Women Sailors & Sailors' Women

by David Cordingly

  The boatman had no intention of endangering himself or his boat, and in spite of Mrs. Parker’s desperate pleadings, he headed for the low fortress and the dockyard at Sheerness, which lay a few hundred yards away across the water. He assured her that no execution would take place that day because the yellow flag was not flying from any of the anchored ships. This flag was the signal to warn the fleet and onlookers that an execution was imminent.

  As soon as they landed, Mrs. Parker spoke to another boatman on the garrison dock-stairs and persuaded him to take her back out to the Sandwich. At exactly eight o’clock, as she was being rowed up to Blackstakes, where the leading ships were anchored, a single gun was fired from the flagship L’Espion. Looking across she was horrified to see the fatal yellow flag hoisted to the masthead, and immediately afterward another yellow flag was hauled up on the foremast of HMS Sandwich. As they came alongside for the second time, she frantically renewed her entreaties to the sentries to let her come on board so she could speak to her husband. With the recent mutiny in everyone’s minds, all officers present were aware that the execution of its ringleader might spark off more trouble. The sentries were under strict orders that no one should board or leave the ship, so once again they refused her permission. The boatman told her that he could not wait because he had promised to collect some people who had booked his services earlier.

  The waterfront was now swarming with an expectant crowd of men, women, and children who were gathering to see the execution. Scaffolding had been erected on the shore of the Isle of Grain for spectators, and an increasing number of yachts, cutters, and rowboats were collecting in the vicinity of the Sandwich. Pushing through the curious onlookers on the shore, Ann Parker hired a third boatman and once again headed across the water toward the ships at anchor. But as she neared the Sandwich she saw a procession of men heading from the quarterdeck toward a platform that had been erected on the cathead, the heavy beam that supported the anchor near the bows of the ship. In the center of the procession she could clearly see the figure of her husband. Richard Parker was dressed in a black suit of mourning, and his hands were bound. Those present on deck observed that he looked a little paler than usual but that he carried himself with a remarkable composure and fortitude. As soon as she recognized his familiar figure and realized that he had only minutes to live, Ann Parker shrieked, “Oh, my dear husband!” and fainted. After a few minutes she recovered, and looking across toward the flagship, she saw the chaplain in his robes turn away from her husband.

  While she lay unconscious in the bottom of the boat, Richard Parker had spoken briefly to the assembled ship’s company. He had knelt and prayed, and had then stood up and said, “I am ready.” The provost marshal had placed the greased halter around his neck but had done it so clumsily that Parker spoke to the boatswain’s mate who was standing nearby and said, “Do you do it, for he seems to know nothing about it.” The boatswain’s mate expertly made fast the halter to the reeve-rope and indicated that all was ready. Parker turned around and looked for the last time at his shipmates gathered on the forecastle. He nodded his head toward them and with an affectionate smile said, “Goodbye to you.” He then turned to Captain Mosse and asked him whether the gun was primed. He was told that it was.

  “Is the match alight?”

  “All is ready.”

  Parker asked whether any gentleman would lend him a white handkerchief so that he could give the signal, and after a pause a gentleman stepped forward and handed him one. Parker bowed and thanked him and ascended the platform. A cap was drawn over his face, and he stepped firmly to the edge of the platform. He dropped the handkerchief and quickly placed his hands in his coat pockets. As the reeve-rope swung him in the air, the gun at the bows of the ship fired with a shattering boom that echoed across the water. The explosion was followed by a rising cloud of gunpowder smoke, but the eyes of the hundreds of seamen on the anchored ships and the waiting crowds on the shore were fixed on the black figure suspended from the yardarm on the flagship’s foremast. It was noted that Parker’s body appeared extremely convulsed for a few seconds and then hung lifeless.

  In all, some 3,000 people watched the last moments of Richard Parker, but his wife was not one of them. She lay senseless in the boat among the dozens of other small craft gathered around the warship. She said later that she “saw nothing but the sea, which appeared covered with blood.”

  For the third time she was rowed back to the shore. Almost overcome with shock and grief but still determined to be with her husband, she hired a fourth boat, and as she was once again rowed back to the flagship, she saw his body being lowered to the deck. By the time she came alongside, she was told that the corpse had been taken into a boat for burial ashore at Sheerness.

  This might seem to be the end of the story, but Ann Parker continued to demonstrate that desperate and heroic determination which enables some people to fight on when all seems lost. With some difficulty she managed to secure an audience with Vice Admiral Skeffington Lutwidge, who had recently been appointed commander in chief of the fleet at Sheerness. She told him she wanted to remove her husband’s body from the burial ground in the garrison. Lutwidge asked her why she wanted to take her husband’s body. She replied, “To have him interred like a gentleman, as he had been bred.”

