Women Sailors & Sailors' Women Read online

  While the lives of all too many prostitutes followed a tragic downward spiral, there were heartening examples of women who turned their earnings to good advantage. We have already noted examples of New York prostitutes who bought up properties and in some cases became wealthy women. Judith Walkowitz has shown in her studies of prostitution in the British ports of Plymouth and Southampton that women were not always the passive victims of male sexual abuse. 40 Many of them retained control of their lives. They negotiated their own prices. They established networks that enabled them to support each other in a male-dominated world. They often worked in pairs, both to protect themselves from violent customers and to enable them to overpower and rob drunken sailors. Many of them became lodging-house keepers, and while this made few women rich, it did give them a measure of independence.

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  The Sailors’ Farewell

  WHEN A WARSHIP was ready to leave harbor, the blue peter flag was hoisted at the masthead. This signal meant “All persons report on board—vessel is about to proceed to sea.” Those sailors who had been allowed ashore swigged down their last drink, said farewell to their women, and made their way down to the waterfront with their sea chests. From there they had to find a boat to take them to their ship, which was anchored out in the fairway.

  Sailors had no right to shore leave, and during times of war, many captains refused to allow their sailors ashore for fear that they would desert. In those cases it was the usual custom to permit wives to be ferried out to the ship. The wives were frequently outnumbered by local prostitutes, carried by enterprising boatmen who banked on the sailors’ paying the women’s fares. 1 To satisfy naval regulations, the women selected by the sailors to come aboard were signed on as their wives. The legal and illegal wives were allowed to live aboard the anchored ship for as long as she was in harbor. They shared the sailors’ hammocks, and judging from contemporary reports and pictures, they danced and drank with them as merrily as the women in the sailors’ taverns ashore. But when the blue peter flag was hoisted, it was time for the women to leave.

  Whether it took place on the shore or aboard ship, the sailor’s farewell to his woman was a theme that captured people’s imaginations and was commemorated in numerous popular prints and poems, particularly in times of war. Although many of the prints and their accompanying verses were overtly sentimental and patriotic, they tell us a great deal about the mood of their times. Two engravings produced during Britain’s war with France and Spain (1739 to 1748) are typical. The first, entitled The Sailor’s Farewell, shows a seaman and his sweetheart standing on the shore with a ship anchored in the distance. The young woman clasps her lover around the neck and rests her head on his shoulder while the sailor points to the ship, which has pennants streaming from her mastheads and is raising her fore topsail as a signal for departure. The following verses are printed below the picture.

  See, see, you streamers! Lo, the wind sits fair,

  And cruel calls the fondly parting pair.

  Oh, signal dire! the foresail too is bent;

  And lo, they give their mutual anguish vent.

  The longboat waits, sly beck’ning are the crew;

  They, death-like, struggle in a last adieu.

  The second engraving, entitled The Sailor’s Parting, shows a scene on the lower deck of a warship. A young sailor and his girl embrace beside a gunport, through which can be seen a billowing Union Jack. Another sailor sleeps in his hammock oblivious of the tender scene being enacted below. As in the previous engraving, the sailor’s clothes and the dress of his woman are as carefully drawn as the accompanying detail. In this case, the poem underneath the picture reflects the thoughts of the young woman:

  Oh, there he goes, my dear is gone,

  Gone is my heart’s desire,

  Oh, may the bullets miss my John,

  That’s all that I require.

  Such was the popularity of these engravings, and the similar prints that were produced during the Seven Years’ War and the wars against Revolutionary France, that the pictures were frequently transferred as decorations onto ceramic tiles, jugs, bowls, plates, and mugs. Among the most charming of the objects that found their way into many homes were the earthenware figures usually designed as matching pairs: one depicting Jack-Tar bidding farewell to his weeping girl and the other showing their happy reunion on his return from the sea. The patriotic spirit that inspired the production and sale of such items is confirmed by the text beneath an illustration of The Sailor’s Adieu on a creamware jug made in Liverpool around 1798: “What should tear me from the arms of my Dearest Polly but the undeniable calls of my country in whose cause I have engag’d my Honour and my Life.”

