Women Sailors & Sailors' Women (24 page)

Similar subjects appear among the work of the Swedish craftsman Johan Tornstrom, who was one of the most gifted of all carvers of figureheads. His first major work was the figurehead for the frigate
Camilla
of 1784, depicting a seminaked woman with one raised hand pointing an arrow at her breast. During the course of the next thirty years, he carried out a range of commissions, many of them for ships built to the designs of the master naval architect Frederick Chapman. One of his most impressive carvings is an armed and helmeted female warrior, presumably representing Athena or Minerva, for the ship
Aran.
In stark contrast is the sorrowing figure of the tragic wife of Orpheus that came from the Swedish frigate
Eurydice,
and in a very different mood, the shameless whore from the bows of
La Coquette
who cups her hands under her exposed breasts.
¹⁰

The owners of nineteenth-century merchant ships were also fond of figureheads of goddesses and allegorical images. The following notice in
The Boston Gazette
of October 10, 1811, is worth quoting in full, because it indicates that the symbolism of the carvings, even on relatively small vessels, continued to be significant and was certainly appreciated by the newspaper's reporter:

Last Tuesday was launched from Mr. William Merrill's yard in Newbury, a brig named
Pickering.
She has for a figurehead the Goddess of Liberty. On her stern are represented Truth and Justice, holding a Wreath over the head of a Bust of the illustrious Patriot, whose name she bears. At the side of them is Peace and Plenty. The vessel is about 250 tons, and one of the most beautiful we have ever seen; we understand she is owned in Gloucester, by Messrs. Sargent & Co. Very often have we seen vessels with the names of great men, but we have seldom met with one, combining so much beautiful hieroglyphical allusion. Its design and execution confer equal honor on the owners and workmen, while it conveys a delicate and deserved compliment to Mr. Pickering.

Not all shipowners were as concerned about the hieroglyphical allusions of their figureheads. In 1798, the Scottish firm of Scotts of Greenock wrote to the London ship carver Henry Hopkins and simply ordered “a fashionable lady head in the present taste.”
¹¹
Hopkins was told it must be five feet long, and when it was complete, he was ordered to send it by the first Berwick smack to the port of Leith near Edinburgh. The same shipyard wanted a figurehead for an East Indiaman in 1849. The ship was to be called
Seringapatam,
and the ship carver Archibald Robertson was told to fashion a seven-foot-high male figure in eastern costume. However, if he thought an eastern female figure would be more showy and look better, he was told to carve it in that style instead.

In addition to goddesses, Indian maidens, and females representing abstract concepts like Faith, Hope, and Charity, many of the figureheads on merchant ships were portrait sculptures of women known to the shipowner. In 1840, for instance, the Devonshire shipowner Joshua Quinton ordered for his schooner
Mary Ann
a carving that depicted the nanny who had saved his children from drowning. The figureheads of many merchant ships depicted the wife or daughter of the shipowner. Among the many fine figureheads in the Mariners' Museum at Newport News, Virginia, is that of the schooner
Irma Bentley,
which was built by George Bentley at Port Greville, Nova Scotia, in 1908. One of the fifteen children of George Bentley identified the figurehead and informed the museum that it was a portrait of the shipowner's daughter, Irma, when she was four or five years old. Irma Bentley subsequently visited the museum and was able to provide a complete history of the carving. She said that she had accompanied her father on many of his voyages to the Caribbean and beyond and was chosen for the figurehead because she was a good sailor and was never seasick.

A survey of the carved figures on the bows and sterns of ships from the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century shows that there were four female images that were consistently favored by the men who commissioned decorative carvings. The first was the figure of an armed and helmeted female goddess or warrior, usually representing Athena or Minerva. The second was a sea nymph or nereid: These frequently appeared among the mass of carvings on the sterns of ships or as supporters to figureheads, and tended to be used as the subject of a figurehead only when the ship was named after a particular nereid such as Arethusa or Galatea. The third female figure was the siren, originally a bird woman in Greek mythology but usually shown on ships as a mermaidlike figure with the addition of wings and a double fish's tail. And the fourth figure that appeared almost as often as a figurehead as she did among the stern decorations was the mermaid herself.