  Ann Parker knew her husband was no criminal, and she wanted him to have a decent burial and the blessing of the church. Vice Admiral Lutwidge had no sympathy for the wife of the notorious leader of the recent mutiny and categorically refused her request. Having failed to get her way by official means, Mrs. Parker resorted to desperate measures. The place where her husband was buried was alongside the walls of the garrison and was enclosed by a new stockade fence that was nearly ten feet high. She tried to find out who kept the key to the gate of the stockade, but failing to do so, she waited until nightfall and returned to the burial place. At about ten o’clock, she came across three women and persuaded them to help her recover the body of her husband. The women were probably sailors’ wives or prostitutes; the commissioner of the dockyard at Sheerness frequently complained that the area was “a common resort of Whores and Rogues by day and night.” 5 When the coast was clear, the four women climbed over the gate and into the stockaded area.

  Although Richard Parker’s coffin was buried in a shallow grave, the women had no tools and had to dig away the earth with their bare hands. They lifted the coffin from the ground, carried it across to the fence, and managed with some difficulty to heave it over the gate. They laid it on the ground outside, and in order to conceal it from the sentries manning the Barrier Gate nearby, they sat on the coffin for the remainder of the night. At four o’clock in the morning, the drawbridge of the fort was lowered and a fish cart rumbled through the gateway onto the road outside. Mrs. Parker accosted the driver and, finding that he was heading for Rochester, persuaded him to add the coffin to his load for the price of a guinea. Having arrived in the town she found the driver of a wagon who, for six guineas, agreed to take the coffin to London and to deliver it to the Hoop and Horseshoe, on Queen Street, Little Tower Hill. Mrs. Parker had hired a room there where she arranged for the coffin to be deposited.

  The mutiny of the seamen at the Nore and the subsequent court-martial of Richard Parker had been widely reported and had caused considerable interest not only among seafarers and their families, but among people from all classes, particularly in London. When the word got out that Parker’s corpse had been brought to the East End by his widow, a crowd began to gather outside the Hoop and Horseshoe. Some of the more unscrupulous women appear to have been charging people to see Parker’s body. By Monday, the crowds of the curious had grown so big that the local magistrates were forced to intervene. Ann Parker was called to the police office on Lambert Street, where she was asked why she had removed her husband’s body from its burial place at Sheerness. She said that she wished to take him to his family in Exeter or to her family in Scotland so that she could bury him like a Christian. S
he was asked whether the rumors were true that she had been charging people money to view the corpse. At this she burst into floods of tears and replied, “Do I appear like a monster so unnatural?” Subsequent inquiries confirmed that there was no truth in the accusation. The magistrates were concerned that elements in the population would use the occasion of the funeral to cause a riot, and they therefore decided that the coffin should be moved immediately to the workhouse on Nightingale Lane and then buried in the churchyard of Aldgate Church the next morning. However, the crowds continued to gather in the Minories all that evening, and fearing a tumultuous assembly the next day, they arranged for the body to be moved at one o’clock in the morning from the workhouse to the burying vault of the church of St. Mary at Whitechapel.

  In the afternoon of Tuesday, July 4, Ann Parker was permitted to attend the funeral service for her husband, which was officiated by Mr. Wright, the rector of St. Mary, Whitechapel. At her particular request, the coffin lid was taken off and she was allowed to look at her husband for the last time. After the ceremony was over she signed a certificate to confirm that the burial service had been duly performed. 6 No doubt to cover themselves in the event of any inquiry into the proceedings, the minister and officers of the parish asked her to state that she was perfectly satisfied with the mode of his interment and with the treatment that she had received. This she agreed to. The following inscription can still be found in the church register under the heading of burials: “4 July, 1797, Richard Parker, Sheerness, Kent, age 33. Cause of death, execution.” 7

  THE STORY OF Ann Parker is obviously unusual and cannot be regarded as typical of the experiences of sailors’ women. Of the hundreds of thousands of sailors who served at sea in the eighteenth century, relatively few were hanged for mutiny, and it would be hard to find another sailor’s wife who went to such extreme lengths to rescue her husband’s corpse and give him a Christian burial. But the story does encapsulate, in an unusually dramatic form, the tragedy that was the lot of so many wives and families of seamen. We are allowed a glimpse of a few days in the life of Ann Parker because of the notoriety of her husband, and because the mutiny at the Nore aroused strong passions and was widely reported at the time. But what of the other seamen who were present that day and what of their families?

  On the morning of Parker’s execution, there were fourteen warships lying at anchor in the River Medway. Most of these ships had between 500 and 600 seamen on board, and we can therefore assume that around 8,000 seamen and marines were assembled on the decks of their ships to watch Parker die. The majority of these men were not allowed ashore and were confined to their ships for as long as they remained in the harbor. Only the officers and the more long-serving and reliable hands would be given permission to spend time ashore. The remainder must endure an existence that was hard but bearable for the younger and more adaptable, but for older men and for landsmen unaccustomed to the confined life on board, it was nothing less than a floating hell.

  Richard Hall was at the Nore in June 1800, when he wrote to his wife from HMS Zealand. He told her that it was worse than a prison: “If I had known it was so bad I would not have entered. I would give all I had if it was a hundred guineas if I could get on shore.” He said that they flogged men every day and that many other men would give all the world if they could get onshore. He concluded, “Dear wife, do the best you can for the children and God prosper them till I come back, which there is no fear of and send an answer as soon as possible.” 8

  The captains were very aware that many of the sailors had been impressed into the navy and had good reason to believe that they would run away if allowed ashore. Between 1795 and 1805, more men were court-martialed for desertion than for drunkenness, theft, or any other offense. The punishment for desertion was brutal: floggings of 200 or 300 lashes were common, and in some cases men were hanged.

