Women Sailors & Sailors' Women

by David Cordingly

  Richardson and his wife had hoped the ship would soon be ordered home again, but Admiral Duckworth decided that the Tromp should be turned into a prison ship, and they had to spend two years in Martinique before they could return home. It was not until September 1802 that they sailed back to Portsmouth.

  Other mentions of women on warships appear in the transcripts of courts-martial. In 1755, for instance, Mr. Mackenzie, the purser of HMS Guarland, made a number of complaints against his commander, Captain Arbuthnot, resulting in the captain’s having to face a court-martial on board HMS Syren in Hampton Roads, Virginia. 20 During the course of the proceedings, it was revealed that the captain had allowed the boatswain’s wife and the master’s wife and child to go to sea on his ship. Most of the purser’s complaints were about the ship’s stores, the stowing of ballast, and the use of water, and the court’s conclusion was that these charges were malicious, frivolous, and groundless. However, Captain Arbuthnot was blamed for carrying women to sea and giving them passage from England to Virginia, “contrary to the 38th Article of his General Instructions,” and for this he was sentenced to be reprimanded.

  Complaints of ill-treatment made by John Piper, another purser, led to the court-martial of Captain Vaughan and Lieutenant Pike of HM sloop Baltimore at Chatham in October 1750. 21 Among the purser’s many complaints was the fact that Lieutenant Pike had a woman on board. Captain Vaughan told the court that the woman, who was named Nancy, was in the sloop when he took command of her and as the ship was only going from port to port and not going abroad he did not at first take any notice of it. However, when the purser complained that Miss Nancy was causing “some uneasiness,” he ordered the lieutenant to put her ashore when they got to Cork. George Banbury, the captain’s clerk, was given the task of taking Nancy ashore, but she managed to persuade him to take her back on board without the knowledge of the captain or the lieutenant. George agreed to do so, and she hid below until the ship was well on her way to Plymouth. When they anchored in Plymouth Sound, Nancy was again rowed ashore. She was obviously a determined woman, because the captain had to admit to the court that when the Baltimore arrived at the Nore, he found that Miss Nancy had managed to get on board again. In the summation of the case, no mention was made of the woman, and the court acquitted Captain Vaughan and dismissed the purser’s complaints as vexatious and groundless.

  One of the most bizarre cases of a woman being present on a warship at sea was revealed in a court-martial that took place on July 10, 1763. 22 A dead woman’s body had been found sewn up in a hammock in the bread room of HMS Defiance. When the ship’s commander, Captain Mackenzie, was questioned about the body, he said:

  I inquired how that woman could have got in the Bread Room, and who kept the keys of that room, on which it was found that Rumbold habitually kept those keys. He then acknowledged that he had concealed her and that when she came on board she was in good health. The reason for their not making any report of the death they said was, the fear of my punishing them.

  Further questioning of Adam Rumbold, the purser’s steward, and Christopher Gutteno, the surgeon’s mate, revealed that the woman had been smuggled on board the Defiance from another ship. She had complained of a stomach ailment, and the surgeon’s mate had bled her and given her a vomit and a grain of opium. She also complained of a violent headache. They had sat up two nights with her, but she had died at five o’clock in the morning. She had apparently stowed away in the Defiance while the ship was stationed in the West Indies, and the seaman who had smuggled her aboard had since been discharged. The verdict of the court was that the woman had died a natural death, and the seamen who attended her were acquitted.

  The presence of a woman on board a naval ship was revealed in another court-martial, which took place on March 15, 1799. 23 On trial were five members of the crew of HMS Hermione. They were charged with murder, mutiny, and delivering up the ship to the enemy. The mutiny was as notorious in its day as the mutiny on the Bounty, which took place ten years before. There was no equivalent to the epic confrontation between Captain Bligh and Fletcher Christian, but the mutiny itself was much more savage. Its cause was the excessive cruelty of Captain Hugh Pigot. The son of an admiral, he had joined the navy in 1782 at the age of twelve, gained his first command at twenty-four, and was appointed post captain in 1794. While in command of HMS Success, he had ordered eighty-five floggings in the span of nine months, and so severe were some of these punishments that two men had died from the number of lashes inflicted on them. 24

  In February 1797, Pigot was appointed to the command of the 32-gun frigate Hermione, on the Jamaica station, which was lying at Cape Nicholas Mole at the western end of Haiti. After a disastrous cruise in which a second ship under his command was wrecked, Captain Pigot returned to Haiti. In June, William Martin joined the Hermione as her boatswain, and he was accompanied by his wife, Frances. Some later reports suggested that there were several other women on the ship, but it is clear from the evidence of the court-martial that Mrs. Martin was the only woman on board.

