Women Sailors & Sailors' Women (8 page)

This might seem to be the end of the story, but Ann Parker continued to demonstrate that desperate and heroic determination which enables some people to fight on when all seems lost. With some difficulty she managed to secure an audience with Vice Admiral Skeffington Lutwidge, who had recently been appointed commander in chief of the fleet at Sheerness. She told him she wanted to remove her husband's body from the burial ground in the garrison. Lutwidge asked her why she wanted to take her husband's body. She replied, “To have him interred like a gentleman, as he had been bred.”

Ann Parker knew her husband was no criminal, and she wanted him to have a decent burial and the blessing of the church. Vice Admiral Lutwidge had no sympathy for the wife of the notorious leader of the recent mutiny and categorically refused her request. Having failed to get her way by official means, Mrs. Parker resorted to desperate measures. The place where her husband was buried was alongside the walls of the garrison and was enclosed by a new stockade fence that was nearly ten feet high. She tried to find out who kept the key to the gate of the stockade, but failing to do so, she waited until nightfall and returned to the burial place. At about ten o'clock, she came across three women and persuaded them to help her recover the body of her husband. The women were probably sailors' wives or prostitutes; the commissioner of the dockyard at Sheerness frequently complained that the area was “a common resort of Whores and Rogues by day and night.”
⁵
When the coast was clear, the four women climbed over the gate and into the stockaded area.

Although Richard Parker's coffin was buried in a shallow grave, the women had no tools and had to dig away the earth with their bare hands. They lifted the coffin from the ground, carried it across to the fence, and managed with some difficulty to heave it over the gate. They laid it on the ground outside, and in order to conceal it from the sentries manning the Barrier Gate nearby, they sat on the coffin for the remainder of the night. At four o'clock in the morning, the drawbridge of the fort was lowered and a fish cart rumbled through the gateway onto the road outside. Mrs. Parker accosted the driver and, finding that he was heading for Rochester, persuaded him to add the coffin to his load for the price of a guinea. Having arrived in the town she found the driver of a wagon who, for six guineas, agreed to take the coffin to London and to deliver it to the Hoop and Horseshoe, on Queen Street, Little Tower Hill. Mrs. Parker had hired a room there where she arranged for the coffin to be deposited.

The mutiny of the seamen at the Nore and the subsequent court-martial of Richard Parker had been widely reported and had caused considerable interest not only among seafarers and their families, but among people from all classes, particularly in London. When the word got out that Parker's corpse had been brought to the East End by his widow, a crowd began to gather outside the Hoop and Horseshoe. Some of the more unscrupulous women appear to have been charging people to see Parker's body. By Monday, the crowds of the curious had grown so big that the local magistrates were forced to intervene. Ann Parker was called to the police office on Lambert Street, where she was asked why she had removed her husband's body from its burial place at Sheerness. She said that she wished to take him to his family in Exeter or to her family in Scotland so that she could bury him like a Christian. She was asked whether the rumors were true that she had been charging people money to view the corpse. At this she burst into floods of tears and replied, “Do I appear like a monster so unnatural?” Subsequent inquiries confirmed that there was no truth in the accusation. The magistrates were concerned that elements in the population would use the occasion of the funeral to cause a riot, and they therefore decided that the coffin should be moved immediately to the workhouse on Nightingale Lane and then buried in the churchyard of Aldgate Church the next morning. However, the crowds continued to gather in the Minories all that evening, and fearing a tumultuous assembly the next day, they arranged for the body to be moved at one o'clock in the morning from the workhouse to the burying vault of the church of St. Mary at Whitechapel.

In the afternoon of Tuesday, July 4, Ann Parker was permitted to attend the funeral service for her husband, which was officiated by Mr. Wright, the rector of St. Mary, Whitechapel. At her particular request, the coffin lid was taken off and she was allowed to look at her husband for the last time. After the ceremony was over she signed a certificate to confirm that the burial service had been duly performed.
⁶
No doubt to cover themselves in the event of any inquiry into the proceedings, the minister and officers of the parish asked her to state that she was perfectly satisfied with the mode of his interment and with the treatment that she had received. This she agreed to. The following inscription can still be found in the church register under the heading of burials: “4 July, 1797, Richard Parker, Sheerness, Kent, age 33. Cause of death, execution.”
⁷

T
HE STORY OF
Ann Parker is obviously unusual and cannot be regarded as typical of the experiences of sailors' women. Of the hundreds of thousands of sailors who served at sea in the eighteenth century, relatively few were hanged for mutiny, and it would be hard to find another sailor's wife who went to such extreme lengths to rescue her husband's corpse and give him a Christian burial. But the story does encapsulate, in an unusually dramatic form, the tragedy that was the lot of so many wives and families of seamen. We are allowed a glimpse of a few days in the life of Ann Parker because of the notoriety of her husband, and because the mutiny at the Nore aroused strong passions and was widely reported at the time. But what of the other seamen who were present that day and what of their families?

On the morning of Parker's execution, there were fourteen warships lying at anchor in the River Medway. Most of these ships had between 500 and 600 seamen on board, and we can therefore assume that around 8,000 seamen and marines were assembled on the decks of their ships to watch Parker die. The majority of these men were not allowed ashore and were confined to their ships for as long as they remained in the harbor. Only the officers and the more long-serving and reliable hands would be given permission to spend time ashore. The remainder must endure an existence that was hard but bearable for the younger and more adaptable, but for older men and for landsmen unaccustomed to the confined life on board, it was nothing less than a floating hell.

