Women Sailors & Sailors' Women

by David Cordingly

  “Sure never any seafaring son of a whore had ever such a good mother upon shore as I have. ’Ounds, mother, let me have a bucket full of punch, that we may swim and toss in an ocean of good liquor, like a couple of little pinks in the Bay of Biscay.” 4 The mother and her favorite son had been drinking for a while when the sailor’s sister, Betty, entered the tavern, “and there was such a wonderful mess of slip-slop licked up between brother Bat and sister Bet that no two friends, met by accident in a foreign plantation, could have expressed more joy in their greeting.”

  The Wapping landlady was one of many sailors’ women who earned a living in the taverns along the Thames, and in other British seaports. In the eighteenth century, as today, alehouses were often run by families. 5 In most cases the landlord was formally in charge, but it was the landlady and her daughters who did much of the work and who set the tone for the establishment. We see them in numerous engravings doling out drink for the sailors, and joining in their noisy celebrations as the men savored their precious few weeks ashore before returning to their ships. There were women licensees of alehouses, but they were a minority and were usually the widows of former landlords. According to the 1796 directory for Liverpool, no less than 27 percent of licensed victuallers were female, but in most places the proportion was much lower. 6

  The sailors’ women who were most in evidence in the East End of London were not landladies or sailors’ mothers but the women described by Ward as strumpets or trulls. They were to be found plying their trade in the brothels that centered around the Ratcliffe Highway. This street lay to the north of the wharves on the riverfront at Wapping. It was described in 1600 by John Stow as “a continual street, or filthy straight passage, with alleys of small tenements or cottages builded, inhabited by sailors and victuallers.” 7 Most sailors were young and unmarried, and every tide brought them flocking ashore from the hundreds of ships moored in serried ranks in the Pool of London. They were looking for women and drink, and the establishments along the Ratcliffe Highway provided for their needs. During the course of the seventeenth century, the neighborhood attracted prostitutes of several nationalities, including an influx of Flemish women who had a reputation for their sexual expertise and Venetian courtesans who were too expensive for ordinary seamen and were patronized by aristocrats and members of the court.

  The most notorious of the local women in the 1650s and 1660s was Damaris Page, who was described by Samuel Pepys as “the great bawd of the seamen.” 8 She was born in Stepney around 1620, became a prostitute in her teens, and married a man named William Baker in 1640. During the course of the next fifteen years, she moved on from prostitution to operating brothels. She had one on the Ratcliffe Highway that catered to ordinary seamen and dockworkers, and she also managed one on Rosemary Lane for naval officers and those who could afford the prices of the classier prostitutes. In 1653, she married a second husband, and two years later she was brought before the magistrates at Clerkenwell. The first charge of bigamy was dismissed on the grounds that her first marriage had not been sanctified, but the second charge was more serious. Accused of killing Eleanor Pooley while attempting to carry out an abortion with a two-pronged fork, she was charged with manslaughter and sentenced to be hanged. She was fortunate to be pregnant herself, however, and after being examined by a panel of matrons, she escaped the death sentence and spent three years in Newgate prison instead. On her release, she resumed her career as a madam and died a wealthy woman in her house on the Ratcliffe Highway in 1669.

  The steady growth in London’s maritime trade during the course of the eighteenth century brought more and more ships to the wharves and quays below London Bridge. A report published in 1800 estimated that there were 8,000 vessels and boats of all kinds in the port of London at any one time, and with the ships came the sailors. 9 Inevitably there was an increase in the supply of prostitutes to meet the demand. Some of these were girls who were forced into prostitution by sheer poverty. Others were young women who decided that they would rather sell their bodies than work sixteen hours a day as laundresses or seamstresses. According to the observations of Daniel Defoe in 1725, many prostitutes came from the huge army of young maidservants in London and took to prostitution to support themselves on the frequent occasions when they found themselves out of work: “This is the reason why our streets are swarming with strumpets. Thus many of them rove from place to place, from bawdy-house to service, and from service to bawdy-house again.” 10