  Perhaps the most vivid depiction of the sailor’s farewell is Portsmouth Point, an engraving by Thomas Rowlandson. This is a panoramic view of the waterfront at Portsmouth as the fleet prepares to set sail. A fresh offshore breeze is tugging at the washing hung out to dry, and everywhere there is bustle and confusion. Sailors are pushing barrows and carrying sea chests and sacks toward the water’s edge, where two men are lifting a woman into one of the boats. A one-legged sailor scrapes away on a fiddle, and dogs are barking and yelping. In the doorway of the Ship tavern an officer says farewell to his family. With one hand he clasps his pretty wife and kisses her, with the other hand he waves to their baby who is clutched in the arms of a maidservant. Another child tugs at the wife’s dress. Nearby a common seaman says a less decorous farewell to his girl. He has pushed her back against a barrel and has managed to get his leg across her. On the left of the picture, a drunken woman with her breasts exposed leers down at a laughing sailor sprawled on the ground at her feet.

  Rowlandson views the scene with humorous detachment, but for the men who must return to the hard life at sea, and for the women who were left alone on the shore, the parting was fraught with emotions. Seafaring was a hazardous occupation at the best of times, but during wartime everyone was aware that the men might be killed or maimed in battle. Even if they survived the perils of the sea, it was more than likely that they would not see their families for months on end, sometimes not for years. Fanny Boscawen adored her husband, Admiral Boscawen, and wrote him the most wonderful letters, but she had to spend ten of the eighteen years of her marriage in a state of constant anxiety while he was away at sea. Captain Collingwood, Nelson’s second in command at Trafalgar, was happily married to Sarah Blackett, and they had two young daughters. In the spring of 1803, Collingwood wrote to his father-in-law and told him that he had spent one year at home since 1793 and was a stranger to his own children.

  One aspect of the sailor’s farewell that was frequently highlighted by popular prints and ballads was the snatching of the sailor from his wife or sweetheart by the press gang. A savage cartoon by Gillray ironically entitled The Liberty of the Subject shows a group of thuggish sailors taking a terrified civilian in the street. The scissors in his pocket suggest that he is a tailor. A furious and powerful-looking woman has grabbed hold of the hair and one ear of the sailor who has taken her husband, and behind her another woman is laying into the press gang with a mop.

  In a different mood is an engraving issued by the publisher Carington Bowles in 1785 that depicts a rural scene. An elegantly dressed young man is comforting a tearful woman who is distraught that her lover is about to be torn from her. A naval officer armed with a club has his hand on the young man’s shoulder while two sailors smirk in the background. The accompanying verses explain what is happening:

  But, woe is me! the press-gang came,

  And forc’d my love away

  Just when we named next morning fair

  To be our wedding day.

  The press gangs, which forcibly recruited men for the navy, frequently did drag young men from their wives and sweethearts, thereby acquiring a notorious reputation. They were hated by seamen and civilians alike. Few naval officers were in favor of impressment and reckoned that one volunteer was worth three men who had been press
-ganged. And yet the system of forcible impressment, which went back to the beginnings of England’s navy, continued in existence until well after the defeat of Napoleon and the end of the naval wars against France. 2 Why did the navy rely so heavily on impressment? How exactly did the system work and what was its effect on the men who were impressed and the women they left behind when their men were bundled off to sea?

  The root cause of the press-gang system was the navy’s need for thousands of men to man the ships in times of war and the lack of sufficient volunteers to fill that need. In 1793, at the commencement of the war against France, the navy’s strength on paper was 45,000 men, made up of 36,000 seamen and 9,000 marines. By 1812, the number had risen to 145,000 men, which was 2.7 percent of Britain’s male population. 3 This was not a large percentage (the army needed 6.7 percent), but the navy ideally wanted experienced seamen and not farm laborers or criminals. Britain had the advantage of a large merchant navy of some 120,000 men, which in theory she could draw on (and in practice frequently did), but merchant ships were even more important in wartime than they were in peacetime in order to maintain the nation’s trade and thus help toward the cost of the army and navy.

