Women Sailors & Sailors' Women

by David Cordingly

  What most upset the merchant seamen and their families was not so much the forcible impressment, though that was bad enough; it was the fact that the men were prevented from seeing their friends and loved ones. “It seems shocking to the feelings of humanity,” wrote Spavens, “for a sailor, after he has been on a long voyage, endured innumerable hardships, and is just returning to his native land with the pleasing hope of shortly beholding a beloved wife and children, some kind relations, or respected friends, to be forced away to fight, perhaps to fall, and no more enjoy those dear connexions.” 11 William Richardson, another merchant seaman who had been impressed, thought the navy’s practice of intercepting homecoming merchant ships was as bad as Negro slavery and pointed out that if a man complained about being prevented from seeing his wife or friends and relations he was likely to be flogged “much more severe than the Negro driver’s whip, and if he deserts he is flogged round the fleet nearly to death.” 12 He reckoned that if men were allowed a few weeks’ liberty after a long voyage, they would soon grow tired of shore life and return more contented to their ships.

  The same message appears in many seamen’s memoirs, and it is not surprising to find that this was one of the major grievances behind the Mutiny at the Nore in 1797. One of the nine articles of the document drawn up by Richard Parker and presented to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty expressed the seamen’s demands in notably restrained language:

  That every Man upon a Ship’s coming into Harbour, shall be at liberty (a certain number at a time, so as not to injure the Ship’s duty) to go and see their friends and families; a convenient time to be allowed to each man. 13

  The more humane officers appreciated the men’s situation, and when circumstances allowed they did give permission for shore leave. In June 1755, Admiral Hawke received a petition from seventeen men who had been on a two-year voyage to the East Indies. Their ship had been intercepted by a naval tender in the English Channel, and they had all volunteered for service. (The generous bounty persuaded many merchant seamen to volunteer for service in the Royal Navy.) In these circumstances volunteers tended to be treated exactly the same way as impressed men, and they were immediately dispatched to the fleet anchorage at Spithead and consigned to the Prince George under the command of Captain Rodney. The men got together and composed an eloquent letter to Hawke setting out their circumstances and explaining that “we have been so long out of land upon a very tedious voyage and several of us having wives and families who are in great distress by our long absence and others of us on private concerns we most humbly intreat your Honour that you would grant us leave of absence for three or four weeks. . . .” 14 Hawke secured permission from the Admiralty and directed Captain Rodney to allow the men three weeks’ leave. This was by no means an isolated instance, but when the demands of war put captains and admirals under pressure to get their ships to sea, there was an obvious reluctance to allow men ashore and risk losing them through desertion.

  WHILE MUCH HAS been written about the horrors of the press gang in Britain, it is often forgotten that the system was operated on a similar scale on the other side of the Atlantic. Indeed impressment was one of the causes of the War of 1812, which was fought by America for “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights.” The war tends to be played down in British history books, partly because it was overshadowed by the events in Europe leading up to the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, and partly because the British suffered several humiliating defeats at sea during the course of the war in actions against formidable American ships such as the USS Constitution.

  Throughout the eighteenth century, British warships sent press gangs into the ports along the east coast of America and forcibly recruited men for the Royal Navy. During a period of five months in 1745 and 1746, press gangs from the 14-gun HMS Shirley impressed 92 men from Boston. In 1771, HMS Arethusa took 31 men during a cruise along the coast of Virginia. One of the most draconian raids was a night raid on New York in 1757, when the navy sent in 3,000 seamen and impressed 800 men. 15 Nearly half of this number were subsequently found to be unsuitable and were released, but operations like this fueled the fury of all sections of the community. The merchants feared the effects on trade, the townspeople saw their communities devastated by the seizure of so many able-bodied men, the women lost husbands and sons, and the seamen themselves no longer felt safe in their own towns.

