely that she was his servant or housekeeper. The first child he described as “a quadroon boy,” whom he baptized and named Leonard. Then on January 2, 1800, he noted, “On this day at eight o’clock A.M. Caroline was delivered of a female child said to be fathered by me.” 15 When his time came to leave the island, he left the girl with Caroline and took the boy back to Ireland with him.

  WHEN A WARSHIP RETURNED to her home port at the end of a voyage, many captains anchored offshore, and instead of allowing the sailors ashore and risk their deserting, let wives and other women come out to the ship. The same pragmatic approach was often adopted when a ship arrived in a port overseas. Edward Thompson recorded the occasion when his ship visited English Harbor at Antigua in October 1756. In a letter to a friend, he said that every Sunday they had a general visit from the Negro women of the different parts of the island. Although the smells of unwashed seamen, the ship’s animals, and foul bilge water should have inured him to most odors, he particularly noted the distinctive scent of the black population of the island:

  But bad smells don’t hurt the sailor’s appetite, each man possessing a temporary lady, whose pride is her constancy to the man she chooses, and in this particular they strictly so. I have known three hundred and fifty women sup and sleep on board on a Sunday evening, and return at daybreak to their different plantations. 16

  His impressions of the women on the remote Atlantic island of St. Helena were more favorable. The island itself he thought was romantic beyond description, with the serenest climate he had ever inhaled. He compared it to the island where Circe cast her magic spells over Odysseus and his companions, but it was the women of St. Helena he found even more spellbinding. He described them as delicately fair, with hair like Venus and the Graces. They were so amiable and endearing that he felt no man ever visited St. Helena without leaving his heart with a nymph of the island. He left his heart with one woman whose beauty surpassed all description, “a very Calypso to detain young Telemachus; and so entangle him in the web of love.”

  Sailors felt much the same w
ay about the young women of the South Sea islands, and in particular Tahiti, which gained a reputation among seamen as an earthly paradise. The British ship Dolphin, under the command of Captain Samuel Wallis, had first come across the island in June 1767. Wallis had left England ten months earlier with orders to search for the great southern continent that was believed to lie somewhere in the South Pacific. He had sailed across the Atlantic to South America, where his men had gone ashore and found that the stories of giants in Patagonia were greatly exaggerated (the tallest of the Patagonians proved to be six foot seven, and most were between five foot ten and six feet tall). From Patagonia he sailed through the Straits of Magellan and then headed westward across the Pacific. After six weeks, there was still no sign of land, and some of the sailors were suffering from scurvy.

  On the afternoon of June 19, they were running before a strong easterly wind. The sky was clear, but there was a haze obscuring the horizon. At three o’clock that afternoon, they sighted the peaks of several high mountains rising above the haze and altered course toward them. They sailed on through the night, and the next morning they could clearly see the shape of a green and mountainous land before them. As they drew closer, they saw the white surf of the breakers on the reef and counted more than a hundred canoes being paddled toward them. The men in the canoes seemed astonished at the sight of the three-masted sailing ship, but they cheerfully acknowledged the sailors’ friendly gestures and one of them threw a plantain branch in the sea as a gesture of peace. After some inconclusive negotiations, the Dolphin bore away to the west, her officers looking for a gap in the reef and a safe place to anchor. As they sailed along the coast, they could see hundreds of men, women, and children lining the shore beneath the coconut palms. George Robertson, the thirty-five-year-old master of the Dolphin, wrote in his journal that “the country had the most beautiful appearance it is possible to imagine.” 17 He noted that there was a coastal strip two or three miles deep that was laid out in plantations, among which were houses resembling long barns, all very neatly thatched. Beyond the houses and the pastures, the mountains soared up into the clouds, their slopes thickly covered with a dense foliage of tall trees.

