Women Sailors & Sailors' Women Page 7

  Louisa at once determined to leave the brothel. She dressed herself in a sailor’s suit, sneaked out of the house, and made her way through town. On Fish Street she entered a house where men were being enlisted to join the crew of one of the U.S. frigates that were in the harbor. She entered as a marine, which enabled her to avoid the strip search that new recruits joining as sailors had to undergo. The next day she went on board the ship: “I had taken the precaution to provide myself with a tight pair of under draws, which I had never shifted but with the greatest precaution, which, together with a close waistcoat or bandage about my breasts, effectually concealed my sex from all on board.” 4

  In August 1812, they sailed out of Boston toward the Gulf of St. Lawrence. They captured two merchant vessels, and learning that a British squadron was on the Grand Banks, they headed south. On August 19, they sighted a British frigate and gave chase. Louisa was stationed in the tops, and far from feeling daunted by the prospect of battle, she found that she was entirely composed and keen to distinguish herself. As they came within range, the British ship fired her broadside, which fell short. At 6:00 P.M., the two ships came alongside each other and the battle commenced in earnest. From her position in the tops, Louisa aimed her musket at the enemy sailors on the deck of the ship below. When a ball of grapeshot struck and splintered the butt of her musket, one of her comrades saw what had happened and said, “Never mind, George, you have already won laurels sufficient to recommend you to the pretty girls when you return to port!”

  Half an hour after the action had begun, the mainmast and foremast of the British ship crashed to the deck, and her captain surrendered. Her crew members were taken prisoner, the ship was set on fire, and at quarter past three, she blew up and sank. The British had lost 15 men killed and 63 wounded. The Americans had 7 killed and 13 wounded.

  The victorious frigate returned to Boston to undergo repairs, and Louisa went ashore to enjoy herself with her shipmates. On more than one occasion she was in the company of girls from the brothel where she had worked, but her disguise was so effective that they failed to recognize her. As soon as the ship was ready they sailed, and in December they were cruising along the coast of South America, where they encountered another British warship. A fierce action took place, and after nearly four hours of bombarding each other with round- and grapeshot, the British ship surrendered with heavy casualties. During the course of the action, Louisa discharged her musket nineteen times, and with some effect since she had now learned to take pretty exact aim. Shortly after the battle she was climbing down the shrouds when she missed her hold and fell overboard. A boat was lowered to rescue her, and as soon as they had pulled her back on deck, her shipmates were ordered to strip off her wet clothes and replace them with dry ones. They had nearly undressed her when she recovered sufficiently to prevent them from going too far. She was able to get dressed without her sex being discovered.

  For three years Louisa served as a marine. She took part in three battles, never deserted her post, and although she mixed freely with the crew both at sea and ashore, at no time did anyone suspect that she was a woman. She had now been away from home for nearly six years, and after receiving her wages and prize money she decided it was time to abandon her male disguise. She went shopping in Boston and bought a suitable outfit so that she was able to resume her former character as a respectable young woman. When she returned to her family home, her parents did not recognize her at first, but when she reminded them of events in her past, they saw she was their long-lost daughter. They welcomed her back and listened to the story of her adventures with tears running down their cheeks. In the final paragraph of the book, Louisa explained how she had been unwilling to make public the worst aspects of her recent experiences but had been persuaded by a friend that her story would provide an example and a warning to other young people “never to listen to the voice of love, unless sanctioned by paternal approbation.” She further explained that she had withheld any details that would enable readers to discover her real name, or the names of her parents.

  Although her identity remained a mystery, the people of Boston had no difficulty in identifying the U.S. frigate on which she served as the USS Constitution. This magnificent 44-gun ship had returned to Boston harbor in 1815 after a succession of spectacular victories over ships of the Royal Navy. In August 1812, she had encountered the 38-gun HMS Guerriere, dismasted her, and forced her surrender in a manner similar to the action described in Louisa’s narrative. And later the same year, she had engaged in a ferocious action off the coast of Brazil against HMS Java, which was reduced to a complete wreck. The British commander, Captain Lambert, was killed by a musket ball fired by a marine sharpshooter in the maintop of the Constitution, which must have led readers of Louisa’s story to think she might have played an extremely significant part in the action. The Constitution had then gone on to capture the Cyane, a 22-gun frigate, and the sloop Levant as news was received of the conclusion of the naval war.

