Women Sailors & Sailors' Women

by David Cordingly

Was there any light?

  There was not any. It was dark.

  If it was dark, how can you know it was that boy?

  I kept the boy in my berth until it was fair daylight, and then I found it to be the boy, the prisoner Finley.

  He was asked how he could be sure that it was the prisoner George Newton committing the sin of sodomy if it was dark. He replied, “There was no other persons lay by me, only one man, that lay in a hammock over my bed, in the same berth.”

  He was asked whether he was sure of what took place.

  I felt the prick of George Newton, in the boy Finley’s arse.

  What did you do then?

  I made a great noise. The ship’s cook was coming at that time, but his wife stopped him, as he told me afterwards.

  When Ferrett was asked whether there had been any falling-out between him and the prisoners, he said there had been none. At this point George Newton was allowed to question the witness. He asked Ferrett whether he had ever heard him use any indecent expression which might suggest that he wanted to commit the sin of sodomy. Ferrett said that he had sailed with him three years on the Harwich and never knew him to be guilty of a crime of this nature.

  The black seaman withdrew, and George Dawson, the ship’s cook, was sworn in. He was asked to relate what he knew of the prisoners’ actions on board the Ocean. He said that he had heard the black man call out that the prisoner had his yard in the boy’s fundament and that he was worse than the brute beasts in the field. He said that it was about two o’clock in the morning, and he confirmed that it was dark.

  Did you see the boy at that time?

  When I got up I saw the boy, he had been secured in the berth all night by the black man, Ferrett.

  Do you know, or think that the black man was drunk?

  I cannot say whether he was drunk. I saw the black man about six in the morning. He was not drunk at that time.

  The cook withdrew, and George Gubbs, the seaman who had been lying in the hammock above Ferrett and Newton, was called as the next witness. He repeated the same story as the cook, as did the fourth witness, Isaac Wright.

  Captain Langdon, the commander of the Ocean, was then called and was sworn in. He told the court that he had gone on board his ship and been informed by the first lieutenant that he had put a man in irons on a charge of buggery. The captain said that he had ordered Newton to be brought before him and his officers on the quarterdeck. He had asked him how he came to be guilty of so heinous and unnatural an offense. Newton had denied the charge, so he sent for the boy, who confessed that the man was guilty and had buggered him several times. The captain said that he had ordered them both to be confined in irons and had written to his commanding officer requesting a court-martial. When asked whether the boy’s confession was voluntary or whether it had been extracted from him by threats or punishment, the captain said that the confession was voluntary.

  The next witness was Lieutenant William Orfeur, who said that he had received a complaint from the ship’s cook, from Ferrett, and from Gubbs and Wright that the prisoner George Newton had committed sodomy with the other prisoner. He had questioned Newton, who said that he was very drunk and that he did not know he had done any such crime, and that he had never been accused of such a thing before.

  The admiral asked the lieutenant, “Do you remember to have heard the boy declare he had ever been guilty of this sin before; or had been accustomed to suffer men to commit sodomy with him?”

  “He said that he had run away from his friends, and had been accustomed to run about the Bird-Cage Walk in St. James’s Park; but on what account he did not say.”

  George Newton now called various witnesses in his defense. They included the master, the mate, and several other seamen. They all testified that he had never been guilty of sodomy before and that on the Harwich he was esteemed a regular man like any other. The final witness was the boy’s father, John Finley of the parish of St. James’s, London. When he had been sworn in, the admiral put the following question to him:

  Your son has called upon you to give the Court a character of him. What course of life had he followed?

  He has always behaved dutifully to his mother and myself. He used to attend upon butchers. He had an inclination to go to sea, and was entered by one Mr. Barratt.

  At this point Thomas Finley fell upon his knees and begged for mercy and said he would never do the like again. George Newton professed his innocence, and the court was then cleared. Upon considering the charges against the two prisoners, the president and the four naval captains had no doubt that the charges were proved against them and that they were both guilty under the 29th Article. The president then announced the punishment that would be inflicted on them:

  George Newton, seaman, and Thomas Finley, boy, shall suffer death, each being hanged by the neck until they are dead, at such time, and at the yard arm of such of His Majesty’s ships as the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty shall direct.

