Women Sailors & Sailors' Women (9 page)

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, 1
^st
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.”

The extraordinary life of Mary Lacy is recorded in almost as much detail as that of Lucy Brewer and Almira Paul but with the vital difference that at several points it checks out with surviving documents.
¹¹
Her story was first published in London in 1773, under the title
The History of the Female Shipwright . . . Written by Herself,
and an American edition was published in New York with a similar title in 1807. Mary Lacy was born of poor parents on January 12, 1740, at Wickham in Kent. She was the eldest of three children and received a good education in a charity school. When she was about twelve, she went into domestic service in the town of Ash and worked in various households for the next seven years. An unrequited love affair so unsettled her that she decided to leave Ash. Carrying an old frock coat and pair of breeches, a pair of stockings and pumps, and a hat, she left the town at six o'clock on the morning of May 1, 1759. As soon as she was out in the countryside, she changed into the men's clothes and left her own under a hedge. She traveled via Canterbury to Chatham, home of one of the royal dockyards. There she learned that the 90-gun ship
Sandwich
had recently been launched and was still short of her full complement of crew. She went on board and introduced herself to the gunner, telling him her name was William Chandler. He gave her some biscuits and cheese and suggested that she apply to Richard Baker, the carpenter, who promptly took her on as his servant. Her duties included making his bed, fetching him beer, boiling him beefsteak, and cleaning his shoes. Unfortunately, Baker had a quick temper and would suddenly fly into a rage and beat her. When not working aboard the ship, Baker lived with his wife in a house in Chatham; Mrs. Baker proved kinder than her husband to Mary Lacy. She provided the young carpenter's mate with “a clean shirt, a pair of stockings, a pair of shoes, a coat and a waistcoat, a checked handkerchief, and a red nightcap for me to wear at sea.”

On May 20, 1759, the
Sandwich
was moved downstream to take her guns aboard. Three weeks later she was at the Nore to take on the rest of her crew, and on June 21 she set sail down the Thames estuary and headed across the English Channel to join Admiral Hawke's squadron off Brest. In July, Rear Admiral Francis Geary came aboard and raised his flag at the mizzenmast. His flag captain, and the commander of the 750 men on the ship, was Captain Richard Norbury.

At this stage in the Seven Years' War between Britain and France, the Royal Navy was engaged in a holding operation that involved a constant blockade of the ports where the French ships were gathered. From the summer of 1759 to the autumn of 1760, HMS
Sandwich
joined the extended line of British warships patrolling the seas off Ushant. The Bay of Biscay has always been notorious for its storms—so bad were the conditions that every two months or so the ship was forced to head back to England and put in to Plymouth in order to carry out repairs, take fresh provisions on board, and allow sick and exhausted crews to recover. Mary Lacy learned to survive the gales, but at one point she was so badly affected with rheumatoid arthritis that she could not walk and had to be confined to the sick bay for several weeks. She had another severe bout of arthritis when the
Sandwich
was in Portsmouth in the autumn of 1760 and was confined to the naval hospital. By the time she recovered, the ship had sailed.

She now joined the
Royal Sovereign
as a supernumerary. This 100-gun ship was the guardship for the port and was permanently stationed offshore at Spithead. Although the crew were in sheltered waters and in sight of land, they were seldom allowed ashore. Mary was confined to the ship for a year and nine months. Fortunately she made a number of friends, notably a young woman who was living on board with a sailor named John Grant. She writes, “The young woman and I were very intimate, and as she was exceeding fond of me, we used to play together like young children.” Grant did not see their friendship in such an innocent light and became so resentful that he took his jealousy out on the young woman by beating her and threatening to send her ashore.

Although Mary's autobiography provides a vivid picture of life on board a British warship, she makes surprisingly few references to any problems she might have experienced in disguising her sex. One of the few occasions when she might have been discovered took place on the
Royal Sovereign.
While working on deck, she tripped and fell down an open hatch. She cut her head badly and was taken to the doctor.

When I came to myself I was very apprehensive lest the doctor in searching for bruises about my body should have discovered that I was a woman, but it fortunately happened that he being a middle-aged gentleman, he was not very inquisitive, and my messmates being advanced in years, and not so active as young people, did not tumble me about or undress me.

Mary now decided to become a shipwright's apprentice, and thanks to recommendations from her former shipmates and her own determination, she succeeded in her aim. In March 1763, she was signed on as apprentice to Alexander McLean, the acting carpenter of the
Royal William,
an 84-gun ship that was out of commission and based at Portsmouth Dockyard. McLean was currently living on board the ship together with his mistress and several other warrant officers and their wives, but he later rented a house ashore.

For the next three or four years, Mary put in twelve-hour days in the dockyard and in the evenings joined their drunken revels. She must have had stamina as well as considerable ability as a craftsman, because she not only survived the long hours and physical demands of the job, but she also earned the men's respect. She records that they would say she was “the best boy on board.” She also continued to attract the women. McLean's mistress was obviously fond of her and on one occasion “came and placed herself in my lap, stroking me down the face, telling the watermen what she would do for me, so that the people present could not forbear laughing to see her sit in such a young boy's lap as she thought I was.” She became particularly friendly with a very handsome girl named Sarah How, who became “very free and intimate with me.” She also carried on a flirtation with a prostitute named Betsey, and then became such close friends with Sarah Chase, a servant girl, that her fellow workers thought they would soon get married. Mary tells us that they were very intimate together and that they agreed that neither of them would go out with any other person without the consent of the other.