  Not surprisingly, The Adventures of Louisa Baker sold extremely well. It cashed in on the patriotic mood of the day but also provided what appeared to be a firsthand account of life among the prostitutes on Negro Hill, or what is today Beacon Hill. Within a few months, a sequel was published entitled The Adventures of Lucy Brewer, alias Louisa Baker. The author explained that she had published the first book with extreme reluctance, but “contrary to all expectation, so great has been its circulation, and so great the avidity with which it has been sought after and perused, that I have, contrary to my determination, even again consented to become my own biographer.” 5 She now admitted that her real name was Lucy Brewer and that she had been born in the small town of Plymouth, Massachusetts. She summarized her early adventures and the three awful years she had spent among “the detestable harlots who inhabit those vile brothel-houses which the Hill contains.” She briefly recounted her experiences as a marine and confirmed that the ship she served on was the frigate Constitution.

  After her return from sea, she spent a while on her parents’ farm, but her previous adventures had made her restless and she decided to continue her travels. She once again assumed male clothes and took the stagecoach to Newport. Traveling with her were a midshipman, a sea captain, a venerable old gentleman, and a seventeen-year-old girl. They stopped to dine at an inn where the captain and the midshipman got drunk. They insulted the girl with rude jokes and obscene language until Lucy rebuked them. The midshipman was enraged. He had a dirk dangling at his side and hinted that with this little weapon he had withstood and overcome formidable foes upon the ocean. Lucy challenged him to a duel, but the midshipman’s courage deserted him when faced with the sight of a cocked pistol. He was forced to apologize to the girl, and when they arrived at Newport, he beat a hasty retreat. Lucy traveled on to New York, where she met the young lady she had defended. Her name was Miss West and she was accompanied by her brother. They were from a wealthy New York family, and Lucy spent some time with them before traveling back to Boston. Dressed as a military officer, she revisited her old haunts on Negro Hill and even called on the madam who ran the brothel where she had been taught her first lessons in vice. The old woman was completely fooled by her disguise. Satisfied with her recent adventures, Lucy returned once again to the peaceful home of her fond parents.

  In May 1816, the third part of Lucy’s story appeared under the title The Awful Beacon, to the Rising Generation of Both Sexes. This time the author was given on the title page as “Mrs. Lucy West (Late Miss Lucy Brewer).” This volume described how Charles West, the handsome brother of Miss West, had read Lucy Brewer’s autobiography and discovered the identity of the young man who had defended his sister’s honor. He wrote to Lucy from New York to say he would like to see her again, and some time later he arrived at her parents’ farm in a carriage. After some further adventures, they were married, and Lucy concluded her book with some moralizing stories and reflections.

  This was not the end of the saga, however, becaus
e in the summer of 1816, Mrs. Rachel Sperry, the madam of the brothel where Lucy had worked for three years, published her side of the story. In a pamphlet entitled A Brief Reply to the Late Writings of Louisa Baker (alias Lucy Brewer), she revealed that the real name of the author of the three publications was Eliza Bowen. She pointed out that, far from being a reluctant innocent who had been corrupted by an old bawd, Miss Bowen had made such rapid strides in the arts of harlotry that she had decoyed countless youths with her feminine wiles, and had been an enthusiastic participant in the midnight revels at the dancing halls. Mrs. Sperry justified her own career by recounting how her husband had drowned in a boating accident near Boston lighthouse in the spring of 1806, leaving her to support three small children. The starving condition of her family had prompted her to open a lodging house on the Hill. She had made sure that her female boarders were quiet and well behaved when they had company in the evenings, and was grateful for their assistance with her sewing work in the daytime. She provided examples of Miss Bowen’s disgraceful behavior and refused to believe that she had sincerely repented of her past life. She concluded her pamphlet with the words “I therefore now furnish the public with a true statement of the whole affair—let the candid examine and judge for themselves.”