  In the volume of court-martial documents at the Public Record Office in London in which the above details are recorded, there is a scrawled note by a clerk noting that on July 17 it was ordered that they both be executed on board the Princess Royal at the Nore on Monday, July 27.

  In the modern Western world, the hanging of two people for sodomy would be regarded by most people as barbaric. What is particularly shocking in this case is that the boy was executed, as well as the man, because he was over the age of fourteen. Moreover, it seems likely that George Newton was normally heterosexual. When asked by Ferrett what he had there, he replied “cunt,” which suggests that he was driven by sexual needs to use the boy in the place of a woman. His protestation to the lieutenant that he was very drunk may explain why he risked committing a crime that was likely to have fatal consequences. But as far as the Royal Navy was concerned, homosexuality was not to be tolerated under any circumstances, and all sailors were aware of this. Every Sunday on every ship at sea the captain read out the Articles of War to the assembled crew. Article 29 clearly stated, “Unnatural offences to be punished by death,” and sodomy was on a level with other offenses carrying the death penalty, such as mutiny, desertion to the enemy, and running away with the ship.

  Naval officers were more likely to get away with homosexual acts than the ordinary seamen. Unlike the seamen, who lived and slept alongside each other with no privacy whatsoever, the officers had the benefit of small cabins, and in some instances where an officer was accused of homosexuality the case never came to trial. But where the evidence was sufficiently damning they could expect no mercy. The case of twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant William Berry is a good example of this, and has the added interest that a key witness was a female member of the crew who was dressed as a boy.

  William Berry was a lieutenant on the sloop Hazard, and during the course of August 1807, he allegedly committed several homosexual acts with Thomas Gibbs, who was rated as a boy of the second class on the same ship. On August 23, Lieutenant Berry called the boy to his cabin and ordered him to hang a tablecloth alongside his bed as a screen, to lock the door, and to put his handkerchief over the keyhole. He then dragged the boy onto his bed and buggered him. When the boy protested that he was hurting him, Berry thumped him on the shoulder and told him to be quiet. Afterward, Berry told him to button up his trousers and to go away and say nothing to anybody. The boy went out crying and told John Hoskin, the gunroom steward, what had happened. Hoskin was aware that the boy had been abused by the lieutenant on at least a dozen prior occasions, but this time he decided that something must be done about it. He told the purser and at half past eleven that night Captain Charles Dilkes, the commander of the Hazard, called Gibbs to his cabin and asked him to explain what had happened between him and Lieutenant Berry. Gibbs recounted his story, and in due course the captain reported the matter to his commanding officer and Berry found himself facing a court-martial.

  The court-martial took place on board HMS Salvador del Mundo at Plymouth on October 2, 1807.
2 The president of the court was Admiral Sir John Duckworth, and the principal witness for the prosecution was Thomas Gibbs. The boy told the assembled company what had taken place in the lieutenant’s cabin in graphic detail. He was followed by Captain Dilkes, who said that Gibbs had been guilty of theft on a couple of occasions, but he did not believe him to be a liar. The next witness was a female sailor. She was described in the court-martial proceedings as “Elizabeth alias John Bowden (a girl) borne on the Hazard’s books as a Boy of the 3rd class,” and according to the Naval Chronicle, she appeared in court in a long jacket and blue trousers. Elizabeth Bowden came from Truro in Cornwall; following the death of her parents, she had gone to look up her elder sister, who lived in Plymouth. Failing to find her sister, she had decided to disguise herself and volunteer for the navy. She had joined the crew of the Hazard in February 1807 and had served for six weeks before it was discovered that she was a fourteen-year-old girl. Instead of sending her ashore, the captain gave her a separate apartment to sleep in and allowed her to remain on board as an attendant to the officers.