  On August 16, Captain Pigot sailed from Haiti in command of a squadron of three ships. He continued to flog his men mercilessly; on September 20 he provoked some of them beyond endurance. At six o’clock in the evening, as the ship was heading northward through the Mona Passage, she was hit by a squall and the men were ordered aloft to reef the topsails. Pigot swore at them for not working fast enough, and as they battled to tie the reef points, with the wind whipping at the flogging sails, he bellowed through his speaking trumpet, “I’ll flog the last man down.” In their desperate scramble to complete the job, three of the young sailors lost their hold and fell to the deck. They were killed instantly. Pigot brutally barked, “Throw the lubbers overboard,” and ordered the boatswain’s mates to go aloft and lash the remaining topmen into completing the job. Midshipman Casey, who had been publicly humiliated and flogged by Pigot the week before, observed that the deaths of the sailors “greatly increased the previous dislike of the Captain and no doubt hastened, if not entirely decided, the mutiny.”

  At eleven o’clock the following night, a group of seamen armed with cutlasses and boarding axes gathered outside the captain’s cabin. Private McNeill, the marine sentry guarding the door of the cabin, was knocked down with a single blow with the flat side of a cutlass, and the men broke their way into Pigot’s quarters. After a frenzied fight in which the captain was slashed, stabbed, and run through with a bayonet, the men smashed one of the stern windows and threw his bloodsoaked body into the sea. During the next few hours of darkness, the mutineers roamed the ship seeking out additional victims. All three lieutenants were attacked and thrown overboard, and after the men had broken into the spirit room and helped themselves to rum, they became increasingly aggressive and began to pay off old scores. The purser and the surgeon were dragged up on deck and shoved out through the gunports, as was the captain’s clerk. They even hauled the marine lieutenant from his sickbed where he was dying of yellow fever and threw him over the side. By morning the next day, they had murdered ten men. Among them was William Martin, the boatswain, who had become the target of Richard Redman, the quartermaster’s mate.

  While groups of men were roaming the ship, Redman went to Jones, the steward, with a sword in his hand and demanded to be let into the captain’s wine store. “I gave him a bottle of Madeira,” Jones said later. “He knocked off the head of it with his sword and drunk half a pint or more. . . .” Stoked up with liquor and carrying two additional bottles, Redman made his way to the boatswain’s cabin and was heard to say, “By the Holy Ghost, the Boatswain shall go with the rest!” He dragged the wretched man out of his cabin to the maindeck and pushed him out through one of the gunports. Martin was heard crying out when he hit the water. Redman then returned to the cabin, and according to Jones, he “remained in the cabin with the Boatswain’s wife, and I saw him no more that night.” When Redman emerged the next morning, he was observed to be wearing a ruffed shi
rt and white waistcoat. None of the witnesses at the court-martial reported any screams or cries for help from Mrs. Martin, and while there seems to have been a suggestion that she therefore submitted to Redman’s embraces willingly, it seems far more likely that she was raped. She must have been terrified by the hideous sounds of murder and mayhem on the darkened ship, and when confronted by the drunken man who had just drowned her husband, she must have felt that resistance was useless if she was to save her life.

  By daybreak the mutineers had elected one of their number to take command of the ship, and they headed for the Spanish port of La Guaira on the coast of Venezuela, 500 miles away. On Sunday, September 27, the Hermione dropped anchor in the roadstead under the guns of the fort. Several of the mutineers went ashore under a white flag and reported to the Spanish governor. The Spanish agreed to take over the ship and renamed her the Santa Cecilia. (The ship was recaptured a month later in a daring night attack by seamen from HMS Surprise: They crept into the Spanish harbor in boats, overcame the crew, cut the anchor cables, and towed the ship out to sea.) In due course, many of the mutineers were caught or gave themselves up, and twenty-four of them were hanged. Mrs. Martin made her way to America and vanished.

