Women Sailors & Sailors' Women (23 page)

Boscawen in turn kept her in touch with his life at sea. At one point he wrote to her every day, but she complained that his letters contained little else but the trite accounts of wind and weather. He explained that often there was little else to write about and that the workings of the ship were scarcely intelligible to anyone who was not a seaman. Most of his time was spent exercising the squadron under his command, carrying out gunnery exercises, and seeing which ship sailed the fastest. He did his best to match Fanny's lively descriptions of her social life, but his account of his daily routine was restricted to a few sentences. “We rise before six, breakfast at eight, dine at one, and sup at eight again and all very regularly. My mess at dinner consists of six, and breakfast and supper only Colby and Macpherson.”
¹⁵
He said that conversation was limited and mostly amounted to a repetition of old voyages, interspersed now and then with accounts of fox hunts by Captain Colby, who was a sportsman. Boscawen seemed to have lived well on most of his voyages. Sometimes there was venison on the menu, sometimes turtle or fresh fish, and he was fortunate to have a baker who produced hot French bread every morning, on which he spread orange marmalade for his breakfast. Fanny had supplied him with some books, but he seems to have spent little time reading. He told her that he found the
History of Gustavus Vasa
to be entertaining, but he did not enjoy the French books she had given him.

A notable feature of Boscawen's letters is his aforementioned preoccupation with his country estate. “A gentle rain all yesterday evening made me think of Hatchlands Park,” he wrote to Fanny in 1756, and he was constantly giving her detailed instructions to pass on to Mr. Woodrose, the estate manager. “Pray exhort Woodrose to roll and weed. By this I think he must have completed his sowing and pray don't forget to buy me 12 load or thereabout of clover hay if it is cheap.”
¹⁶
He also wanted the three roads in the park to be leveled, the ditch around the grotto to be cleaned, and all the ground at the lower end of the park to be plowed, leaving a broad walk under the grown trees. But always his thoughts came back to his beloved Fanny. “I am heartily tired of this prison kind of life,” he wrote from on board the
Invincible
in May 1756, “and what I think is extraordinary, the older I grow, and the more used I am to it, the more tiresome I find it. I wish myself with you every hour, and dream of you every night.”
¹⁷

We know more about the feelings of admirals and naval captains than we do about the other ranks, because much more of their correspondence has been preserved. It is also a fact that senior naval officers tended to be considerably older than most ordinary seamen and therefore were more likely to have wives and children. The majority of the sailors of the lower deck in the navy were young men in their twenties. Many had gone to sea out of a spirit of adventure or because they wanted to see the world. Often they came from seafaring families, and it was taken for granted that they would go to sea to earn a living. During times of war, surprisingly large numbers of young men joined the navy for patriotic reasons or were prepared to tolerate the hard life, even if they were victims of the press gang. A common sailor, who had been pressed into the navy and was in Vernon's fleet at the capture of Portobelo, told his wife that it was with an aching heart that he had been taken from her by a gang of ruffians but that he was pleased to be fighting for his country against the impudent Spaniards: “I am and so is every man of us resolved either to lose our lives or conquer our enemies, true British spirit revives and by God we will support our King and country so long as a drop of blood remains.”
¹⁸

But many sailors would have agreed with Boscawen that life aboard a warship was “a prison kind of life.” And unlike the senior officers, they did not have the luxury of a large cabin with fine furniture, French bread for breakfast, and splendid wines with their dinner. The younger seamen missed their mothers and sisters, and those who were married missed their wives. Since a large number of sailors were illiterate, it was difficult for them to keep in touch with their loved ones by letters. Samuel Leech, a sailor on HMS
Macedonian
during actions against American ships in the War of 1812, acted as a scribe for those of his shipmates who could not read and write, but there must have been many men who lost touch completely with their families while they were away at sea. For them it was a matter of surviving the hard life as best they could. Leech described the informal concerts that would take place on deck during calm weather at sea. Scores of men would gather around a gun, and one of their number would seat himself on the gun and sing a selection of favorite songs. Another man would stand up and tell a few stories, and another would crack jokes. Leech thought that a casual visitor to a man-of-war might assume from the songs, the dances, and the revelry of the crew that they were happy, but it was his belief that these interludes only made life tolerable: “By such means as this sailors contrive to keep up their spirits amidst constant causes of depression and misery.”
¹⁹

