Women Sailors & Sailors' Women

by David Cordingly

  Another American warship in the Mediterranean at this time is known to have had women on board. John Cannon, the boatswain of the 36-gun frigate New York, had his wife with him, and so did John Staines, a quarter-gunner in the same ship. During the course of the cruise, Staines’s nineteen-year-old wife, Nancy, had a miscarriage and developed a serious infection. In spite of all the efforts of the ship’s surgeon, who prescribed warm baths, elixir vitriol, and an antiemetic, she succumbed to a high fever and died within twelve days. 3

  Ten years later, during the War of 1812, we find Commodore Stephen Decatur, one of America’s naval heroes, arranging for two women to be taken onto the United States as supernumeraries. 4 The women were wives of seamen on the ship, and it was Decatur’s intention that they should act as nurses. They were signed on to the ship’s books on May 10, 1813, and two weeks later the United States sailed from New York, evaded a British squadron that was blockading the coast, and sailed north to New London, Connecticut. On October 28, John Allen, the husband of one of the women, fell overboard and drowned. His wife, Mary, received Decatur’s permission to leave the ship and return to New York. It is not known what happened to Mary Marshall, the other woman. She may have stayed on board until her husband was transferred to the President in May 1814.

  The examples quoted above suggest that the American navy, which only came into existence in the years following the Revolution of 1776, was remarkably relaxed in its attitude toward women on board warships. But the case of little Sally Trunnion, which was by no means an isolated one, indicates that the British also allowed wives of seamen on board their ships. Indeed, it was not unusual in the Royal Navy for warships to have several wives living on board when the ship was at sea. Sometimes the women were the wives of officers or colonial governors who were taking passage on a ship to overseas postings. Sometimes naval captains were given permission by their commanding officers to have their wives living on board, but this was only in peacetime and usually when the ship was stationed for a length of time in harbor. Usually the women who went to sea were the wives of those warrant officers known as standing officers—the gunner, the boatswain, and the carpenter.

  The reason that the standing officers were often allowed to take their wives to sea can be explained by the special position they held on a warship. Although they were inferior in rank to the commissioned officers (the captain and the lieutenants), they were key members of the ship’s company. They received their warrants from the Navy Board and in theory were attached to the same ship from the moment she was built to the day she was broken up. By contrast, the commissioned officers received their commissions from the Admiralty and were appointed to a particular ship for a particular commission, which could be a matter of only a few months. When the commission was completed, they were unemployed. The more permanent position of the standing officers was reflected in the fact that when a ship was laid up for repairs they stayed with her. They continued to live in the ship, and their wives and children often joined them on board.

  The warrant officers fell into two unofficial categories. Those of wardroom rank, who lived and ate with the commissioned officers in the stern of the ship, included the master, the purser, the surgeon, and the chaplain. The other warrant officers, who included the gunner, the boatswain, the carpenter, and the cook, usually had cabins in the forward part of the ship, conveniently near the boatswain’s and carpenter’s stores and the galley. Their wives were thus able to live with them relatively unnoticed by most of the crew and well out of the way of the officers on the quarterdeck. This may be why many captains were prepared to overlook their presence on board. There was also the fact that the warrant officers were generally regarded as reliable, steady men. They were older than the young men who formed the bulk of a warship’s crew, and their wives seem to have been equally steady and responsible. If they had been young and flighty they would have been a disruptive influence and unlikely to have been tolerated on board by the captain. Sometimes the warrant officers’ wives came to the fore during battle, but mostly they seem to have melted into the background and to have played a motherly role.

  These women of the lower deck were not recorded in the ship’s muster book, so they did not officially exist. They had to make their own arrangements with the purser for victualing or share their husband’s food ration. (It was common practice for standing officers to provide their own food and drink rather than eat the ship’s food.) Since there was no official record of their existence, they rarely appear in captains’ letters or logbooks and we only learn of them by chance through other means, such as the journals of naval surgeons or chaplains, the transcripts of courts-martial, or the memoirs of seamen. Occasionally, there are passing references to them in official records. Many captains produced their own sets of orders for the conduct of the officers and men on their ships, and in some of these we catch a glimpse of the women carried on board. In the orders that Edward Riou, captain of HMS Amazon, issued in 1799, the following instruction appeared: “Screens are never to be admitted except where women sleep and then only during the night and to be taken down (not rolled up) during the day.” 5

  The official attitude of the Royal Navy to taking women to sea was set out in a series of instructions that went back to the seventeenth century and even earlier. In 1731, the British Admiralty issued a set of printed instructions entitled Regulations and Instructions Relating to His Majesty’s Service at Sea. These were based on instructions issued by James, Duke of York, in 1663, which had been amended and reissued several times during the next seventy years. Part Two of the 1731 regulations sets out precise details for the captains and commanders of His Majesty’s ships, and Article 38 made the navy’s attitude toward women abundantly clear: “He is not to carry any woman to sea, nor to entertain any foreigners to serve in the ship who are officers or gentlemen, without orders from the Admiralty.” 6