  We do not know for certain what the public made of Lucy Brewer’s adventures, but we do know that her story proved so popular that the various parts were combined in a single volume entitled The Female Marine and that nine editions of this were published between 1816 and 1818. (This was in addition to the six editions of The Adventures of Louisa Baker and the three editions of The Adventures of Lucy Brewer.) Many of the readers seem to have been young women who were fascinated by the heroine’s racy life. Inside the cover of one surviving copy, a woman wrote that The Female Marine was “a very interesting Book indeed,” underlining the words for emphasis. Several accounts had already appeared of women dressing as soldiers and fighting in the U.S. Army, 6 and it therefore seems likely that contemporary readers assumed this was a true account of a woman who had had similar experiences in the U.S. Navy.

  We now know that the stories are entirely fictitious and that they were written by a man. Research by the American historian Alexander Medlicott, Jr., in the 1960s showed that there was no evidence to prove the existence of Louisa Baker, Lucy Brewer, Lucy West, or Eliza Bowen in any of the towns of Plymouth County, nor could any marine with the first or last name of George be found on the muster rolls of the USS Constitution. Further research by Professor Daniel A. Cohen has made it abundantly clear that the mastermind behind the pamphlets was an enterprising Boston publisher named Nathaniel Coverly, Jr. It was he who arranged for their publication and subsequent promotion, but he was not their author. He employed a writer who produced prose and verse for him to order. This was Nathaniel Hill Wright, a poet and printer in his late twenties who turned his hand to a variety of tasks to support himself and his family. It was said that Wright “could do the grave or the gay, as necessity demanded, and with equal facility.” He evidently had considerable gifts as a writer because his account of Lucy Brewer’s adventures is remarkably convincing. In the tradition of Daniel Defoe, he concealed his own identity and cunningly combined real events and real places with entirely imaginary characters.

  Encouraged by the success of The Female Marine, Coverly published another story about a female sailor in September 1816. This was entitled The Surprising Adventures of Almira Paul. Like Coverly’s earlier publications, this has often been regarded as a true account although the story is harder to believe than the story of Lucy Brewer. It was also written in the form of an autobiography and described how Almira Paul was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1790. At the age of fifteen, she married William Paul, a sailor, by whom she had two children. When her husband was killed in a sea battle in 1811, she decided to go to sea herself. Leaving her children with her mother, she dressed as a man and joined the British cutter Dolphin as the cook’s mate. She took the name of Jack Brown and subsequently saw action on a variety of British and American ships.

  During the course of the next three years, she survived some difficult times. She was bullied by the ship’s cook and took her revenge by kicking him overboard. For this offense she was ordered to be flogged, and she avoided revealing her sex by wearing a shirt during the flogging. She fell from the main yard onto the deck and fractured her skull but recovered. She was captured by Algerian pirates in the Mediterranean and was released in Algiers by the British consul. She made her way to Portsmouth, where she married a woman who had lost her sailor husband at the Battle of Trafalgar. Before the widow had time to discover that she had married a woman, Almira Paul was on a ship bound for Jamaica. She went down with fever in Demerara but recovered with the aid of a black nurse. She then sailed to Liverpool, where she went ashore and was wooed by the local girls who attempted “by their expressions of love and regard for me, to decoy me into their favorite ports; where they might be the better enabled to induce me to part with a few guineas.” She returned to the Mediterranean and joined the crew of the Macedonian, which she deserted in Baltimore; to avoid being arrested as a deserter she resumed female clothes. However, after three years associating with sailors, she was reluctant to leave their company and therefore became a prostitute in the red-light district of the port. After six weeks of this, she traveled to New York and then on to Boston, where she joined the prostitutes on West Boston Hill. The story ends with her imprisonment in a Boston jail for failing to pay her landlord.

