Free Women Sailors & Sailors' Women by David Cordingly

William Prothero, and Mary Lacy bring up a number of interesting questions. How many other women cross-dressed as men and went to sea in the great age of sail? How was it possible for them to fool their shipmates for so long when they were living in such close proximity? Why on earth would a woman want to run away from her home and family and put herself through the notorious hardships and dangers of life at sea? And why has the whole subject of cross-dressing women so fascinated people that fictional accounts of female sailors became best-sellers, sea chanties and ballads were written about them, and they even appeared in plays and melodramas on the London stage?
    We will never know how many women went to sea as men because the only cases we have any evidence of are those in which the woman’s sex was revealed and publicized in some way, or those cases where a woman left the sea and had her story published. There must have been many women who sailed as men whose sex was never discovered and who lived and died as anonymously as their sisters who never went to sea. Stark’s research has revealed twenty cases of female sailors in the Royal Navy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that appear to be genuine and two accounts that are largely fictitious. Another fifteen cases of female sailors on board merchant vessels and fishing boats are recorded in newspaper articles, reports in the
Naval Chronicle,
and other sources, though the accuracy of these cannot be guaranteed. As there were up to 145,000 men in the Royal Navy in 1810, and some 120,000 men in the merchant navy at the same period, it is evident that female sailors were very rare indeed, and it is little wonder that when they were discovered their stories found their way into the newspapers.
    What is striking about the genuine cases of female sailors is how they were able to fool the men on board for weeks, months, and in some cases, several years. On the face of it the women had an almost impossible task. Anyone who has been belowdecks on HMS
Victory
or the USS
Constitution
will recall the lack of headroom and the cramped conditions. The
Victory
and the
Constitution
were among the largest ships of their day, so that life on a more typical warship of, say, 74 guns was even more confined. The officers had the benefit of living in small cabins constructed of wood or canvas screens, but the ordinary seamen lived literally on top of each other in a low, cavernous space dominated by the rows of guns. The off-duty watch slept in hammocks suspended below the deck beams. A female sailor could find herself in a hammock with no more than a few inches separating her from the seamen snoring in the hammocks on either side of her. Below the hammocks, the seamen sat on their sea chests or lay on the deck with their backs against the gun carriages. For meals they gathered around temporary tables slung between the guns, usually six to a table or a mess. One of their number would fetch the food for the mess from the galley, and broth or salt beef would be shared among them and eaten out of wooden bowls.
    A 74-gun ship had a crew of around 550 to 650 men, most of whom were crammed into the area in front of the quarterdeck, about half its 176-foot length. The stern of the ship was largely taken up by the captain’s cabin, appropriately called the great cabin, and by the quarters and stores of the officers and warrant officers. Much of the remaining space that was not occupied by the guns was filled with anchor cable, spare sails, and pens containing an assortment of animals. Cows, goats, pigs, and chickens predominated but many sailors kept pets, and so the barking of dogs and the screeching of parrots and monkeys were added to the clucking of chickens and the lowing of cattle. Most ships also had several cats, whose job it was to keep down the population of rats that lurked in dark corners and ate their way through any food not firmly contained in barrels.
    While life