  While all too many prostitutes were downtrodden victims exposed to the dangers of disease and violence that were the hazards of their profession, it is evident that many women retained some measure of control over their lives. In the 1780s, Francis Place was apprenticed to a London leather breeches maker who had three daughters. The eldest daughter was a common prostitute, but the other daughters had more satisfactory arrangements. The youngest daughter, about age seventeen, had pleasant lodgings where she was visited by a gentleman, and the second daughter was kept by the captain of an East Indiaman “in whose absence she used to amuse herself as such women generally do.” 11

  There was also a class of prostitutes who worked from home or could be approached in the theaters or pleasure gardens. These were the women who were sought out by the more discerning naval officers wishing for female entertainment. The names of these women, together with their addresses and details of their physical appearance and special skills, could be found in a variety of publications such as The Covent Garden Magazine or Amorous Repository, The Man of Fashion’s Companion, and The Rangers Magazine. The first lists, produced in the 1740s, were handwritten and compiled by John Harris, who worked at the Shakespeare’s Head, a Covent Garden tavern frequented by sea captains and directors of the East India Company. So popular were the lists that Harris went into print, as Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies, and some 8,000 copies of the 1758 edition were sold. Harris died in 1765 but his lists continued to be updated and issued on an annual basis up into the 1790s. The British Library has several editions and they make fascinating reading. Several of the women included in the slim volumes indicated a preference for sailors. Mrs. Crosby of 24 George Street, for instance, “being particularly attached to the sons of Neptune,” had married an elderly sea captain. On his death, he left her a small annuity that was enough to keep her off the streets but not enough to live on, so she worked as a part-time prostitute. Readers of Harris’s List were told that she could be contacted at home during the day or in one of the theaters in the evening, where she always sat in the side boxes. She was described as having dark hair flowing in ringlets down her back, languishing gray eyes, and a tolerable complexion. She charged one guinea for her services. 12

  Mrs. Grafton, who lived near Union Stairs in Wapping, let it be known that “her chief and best customers are sea officers, who she particularly likes, as they do not stay long at home, and always return fraught with love and presents.” 13 She was described as a comely woman of forty who could give more pleasure than a dozen raw girls. She had acquired twenty years’ experience working as a prostitute in Portsmouth before settling in London. Her price was 5 shillings, an attractive price for most naval officers, as a day’s pay for the most senior captains in this period was 20 shillings.

  Harris’s List makes frequent use of nautical expressions in describing the physical accomplishments of some of the women. The most conspicuous example of this occurs in the description of Miss Devonshire of Queen Anne Street. After a description of her fair complexion, her cerulean eyes, her fine teeth, and her good figure, the reader is informed that “many a man of war hath been her willing prisoner, and paid a proper ransom; her port is said to be well guarded by a light brown chevaux-de-freize, and parted from bumbay by a very small pleasant isthmus. The entry is rather straight; but when once in there is very good riding . . . she is so brave, that she is ever ready for an engagement, cares not how soon she comes to close quarters, and loves to fight yard arm and yard a
rm, and be briskly boarded.” 14

  By the 1840s and 1850s, the cheerful, noisy atmosphere of the East End taverns and bawdy houses noted by Ward and pictured by Rowlandson had been replaced by a darker, more sinister area of slum dwellings, seedy dance halls, and down-at-the-heel brothels. The increase in the number of prostitutes and the dreadful conditions in which most of them worked led to a number of studies and investigations. In 1857, William Acton, a surgeon who specialized in female venereal diseases, published a book entitled Prostitution, Considered in Its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspects in London and Other Large Cities. This was based on information derived partly from his own observations and partly from figures supplied by the police. He reckoned that there were 2,825 brothels within the Metropolitan Police District and some 8,600 prostitutes. According to his figures, more than one-third of the brothels were situated in the East End of London, with the heaviest concentration in the area around the Ratcliffe Highway.