  Many young men did volunteer for the navy, partly for patriotic reasons, partly out of a sense of adventure, and partly for the generous bounty that was offered. In 1797, the bounty was £70, the equivalent of five and a half years’ wages for an ordinary seaman. Nicholas Rodger quotes figures to show that in Plymouth during the period between 1770 and 1779 only 6 percent of the men on the ships’ musters had been pressed into service. 4 However, by 1800 the navy was having to rely heavily on impressment to make up the necessary numbers.

  Impressment was carried out in several different ways. The first was a land-based operation that was run by the Impress Service. By 1793, when it was formally recognized as a permanent body, the service was operating gangs in fifty-one ports in Britain and Ireland. The gangs were led by captains or commanders (usually called regulating captains) who were in charge of recruitment in a particular district. They had several lieutenants under them who took charge of the groups of men who went out and looked for recruits. In each district a rendezvous was established where volunteers could be enlisted, and where pressed men could be confined until they could be dispatched under armed guard to the fleet. In London there was a rendezvous on Tower Hill and another at St. Katharine’s by the Tower, both of them conveniently placed for recruiting seamen from the hundreds of ships in the Pool of London.

  The second and more productive method of recruiting was to intercept incoming merchant ships. Sometimes this was carried out by a warship coming alongside a merchant ship as she approached a port. Sometimes the operation was carried out by a naval party in a tender hired for the purpose. The tenders were usually brigs or sloops manned by a naval officer and a crew of armed seamen. The captains, mates, and boatswains of merchant vessels of fifty tons and upward were officially exempt from impressment; so were the crew of colliers, certain classes of fishermen, and all foreign nationals. However, the exemptions were frequently ignored, and captains of merchant ships went to considerable lengths to avoid putting in to a port where the press gang was known to be operating, sometimes using guns and small arms to prevent a naval party’s boarding them at sea.

  Although the press gangs operating in the streets of ports and harbors rarely encountered serious opposition, there were occasions when the families and friends of impressed seamen attempted to rescue them from the gangs. William Spavens was a former merchant seaman who had been pressed into the navy when his ship returned to Hull from a trading voyage to Russia. He was sent to join the crew of the 68-gun ship HMS Buckingham, and after a cruise to the West Indies, his ship returned to Britain with orders to procure men for the service. They put in to Liverpool, a port notorious for its opposition to the press gang, and sent a small group of sailors ashore. They picked up sixteen men, but only one proved to be a seaman, so they detained him and set the rest free. The next day, July 25, 1759, the captain sent a gang of eighty sailors ashore, including Spavens. They picked up several stragglers and then came across the crew of the ship Lion in the customhouse. The gang had no difficulty in taking seventeen of the seamen but then had to run the gauntlet of an infuriated mob as they led the impressed men along the streets back to the ship. Spavens describes how several hundred women, old men, and boys flocked after them and attacked them with stones and brickbats. The sailors from the Buckingham fired their pistols over the heads of the crowd and managed to reach the waterfront, “but the women proved very daring, and followed us down to the low water mark, being almost up to their knees in mud.” 5

  On this occasion the crowd failed to rescue the impressed men, but in Bristol some women were more successful. Captain Brown was the regulating officer responsible for naval recruitment at Gloucester, a few miles up the River Severn from Bristol. In May 1759, he had to report a humiliating incident in which two women had been responsible for freeing fourteen men who had been taken by the press gang. On May 8, he had arranged that twenty men taken in the Gloucester area should be transported down the river to the Kingroad anchorage. Lieutenant McKinley was put in charge of the transport vessel, and he was accompanied by several members of the press gang who were fully armed. The remainder of the press gang under Lieutenant Hyde accompanied the transport vessel in a boat until she was clear of the town and on her way down the estuary.

