If the wives of warrant officers (and even ordinary seamen on occasion) were unofficially allowed to go to sea with their husbands, what about the wives and mistresses of captains? The great majority of captains undoubtedly felt that a warship at sea was no place for a woman, particularly a gentlewoman. This was not simply because of the discomforts of life at sea and the obvious dangers involved when going into action—it was also because the Royal Navy, like the merchant service and the fishing fleet, was a predominantly male society with masculine values and traditions. Admirals and captains were happy to entertain ladies in harbor with elegant dinners and concerts, but however much they might like women and however much they might miss their wives when they were away, they felt that a woman’s place was at home.
There were occasions when a captain would take a woman to sea, but it was not a usual practice. In 1787, the twenty-eight-year-old Captain Horatio Nelson married Fanny Nisbet on the island of Nevis in the West Indies. It is notable that he did not take her back to England with him in his ship HMS Boreas. The 28-gun frigate was considered too cramped for passengers, and so while Nelson returned home in the Boreas, Fanny, her son, Josiah, and her uncle crossed the Atlantic in the Roehampton, a large and comfortable West Indiaman. However, eleven years later, following his victory at the Battle of the Nile, Nelson invited Sir William and Lady Hamilton on board his flagship, the Foudroyant, and they spent an idyllic six weeks cruising from Palermo to Syracuse and Malta. It was during this cruise that Horatia, the daughter of Nelson and Lady Hamilton, was conceived.
A conspicuous example of a naval wife accompanying her husband on a warship was that of Lady Cochrane, the wife of Admiral Lord Cochrane, who was one of the most dashing and colorful of the generation of naval officers that followed Nelson. Thomas Cochrane was born in 1775, the son of the Earl of Dundonald. After a spell in the army, he joined the navy as a midshipman at the unusually advanced age of seventeen. By 1798, he was commander of the Speedy, a naval brig, and he captured several prizes off the French and Spanish coasts. In 1801, he was captured by a French squadron but was released during an exchange of prisoners. He combined a successful naval career with duties as a member of Parliament until 1814, when he was falsely accused of connivance in a stock exchange fraud. He was expelled from the navy and from Parliament. In 1817, he was offered and accepted the command of the navy of Chile, which was then engaged in the struggle for independence from Spain.
In 1812, Cochrane had met Katharine Barnes, a spirited woman whom he described as “the orphan daughter of a family of honourable standing in the Midland Counties.” 35 His uncle, who wanted him to marry the rich daughter of an admiralty official, refused to give his permission for the marriage, so the couple traveled to Annan in Scotland, where they were married in secret. By the time Cochrane was appointed vice admiral of Chile they had two young sons. At the end of August 1817, the family set sail for South America in the Rose, an old merchantman of 300 tons. Upon their arrival in Valparaiso, Cochrane took charge of the Chilean fleet. While Cochrane engaged in a series of actions against Spanish ships, his wife traveled on horseback into the mountainous interior of Chile in the hope that a change of air would improve the health of their younger son, who was seriously ill. News of the approach of a royalist army forced her to return to the coast by a circuitous and dangerous route that involved crossing a vast gorge on a frail, swaying rope bridge with her little boy clutched in her arms.
Safely back in Callao Bay, Lady Cochrane joined her husband on his flagship, a captured Spanish frigate of 50 guns. She was no sooner aboard than Cochrane learned that a warship laden with treasure had escaped from the harbor. He at once set off in pursuit, overtook the ship, and opened fire. In his autobiography, Cochrane later described his wife’s role in the action:
Lady Cochrane remained on deck during the conflict. Seeing a gunner hesitate to fire his gun, close to which she was standing, and imagining his hesitation from her proximity might, if observed, expose him to punishment, she seized the man’s arm and, directing the match, fired the gun. The effort was, however, too much for her, as she immediately fainted, and was carried below. 36
Concerned about the safety of her children, Lady Cochrane returned to England soon after this, traveling in the British frigate Andromache. Cochrane’s naval actions were so successful that he was instrumental in securing the independence of Chile and Peru. When he returned to Britain, he was reinstated in the Royal Navy and promoted to rear admiral in 1832 and full admiral in 1851.