Richard Hall was at the Nore in June 1800, when he wrote to his wife from HMS
Zealand.
He told her that it was worse than a prison: “If I had known it was so bad I would not have entered. I would give all I had if it was a hundred guineas if I could get on shore.” He said that they flogged men every day and that many other men would give all the world if they could get onshore. He concluded, “Dear wife, do the best you can for the children and God prosper them till I come back, which there is no fear of and send an answer as soon as possible.”
⁸

The captains were very aware that many of the sailors had been impressed into the navy and had good reason to believe that they would run away if allowed ashore. Between 1795 and 1805, more men were court-martialed for desertion than for drunkenness, theft, or any other offense. The punishment for desertion was brutal: floggings of 200 or 300 lashes were common, and in some cases men were hanged.

Richard Parker paid the ultimate price for leading a protest against some of the worst aspects of naval life, and his wife was left a widow. There was another wife of an impressed seaman whose story was equally dramatic but had a happier ending. Margaret Dickson was born around 1700 in Musselburgh, a tiny fishing village on the Firth of Forth, a few miles from Edinburgh.
⁹
Her parents were poor but ensured that she had a good religious education and was versed in the household duties that might be expected of her. She duly married a local fisherman and bore him several children. At some time around 1726 or 1727, her husband was taken by the press gang during one of the navy's periodic recruitment sweeps of the Firth of Forth.

Left on her own, Margaret Dickson had a brief affair with another Musselburgh man and became pregnant. She was so frightened of causing a scandal (it was a local custom that adulterous women should be publicly rebuked in church) that she attempted to hide her pregnant state until the last moment. She was alone when she went into labor. Unable to get assistance from her neighbors, she fell unconscious and had no recollection whether she gave birth to a baby that was alive or stillborn. When a dead baby was found near her house, she was accused of murder, arrested, and sent to the jail in Edinburgh. At her trial, a surgeon gave damning evidence. He had put the baby's lungs in water and found that they floated, which according to him meant the child had been born alive because it had breathed air into the lungs. Margaret Dickson was found guilty of murder and condemned to death.

During the subsequent days in prison she confessed that she was guilty of adultery but constantly denied that she had murdered her child “or even formed an idea of so horrid a crime.” She was hanged at Edinburgh in 1728, and afterward her body was delivered to her friends, who placed it in a coffin and sent it on a cart for burial in Musselburgh. The weather was sultry, and the people in charge of the cart decided to stop for a drink at the village of Pepper-Mill outside Edinburgh. While they were drinking, one of them saw the lid of the coffin move. They went to remove it and were startled when the hanged woman sat up. Most of the spectators ran off in terror, but someone had the presence of mind to take her indoors, bleed her, and put her to bed. The following morning she woke up and had recovered sufficiently to be able to walk back to her home in Musselburgh.

Under Scottish law, a person could not be punished twice for the same offense, and since she had already suffered the due punishment, she was now a free person. Her sailor husband had meanwhile returned to Musselburgh, and since the marriage of an executed person was automatically dissolved, they were married for a second time a few days later. According to the account in the
Newgate Calendar,
she continued to deny that she had murdered her child, and we learn that “she was living as late as the year 1753.”

Margaret Dickson's recovery may seem miraculous, but in fact there are several accounts of people who survived hanging in Britain during the eighteenth century. Presumably, if the drop was not sufficient to break the neck, one simply suffered temporary asphyxiation, became unconscious for a while, and when the pressure of the rope was released, was able to make a complete recovery.

4

Female Sailors: Fact and Fiction

I
N AUGUST
1815, a book was published in Boston entitled
The
Adventures of Louisa Baker.
The heroine of the book was a young woman from Massachusetts, and the story was told in her own words.
¹
She described how she had been seduced and abandoned by the son of a local trader, and had run away from home to spare her respectable parents the shame. In bitterly cold weather she walked to Boston, where a kindly woman took pity on her and gave her a bed for the night. The woman told her to avoid the area of town that was inhabited by prostitutes and warned her against the pimps who were continually in search of new victims.

With a heavy heart, Louisa set forth to look for a job as a chambermaid with a respectable family. She described herself as “a young and slender female thinly clad, and in a tedious snowstorm, with a handkerchief in one hand containing a few articles of clothing.”
²
Faint with cold and hunger, she eventually came to a house on the heights of west Boston where she was welcomed by a matronly woman and a number of girls whom she took to be her daughters. Interviewed by the matron, she revealed why she had left her home. She was allowed to stay until she had given birth to her baby (who did not survive) and recovered her health. But when she then expressed a wish to leave the house and return to her friends, the woman turned nasty. She told Louisa she must pay for the days she had spent with her and threatened to expose the secret of her seduction. Louisa was persuaded that she had no alternative but to entertain gentlemen in the manner practiced by the other girls—prostitutes, she now realized—of the household.

The house was in the notorious red-light area known as Negro Hill, and several pages of the book are devoted to an account of the area and its inhabitants. The author described the dancing halls where the girls endeavored to please the patrons with their obscene gestures. She also described the different grades of harlots. These ranged from the strumpets of distinction who lived in some style down to the women she called “arch hags,” whose chief qualifications were swearing, drinking, and obscenity: “Their companions are principally composed of sailors of the lowest grade and straggling mulattoes and blacks.”
³

In 1812, after three years in which she learned to attract the attention of men and to “practice vices perhaps before unthought of,” she met the first lieutenant of a privateer. During an evening's conversation, he explained what he would do if he were a female and wanted to see the world: He said he would dress as a man and was confident that it would be possible for a female to travel abroad by land and sea without her sex being exposed.

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, because 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.