William Nevens, the American sailor from Maine, entitled his memoirs
Forty Years at Sea . . . Being an Authentic Account of the Vicissitudes, Hardships, Narrow Escapes, Shipwrecks, and Sufferings in Forty Years Experience at Sea.
It will be recalled from chapter 2 that he had gone to sea at seventeen, made a number of voyages in a merchant ship to the West Indies, and been taken by the press gang in Barbados and forced to join the crew of a British warship; he had escaped by swimming to another vessel and ended up in Boston, where he married an English girl from Liverpool. She was nineteen and he was still only twenty-three. Like the majority of seamen, he saw very little of his wife over the next few years because he was earning a living at sea. While he was away on one of his voyages, he learned that his wife had died, leaving him with a baby boy of ten months. In his memoirs, which were published in 1850 after he had lived through numerous hazards and risen to become captain of a merchant ship, Nevens looked back on his years of marriage. He realized that many people would say that a sailor should not take on the responsibility of a wife but pointed out that only a sailor could appreciate what it meant to have someone he loved who would be there for him when the voyage was over. Of his own wife he wrote, “Although the most of my time had been spent away from her since our marriage, yet whilst she lived I felt that I had something to bind me to society, a kind and sincere friend, a trusty counsellor, an agreeable companion. With what eagerness did I seek her ardent welcome when returned from a long voyage.”
²⁰

10

Women and Water, Sirens and Mermaids

W
HEN CAPTAIN COLLINGWOOD
learned that there was a woman aboard one of the ships in his squadron, he ordered her to be sent home at once. “I never knew a woman brought to sea in a ship that some mischief did not befall the vessel,” he wrote to Admiral Purvis.
¹
It was a view that had been shared by seamen for centuries and is still prevalent among some sailors and fishermen today. Linda Greenlaw, the captain of the fishing boat
Hannah Boden
and one of the most consistently successful fishermen operating on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland in recent years, has said that for a long time she had to endure the Jonah-like forebodings of an old fisherman on the quay at Gloucester, who made it clear that every time she set off for the fishing grounds he expected some disaster to befall her boat.
²
For eight years he watched her comings and goings and was always surprised when she returned safely to port.

As with so many sailors' superstitions, it is hard to discover the origins of the belief that a woman on a ship brings bad luck, and even harder to find any factual basis for it. Columbus, Magellan, and Drake might not have taken women on their epic voyages, but the ships of the Pilgrim Fathers were loaded with women and survived the Atlantic crossing, as did the hundreds of emigrant ships that followed in their wake. We have already seen that the British navy was prepared to turn a blind eye to the wives of warrant officers living on board; and the wives of captains, diplomats, and colonial governors frequently traveled overseas without bringing any harm to themselves or their fellow passengers. Those naval officers who did object to the presence of women on their ships seem to have regarded them as a nuisance rather than a source of bad luck—an attitude summed up by Nelson's remark before setting sail in 1801: “On Sunday we shall get rid of all the women, dogs and pigeons, and on Wednesday, with the lark, I hope to be under sail for Torbay.”
³

What is curious about the sailors' superstition is that it is flatly contradicted by the long-held belief that water is the female element and that women have powers over the sea that are denied to men. This belief dates back to ancient Greece and beyond. Evidence has been found at Knossos to indicate that the Great Goddess of the Cretans not only symbolized fertility but also regulated the course of the sun and stars and protected seamen on their voyages. When the Egyptian goddess Isis was adopted by the Greeks, she became the goddess of seafarers, and Greek ships were often named after her. Aristotle and the medical writers of his time believed that women were physically wetter than men. Their soft, spongy flesh retained more fluid from their diet, and the purpose of menstruation was to remove the excess fluid from their bodies. Pliny the Elder, in his monumental
Natural History,
which was published in
A.D.
77 and summed up the thinking of the generations of writers and philosophers who had preceded him, said there was no limit to the marvelous powers attributed to females:

For, in the first place, hailstorms, they say, whirlwinds, and lightning even, will be scared away by a woman uncovering her body while her monthly courses are upon her. The same, too, with all kinds of tempestuous weather; and out at sea, a storm may be lulled by a woman uncovering her body merely, even though not menstruating at the time.
⁴

This belief that the naked female body could calm storms may account for the large number of ships' figureheads that feature a woman with one or both breasts bare.

The power that women were believed to have over water is most clearly demonstrated in the link between the Virgin Mary and the sea. In Catholic countries she was, and still is, widely regarded as the patron saint of sailors and fishermen. On the hills and cliff tops overlooking innumerable ports and fishing villages around the coasts of France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy can be found churches dedicated to the Virgin. Inside many of these are altars and chapels specially dedicated to seamen, and over the centuries it has been the custom for seafarers to offer prayers to the Virgin before setting out on a voyage. It was usual on the ships of Catholic countries (and on English ships before the Reformation) to have a shrine to the Virgin on the poop deck. Christopher Columbus was only one of many seafarers to name his ship
Santa María
in the belief that the Virgin Mary would guide him safely across the ocean. In the Spanish Armada of 1588, there were five ships named
Santa María
and four called
La María.