Armed goddesses were popular subjects for figureheads on warships, because they combined an impressive warlike appearance with the sterling qualities of the goddess Athena and the mystical powers that women were believed to have over the element of water. The appeal of this image is underlined by the fact that it was adopted by Great Britain as the personification of her role as a maritime power. With the addition of a trident in one hand and the flags of England and Scotland painted on her shield, the Greek goddess Athena became Britannia. The original figure of Britannia can be traced back to the images of a captive female warrior that appeared on coins struck by various Roman emperors to represent the conquered island of Britain, but during the course of the seventeenth century, a version of the helmeted Athena figure was increasingly used as a patriotic symbol.
¹²
The visual image was given an additional boost by the stirring tune that Thomas Arne composed for the poem which was to take on the guise of a national anthem for the Royal Navy. “Rule, Britannia!” was written by James Thomson as the finale for a masque that was commissioned by the Prince of Wales and performed at his summer residence in 1740. The words reflect the aspirations of a pugnacious island race that had suffered conquest by Romans, Vikings, and Normans in the distant past, had fought off the Spanish Armada, and was determined not to be conquered again:

 

When Britain first, at Heaven's command

Arose from out the azure main,

This was the charter of the land

And guardian angels sang this strain

“Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves,

Britons never, never, never will be slaves.”

 

English caricaturists such as James Gillray and George Cruikshank frequently used Britannia as the personification of Britain. In their savage cartoons that were drawn during the course of the wars against Napoleonic France, Britannia looks more like a large washerwoman in fancy dress than a Greek goddess, but she later assumed a more serious aspect. Whenever she has appeared on British coins and banknotes (she is currently found on the reverse of the 50-pence piece), she is closer to the original image of Athena.

The sea nymphs on the bows and sterns of European ships were mostly derived from Greek mythology. In Greek legend there were two families of sea nymphs. There were the oceanides, who lived in the oceans, and the nereids, who were the fifty daughters of the sea god Nereus and Doris and who lived in the Mediterranean. According to Apollodorus of Athens, there were no fewer than 3,000 oceanides. The best known of them was Calypso, who ruled over the island of Ortygia in the Ionian Sea. In Homer's
Odyssey,
she kept Odysseus a prisoner in a cavern on the island for seven years before she was ordered by Zeus to release him.

The nereids were fair virgins with golden hair who could sometimes be seen frolicking among the waves in the company of tritons, who were half-men and half-fish. On ship decorations, the nereids are often shown riding dolphins, with usually a few tritons in attendance. Many warships were named after particular nereids, the most popular being Arethusa, Galatea, and Thetis. In the Greek myths, Arethusa was pursued by an amorous hunter and escaped by changing into a spring on the island of Ortygia. Galatea was courted by Polyphemus, the one-eyed cyclops, but fell in love with Acis, a young herdsman, and was changed into a river. Thetis was so beautiful that she was courted by Zeus and Poseidon before she settled down and married Peleus, king of Thessaly. Five British warships were named
Calypso.
Five British warships, and several French ships, were named after Arethusa. There were five warships called
Galatea,
and no fewer than nine British warships operating between 1717 and 1855 were named after the sea nymph Thetis.

Like the nereids, the sirens originated in the Greek myths.
¹³
They were among the hybrid creatures such as centaurs and sphinxes, half-animal and half-human, who lived on the boundaries of the known world and were likely to be encountered by the more intrepid travelers and explorers. It was said by some that the sirens were demons of death: And like the soul birds of ancient Egypt, they were souls who were sent to catch souls. The song of the sirens was impossible to resist, and lured seafarers to shipwreck and death. According to some accounts, it was the beauty of the song that attracted men. It was described as being like the music of the spheres. Other accounts maintained that it was the contents of the song that was its attraction. It was a source of knowledge: It told men what they most wanted to hear, and in particular, it foretold the future.