Lady Cochrane’s experience was not typical, but the novels of Jane Austen suggest that it was not wholly unusual for a naval wife to spend time at sea. Several of the principal characters in her last novel, Persuasion, are naval officers and their wives. One of the most formidable of these is Mrs. Croft, the wife of an admiral. She is described as having a reddened and weather-beaten complexion as a result of having been much at sea. She informed the well-meaning but unworldly Mrs. Musgrove that during her fifteen years of marriage to the admiral, she had crossed the Atlantic four times, been once to the East Indies and back again, and visited Cork, Lisbon, and Gibraltar.
“And I do assure you, ma’am,” she told Mrs. Musgrove, “that nothing can exceed the accommodations of a man of war; I speak, you know, of the higher rates. When you come to a frigate, of course, you are more confined—though any reasonable woman may be perfectly happy in one of them; and I can safely say, that the happiest part of my life has been spent on board a ship.”
Jane Austen knew about such things because two of her four brothers were captains in the Royal Navy at the time she was writing Persuasion. Frances Austen (the family called him Frank) served under Nelson, spent time in the West Indies and the Far East, and later rose to the exalted rank of Admiral of the Fleet. Charles Austen served on the North American station and in the West Indies, and was eventually promoted to rear admiral. They both kept up a lively correspondence with Jane and saw her whenever they came home on leave. 37 It was from Charles that she had firsthand knowledge of women on warships. Charles had married Fanny Palmer, daughter of the attorney general of Bermuda, in 1807, and when he became flag-captain to Sir Thomas Williams on HMS Namur, he arranged for his wife and two small children to live with him on board. This arrangement lasted for some months and became a problem only when it was found that their eldest daughter, Cassandra, suffered constantly from seasickness.
7
Seafaring Heroines
THE STORMS OFF Cape Horn during October 1856 were so ferocious that one experienced sea captain retreated to the safety of Rio de Janeiro after his sails were ripped to shreds and ten of his crew washed overboard and drowned. Another ship, the Neptune’s Car from New York, spent several weeks battling with the mountainous waves whipped up by the gale-force winds from the west. For every mile of progress painfully gained, the ship was beaten back two, so that Captain Joshua Patten considered bearing away and running before the storm to seek shelter in the Falkland Islands. He had spent eight days without proper sleep. He had taken double watches and had been almost continuously on deck, where it was so cold that ice had formed on the rigging. 1
Before he was able to order a change of course he collapsed on deck. His young wife, Mary, was called up from below and was alarmed to find him lying prostrate with his face covered in sweat. Thinking that he must be suffering from pneumonia, she asked the seamen to carry him below and to lash him into his bunk to prevent him from being thrown out by the lurching rolls of the ship. With some desperation she looked through the books in the ship’s library for advice on his condition. From one she gathered that he might be suffering from encephalitis, or brain fever, for which there was no remedy apart from rest. With her husband out of action, Mary had to decide what to do next.
Under normal circumstances the first mate would have taken over command of the ship, but this was not an option. The former first mate of Neptune’s Car had broken his leg before the voyage, and the ship’s owners had rep
laced him with an incompetent seaman who slept on duty and persistently disobeyed Joshua Patten’s orders. He had been replaced as first mate by a man named Hare, who was competent enough to handle the ship but was unable to navigate. When the crew learned that Captain Patten was confined to his bunk, the man whom Hare had replaced attempted to incite a mutiny. Mary Patten, who had learned to navigate on a previous voyage, realized that she must take immediate action if the ship was to be saved from a mutinous crew and the onslaught of the storm. She ordered all hands to muster on the quarterdeck and prepared to address them from the raised poop deck at the stern of the ship. It is hard for us to imagine the scene and what must have been going through her mind—and the minds of the crew—at that moment.