  While the adventures of Almira Paul might seem to stretch our credulity to the limit, the story of Lucy Brewer is by no means far-fetched. A real-life parallel can be found for most of the incidents in Brewer’s life: a number of female sailors left home because they had been seduced and become pregnant; many sailors’ wives resorted to prostitution in order to support themselves and their families; there is at least one account of a female sailor binding her breasts to conceal her sex; many women disguised as men took part in sea battles; and at least three female sailors subsequently had accounts of their lives published. 7 It is possible that the publisher or the author of the stories in The Female Marine had read or heard of some of these accounts and made use of them in much the same way as Daniel Defoe drew on the life of the shipwrecked mariner Alexander Selkirk as his inspiration for the character of Robinson Crusoe.

  The most famous of the women who served in the Royal Navy were Hannah Snell and Mary Anne Talbot, whose lives will be examined in the next chapter, but there are a number of other women whose lives are equally fascinating. The American writer Suzanne Stark has investigated the stories of twenty of the women who are believed to have served in the Royal Navy between 1650 and 1815, and by checking with captains’ logs, ships’ musters, and contemporary newspaper articles, she has been able to sort out fact from fiction. 8 The most impressive naval career of all the female sailors is that of William Brown, a black woman who spent at least twelve years on British warships, much of this time in the extremely demanding role of captain of the foretop. A good description of her appeared in London’s Annual Register in September 1815: “She is a smart, well-formed figure, about five feet four inches in height, possessed of considerable strength and great activity; her features are rather handsome for a black, and she appears to be about twenty-six years of age.” The article also noted that “in her manner she exhibits all the traits of a British tar and takes her grog with her late messmates with the greatest gaiety.” 9

  Brown was a married woman and had joined the navy around 1804 following a quarrel with her husband. For several years she served on the Queen Charlotte, a three-decker with 104 guns and one of the largest ships in the Royal Navy. The Queen Charlotte had a crew of 850 men and usually served as the flagship of the fleet. Brown must have had nerve, strength, and unusual ability to have been made captain of the foretop on such a ship. The topmen were responsible for going aloft in all weathers and furling or setting the highest sails (the topsails and
topgallants). The captain of the foretop had to lead a team of seamen up the shrouds of the foremast, and then up the shrouds of the fore-topmast and out along the yards a hundred feet or more above the deck. With their feet on a swaying foot-rope, the men had to heave up or let go of the heavy canvas sails, difficult enough in fine weather but a hard and dangerous job in driving rain and rough seas.

  At some point in 1815, it was discovered that Brown was a woman and her story was published in the papers, but this does not seem to have affected her naval career. She had by this stage earned a large sum of prize money, and she visited the pay office on Somerset Place to collect this. Her husband attempted to cheat her out of the money, though whether he was successful in this is not known. What is certain is that Brown returned to the Queen Charlotte and rejoined the crew. The entry in the ship’s muster book for the period December 31, 1815, to February 1, 1816, reads, “William Brown, AB, entered 31 December, 1815, 1st Warrt., place of origin, Edinburgh, age 32.” 10 This indicates that she was rated as able seaman and confirms her age as thirty-two, not twenty-six as recorded in the newspapers. In January 1816, she was made captain of the forecastle, which was a more senior role but did not usually entail going aloft. In the summer of 1816, she and several other seamen were transferred from the Queen Charlotte to the Bombay, a 74-gun ship; according to the Bombay’s muster book, William Brown joined the ship on June 29. The muster books for the succeeding years are missing, so we do not know what happened to her after that date.

  William Prothero, like the fictional Lucy Brewer, was a marine; that is to say, she served on board ship as a soldier rather than as a sailor. The details about her are tantalizingly brief. The muster books of HMS Amazon tell us that Private William Prothero entered the ship on December 1, 1760, and was discharged on April 30, 1761. The Amazon was a Sixth Rate ship of 22 guns under the command of Captain Basil Keith. On April 20, 1761, the ship was at Yarmouth and the captain noted in his log, “One of the marines going by the name of Wm. Protherow was discovered to be a woman. She had done her duty on board nine months.” A further snippet of information is provided in the journal of J. C. Atkinson, who was a surgeon’s mate on the Amazon. He noted that she was “an eighteen-year-old Welsh girl who had followed her sweetheart to sea.”