  In 1756, the Admiralty issued Additional Regulations Relating to His Majesty’s Service at Sea. The position of women on ships was further clarified in Article 11, which dealt with cleanliness on ships. In addition to the captain’s making sure that his men constantly kept themselves clean, that the ship be aired between decks, and that precautions were taken to prevent people relieving themselves in the hold “or throwing anything there that may occasion nastiness,” there was the following instruction: “That no women be ever permitted to be on board but such as are really the wives of the men they come to, and the ship not to be too much pestered even with them. But this indulgence is only tolerated while the ship is in port and not under sailing orders.” 7

  In 1806, a revised and much enlarged set of regulations was issued at the instigation of Lord Barham, the First Lord of the Admiralty. Article 14 of these regulations was much the same as Article 28 of the earlier ones, instructing the captain as follows: “He is not to allow of any woman being carried to sea in the ship, nor of any foreigners who are officers and gentlemen being received on board ship either as passengers or as part of the crew without orders from his superior officer, or the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty.” 8

  It is interesting to compare these instructions concerning women with those issued by the British army during the same period. Unlike the navy, which frequently took women to sea but acted as if they did not exist, the army was accustomed to having women accompanying regiments. Loose women and prostitutes were discouraged, but the wives of officers often accompanied their husbands overseas, and a limited number of soldiers’ wives were allowed to travel with the regiments on campaigns. The soldiers’ wives were expected to make themselves useful by washing the soldiers’ linen, searching for victuals, cooking, and acting as nurses. When the regiment was on the march, they accompanied the baggage wagons at the rear of the column, but when they arrived in camp or barracks, they were permitted to share a tent with their husbands or join them in a corner of the barracks.

  In the early part of the eighteenth century, the number of soldiers’ wives all
owed to accompany a regiment varied from three to ten for each company, but the situation was regularized in 1800 when the Duke of York issued an order setting out that “His Royal Highness permits women, being the lawful wives of soldiers, to embark in the proportion of 6 to 100 men (Non-commissioned Officers included).” 9 This number is confirmed by orders issued for individual regiments. In 1801, for instance, the Corps of Riflemen published “Rules for the Soldiers’ Wives,” which began, “The number of women allowed by Government to embark on service are six for every hundred men, inclusive of all Non-commissioned Officers’ wives. This number is ample and indeed more than sufficient for a light corps. . . .” 10 In 1807, a General Order for troops destined for service on the Continent further specified that the wives should be carefully selected “as being of good character and having the inclination to render themselves useful; it is very desirable that those who have children should be left at home.” 11

  There were about 4,500 wives with the army in Spain in December 1813, and memoirs of army officers who served under the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsular campaign suggest that the women had a hard time. 12 They were subject to army discipline and punishment, suffered from exposure and hunger, and gained a reputation for plundering on and off the battlefield. Like their husbands, they were exposed to enemy attack. However, as they were in such short supply, the women were never likely to remain widows for long if their husbands were killed. Lieutenant William Gratton noted that “when a married man was shot, and his wife was a capable and desirable person, she would receive half a dozen proposals before her husband was 48 hours in the grave.” 13

  Much less is known about wives at sea than is known about army wives, and the evidence we have is fragmentary. In the Public Record Office in London are twelve private journals by a young Irish physician named Leonard Gillespie, which provide a vivid insight into life on a small warship. Gillespie was appointed surgeon of the 16-gun sloop Racehorse in August 1787, and he spent the next three and a half years on the ship as she patrolled up and down the east coast of Britain, impressing seamen and chasing smugglers. Women mostly feature in his journal when the Racehorse is in port. In December 1787, for instance, the sloop was anchored at the Nore, and he recorded the presence of four prostitutes on board. They had infected several members of the crew with venereal disease, “yet these women are seemingly well in health, are in good spirits and having been turned over from their first paramours are entertained by others who seem to remain unaffected by any syphilitic complaints.” 14

  Gillespie’s journal reveals that in January 1789, a member of the crew had his wife on board while they were at sea. Gillespie noted that on January 11, when the Racehorse was en route from North Shields to Sheerness, McKenzie’s child, who was twelve months old, was suffering from a cough, a fever, and respiratory difficulties following a bout of measles. Three days later the child was vomiting and seriously ill. At six o’clock on the morning of January 16, the child died. Three weeks later, as they were sailing off Whitby, he recorded that “McKenzie’s wife menstruated but has not been well since from affliction for the loss of the child. . . .” 15 The next day she was still ill but was taking some nourishment and getting some sleep. By the time they reached Sheerness, Mrs. McKenzie was up and looking healthy. From the muster book of the Racehorse, we learn that her husband was a twenty-four-year-old Scotsman from Sutherland named Charles McKenzie. 16 He was listed as an able seaman, which makes his case unusual. As we have seen, it was common practice to allow warrant officers to take their wives to sea, but although McKenzie was rated an able seaman (which meant that he had some two years’ experience at sea), he would not normally have been allowed any special privileges. Mrs. McKenzie does not, of course, appear anywhere in the muster book.