The Neptune’s Car was a magnificent clipper ship, very similar in size to the Flying Cloud and the Cutty Sark. In her hold she carried a valuable cargo of iron, sheet lead, and mining machinery for the California goldfields. She was 216 feet in length and under full sail carried a vast spread of canvas on her three great masts. In the gales they were facing off Cape Horn most of her sails were furled, and she carried just sufficient storm canvas to enable her helmsman to keep her on course. As the ship rolled through the heaving gray seas, the air was filled with a fine spray blown from the foaming wave crests. When the bows of the ship thumped into the body of the waves, clouds of white spume were flung in the air, drenching those on deck. Sometimes a larger than usual wave swept right across the main deck, so that much of the vessel appeared to be under water until she lifted on the next wave and tons of water streamed from her scuppers. Above the background roar of the sea was the constant, high-pitched howl of the wind in the rigging.
Mary Patten was a diminutive figure on the poop deck. Like most captains’ wives of the period, she was wearing a long, dark skirt that reached to her ankles, and she clasped a shawl around her shoulders. At nineteen, she was younger than most of the captains’ wives who went to sea. She was slender, with black hair and what one observer described as “large, dark, lustrous eyes and very pleasing features.” 2 A few weeks earlier she had discovered that she was pregnant.
Facing her on the quarterdeck was a group of weather-beaten sailors. Exactly what she said to them as she clung to the rail we do not know, but her aim was to persuade them to remain loyal to her husband and to herself. She reminded them that the objective of the voyage was to deliver the cargo to San Francisco. She explained that if they put in to a foreign port en route, the ship’s owners would suffer a heavy penalty. She made it clear that she was determined they get to San Francisco, and she asked for their support. To the older members of the crew she must have looked no more than a schoolgirl, and they were used to taking orders from men who had spent years at sea and learned their trade the hard way. But impressed by her determination and spirit, they agreed to follow her orders. It was a turning point in a voyage that was to make her a reluctant heroine.
Mary had been born in New England on April 6, 1837. A few days before her sixteenth birthday she had married Joshua Patten at the Old North Church in Boston. Her husband was twenty-six years old but was already an experienced seaman. She saw very little of him during the first two years of their marriage, but in 1855 he was given command of the Neptune’s Car and it was agreed that she should accompany him on a voyage that took them around the world. The Neptune’s Car had been built in Portsmouth, Virginia, and launched only two years earlier, so Captain Patten had already proved his ability to have been entrusted with such a magnificent ship. During the first part of their earlier voyage from New York to San Francisco, they raced the clipper ship Westward Ho commanded by Captain Hussey. Bowling along under the southeast trade winds, they recorded speeds of sixteen knots at times and on one occasion traveled an impressive 312 miles during the course of a day. After rounding the Horn and heading north up the coast of Chile, they were becalmed for eight days near the equator and lost ground. They arrived in San Francisco five and a half hours after Westward Ho, having completed the passage from New York in 100 days, 23 1/2 hours. However, Captain Hussey was sufficiently impressed by the young Captain Patten’s performance to challenge him to a race to China.
The passage across the Pacific was fast but was marred by a death: One seaman was badly injured in a fall from the upper deck, and one of the lascar sailors fell overboard. The ship was brought into the wind and a boat launched to search for him, but he could not be found. In spite of this delay, the Neptune’s Car succeeded in winning the race to Hong Kong, beating Westward Ho by eleven days. Captain Patten was awarded a charter to London, and the next stage of their circumnavigation passed without serious incident. On the final stage of their voyage, they ran into a mid-Atlantic thunderstorm. The foremast of the ship was struck by lightning, and several seamen who were working out on the yards fell to the deck. Mary took charge of the injured and organized a sick bay. She dressed their wounds and set broken bones, and her nursing efforts were so successful that none died as a result of their injuries.
