Women Sailors & Sailors' Women

by David Cordingly

  The picture was painted by Arthur Hughes in 1862. The setting is Old Chingford Church in Essex, and the model for the sister of the sailor boy was Hughes’s young wife, but as far as we know, the picture was not based on any particular event or occasion known to the artist. However, many a young sailor came home from the sea to find that one of his family had died. There is a moving passage from the memoirs of William Richardson, who went to sea as a boy on merchant ships. Returning from a voyage to the Baltic, his ship was delayed by wind and weather but eventually reached the port of Shields and was moored alongside a quay to unload her cargo of tar barrels. Richardson recalled the occasion many years later:

  I never remember being so anxious in getting on shore to see my mother again, as at this time. I never met with a greater shock. When I entered the house I perceived the family were in mourning, and inquiring the cause, was told that my poor mother had departed this life six weeks ago. I thought it impossible, and went up to her bedroom; but she was not there. I came down again almost distracted, then sat down and wept bitterly, but I could not rest—went out, and then on board, wept in silence, and thought I should never know happiness again. 7

  For sailors’ wives who had waited months for news of their husbands, the sailors’ return was of critical concern, because all too often the sailors did not return. The great killer of seamen was not enemy action or shipwreck but disease. The figures speak for themselves. During the French Wars from 1793 to 1815, approximately 100,000 British seamen died. Of this number, about 12 percent died from enemy action, shipwreck, or similar disasters; 20 percent died from accidents; and no less than 65 percent died from disease. 8 The diseases that most afflicted seamen were scurvy, typhus, and yellow fever. Scurvy was the result of a lack of vitamin C in the diet, and it decimated crews on lengthy voyages until the recommendations of the naval surgeon Dr. James Lind were finally put into practice toward the end of the eighteenth century. Typhus was often brought aboard ships by press-ganged men who had been confined for weeks in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. With several hundred men crammed into a ship, it could spread rapidly, and men died horribly within two or three weeks of going down with the disease.

  Even more feared by seamen and soldiers alike were the tropical fevers that made a posting to the West Indies or the tropical coast of Africa appear like a sentence of death. In 1726, an expedition to the Caribbean under Admiral Hosier lost more than 4,000 dead out of a squadron of 4,750. This was an unusually high proportion, but malignant yellow fever continued to wreak havoc among the crews of ships stationed in West Indian harbors. In 1806, William Turnbull published The Naval Surgeon, a massive volume based on his practical experience as a surgeon in the navy. He warned that the West Indies was the most unhealthy of all stations and advised captains of ships to anchor as far from land as possible. Of yellow fever, he wrote that “the first symptoms are sudden giddiness and loss of sight, to such a degree as to make the person fall down insensible.” During the final stages, “the foam issues from the mouth; the eyes roll dreadfully; and the extremities are convulsed, being thrown out and pulled back in violent and quick alternate succession.” 9

  Many of the sailors who survived disease returned home with crippling injuries from shipboard accidents or wounds sustained in action. Nelson, who lost his sight in one eye during the siege of Calvi in 1794, and had his right arm amputated following a disastrous attack on Tenerife, was only the most famous of many. Disabled sailors with begging bowls were a familiar sight on the streets of London, Portsmouth, and other ports, and the naval hospitals were filled with men suffering from appalling injuries.

  There is a passage in the memoirs of William Spavens that describes the state of the men in the queue for the Chatham Chest, the pension board for disabled seamen. After long service in the navy and on East Indiamen, Spavens suffered a major injury to his right leg while handling casks in a longboat alongside his ship and had to have the limb amputated. He was in good company at Chatham. There were men swinging on crutches with a wooden leg below the knee, or above the knee, or with both legs missing. There were men with their noses shot off, or pieces torn from their cheeks, or missing their jawbones or chins. One man had his skull fractured and trepanned and a silver plate substituted for the missing bone. There were many who had lost a hand, an arm, or both arms. Some had their limbs permanently contracted by their injuries; “some with a hand off and an eye out; another with an eye out and his face perforated with grains of battle-powder, which leaves as lasting impression as though they were injected by an Italian artist.” 10 These were the victims of the shipboard accidents and the naval wars of the Napoleonic period. At the Battle of Camperdown in 1797, for instance, there were 244 men killed and 796 wounded in the British fleet alone. At Trafalgar, 1,700 men were killed and wounded in the British ships, and three times that number among the French and Spanish ships.

  The navy had arrangements in place during the eighteenth century that in theory provided some support for seamen’s widows. In practice the systems were haphazard and in some cases entirely unsatisfactory. When a ship’s company was paid off after a voyage, a seaman’s widow was entitled to her husband’s back pay, but this was not as simple as it might appear. The woman would first have to make her way to the port where the ship was being paid off (it could be several hundred miles from where she lived and involve an expensive journey). She then had to provide written proof that she was the widow of the deceased man. And having arrived at Spithead or Plymouth or the Nore and tracked down her husband’s ship, she could find that payment was delayed because the men’s wages were in arrears since paying off could take months or even years. However, things were improved by an Act of Parliament of 1792, which decreed that seamen, marines, and warrant officers could collect all of their accumulated pay upon their arrival in Britain or Ireland, even if their ships had not yet been paid off. The same act allowed them to send pay to their families while abroad, and if they died, the pay could be remitted to their families via a local office or agent. From 1797, seamen received their full pay while injured until they either recovered, were discharged to Greenwich Hospital, or were given a pension from the Chatham Chest.