The very name of the Virgin Mary was derived from the Latin name for water, the symbol of her purity, and her blue cloak represented the sea, the sky, and eternity. In Italian Renaissance paintings, she was often depicted against a distant lake or a glimpse of sea, usually a calm sea representing tranquillity. In Leonardo da Vinci's
Annunciation,
in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, there is a sunny and peaceful harbor in the distance beyond the figure of the young Virgin Mary, symbolizing her role as the Port of Salvation. Mary was also associated with the moon and the stars and became known as
Stella Maris,
the Star of the Sea. The moon controlled the tides, and the stars were used for navigation; thus, Mary was seen as a crucial mediator between the seafarers and the elements when they ventured out to sea.
⁵

Four hundred years after Leonardo da Vinci painted
The Annunciation,
we find Sigmund Freud pointing out the association between women and water in the lectures he delivered at the University of Vienna during the winter terms of 1915 and 1916. He was nearly sixty, and the lectures summed up much of his life's work on the interpretation of dreams. In his tenth lecture, on the symbolism in dreams, he observed that birth was represented in dreams by water. He reminded his audience that not only are all mammals, including man's ancestors, descended from creatures that lived in water, “but every individual mammal, every human being, spent the first phase of its existence in water—namely as an embryo in the amniotic fluid in its mother's uterus, and came out of that water when it was born.”
⁶

Freud also maintained that the female genitalia were symbolically represented in dreams by objects which enclosed a hollow space such as cavities, hollows, bottles, boxes, chests, cupboards, and rooms. Ships also fell into this category, and he made the interesting point that the link between ships and women was confirmed by etymologists “who tell us that ‘Schiff' [the German word for ship] was originally the name of an earthenware vessel, and is the same word as ‘Schaff' [a dialect word meaning ‘tub'].” This is not such an obscure argument as it might appear when it is recalled that for centuries ships have been regarded as feminine and referred to as “she” or “her” by sailors. Most of the early written references in English to a ship being a “she” appear in sixteenth-century documents, but there are one or two earlier references. By the eighteenth century, the majority of English-speaking seafarers referred to ships as female, although the terms “man-of-war,” “merchantman,” “Indiaman,” “Guineaman,” and similar masculine terms continued to be used for certain types of ships. There have been numerous explanations put forward as to why a ship should be regarded as feminine, some more convincing than others. Some will say it is because the ship is beautiful, or capricious, or full of curves; some will point out the anatomical similarities—that a ship has a head, cheeks, ribs, a waist, a belly, a bottom, and knees; some will say that a ship is like a mother and offers womblike protection to those on board; it has also been suggested that sailors think of ships as feminine because there is often a female figurehead on the bow.

At first sight there would appear to be an obvious link between the concept of a ship being feminine and the female figurehead. If a woman had special powers over the sea, it made sense for the figurehead to depict a woman, and ideally a naked or seminaked woman, since an unclothed woman could allegedly calm storms. In fact, female figureheads did not become popular until the nineteenth century, and it is only because the majority of the figureheads that have been preserved date from the 1780s onward that it is commonly assumed that most figureheads depicted voluptuous women. The reality is that in earlier centuries, most figureheads depicted male subjects, animals, birds, or monsters. Egyptian vessels displayed the sacred symbols of the gods, such as the falcon, the ibis, and the lotus flower. The ships of classical Greece usually had the head of a ram or a wild boar at the prow, and a large eye, the
oculus,
painted on each side of the bow. Viking ships had serpents or dragons. The warships of the maritime countries of medieval Europe were decorated with heraldic designs, and the figureheads were often of animals. English ships of the Elizabethan period had lions, tigers, unicorns, eagles, and St. George and the Dragon.