  The cold statistics produced by Acton and other observers were brought to life by the descriptions of men like Bracebridge Hemyng, who interviewed the unhappy China Emma. Hemyng was aided in his investigations by a local police sergeant who knew his way around the brothels and drinking dens of the sailors’ district. In one particularly sleazy and tumbledown hovel, they entered a room where a lascar was living with his woman. The East Indian sailor had been smoking opium and was lying on a straw mattress on the floor covered by two tattered blankets. He was stupefied by the opium and the room was filled with its sickly smell. The only piece of furniture was a table. The woman who crouched by his bedside looked like an animated bundle of rags. Her face was grimy and unwashed “and her hands so black and filthy that mustard-and-cress might have been sown successfully upon them.” 15 Other lodging houses were more respectable, and Hemyng found the rooms to be larger than he expected. They were sometimes furnished with four-poster beds hung with faded chintz curtains. On the mantelpiece there would be some cheap crockery with a gilt or rosewood mirror hanging above. The sailors did not seem in the least concerned by the sudden appearance of the police sergeant and his companion and never showed any hostility.

  The two men also visited a dance hall on the Ratcliffe Highway. This was on the upper floor of a public house and was a long room illuminated by gas lighting. There were benches along the walls and in the far corner a raised dais for the orchestra. Sitting behind a wooden ledge on which they placed their music sheets were four bearded and shaggy-looking musicians. Their instruments consisted of a trumpet, two flutes, and a fiddle, and with these they filled the room with a shrill, exhilarating sound that provoked the dancers to waltz around the room at great speed. Hemyng was astonished by the grace of the dancers, particularly the foreign sailors, who danced the waltzes and polkas with polished ease. The women were not such expert dancers but were self-possessed and decorous: “They did not look as if they had come here for pleasure exactly, they appeared too business-like for that; but they did seem as if they would like, and intended, to unite the two, business and pleasure, and enjoy themselves as much as the circumstances would allow.” 16 He noted that the women did not change into their ball dresses in the dance hall but dressed at home and then walked through the streets in all their finery but without their bonnets.

  John Binney, another contributor to Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, noted that within the category of sailors’ women there were two classes. The lower class were little more than thieves. They would take a sailor into a coffeehouse or tavern, spike his drink with a drug such as laudanum, and then rob him. Or they would pick up a drunken sailor on the highway, lure him into a dark street with the promise of sex, and then steal his money and valuables. But there was also a better class of prostitute who did not resort to stealing and who did not work for male pimps.

  They dress tolerably well, in silk and merino gowns with crinolines, and bonnets gaily attired with flowers and ribbons. Many of them have velvet stripes across the breast and back of their gowns, and large brooches with the portrait of a sailor encased in them. They generally lay their hair back in front in the French style. 17

  Most of them lived in Albert Square, Palmer’s Folly, Seven Star Alley, and the other streets around the Ratcliffe Highway. Binney reckoned the best-looking girls were Irish cockneys, but there were also a number of Dutch and German prostitutes, some of whom he thought were good-looking and others not. The foreign women spoke English pretty well, and one of the German women explained to an interviewer how she saw herself as a wife to visiting sailors. She was currently living with an English sailor whose ship was in the docks. She had known him for a year and a half and he always lived with her when he came ashore.

  He is a nice man and give me all his money when he land always. I take all his money while he with me, and not spend it quick as some of your English women do. If I not to care, he would spend all in one week. Sailor boy always spend money like rainwater; he throw it in the street and not care to pick it up again. 18

  She said that she was honest with him and he trusted her. If he had £24 when he left his ship and he stayed six weeks with her, they would spend £15 or £20 together and he would let her keep whatever was left over when it was time for him to go. She knew that if he kept his money himself he would fall into bad hands. He would order clothes at a slop-seller who would overcharge him and ruin him. She was frank about her relations with other sailors: “I know very many sailors—six, eight, ten, oh! more than that. They are my husbands. I am not married, of course not, but they think me their wife while they are on shore.” However, she admitted that she did not care much for any of them and that she had a lover of her own who was a waiter in a coffeehouse. He was German and came from Berlin, where she herself had been born.