  For seamen killed at sea in a shipboard accident or during battle there was an established tradition that the clothes and belongings of the dead man should be auctioned off to the members of the crew and the proceeds passed on to his widow. Seamen were usually generous in their bids, but this could only provide temporary relief. The most ingenious system devised by the navy was the practice of listing “widow’s men” on the muster book of every vessel in commission. It was a system that dated back to the reign of Henry VIII and was originally intended for the widows of commissioned and warrant officers; from 1733, it was applied to all seamen who died on board. Two widow’s men were listed on the books for every hundred men in the crew: They were rated as able seamen but were entirely nonexistent. The pay of these fictitious men became a pension fund for widows of seamen who died during the course of the voyage. The irony of the system, as Suzanne Stark has pointed out, was that the navy paid out for the invisible widow’s men listed in the muster book, but it was not prepared to list on the muster book and pay or provide victuals for the warrant officers’ wives who were very much alive and present on large numbers of ships in the fleet.

  The most satisfactory system was that introduced in August 1732, “for the relief of Poor Widows of Commission and Warrant Officers of the Royal Navy.” 11 Three pence of every pound was deducted from the pay and half-pay of officers, and this, together with any benefactions from well-disposed persons, was put into a fund administered by a Court of Commissioners, who distributed the money to naval officers’ wives who could provide satisfactory certificates in support of their claims. The governors of the court were extremely grand (in 1750, Lord Sandwich was president of the court and with him were Lord Anson, Lord Barrington, and Admiral Townsend), but the records indicate that they dealt fairly and sym
pathetically with all the petitions presented to them. In July 1733, an advertisement was published in the Gazette and Daily Courant setting out the rules of the system and how the widows might apply. At one of the first meetings of the court, on July 3, 1733, the sum of £542 was divided up and distributed to the widows of six boatswains, two gunners, two carpenters, two pursers, two surgeons, three masters, “and one Susan Perry, widow of a Master of a Vessel appointed by the Navy Board.”

  Naval widows fared best if their husbands died during one of those sea battles that captured the popular imagination and were hailed at home as glorious victories. Such battles would invariably be followed by a public outpouring of thanks and generosity. After Lord Howe’s victory over the French at the battle of the Glorious First of June in 1794, Dr. Thomas Trotter, physician to the fleet, reckoned that gifts from the people of London for the widows and orphans of those killed amounted to between £20,000 and £30,000. 12 The company of the Theatre Royal, on Drury Lane, gave a performance that raised £1,800, and Lord Howe himself gave his own share of the prize money for the wounded. After the Battle of Camperdown in 1797, Lloyds of London opened a Patriotic Fund, which collected £52,609 from all parts of the kingdom for the benefit of the wounded seamen and the widows of those killed. 13

  For the seaman’s wife whose husband survived tropical fevers, scurvy, shipboard accidents, sea battles, or shipwreck, and who returned home without serious injuries, life could still be very hard. The wage of an ordinary seaman in the mid-eighteenth century was 19 shillings a lunar month (20 shillings and 7 pence a calendar month), an amount that had not changed since Cromwell’s day. From this sum was deducted 1 shilling for the Chatham Chest, and 6 pence for Greenwich Hospital. Most seamen also owed money to the purser for clothing and tobacco. The remaining sum did not compare badly with wages for unskilled laboring jobs on land, but the problem was the very long intervals between payments. Payment was not made until a ship ended her commission, which could be anything from six months to three years from the moment the seaman signed on. To discourage the men from deserting, the payments were usually made shortly before the ship sailed on her next commission, and with the ship anchored in the outer reaches of the harbor well away from the shore. If a seaman’s wife wanted to be certain that she got a share of her husband’s wages, she would have to be on board when the commissioner of the dockyard and his clerks came out with the wages in cash to pay the ship’s company. If she was not present at the time, many seamen would have been tempted to squander the cash at the first opportunity they had to go ashore.

  The scandal of the long delays in payment was acknowledged by the Navy Act of 1758, which required ships in home waters to be paid a year’s wages every eighteen months, a gesture toward the seamen’s problems. The difficulties experienced by seamen’s families were also recognized by the 1758 act, which provided the mechanism to enable seamen to send money to their relations free, via government channels. However, very few seamen seem to have taken advantage of this piece of legislation. This may have been because the bureaucracy of the system was too daunting, or it may simply reflect the fact that a relatively small proportion of ordinary seamen were married. The majority of the married men in the British Navy were commissioned officers or warrant officers, and most of these would have made their own financial arrangements through lawyers or dockyard agents.