  The American newspapers and the minutes of town meetings frequently recorded official protests, riots, and violent responses to the raids of the press gangs. There were three days of rioting in Boston in November 1747. An angry crowd that included Negroes, servants, and hundreds of seamen stormed the Town House where the General Court was sitting and demanded the seizure of the impressing officers and the release of the men they had taken. During the course of the riot, they besieged the governor’s house, laid hold of a naval lieutenant, assaulted a sheriff, and put his deputy in the stocks. 16 In Newport, Rhode Island, in June 1765, around 500 seamen, boys, and Negroes went on a rampage in protest after suffering five weeks of impressment.

  After the American Revolution of 1776, in which the British colonies achieved their independence, the Royal Navy could no longer impress American seamen. Any operations by British captains in American ports or aboard American ships were restricted in theory to searching for deserters from the navy, and the men who were seized were therefore not impressed but recovered. In practice, the navy did continue to impress American seamen. The British argued that a man who was born British remained a British subject and that applied to any man born in America before she achieved her independence. In an effort to safeguard their citizens, the American government issued their seamen with a document called a protection, a certificate headed by the seal of the United States and bearing a declaration signed by a public notary or customs officer that stated the bearer was an American citizen and was “to be respected at all times by sea and land.” The name, age, and height of the bearer were included in order to identify him. In practice many American seamen found that a protection was no protection at all.

  The experiences of an American sailor who was on the receiving end of the press gang are recounted in the memoirs of Captain William Nevens. 17 Born in Danville, Maine, in 1781, he was trained as a carpenter, but at the age of seventeen he joined the crew of a brig from Liverpool and sailed to Boston. After several voyages to the West Indies in different merchant ships, he sailed from Boston on the whaling ship Essex under the command of Captain Kilby and arrived in Barbados in February 1800. The ship was in such a poor state that the crew were paid off and Nevens planned to sail home in a schooner bound for Boston. He went ashore one evening with some of his shipmates, and as a precaution against the press gangs they armed themselves with clubs. After an evening of merrymaking, four of them wandered down to the beach to enjoy the cool sea breeze and work off the effects of the tamarind punch they had been drinking. They were taken by surprise when an officer and ten or twelve armed sailors surrounded them and hauled them into a boat. There they found ten other impressed seamen. The boat put off from the shore, and they were rowed among the anchored vessels until they came alongside a British warship, the 18-gun Cyane. The next morning, Nevens was interviewed by the ship’s captain. When Nevens informed him that he was an American, the captain demanded to see his protection. Nevens produced the document from his pocket. The captain glanced at it and said, “You are an Irishman. What business have you with a protection? There are plenty of Nevenses in Ireland but there never was one born in America,” and with that he tore up the protection and threw it overboard. Nevens managed to get a message to Captain Kilby, who came on board the warship, confirmed that Nevens was American, and demanded his release. The British captain swore that he knew Nevens’s father in Ireland. He declared that Nevens was a damned Irish rebel and told Captain Kilby to get off his ship. Seeing his situation was hopeless, Nevens asked Kilby to take home his sea chest and bedding and if he did not return within a ye
ar to send them to his parents. “Having made these dispositions,” writes Nevens, “I bade adieu to my liberty, and settled myself to the consoling prospect of serving Great Britain a few years for nothing.” He noted that every vessel in the British Navy at this period had several Americans on board and though several escaped, the majority were compelled to serve under threat of flogging.

  William Nevens was determined to escape, and his opportunity came when the Cyane sailed to St. Kitts. To prevent the crew deserting the captain anchored her three miles offshore, but Nevens saw that there was an American sloop of war anchored between the Cyane and the shore. He slipped overboard at night and swam toward the American sloop. Unfortunately, the tide swept him past her, and he was forced to continue swimming for nearly two hours before he came alongside another ship. This was a Scottish brig, Sally of Greenock, which was bound for New York. Her captain agreed to take him, and he eventually got back to Boston, where he married an English girl from Liverpool.

  As with so much of maritime history, there are many accounts of men who were victims of the press gang but few accounts of what happened to the women whose husbands were taken from them. However, there were two women whose experiences were so unusual that they were recorded in some detail. They were Margaret Dickson, whose extraordinary story was published in the Newgate Calendar, and Ann Parker, who found herself at the center of one of the most notorious events in British maritime history—the Mutiny at the Nore.