  For several days, the Dolphin proceeded cautiously along the coast, pausing every now and again to trade with the hundreds of canoes that accompanied their progress. Robertson reckoned that one morning there were nearly 4,000 men in the canoes lying around their ship. In several canoes there were young women whose beauty and provocative gestures attracted the open admiration of the young sailors. The men in the canoes were quick to spot this and endeavored to use the women as decoys to enable them to board the ship or entice the sailors ashore. The British were desperate to stock up on food and water, but attempts to go ashore in boats were hampered by the jostling and jeering men in the canoes. There were several ugly incidents, in one of which the Tahitians began pelting the ship with stones, and it was not until the British had demonstrated the firepower of their muskets and cannon and had killed and wounded several Tahitian men that an uneasy truce was called.

  On June 25, the Dolphin dropped anchor in five fathoms of water in a great curving bay that was sheltered by the outlying reef. This was Matavai Bay, which Robertson thought was “as fine a bay as any in the world” and was later to be one of the favorite anchorages of Captain Cook. There was a river at the head of the bay, and the water there was as calm as a millpond, so the sailors could beach their boats and keep their firearms dry as they jumped ashore. At night, the air was filled with the sweet smells of tropical flowers and vegetation.

  With the ship safely anchored, relations with the islanders rapidly improved. This was due in large part to the young women of the island, who were encouraged by the older men to fraternize with the sailors. Robertson described the sailors’ first encounter with the women when a boat from the Dolphin was eventually able to land on the beach.

  But our young men seeing several very handsome young girls, they could not help feasting their eyes with so agreeable a sight. This was observed by some of the elderly men, and several of the young girls was drawn out, some a light copper colour, others a mulatto and some almost white. The old men made them stand in rank, and made signs for our people to take which they like best, and as many as they liked and for fear our men had been ignorant and not known how to use the poor young girls, the old men made signs how we should behave to the young women. This all the boats crew seemed to understand perfectly and begged the officer would receive a few of the young women on board. 18

  The sailors made signs to the girls that they were not so ignorant as the old men supposed, which pleased the old men, “but the poor young girls seemed a little afraid, but soon after turned better acquainted.”

  The officer in charge of the landing party had no orders to bring any of the natives aboard, so he indicated to the women that they would return soon and ordered his men back into the boat. Back on the Dolphin, all the sailors swore that they had never seen handsomer women in their lives and declared they would rather take a two-thirds cut in their daily allowance than lose the opportunity of having a girl apiece. Wallis bowed to the inevitable, and soon the sailors were exchanging presents with the young women and getting acquainted. The Tahitians, like most of the South Sea islanders, particularly valued the iron nails, hatchets, and other metal objects that the British had on their ship and used every opportunity to steal them. They were now able to get as much iron as they wanted by bartering their women. The sailors found that one nail was generally the price exacted by the women for their sexual favors. The trade became so brisk that one of the carpenters reported to Robertson that every iron cleat on the ship was gone and that most of the men had abandoned their hammocks and were sleeping on the deck because their hammock nails had been removed.

  By the time the Dolphin set sail on July 27, six weeks after first sighting Tahiti, the initial hostilities between the islanders and the British had been replaced by the warmest friendships on both sides. When the Dolphin returned to England in May 1768, Captain Wallis reported that Tahiti was an ideal base in the Pacific for provisioning ships. It had plentiful supplies of food, wood, and fresh water, it had sheltered bays and safe anchorages, and it had friendly inhabitants. The Admiralty and the Royal Society, which were preparing a scientific expedition to the South Seas, decided that Tahiti would make an ideal location for observing the transit of Venus across the sun—an exercise that would help to determine the distance of the Sun from the Earth.

