Free Pepper by Marjorie Shaffer Page B

although little is known about them. On the rare occasions when Portuguese vessels bound for Goa from Lisbon carried women, there were no more than twenty. Some bizarre solutions were put forth to remedy the chronic lack of European women in Portuguese strongholds. A Jesuit in the sixteenth century in Brazil suggested sending prostitutes. Convents were popular among married European women who needed a refuge while their husbands were away. The Augustinian convent of Santa Monica, established in Goa during the early seventeenth century, would far exceed its capacity of one hundred nuns.
    Despite the obstacles, some European women managed to establish themselves in Asia in the early days of European exploration. One of them was an Englishwoman named Judith who survived a shipwreck off the coast of China. Judith was the maidservant of an English family sent to the East in 1619. She accompanied Richard Forbusher, a master carpenter for the East India Company, and his wife and two young sons aboard a ship named Hope . Only a sketchy account of their ordeal survives. Forbusher is mentioned several times in the company’s court minutes, which provide details of transactions brought before the court. We know that he was an able carpenter. In the company’s court minutes dated February 26, 1619, Forbusher was described as an “old servant who built a pinnace in the Somers Islands, and is known to be very skilful, and willing to go and live in India for seven years with his two sons.”
    When they arrived in Bantam, the family and maidservant debarked and were apparently put on the Unicorne , which was bound for Japan. This ship was wrecked off the coast of China, where they were taken captive by the Portuguese and shipped off to Malacca. At some point, Forbusher was slain, the children “detained,” and Judith turned “Catholic,” according to the company’s records. On October 25, 1626, Forbusher’s wife, Johan Cranfield, petitioned the company for her husband’s wages. She related that she was ransomed for two Portuguese men and had made it all the way back to London. Her children had apparently died. Only Judith remained in Malacca. We do not hear again about this family in the company’s records. It isn’t known whether Johan ever got her money, although the company did pay a widow her husband’s wages.
    In 1637 Judith suddenly appears in the journal of Peter Mundy. He arrived in Malacca in May of that year and describes “an Englishwoman Married to a Portugall Mestizo of some quallity, are well to live, and have beetweene them one pretty boy.” He relates that when Judith arrived in Malacca she went to live with the “Misericordia,” an order that takes care of orphans. “She was called Judith and now Julia de la gracia.” We don’t know much more about Judith, but we can imagine that she might have found a measure of happiness in Malacca.
    In later years some women risked their lives to go to Asia and earn their fortunes by disguising themselves as men. Johan Splinter Stavorinus, a captain for the Dutch East India Company from 1768 to 1778 who made several voyages to Africa and Asia during his employment, describes in his richly detailed journal a woman named Margaret Reymers who dressed in men’s clothes and enlisted as a solider aboard the ship Schoonzicht .
    A farmer’s daughter in her early twenties, Margaret left the duchy of Oldenburg because of “ill treatment,” according to Stavorinus. She met a Dutch recruiting officer in Hamburgh, who advised her to don men’s clothes and go to India, where she would make her fortune. Margaret was tall and “of a large and coarse make, by which she could easily pass for a man, in her soldiers’ uniform,” Stavorinus observed. She remained unnoticed for two months on the Schoonzicht , but after her subterfuge was discovered, she was put ashore at the Cape of Good Hope and