The earliest written description of the sirens appears in the
Odyssey.
Circe warned Odysseus about the sirens while he was staying on her enchanted island:

Your next encounter will be with the Sirens, who bewitch everybody that approaches them. There is no homecoming for the man who draws near them unaware and hears the Sirens' voices; no welcome from his wife, no little children brightening at their father's return. For with the music of their song, the Sirens cast their spell upon him, as they sit there in a meadow piled high with the mouldering skeletons of men, whose withered skin still hangs upon their bones.
¹⁴

Circe advised Odysseus to plug the ears of his crew with beeswax and have them bind him to the mast so that he could hear the sirens' song but be unable to approach them. As his ship neared the spot where they lived, Odysseus heard their lovely voices coming across the water and was filled with such longing that he signed to his men to set him free, but they ignored him and rowed resolutely on until they were out of danger. Homer does not describe the appearance of the sirens in the
Odyssey,
but in Greek and Roman art and literature they are always depicted as bird-women, sometimes as women with wings, more often as birds with women's heads. According to tradition, they lived off the coast of Italy on the island of Capri.

Sharing some of the attributes of the sirens but altogether more beguiling were the mermaids. Their origin is difficult to determine because they appear in various forms in the myths of many countries. In Russian folktales, a maiden who drowned was likely to become a Rusalka. In the southern regions around the Danube, the Rusalki were beautiful in appearance and so bewitched their victims with their sweet songs that death in their arms was peaceful. In the cold northern regions, the Rusalki were frightening to behold; their eyes shone with a green fire, their hair was unkempt and uncombed, and their skin was like that of the bodies of the drowned. Scandinavian legends tell of the goddess Ran, the ravisher, who caused storms at sea and captured dying sailors in a huge net. She entertained the drowned men in a great hall beneath the sea and fed them on fish delicacies. Her nine daughters were temptresses who reached out their arms and dragged young men to the seabed.

The mermaid who appears in the art and literature of Western Europe is invariably beautiful, but she too is associated with death. Invented by men, she became a symbol of men's ambivalence toward women. She is a temptress like Eve, and her fishy tail is a reminder of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Like Aphrodite, who was born from the sea in a scallop shell, the mermaid has long, flowing hair, a sure indication of an abundant sexual appetite. Also like Aphrodite, she holds a mirror. This was a symbol of vanity, but it was also possible to see the future by looking into a mirror: The gift of prophecy was an important attribute of the mermaid, as it was of the siren. In addition to the mirror in one hand, the mermaid invariably has a comb in her other hand. The meaning of this is lost on us today, but in classical times it was directly connected with female sexuality because the Greek word for comb,
kteis,
and the Roman
pecten
were also used for the female pudenda. An alternative interpretation was proposed by Robert Graves, the poet and compiler of a comprehensive encyclopedia of mythology: In
The White Goddess,
he suggested that the mermaid's comb was originally the plectrum that the sirens used to pluck the strings of their lyres.

It is often assumed that the mermaid owes her origin to sailors mistaking the dugong or manatee for a fish-tailed woman, but this is too simplistic an explanation. In the first place, the dugong is a bulky, ugly creature with a shiny, bald head and a mustache: It could only be mistaken for a mermaid by a sailor who was either very nearsighted or very drunk. Likewise, a number of mermaid sightings took place in seas that have never been home to either dugongs or manatees. The dugong lives in the shallow waters of countries bordering the Indian Ocean, Indonesia, and Australia. The manatee frequents the rivers and freshwater lakes in Florida, some of the West Indian Islands, Brazil, and the Congo River in Africa. Neither mammal is known to have lived in the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic, or the North Sea, where so many of the mermaid legends first surfaced. It is possible that the dugong, or the much more attractive seal, may account for some mermaid sightings, but it seems more likely that the mermaid was the creation of poets, writers, and artists. She is one of those creatures like the unicorn and the dragon that appeared in early folktales and took a firm hold on people's imaginations.