  Standing in the great cabin of the Salvador del Mundo, Elizabeth Bowden was asked whether she had ever looked through the keyhole of Lieutenant Berry’s cabin door and seen the boy Thomas Gibbs behaving in an indecent manner with the prisoner. She replied that she had, once, shortly before the ship came into Plymouth:

  I looked through the keyhole and I saw Thomas Gibbs playing with the prisoner’s privates—I went up and called the gunroom steward and told him to come down and look through the keyhole and see what they were about—he did come down but did not look in and called me abaft told me to sit down.

  Have you frequently observed Thomas Gibbs go into the prisoner’s cabin and the door shut, and the prisoner at the same time in the cabin.

  Yes.

  Did Thomas Gibbs ever relate to you or in your hearing what passed between him and the prisoner—and what induced you to look through the keyhole.

  Gibbs has never told me anything that had happened—he was called in several times and I thought I would see what he was about.

  The next witness was Charles Gregson, the ship’s surgeon, who repeated the boy’s graphic account of the indecent act that had taken place on August 23, adding that the boy had been forced to have oral sex with the prisoner on two occasions and “that he had cut up his fishing lines and flogged him upon his bum—and after that Mr. Berry had played with his cock and he had done the same with Mr. Berry.” When asked whether he had conducted a physical examination of the boy, the surgeon said that he could not find any mark of any injury on the boy, although the boy had complained of feeling sore.

  The final witness for the prosecution was John Hoskin, the gunroom steward, who told the court of the various sex acts that the boy had reported to him. He was asked whether he believed the boy to be a liar. He replied:

  I know the boy to be a liar—but I believe him to have spoke the truth in this instance.

  Why the truth in this instance?

  I frequently saw him come out of Mr. Berry’s cabin, apparently very red and high coloured more than he usually is.

  In his defense Lieutenant Berry called a relation, William Sandell, an apothecary and male midwife from London, who said that Berry had consulted him in the past because he had problems with impotency and that he believed it would have been impossible for him to have committed an act of sodomy. The Hazard’s surgeon said he had examined Berry and believed he was capable of an erection, but stressed he could not be certain of this “as it involves some nice and intricate parts of physiology.”

  The court considered the evidence and came to the conclusion that Lieutenant Berry was guilty of sodomy and the other charges of uncleanness and was therefore condemned to be hanged. The sentence was carried out on October 19, 1807, and Berry was hanged from the starboard fore-yardarm of the Hazard.

  Hanging was not the only sentence meted out to those condemned under the 29th Article. At a court-martial in December 1754, Thomas Landerkin of HMS Porcupine was found guilty of having committed uncleanness and was sentenced to receive twenty lashes with a cat-o’-nine-tails on his bare back alongside every ship and sloop in commission at Plymouth. The floggings were to be inflicted at two different times, and he was ordered to be dismissed from the service afterward. 3 Robert Paton, the boatswain of HMS Volage, received a variation of this punishment, which involved the maximum public humiliation. In February 1800, he appeared before a court-martial at his own request for attempting to commit an unnatural crime. He was found guilty and was sentenced to receive 200 lashes and to be drummed ashore with a halter about his neck “in as disgraceful a manner as possible.” He was also stripped from his post as a boatswain, lost all pay due to him, and was ordered incapable of ever serving in the Royal Navy in any capacity. 4

  Considering that the navy cooped up thousands of young men for months on end without access to women, it is surprising how few homosexual incidents resulted in prosecutions. When one looks through the massive leather-bound volumes in the Public Record Office that contain the summaries of naval courts-martial, one rarely finds cases of “unnatural crimes” among the multitude of other offenses. During the course of the Seven Years’ War of 1756 to 1763, for instance, there were only eleven courts-martial for sodomy, four of which led to acquittals. Since there were some 70,000 or 80,000 men serving at sea during the war, one can only conclude that homosexuality was either overlooked, was not reported because of the savage punishments, or was very rare indeed. In 1795, no cases of sodomy appear among the offenses listed in the summary of courts-martial. In 1800, when the naval war against Revolutionary France was at its height, there were 272 courts-martial. 5 Analyzing the various offenses for which the accused men were charged, we find that 64 courts-martial were held for men charged with desertion; 34 for drunkenness and neglect of duty; 25 for mutinous behavior and seditious language; 21 for robbery, fraud, and embezzling stores; 20 for attempting to desert; 18 for being absent without leave; 14 for riotous and disorderly behavior and bad language; 13 for captains and officers charged with the loss of their ship; and then came such offenses as striking a superior officer and sleeping on watch. There were four cases of sodomy that year. Thomas Hubbard and George Hynes, both of HMS St. George, were found guilty and hanged; Robert Paton of HMS Volage we have already noted; and Joshua Thomas was charged with the unnatural sin of sodomy on a beast but was acquitted.