  Richard Parker paid the ultimate price for leading a protest against some of the worst aspects of naval life, and his wife was left a widow. There was another wife of an impressed seaman whose story was equally dramatic but had a happier ending. Margaret Dickson was born around 1700 in Musselburgh, a tiny fishing village on the Firth of Forth, a few miles from Edinburgh. 9 Her parents were poor but ensured that she had a good religious education and was versed in the household duties that might be expected of her. She duly married a local fisherman and bore him several children. At some time around 1726 or 1727, her husband was taken by the press gang during one of the navy’s periodic recruitment sweeps of the Firth of Forth.

  Left on her own, Margaret Dickson had a brief affair with another Musselburgh man and became pregnant. She was so frightened of causing a scandal (it was a local custom that adulterous women should be publicly rebuked in church) that she attempted to hide her pregnant state until the last moment. She was alone when she went into labor. Unable to get assistance from her neighbors, she fell unconscious and had no recollection whether she gave birth to a baby that was alive or stillborn. When a dead baby was found near her house, she was accused of murder, arrested, and sent to the jail in Edinburgh. At her trial, a surgeon gave damning evidence. He had put the baby’s lungs in water and found that they floated, which according to him meant the child had been born alive because it had breathed air into the lungs. Margaret Dickson was found guilty of murder and condemned to death.

  During the subsequent days in prison she confessed that she was guilty of adultery but constantly denied that she had murdered her child “or even formed an idea of so horrid a crime.” She was hanged at Edinburgh in 1728, and afterward her body was delivered to her friends, who placed it in a coffin and sent it on a cart for burial in Musselburgh. The weather was sultry, and the people in charge of the cart decided to stop for a drink at the village of Pepper-Mill outside Edinburgh. While they were drinking, one of them saw the lid of the coffin move. They went to remove it and were startled when the hanged woman sat up. Most of the spectators ran off in terror, but someone had the presence of mind to take her indoors, bleed her, and put her to bed. The following morning she woke up and had recovered sufficiently to be able to walk back to her home in Musselburgh.

  Under Scottish law, a person could not be punished twice for the same offense, and since she had already suffered the due punishment, she was now a free person. Her sailor husband had meanwhile returned to Musselburgh, and since the marriage of an executed person was automatically dissolved, they were married for a second time a few days later. According to the account in the Newgate Calendar, she continued to deny that she had murdered her child, and we learn that “she was living as late as the year 1753.”

  Margaret Dickson’s recovery may seem miraculous, but in fact there are several accounts of people who survived hanging in Britain during the eighteenth century. Presumably, if the drop was not sufficient to break the neck, one simply suffered temporary asphyxiation, became unconscious for a while, and when the pressure of the rope was released, was able to make a complete recovery.

  4

  Female Sailors: Fact and Fiction

  IN AUGUST 1815, a book was published in Boston entitled The Adventures of Louisa Baker. The heroine of the book was a young woman from Massachusetts, and the story was told in her own words. 1 She described how she had been seduced and abandoned by the son of a local trader, and had run away from home to spare her respectable parents the shame. In bitterly cold weather she walked to Boston, where a kindly woman took pity on her and gave her a bed for the night. The woman told her to avoid the area of town that was inhabited by prostitutes and warned her against the pimps who were continually in search of new victims.

  With a heavy heart, Louisa set forth to look for a job as a chambermaid with a respectable family. She described herself as “a young and slender female thinly clad, and in a tedious snowstorm, with a handkerchief in one hand containing a few articles of clothing.” 2 Faint with cold and hunger, she eventually came to a house on the heights of west Boston where she was welcomed by a ma
tronly woman and a number of girls whom she took to be her daughters. Interviewed by the matron, she revealed why she had left her home. She was allowed to stay until she had given birth to her baby (who did not survive) and recovered her health. But when she then expressed a wish to leave the house and return to her friends, the woman turned nasty. She told Louisa she must pay for the days she had spent with her and threatened to expose the secret of her seduction. Louisa was persuaded that she had no alternative but to entertain gentlemen in the manner practiced by the other girls—prostitutes, she now realized—of the household.

  The house was in the notorious red-light area known as Negro Hill, and several pages of the book are devoted to an account of the area and its inhabitants. The author described the dancing halls where the girls endeavored to please the patrons with their obscene gestures. She also described the different grades of harlots. These ranged from the strumpets of distinction who lived in some style down to the women she called “arch hags,” whose chief qualifications were swearing, drinking, and obscenity: “Their companions are principally composed of sailors of the lowest grade and straggling mulattoes and blacks.” 3

  In 1812, after three years in which she learned to attract the attention of men and to “practice vices perhaps before unthought of,” she met the first lieutenant of a privateer. During an evening’s conversation, he explained what he would do if he were a female and wanted to see the world: He said he would dress as a man and was confident that it would be possible for a female to travel abroad by land and sea without her sex being exposed.