  It seems to have been a common practice for sailors to seek out the same woman when they came ashore. Sergeant Prior of the Metropolitan Police told Hemyng that when sailors landed in the docks they would draw their wages and go to live with the women they had been with previously. They would give the women their money and considered themselves married to them for the time being. The women usually treated them honorably, and when the money ran out, the men went off to sea to earn some more.

  IT IS INTERESTING to compare the sailors’ district of London with that of New York. Between 1800 and 1820, New York’s population had more than doubled, to around 123,000, and it had become the leading port of North America. Sailing vessels of all sizes clustered along the city’s wharves, their masts forming a dense forest of weathered pine, tarred rigging, and salt-stained sails stretching the length of South Street. Today an elevated highway sweeps overhead toward the gleaming skyscrapers of Wall Street, but in the early part of the nineteenth century, the waterfront was a miscellaneous collection of warehouses, sail lofts, timber yards, fish markets, taverns, ships’ chandlers, and the houses of merchants and sea captains. Dozens of horses and carts threaded their way among the throngs of seamen and dockworkers. As with the waterfront alongside the Pool of London, the potent smells of fish and tar and horse manure mixed with the more pleasant aromas from cargoes of grain and tea and spices being unloaded from the ships.

  Behind the buildings on the waterfront was an assortment of fine brick mansions, shops, seedy boardinghouses, bars, and dancing saloons. The area particularly frequented by sailors was centered around Water Street, and this is where the sailors’ women were to be found. In 1853, there were reported to be thirty-eight houses of prostitution on Water Street alone and 138 young women working in them. 19 According to Matthew Hale Smith, the women there were the lowest and most debased of their class. They were flashy, untidy, and covered with tinsel and brass jewelry: “Their dresses are short, arms and necks bare, and their appearance as disgusting as can be conceived.” 20 Equally notorious for vice and crime were Cherry Street, Fulton Street, and the waterfront adjoining Corlears Hook. The latter area is generally credited with giving rise to the term “hooker” and certainly ha
d its fair share of rough characters, male and female. One observer thought the women there were bloated with rum, rotten with disease, drugged on opium, and victims of brutality and every kind of excess.

  In some ways the dancing saloons, lodging houses, and brothels were similar to their equivalents in London’s East End. The dancing saloons had three-piece bands that played noisy and energetic music on the violin, the banjo, and the tambourine. The bars were packed with weather-beaten sailors who were carefree and generous with their wages. “A sailor with cash in his pocket has a decided antipathy to drinking alone,” wrote William Sanger, “and generally invites everyone in the room, male and female, to partake with him.” 21 But there does seem to have been a difference between London and New York in the level of violence and in the way the prostitutes and their customers flaunted themselves on the streets. In Wapping and Stepney and Limehouse, most of the crime and vice went on behind closed doors or in dark alleys. In New York, it often took place in full view of respectable residents and shocked neighbors.

  In 1839, a watchman arrested Edward Hogan and Catharine Riley for shamelessly copulating on the front steps of a house on Oliver Street. Ellen Robinson said it was impossible to live in her Water Street tenement because prostitutes were in the habit of sitting half-naked on the front stoop. In March 1847, the National Police Gazette reported the trial of George Beach on a charge of keeping a disorderly house. 22 Beach lived at 304 Water Street and faced an onslaught from hostile neighbors. John Robinson, who lived at number 309, complained that Beach’s house was one of the worst in the city. It was a place of riot and drunkenness where men and women of the most infamous character gathered and used obscene and profane language. Robert Legget, who lived on Cherry Street, confirmed that it had been a riotous house for years and that he had seen thieves and prostitutes on the premises as late as one o’clock in the morning. But the most graphic account came from Charles Devlin, who was described as the principal complainant. He lived opposite, at number 318, with his wife and young daughters, and said that he had observed girls dancing naked in the house, and on Saturday nights “girls on Beach’s steps take down men’s pantaloons, which is a common practice.” But his most damning charge was that Beach had girls as young as eleven years of age in the house and that he had cohabited with a girl of thirteen.