It was during the course of the seventeenth century that carved decorations on the bows and sterns of warships proliferated. The carvings were loaded with symbolic imagery that was intended to express the power of each nation and to glorify the head of state. The French ship
Le Grand Louis,
commissioned by Cardinal Richelieu in 1600, featured a figurehead of Jupiter riding on an eagle. The
Wasa,
built for King Gustav Adolf of Sweden and launched from the royal dockyard at Stockholm in 1628, had a lion figurehead and nearly 500 carved figures. Like the
Mary Rose
of the previous century, the
Wasa
sank during her maiden sail in full view of the watching crowds. Preserved in the mud for three centuries, she was raised in 1961, and she has since undergone extensive restoration and has been the subject of meticulous research. No fewer than 453 of the sculptured figures have been recovered, and analysis of these has revealed a great deal about the ideas that lay behind the ship carvings of this period. The central theme of the decoration is the glorifying of the king, whose portrait is the focus of the stern carving. The rudder is decorated with a large lion trampling on a grotesque head, one of several images intended to symbolize Sweden defeating her enemies. The majority of the
Wasa
's carvings are male figures, mostly armed warriors, Roman emperors, mythological figures like Hercules, and wild men with clubs symbolizing strength and aggression. The only female figures are a few caryatids representing nereids and a dozen relatively small mermaids.
⁷

A similar decorative scheme was adopted on the magnificent British warship the
Sovereign of the Seas
(also called the
Royal Sovereign
). This 100-gun ship was designed by the famous shipbuilder Peter Pett and built at the royal dockyard at Woolwich. She was launched in 1637, and we are fortunate to have a detailed explanation of her decoration from Thomas Heywood, a designer of masques who planned the overall scheme. He leaves us in no doubt about the message he wished to convey in the symbolism of the various figures:

Upon the beak head sitteth Royal King Edgar on horseback trampling upon seven kings. Upon the stem head there is a Cupid, or a child resembling him, bestriding a lion, which importeth that sufference may curb insolence, and innocence restrain violence; which alludeth to the great mercy of the King, whose mercy is above all his workes. On the bulkhead right forward stand six severall statues in sundry postures; their figures represent Consilium, that is Counsell; Cura, that is Care; Conamen, that is Industry; Counsell holds in her hand a closed or folded scroll; Care a sea compass; Conamen, or Industry, a lint stock fired. Upon the other side, to correspond with the former, Vis, which implyeth Force or Strength, holding a sword; Virtus, or Virtue, a spherical globe; and Victoria, or Victory, a wreath of Lawrell. The moral is that in all high enterprises there ought to be first, Counsell to undertake, then Care to manage and Industry to performe; and in the next place, where there is an Ability and Strength to oppose and Virtue to direct, Victory consequently is always at hand to crown the undertaking.
⁸

By the end of the seventeenth century, the carved work on British ships had become so elaborate and so expensive that the Navy Board issued an order in June 1703 that restricted the amount of carving and required all but the largest warships to have a figurehead in the form of a lion. Elaborate figureheads continued to be installed on the large three-deckers, and these usually consisted of a male rider on horseback surrounded and supported by various allegorical figures.

Although most eighteenth-century figureheads on British, French, Dutch, and Scandinavian warships were either heraldic beasts, decorative coats of arms, or male horsemen, there were exceptions. F. H. Chapman's great book of ship designs of 1768,
Architectura Navalis,
shows a number of female figureheads, notably that of the French frigate
La Sirenne,
34 guns, which had a winged female figure representing a siren; and various merchant ships are shown with female figures, one with a sword and scales representing Justice, and others that appear to be goddesses. British royal yachts often had a female figurehead, usually a sculpted portrait of the queen or princess after whom the yacht was named. The yacht
Royal Caroline
of 1749, for instance, had an elaborate gilded figure of Queen Caroline, the wife of King George II. The importance attached to the decoration on such a vessel is revealed by the costs. The decorative carving on the
Royal Caroline
cost no less than £1,100, while the figurehead required 120,000 sheets of gold leaf at a cost of £950. The combined cost of the carving and gilding in today's terms would be in the region of £140,000.
⁹

Female figureheads began to come into their own in the 1780s, and during the course of the nineteenth century they became as popular as male figures, particularly on merchant ships. Warships continued to have kings, warriors, naval heroes, and Greek gods, but these were now joined by a range of goddesses, such as Diana, Thetis, and Minerva, as well as by sirens, sea nymphs, and mermaids, and by allegorical figures representing positive attributes such as Fame, Fortune, and Victory. French female figureheads were particularly impressive and reflected the quality of French monumental sculpture. There are some fine examples in the Musée de la Marine in Paris, notably the vigorously sculpted figure of a female warrior from the
Poursuivant,
the imperious and statuesque carving of the sea nymph wife of Neptune for the
Amphitrite,
and the exquisitely beautiful mermaid on the bows of the small state barge built for Marie Antoinette and designed for use on the Grand Canal at Versailles.