  Although naval officers were better paid than their men, they were paid no more frequently and had many more expenses than an ordinary seaman. The principal expense for a young naval officer was his uniform: The full-dress uniform for a commander cost 16 to 20 guineas; his undress coat and epaulette were 8 guineas; his gold lace hat cost 5 guineas; and a sword and knot cost 6 guineas. In total, this was likely to cost him considerably more than his first quarter’s pay. 14 On top of this, he had to pay for his navigational instruments and books. A young lieutenant even had to pay 11 shillings and 6 pence for the piece of parchment confirming his commission. It was not until 1795 that officers could have all their half-pay and an advance of three months’ full pay on appointment to cover expenses, and could receive part of their pay while abroad. Officers who were living on their pay, which was quite normal, could suffer considerable hardship even while employed—and this meant that their wives and children suffered, too.

  Admirals, who received the lion’s share of prize money from the capture of enemy ships in wartime, could earn very large sums, and a few were able to buy themselves splendid houses and country estates. However, this in itself could be a burden for the admiral’s wife, especially if her husband was away on active service for any length of time. During the long months that Admiral Boscawen was at sea, his wife, Fanny, was responsible not only for bringing up their five children but also for running their country house near Guildford and overseeing the acres of farmland that came with it. In a letter written to her husband on June 9, 1755, she described a typical day.

  She rose at half past six, and her first task was to feed the forty ducks and chickens that she kept under the laundry window. She then paid a visit to Mrs. Farr, the housekeeper, and ordered dinner and discussed household affairs: “By the way, beef is 4 pence a pound, and they threatened me with 4 1/2 pence when first I came, and made me pay that price for one sirloin.” 15 Along with her two daughters, who had been woken at six o’clock by Nanny Humphreys, she proceeded to the farmyard, where she inquired about the horses and had a discussion with Woodrose, the estate manager. They then walked into the village and back, and at nine they sat down to breakfast in the admiral’s dressing room. After breakfast, the girls spent the morning working while she wrote letters. At around one o’clock, they walked to the grove, and at exactly two o’clock, the bell rang for dinner, “for Mrs. Farr is very exact, but I think, not much of a cook.”

  In the afternoon, they fed the chickens again, went for another walk, and then settled down in the dressing room where Fanny worked while Miss Pitt read aloud. This continued until almost eight o’clock, when the girls went to bed. An evening walk in the park was followed by another conference with Woodrose. Supper was at nine, and it was not until eleven that Fanny went to bed. On the surface, it was a pleasant, untroubled existence, reminiscent of the lives of many of Jane Austen’s heroines fifty years later. One suspects, however, that Fanny did not wish to burden her husband with more worries than he already had, and the evidence suggests that she took the running of the estate very seriously and was a first-class manager. Writing a few weeks later, Fanny was able to report that the estate was flourishing under her administration: The hay had been got in and stacked; the turnips were sowed; the two pastures in the park had been rolled; the horses were thriving; and her barley was not only the finest in the parish, but was a fortnight ahead of schedule and entirely free from weeds.

  The wives of ordinary seamen in the Royal Navy did not have great estates to manage. Precise details about the plight of these women in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are hard to come by, but from a variety of sources we catch glimpses of women struggling to support themselves and their families, sometimes having to resort to desperate means to do so. From the accounts of the chaplain of Newgate prison, we learn of sailor’s wives who were hanged for resorting to theft. Mary Dutton, the widow of a sailor killed at Cartagena, was hanged at Tyburn on January 13, 1742, for stealing a watch in Piccadilly. Elizabeth Fox, a sailor’s wife, was hanged on March 18, 1741, for stealing £9 and five Portugal pieces from a dwelling house. 16 She was reputed to have been one of the most notorious pickpockets in London. The drawings and engravings of artists and caricaturists like Rowlandson and Cruikshank frequently drew attention to the poverty-stricken state of naval wives; popular ballads sometimes did the same. There was, for instance, a ballad entitled “The Sea Martyrs; or, the seamen’s sad lamentation for their faithful service, bad pay, and cruel usage.” This was prompted by the case of a group of sailors from HMS Suffolk who had protested over lack of pay and had been executed. The b
allad argued their case with passion:

  Their starving families at home

  Expected their slow pay would come;

  But our proud Court meant no such thing,

  Not one groat must they have till spring;

  To starve all summer would not do,

  They must starve all winter too.

  Their poor wives with care languished,

  Their children cried for want of bread,

  Their debts increased, and none would more

  Lend them, or let them run o’ th’ score.

  In such a case what could they do

  But ask those who money did owe? 17

  In Portsmouth, the local churchwardens were forced to appeal to the Admiralty for financial assistance because they could not afford to provide relief for “the great number of Sailors and Soldiers, their Wives and Families, and others, who Daily resort there.” 18 The 1821 census listed the town as having 2,881 males to 4,388 females, and in some areas of the town, most of the young women had resorted to prostitution in order to support themselves. No doubt, many sailors’ wives took in lodgers, went into domestic service, took in laundry, and did other menial work to earn a livelihood. Some are known to have run taverns and lodging houses. But all this had to be done in addition to having to bring up a large family.