  On April 5, 1769, two years after the Dolphin’s visit, the converted collier Endeavour, under the command of Captain James Cook, dropped anchor in Matavai Bay. The activities of the Endeavour’s artists, astronomers, and naturalists on this, the first of Cook’s great voyages of exploration, established the reputation of Tahiti as a paradise on earth. 19 The drawings of Sydney Parkinson and the observations of the sailors confirmed the handsome appearance of the inhabitants. Joseph Banks, the wealthy young scientist who accompanied Cook, had needed little persuasion to take one of the Tahitian women as his mistress during the three months of the Endeavour’s visit, and he later wrote:

  In the island of Otaheiti where Love is the chief occupation, the favourite, nay almost the sole luxury of the inhabitants; both the bodies and souls of the women are modelled into the utmost perfection for that soft science; idleness the father of Love reigns here in almost unmolested ease. . . . 20

  The reputation of the Tahitian women was confirmed by the visits of French explorers, most notably that by Louis de Bougainville, who dropped anchor some miles to the east of Matavai Bay on April 2, 1768, less than a year after the departure of HMS Dolphin. Bougainville was a former soldier and diplomat who was later to achieve international renown when he published his book Voyage autour du monde, a detailed description of the discoveries made during his circumnavigation. He was accompanied on his voyage by an astronomer and by Philibert Commerson, a naturalist and distinguished member of the Académie des Sciences, who
unwittingly added another female sailor to the list of those that have been recorded. Commerson had a youth traveling with him as his valet, and it was not until they reached Tahiti that he discovered his valet was a woman. Her name was Jeanne Bare, and she had managed to deceive all the men on board; but when they landed at Tahiti, the islanders saw through her disguise at once. 21

  Bougainville spent no more than ten days in Tahiti, but it was long enough for him to be entirely beguiled by the place. He named it New Cythera after the Greek island where Venus, the goddess of love, first arose from the waves. He thought the climate was the most perfect in the world: “Nature herself dictated the laws. The inhabitants follow them in peace and constitute perhaps the happiest society which the world knows.” As for the men and women, they were like Greek gods and goddesses. “I never saw men better made, and whose limbs were more proportionate,” he wrote, “in order to paint Hercules or a Mars, one could nowhere find such beautiful models.” On one occasion, a young Tahitian woman was standing on the deck of his ship next to the capstan. She negligently let fall her robe, “and stood for all to see, as Venus stood forth before the Phrygian shepherd; and she had the celestial shape of Venus. The sailors rushed to get at the hatchway, and never was a capstan turned with such eagerness.” 22

  Twenty years after the visits of Cook and Bougainville, Captain Bligh arrived at Tahiti in HMS Bounty. He had first seen the island in 1777 when he was master of the Resolution on Cook’s third voyage, and this time he fell completely under its spell. A strict and demanding captain when at sea, he fatally allowed himself and his crew to relax under the benevolent influence of the island’s climate and her carefree people. The purpose of the Bounty’s voyage was to take the seedlings of the breadfruit tree that grew in such profusion in Tahiti and transport them to the British colonies in the West Indies, where it was believed they would provide food for the slaves working on the plantations. The Bounty was equipped with special racks to accommodate several hundred flowerpots, and as soon as she was safely anchored in Matavai Bay, and greetings and gifts had been exchanged with the islanders, Bligh set his botanists to cultivating a nursery garden on Point Venus. During the five months it took to cultivate the seedlings and transfer them to the flowerpots, the Bounty’s crew enjoyed the delights of the island, and in particular the young women, whom they found to be every bit as attractive and willing as they had been led to believe. While Bligh remained faithful to his wife, Fletcher Christian and several other members of the crew took up permanent residence ashore and formed liaisons with Tahitian women that were to last beyond the mutiny. Christian, the master’s mate, was twenty-five years old and was the son of a Cumberland lawyer. He had a cheerful, handsome face, a lively manner, and considerable charm. A former shipmate remarked that he was “a great man for the women.” He was renowned for his physical strength, but he was also subject to black moods of depression on occasion. After making love to several of the Tahitian girls, he settled on an outstandingly beautiful young woman named Mauatua, who was the daughter of a chief. He renamed her Isabella, and she remained his partner until his violent death several months later.