  The fact is that the vast majority of seamen, when not actively engaged in working the ship, seem to have spent far more time thinking about women than about men. They wrote letters to women, they sang sea chanties and ballads about women, they tattooed their bodies with the names of women, they scratched pictures of women on whales’ teeth and walrus tusks, they collected souvenirs in foreign ports to take back to their women, and they treasured mementos from the women they had left behind at home. And they thought about their women when they went into battle. Captain Collingwood, the friend of Nelson and his second in command at Trafalgar, wrote to his father-in-law shortly after the Battle of the Glorious First of June in 1794 and gave him a report of the action. He said that the night before the battle was spent in watching and praying and preparations for the next day, “and many a blessing did I send forth to my Sarah, lest I should never bless her more.” At dawn on June 1, the British fleet bore down on the French fleet under cloudy skies with a fresh breeze from the southwest. As the two lines of ships came within range, the French ships began firing their broadsides. Collingwood was flag-captain of the Barfleur and was on the quarterdeck with Admiral Bowyer as the thunder of the French guns boomed out across the ocean. “It was then near ten o’clock. I observed to the Admiral, that about that time our wives were going to church, but that I thought the peal we should ring about the Frenchmen’s ears would outdo their parish bells.” 6

  Collingwood married Sarah Blackett in 1790, and in the four years before the battle she gave birth to two daughters. Collingwood w
as devoted to them but was fated to spend most of his married years at sea, blockading the French ports. He was a courageous and able commander who put his service to his country before all else, but his letters betray his continual regret at being apart from his loved ones. “Would to God that this war were happily concluded!” he wrote in May 1800. “It is anguish enough to be thus separated from my family; but that my Sarah should, in my absence, be suffering from illness, is complete misery.” By October of the same year he was longing for peace to bring an end to the endless patrols off the French coast: “I have come to another resolution, which is when this war is happily terminated, to think no more of ships but pass the rest of my days in the bosom of my family, where I think my prospects of happiness are equal to any man’s.” 7

  In February 1802, during the negotiations for the Peace of Amiens, Collingwood was able to return home to spend a few precious months with his family in their house on the banks of the beautiful River Wansbeck. He spent an idyllic summer planting and cultivating the garden and getting to know his daughters, aged nine and ten. In the spring of 1803, the war was resumed and he was called back to sea. He never saw his home again. In August 1805, exactly two months before the Battle of Trafalgar, he was aboard the Dreadnought off Cádiz. As his squadron kept watch on the movements of the enemy fleet, his home was constantly in his thoughts. “Pray tell me all you can think about our family,” he wrote to his wife, “and about the beauties of your domain, the oaks, the woodlands, and the verdant meads.” 8

  After Nelson’s death at Trafalgar, Collingwood had to take over temporary command of the British Mediterranean fleet. The administrative burden that this placed on his shoulders was daunting. “How I shall ever get through all the letters which are written to me, I know not,” he wrote to Sarah in December 1805. “I labour from dawn till midnight, till I can hardly see; and my hearing fails me too. . . .” 9 His hopes of getting home were dashed when he was formally appointed to the command. A deeply conscientious man, he wore himself out with his unflagging attention to his duties. In February 1810, he was on board his flagship, the Ville de Paris, when he became so seriously ill that he was persuaded to hand over his command to Rear Admiral Martin so that he could return to England to recuperate. His ship cleared the harbor on March 6, 1810, and set sail for home, but he died the next day. A postmortem examination was carried out, and the surgeon concluded that his death was caused by a contraction of the pylorus, brought on by the confinement on board ship and by his continually bending over a desk while engaged in his correspondence.