The most valuable skill that Mary Patten acquired during that first voyage in Neptune’s Car was the art of navigation. Her husband taught her about the winds and tides; he showed her how to calculate the ship’s position with the aid of the sextant and the chronometer, how to work out the correct course to steer, and how to keep a daily record of the ship’s progress in the logbook. This knowledge was to save the day when her husband fell ill on the second voyage.
The voyage began on July 1, 1856, when they set sail from New York bound for San Francisco. The big clipper ship sped south under full sail, the only problem being the behavior of the first mate. In addition to sleeping on duty, he sometimes ordered the sails to be reefed against the wishes of the captain. At this time they had no explanation for his mutinous behavior, and Patten solved the problem by making Mr. Hare first mate in his place. As they sailed farther and farther south, the shimmering blue seas of the tropics with the shoals of flying fish skimming over the surface were replaced by the cold gray rollers of the southern Atlantic. They sighted the occasional albatross, and storm petrels followed in their wake. By the time they were level with the River Plate, the westerly winds were sweeping off the Argentinian plains and the seas were swelling.
Mary’s husband collapsed when they were battling the waves near Cape Horn. When she took over effective command of the ship, she had to decide whether to continue beating into the headwinds or to take an alternate course. She decided to head southeast in the hope of picking up a favorable wind when they reached latitude 60 degrees south. She ordered the crew to put the ship onto the starboard tack so that they ran before the seas rather than butting straight into them. The next day, the sun broke through the clouds, and Mary was able to take a noonday sight with the sextant. She went below to work out their position and found that they were 250 miles south-southeast of the Horn in Drake Passage, the 600-mile stretch of water that lies between the southern tip of South America and Antarctica.
The winds eased off, and they set more sail until a lookout spotted a white haze on the undersides of the clouds to the south. The experienced hands knew that this indicated the presence of field ice stretching up from Antarctica. The ship was hove to for the night and double watches were set to keep an eye out for icebergs. The next day brought them the favorable southeasterly wind they wanted. A fifteen-year-old boy with sharp eyesight was sent aloft to look for a safe passage through the ice, and following his shouted instructions, they cautiously proceeded westward. After four anxious days, they were clear of the danger from the ice and were able to head north into the warmer waters of the Pacific.
With calmer seas and sunny skies, the crew were able to wash and shave and to spread out their sodden clothes, mattresses, and blankets to dry. Captain Patten recovered sufficiently to come up on deck, and the mutinous first mate was reinstated. Unfortunately, the captain soon had another seizure, his legs buckled under him, and he was compelled to retire once again to his cabin. Mr. Hare, now second mate, then
discovered that the first mate had once again disobeyed orders and had set the ship on a heading to Valparaiso. It was now obvious to the captain and his wife that the first mate must have bet his pay that one of their rival ships, the Romance of the Seas or the Intrepid, which had set off about the same time as Neptune’s Car, would beat them to San Francisco. Captain Patten formally downgraded the first mate and told him that he would be reported to the American authorities with a recommendation that he be stripped of his first mate’s certificate. The captain also got the ship’s carpenter to fit a telltale compass next to his bunk so that he could ensure the helmsmen were always keeping to the correct course.
On October 17, they crossed the equator, but by this time the captain’s illness had taken a more serious turn and he had lost his sight. Once again, Mary took command. She was now four months pregnant, but this in no way interfered with her duties. For the next fifty days she did not even allow herself the luxury of undressing but slept in her clothes and concentrated on getting the ship to her destination as quickly as possible. In early November they sighted the headland marking the entrance to San Francisco Bay, but the wind died and for ten days they were becalmed. At last, on November 15, the wind freshened and they headed into the bay. Mary insisted on taking the helm for the final stages and steered the salt-stained vessel into port. In the ship’s log she noted that the voyage had taken them 136 days.
Women Sailors & Sailors' Women Page 14