  However, a document in the Public Record Office reveals that in August 1803, she appeared before the Court of the Commissioners in London, which managed the charity that granted relief to the poor widows of naval officers. In the transactions of the court it is noted that “Frances, Widow of Wm. Martin, who was murdered while acting as Boatswain of the Hermione” was detained as a prisoner in the Spanish port and did not return to England until April 1802. 25 The court agreed that she should be granted a pension from the day on which her husband was murdered.

  A number of seamen’s wives were present at battles. John Nicol was a seaman on board HMS Goliath during the Battle of the Nile in 1798 and later wrote an account of his experiences that mentioned the part played by women that day. 26 The Goliath was a 74-gun ship, and under the command of Captain Foley, she led Nelson’s fleet into the battle. The French fleet was lying at anchor in Aboukir Bay, between Alexandria and the mouth of the Nile. The French had a strong defensive position, and when they sighted the British fleet on the horizon on the afternoon of August 1, they assumed that the enemy would wait until the next morning before attacking. Nelson decided to take them by surprise. With the sun low in the sky and many of the French sailors still ashore, the British ships swept into the bay on a fresh northwesterly wind. Much of the battle took place in the dark.

  Nicol would have preferred to be on the deck of the Goliath so that he could see what was happening, but his station was down below in the powder magazine with the gunner. He noted, “Any information we got was from the boys and women who carried the powder.” As they drew near the enemy, the British seamen stripped to their waists, opened the gunports, and gave three cheers every time they fired a broadside. The two fleets were evenly matched until the huge French flagship L’Orient of 120 guns was seen to be on fire. Admiral Brueys had had both legs shot off but was continuing to direct the action until around ten o’clock that night when the ship’s magazine caught fire and the ship blew up. The explosion could be heard in Alexandria, fifteen miles away. The Goliath was so shaken by the blast that Nicol and his shipmates thought the after part of their ship had been blown off until some of the boys told them what had happened. There was a nasty moment when a shot came bursting through the hull into the magazine, but no serious harm was done and the carpenters plugged the hole to stop the water that was pouring in. It was hot work manning the guns, and Nicol later recalled:

  I was much indebted to the gunner’s wife, who gave her husband and me a drink of wine every now and then which lessened our fatigue much. There were some of the women wounded and one woman belonging to Leith died of her wounds, and was buried on a small island in the bay. One woman bore a son in the heat of the action; she belonged to Edinburgh. 27

  One after the other, the French ships struck their colors and surrendered, and at dawn the next day, Nicol went on deck to view the aftermath of the battle. “The whole bay was covered with dead bodies, mangled, wounded and scorched, not a bit of clothes on them except their trousers,” he recalled. “Thus terminated the glorious first of August, the busiest night of my life.”

  Nicol’s references to women are confirmed by two other sources. Most unusually, the names of four women were recorded in the muster book of HMS Goliath. They were Sarah Bates, Ann Taylor, Elizabeth Moore, and Mary French, and it was noted they were “victualled at 2/3 allowance per Captain’s order in consideration of their assistance in dressing and attending on the wounded, being widows of men slain in fight with the enemy on 1st August 1798.” 28 Two other women who were present at the battle, Ann Hopping and Mary Ann Riley, put in a claim for the Naval General Service Medal many years later but were not awarded it because it was decreed that it could be given only to males. 29

  The records of the Naval General Service Medal provide evidence of another birth on a warship. The medal was established in 1847, and it was intended that it be awarded to all who could prove that they had been present at specified naval actions between 1793 and 1840. Among the claims was one from Daniel Tremendous McKenzie, who had been born on HMS Tremendous shortly before the Battle of the Glorious First of June, 1794. His rating on the medal roll is given as “Baby.” His mother’s name does not appear on the ship’s muster book, but his father is there, listed as Daniel McKenzie, age twenty-seven, an able seaman. 30 There was an obvious injustice in issuing a medal to a baby boy but not allowing it to be awarded to the women who took part in battles, many of whom had done heroic work as nurses or had carried powder to the guns.