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  Ann Parker and the Mutiny at the Nore

  SAILORS’ WIVES HAD more than their fair share of anxiety and grief, but few had to endure the agony of Ann Parker. She arrived at Sheerness shortly before her husband was due to be executed. She was too late to be allowed on board HMS Sandwich to see him and exchange a few last words with him, but she was not too late to witness his body being hanged from the yardarm of the ship. Richard Parker went to his death not knowing that his wife was among the thousands of onlookers who had gathered to watch the final episode in a drama that had gripped the nation. 1

  Apart from the heroic determination that she showed in the days before and after the execution, nothing is known of Ann Parker beyond the fact that she was a farmer’s daughter from Aberdeen. Her husband’s early years are almost as obscure. Richard Parker was born in Exeter around 1764. He is believed to have come from a respectable family and to have obtained a good education, but at the age of nineteen he was taken by the press gang in Plymouth. He was imprisoned in a navy tender and transported to London, where he was forced to join the crew of the 74-gun ship HMS Ganges. Unusual for a pressed man, he was promoted to midshipman, which suggests that he may have had some seafaring experience in merchant ships. According to one source, he was discharged from the Ganges for immoral conduct and transferred to the sloop Bulldog as an ordinary seaman. 2 He served on the Bulldog until June 1784, when he was discharged sick to Haslar Hospital. He seems to have remained in the navy for a few more years and to have been promoted to petty officer or acting lieutenant.

  At some point Parker came into an inheritance, left the navy, and settled in Scotland, where he met and married Ann. Like many others before him and others since, being unemployed and having money to spend led him into a life of gambling and dissipation. He soon spent his entire fortune, ran into debt, and ended up in an Edinburgh jail. At the outbreak of the war with Revolutionary France in 1793, he volunteered to rejoin the navy and was released from prison after paying his creditor with part of the bounty he received from the commissioning officer. From Edinburgh’s port of Leith, he was transported south to the Nore with volunteers and pressed men, and was signed on to HMS Sandwich as a supernumerary.

  Parker rejoined the navy at a critical time. After years of grumbling about their wretched conditions, the seamen of the channel fleet at Spithead had united in protest and on April 15, 1797, they submitted a petition to the Admiralty in which they demanded better food, shore leave on returning to port, pay for those injured, and above all, an increase in their wages, which had not changed since 1653. Senior officers were generally sympathetic to the men’s requests, and with the country at war with France, they needed a fighting navy manned by loyal hands. Within eight days the Admiralty had agreed to all the demands, but when the fleet was ordered to sea on May 7, the men refused to obey their officers because they did not believe the promises that had been made. An Act of Parliament was hastily passed, and on May 14, Admiral Lord Howe arrived at Portsmouth with the news that all the men’s demands would be met and that a pardon would be provided for the Spithead mutineers.

  Meanwhile, unrest had spread among the ships anchored at the Nore, and Parker became a leading figure among the seamen’s delegates. In addition to the concessions made to the men at Spithead, which had been extended to the whole navy by the act, the Nore seamen wanted a more equal distribution of prize money, the payment of arrears of wages before the ship went to sea, and the removal of the harshest of the Articles of War. The mutiny at the Nore began on May 12. At half past nine in the morning, the sailors climbed out on to the booms of the Sandwich and gave three cheers, which were at once answered by the crew of the nearest ship, the Director, commanded by William Bligh, who had already experienced a mutiny on his ship the Bounty eight years before. The men of the Sandwich trained the forecastle guns on the quarterdeck, and the officers had little option but to surrender the ship. Later that day the seamen unanimously chose Parker as their leader. There followed several days of confusion. Most of the other ships joined the mutiny. Parker held a number of meetings in the Chequers, a public house in Sheerness, and he and his committee of mutineers drew up a set of nine demands that they presented to the port admiral. Parker seems to have done his best to keep a check on the wilder actions of the rebellious seamen, but although there was no bloodshed, he could not prevent a certain amount of looting and other excesses. The seamen stole sheep from the Isle of Grain, robbed fishing boats of their catches, and so alarmed the local inhabitants that many respectable families sent their women away with their valuables for safety.