  On the morning of May 9, the vessel dropped anchor at Kingroad. Lieutenant McKinley, who had a drinking problem, decided to take the opportunity to go ashore with the master of the vessel. He carelessly left open the hatch over the area where the impressed men were confined, but since they were all handcuffed to one another he presumably thought there was no chance of their escaping. His mistake was to have allowed two of the impressed men’s wives on board the vessel. While he was ashore the women produced an axe and a hatchet, which enabled the men to cut themselves free. Captain Brown later noted that the bolts securing the men required six or seven cuts with the axe before they parted.

  Meanwhile, Lieutenant McKinley had gotten drunk, fallen down a bank, and broken his sword. When he eventually returned to the vessel, anchored out in the estuary, he found that fourteen of the twenty impressed men had taken a boat and all the guns on board, and had vanished. A few weeks later he went on a drunken rampage in Gloucester. He lurched down the street shouting and swearing obscenities, causing a riot among the inhabitants. When he fired a pistol at the chest of an onlooker, he was arrested by the constables and thrown into jail “without any other damage to his person than the insult of some thousands.” 6

  Another recruiting officer in the Bristol area suffered a humiliating experience at the hands of some determined women. Lieutenant McKenzie was in charge of the hired vessel United Brothers, which lay in the anchorage at Kingroad. In October 1805, he was in the village of Pill on the outskirts of Bristol, searching for suitable men to impress into the navy. Entering an inn kept by Joseph Hook, he spotted a seaman and was attempting to take him when he was attacked by Mrs. Hook, her daughter, and a female servant. The three women rescued the seaman and enabled him to escape through a back door. Writing afterward to Captain Barker, his superior officer, McKenzie complained that the women had violently assaulted him and torn his uniform. He was particularly upset that Joseph Hook had looked on throughout and made no attempt to prevent his family from attacking him. 7

  It is little wonder that women should object to impressment. Their men were taken from them without warning, often leaving them with a house and children to support, and no income. Mary Creed was pregnant and living in lodgings at Mrs. James’s on Griffin Lane, Bristol. A few days after Christmas 1806, she wrote the following letter to the secretary of the Admiralty:

  Sir, You will be pleased to lay before the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty the deplorable situation I am in by having my husband, who is very sickly, and unfit for the service, taken from me
by the Press Gang here. I am big with child, and have no other way of support but him, he likewise supporting his old father and mother, and if he was examined by any Doctor he would be found more fit for a hospital than a ship, having entirely lost the use of his right hand. 8

  Mary Creed’s husband, John, had served as a steward on a West Indiaman, and although he was rated as a landman rather than a seaman, the regulating captain in charge of the impressment service at Bristol reckoned that he was “a very stout able man.” His wife’s plea was turned down, and John Creed was forced to join the Royal Navy.

  Earlier the same year John Jacobs, the thirty-year-old boatswain of the merchant ship Betsey, was returning to Bristol in a convoy from the West Indies. His ship was intercepted by a vessel commanded by Lieutenant Lucas, and Jacobs found himself pressed into the navy. His wife, Mary Jacobs, immediately wrote to the Admiralty and begged their lordships to accept a substitute to serve in his place because “he is the sole support of me and four children.” 9 The regulating captain noted that John Jacobs was Swedish, but because he had married in Bristol he was still liable for impressment. The scribbled note on the back of the letter suggests that Mary Jacobs also lost her husband to the navy.

  In July 1806, Lucy Castle wrote to the Admiralty from Princes Street, Bristol, on behalf of her husband, William, who had been taken by the press gang and confined on board the naval brig Enchantress until such time as he could be dispatched to Plymouth to serve on a warship. Mrs. Castle explained that her husband was a native of America, but her plea was set aside because he had married an Englishwoman. From his confinement in the Enchantress, William Castle wrote a pathetic letter to the authorities in which he pointed out that his wife was pregnant, and that she and her other children were in great misery and had nobody to maintain them. The regulating captain noted that William Castle was twenty-two years of age, was formerly chief mate of a merchant ship, and “being an able seaman in every respect fit for the service cannot be discharged.” 10