  Queen Victoria seems to have played a key part in the decision to exclude women from the medal. Jane Townshend was present at the Battle of Trafalgar on board HMS Defiance, and when she put in a claim for the medal, Admiral Sir Thomas Byam Martin, who was a member of the committee that vetted the claims, wrote, “The Queen in the Gazette of the first of June [1847] directs all who were present in this action shall have medals, without any reservation as to sex, and as this woman produces from the captain of the Defiance strong and highly satisfactory certificates of her useful services during the action, she is fully entitled to the medal.” 31 However, Admiral Byam Martin subsequently noted in the committee’s minutes, “Upon further consideration this cannot be allowed. There were many women in the fleet equally useful, and it will leave the Army exposed to innumerable applications of the same nature.” This provided the committee with an excuse for the decision, but it seems likely that the Queen was responsible for the change of heart: She was no supporter of women’s rights and believed that a woman’s place was in the home.

  Evidence that the French also had women on their warships was provided in the aftermath of the Battle of Trafalgar. In the closing stages of the battle, the French ship Achille caught fire. Shooting from the musket men stationed in the tops caused her mizzentop to catch alight. This was a deadly threat to the ship, and the French seamen immediately began to hack down the mast, hoping that the flaming spars would fall overboard into the water. Their efforts were in vain, because two devastating broadsides from the British ship Prince brought down all three masts. The burning mizzentop fell on the boats amidships and red-hot wreckage dropped through to the deck below. The fire rapidly spread, and the French had no option but to abandon ship before her magazine caught fire and she exploded. The Achille had been bravely fought, and though she did not strike her colors and surrender, the British ships in the vicinity held their fire and went to her aid. The Prince launched her boats and began to pick up some of the hundreds of French seamen who had jumped into the water. Boats from the Belleisle and the Euryalus were sent to help, and the schooner Pickle and a cutter joined in the rescue. The Achille exploded at 6:10 P.M., and the surrounding boats closed in to pick up the last survivors from the wreckage. Among them was a naked woman w
ho was found clinging to a spar and was taken aboard the Pickle. She was given a jacket and trousers and transferred with fifty French survivors to the Revenge. 32

  The woman’s name was Jeanette. Her husband was a member of the Achille’s crew, and she had dressed in men’s clothes and stowed away in the ship. When the fire broke out, she had tried to find her husband but, failing to do so, had attempted to escape by climbing out of a port in the gunroom and sitting on the rudder chains. The heat melted the lead of the rudder stock, which dripped on her, and she decided to take off her clothes and jump into the sea. She managed to grab hold of a floating spar, but one of the men clinging to the spar bit and kicked her, forcing her to swim to another. The British seamen in the Pickle were considerably more gallant than the shipwrecked Frenchmen. An officer gave her some sprigged blue muslin that had been taken from a Spanish ship, and the captain ordered that two shirts from the purser’s stores be made into a petticoat for her. A few days later she rejoined her husband, who had survived the fire and was found among the survivors.

  More examples of women on warships can be found in the years following the Napoleonic Wars. Charles M’Pherson, a sailor on board HMS Genoa during the Battle of Navarino in 1827, recalled that nine of the petty officers on his ship had their wives on board. During the action, the wives helped the surgeon by dressing the injured men’s wounds and bringing them drinking water when they needed it: “Two of their number, I think it but justice to mention, acted with the greatest calmness and self possession. One of them was a Mrs. Buckley, and the other a Mrs. Clark, the latter a Marine’s wife.” 33 On another ship a few years later, a naval captain was informed by his surgeon that a woman on board had been in labor for twelve hours, and if he would permit the firing of a broadside to leeward “nature would be assisted by the shock.” 34 The captain agreed to fire the ship’s guns and the woman delivered a fine baby boy. Like other boys born belowdecks on warships, he would inevitably be known as “a son of a gun” because it was usual for such births to take place alongside the guns.