  On June 4, the day when the fleet normally celebrated the King’s birthday, some sailors took the opportunity to avenge themselves on their most unpopular officers. A mock trial was held on board HMS Monmouth, and four petty officers and a midshipman were subsequently flogged. Several officers were tarred and feathered and rowed in boats among the anchored ships. Effigies of William Pitt, the prime minister, were hoisted at the yardarms of some ships, and the seamen took potshots at them with guns and pistols, which inevitably led to rumors that real executions were taking place. The mutineers also began intercepting shipping on the Thames with the aim of blockading London. But soon the seamen began to have second thoughts. The Spithead mutineers had already won some major concessions, and it soon became clear that the authorities were not inclined to agree to the additional demands. The Admiralty brought up ships to surround the fleet at the Nore, and the mutiny began to collapse. Officers resumed command of their ships, and the crew of the Sandwich delivered up Parker as a prisoner. He was sent at once to Maidstone jail. On June 22, he found himself before a court-martial on board HMS Neptune, moored in the Thames off Greenhithe. There could be only one verdict for the ringleader of a mutiny, and he was duly sentenced to death. Parker, who had conducted his own defense, heard the verdict “with a degree of fortitude and undismayed composure which excited the astonishment and admiration of everyone.” 3

  When Ann Parker learned that her husband had taken the bounty and rejoined the navy, she hurried to Leith, but when she arrived she discovered that the ship with the pressed men and volunteers aboard had already left the harbor and was sailing south to the Thames. She waited for further news, and when she heard of the mutiny at the Nore and Parker’s imprisonment, she set off on the long journey from Scotland to London. By the time she arrived in the capital, her husband had been tried and convicted. The day before the execution was due to take place she made her way to St. James’s Palac
e. There she handed a petition to the Earl of Morton for delivery to the Queen. Observers noted that she behaved in a manner appropriate to her unhappy situation. She waited until five o’clock in the afternoon, but with no response forthcoming from the palace, she abandoned all hope of a reprieve and set off to see her husband.

  It was thirty-five miles from St. James’s to the River Medway where the fleet was anchored. She managed to get a place on a coach that rattled east along the southern shores of the Thames through Dartford and Northfleet and Gravesend. It was eleven o’clock in the evening by the time she reached the ancient city of Rochester, huddled on the riverbank beneath its Norman castle and cathedral. She hurried down to the waterfront and found a boatman who had a cargo of garden produce for Sheerness. He agreed to take her with him early the next morning.

  At four o’clock in the morning on the day set for the execution, the boatman helped Mrs. Parker aboard his boat and they set off downstream with the outgoing tide. As the winding river broadened out into the estuary of the Medway, the first light of dawn from an overcast sky revealed mile upon mile of marshes and mudflats on either side of them. There was a fresh easterly breeze, and even at that early hour, there was considerable activity on the river. 4 Local fishing boats headed out to the fishing grounds in the Thames estuary, and trading sloops and brigs set off for the ports of Kent, Suffolk, and farther afield.

  By six o’clock, they could see the distant forest of masts marking the anchorage of the fleet at the Nore. This was the name given to the final stretch of the Medway before it joined the Thames. More than twenty warships were anchored there that morning, protected by the guns of Sheerness fort. It was nearly seven o’clock when they came alongside HMS Sandwich. The massive wooden hull of the 90-gun ship towered above them. Normally she was the flagship of the fleet, but the admiral had recently removed his flag to HMS L’Espion, leaving the Sandwich under the command of Captain Mosse. Mrs. Parker asked permission to speak to her husband, but the marine sentries on duty refused to allow her on board and ordered the boatman to pull clear, threatening to fire into his boat if he did not do so.