  Dr. Gillespie did not enjoy his time on board the Racehorse, and in November 1790, he left the ship and headed for Paris, where he spent some time furthering his medical studies. There is a gap in his journals, and they resume when he took up the appointment of senior surgeon at the naval hospital in Martinique. The British had taken the West Indian island from the French, and it was used as a naval base before being given back to the French under the terms of the Peace of Amiens. Gillespie spent seven years at the naval hospital, which was located by the harbor at Fort Royal, the island’s capital. Much of his time there was taken up with the thankless and usually hopeless task of looking after victims of the deadly tropical fevers that decimated the crews of ships in West Indian ports. One of these victims was the wife of William Richardson, the gunner on HMS Tromp, who later published a book entitled A Mariner of England: An Account of the Career of William Richardson from Cabin Boy in the Merchant Service to Warrant Officer in the Royal Navy As Told By Himself. Like Gillespie’s private journals, Richardson’s memoirs provide a graphic picture of daily life in the navy, and most of his text is concerned with his fellow seamen, his disapproving comments on the press-gang system, and his observations on the foreign ports he visited during his extensive travels. But he also provides some useful information about sailors’ women.

  Richardson was born in the port of South Shields, County Durham, in 1768, and was the son of a merchant sea captain. He went to sea as a boy and spent several years on colliers and merchant ships in the North Sea and the Baltic. He then joined a slave ship and sailed to the Guinea coast and across to the West Indies. On his return, he was press-ganged into the navy while his ship was anchored in the Thames. He served in several large warships and became a warrant officer. In 1797, his ship was ordered into Portsmouth Dockyard for repairs, and while he was on leave that summer he married Sarah Thompson, a local girl from Portsea. Her father was a master stonemason, and Richardson tells us that he had met her before his last sailing to the West Indies “and she had promised to wait for my return, which she did. I have every reason to be satisfied with my choice, and her kind care and affection for my welfare.” 17 In March 1800, Richardson was appointed gunner on HMS Tromp, an elderly 54-gun ship lying at Chatham. This meant moving all his chests, bedding, cabin furniture, and cooking utensils from his former ship, loading them on to a passage boat, and sailing with his wife around the coast to the Medway. When they arrived, they found the cabins in the Tromp were being painted, so they took up residence ashore at the Red Lion pub.

  On July 10, 1800, the ship sailed from Chatham to Portsmouth, where she was to join two other warships so she could escort a convoy of nineteen merchant ships across to Martinique. Richardson was ashore at Portsmouth when he saw the signal for sailing flying from the masthead of the Tromp. He hurried to Portsea to say good-bye to his wife and found that she had decided to sail with him. Knowing from firsthand experience of the dangers of tropical diseases in the West Indies, he was reluctant for her to go, but eventually he agreed. He then found that nearly a dozen other women were also intending to sail on the Tromp, including the wives of the captain, the master, the purser, the boatswain, and the sergeant of marines. Richardson’s comment was that “a person would have thought they were all insane wishing to go to such a sickly country!” 18 There were emotional scenes as Mrs. Richardson bade farewell to her parents, and so quick had been her decision that they had to retrieve their clothing all wet from the washerwoman.

  On August 1, the convoy sighted Madeira. At half past one in the early hours of the next morning, the captain’s wife gave birth to a fine boy, and at ten o’clock they came to anchor in Funchal Roads, Madeira. Richardson and his wife went ashore, drank some of the worst Madeira wine they had ever come across, and did some sightseeing. Having stocked up with water and fresh beef, fruit, and vegetables, the convoy weighed anchor and set sail across the Atlantic. After an easy passage, they arrived at Barbados on September 2, where they left the merchant ships and then headed north-northwest to Martinique. Two days later, they dropped anchor in nineteen fathoms in Fort Royal Bay.

  Within days of their arrival, Richardson’s worst fears were realized as the Tromp
’s crew began to go down with fever (almost certainly malignant yellow fever, the prime killer of new arrivals in the Caribbean). The death toll was appalling. The first lieutenant and the clerk were the first to die; then the master and his wife, the marine officer, the boatswain, the surgeon’s mate, and most of the midshipmen; “then the master-at-arms, the armourer, gunner’s mate (a fine stout fellow), the captain’s steward, cook and tailor, then the captain’s lady maid, and many brave men.” 19 When Richardson’s wife showed signs that she too had the fever, he took her ashore and put her under the care of Madame Janet, a French black woman who was reputed to be an excellent nurse, and a French doctor named Dash. They put her to bed in an airy room, gave her herbal tea to drink, and would not allow her to eat anything. The starvation diet produced results, and after a few days she began to recover.

  Around this time Richardson recorded that Dr. Gillespie came on board the Tromp to see what could be done about the fever-stricken ship, but as the men had already sprinkled the decks with vinegar, smoked out the ship below deck, and pumped clean water in and out of the hold, the only additional advice that he could give them was to wear flannel next to the skin. Gillespie received another mention in Richardson’s memoirs when the gunner asked his permission to bury the mangled body of a marine in the graveyard of the hospital. The man had fallen overboard while drunk, and a shark had bitten off his head, one arm, and one leg. At first Dr. Gillespie refused Richardson’s request on the grounds that only people who died in the hospital could be buried there, but on viewing the body, he changed his mind and allowed him to be buried in the hospital grounds.