Women Sailors & Sailors' Women by David Cordingly Page A

fascinated by the heroine’s racy life. Inside the cover of one surviving copy, a woman wrote that
The Female Marine
was “a very interesting Book indeed,” underlining the words for emphasis. Several accounts had already appeared of women dressing as soldiers and fighting in the U.S. Army, 6 and it therefore seems likely that contemporary readers assumed this was a true account of a woman who had had similar experiences in the U.S. Navy.
    We now know that the stories are entirely fictitious and that they were written by a man. Research by the American historian Alexander Medlicott, Jr., in the 1960s showed that there was no evidence to prove the existence of Louisa Baker, Lucy Brewer, Lucy West, or Eliza Bowen in any of the towns of Plymouth County, nor could any marine with the first or last name of George be found on the muster rolls of the USS
Constitution.
Further research by Professor Daniel A. Cohen has made it abundantly clear that the mastermind behind the pamphlets was an enterprising Boston publisher named Nathaniel Coverly, Jr. It was he who arranged for their publication and subsequent promotion, but he was not their author. He employed a writer who produced prose and verse for him to order. This was Nathaniel Hill Wright, a poet and printer in his late twenties who turned his hand to a variety of tasks to support himself and his family. It was said that Wright “could do the grave or the gay, as necessity demanded, and with equal facility.” He evidently had considerable gifts as a writer because his account of Lucy Brewer’s adventures is remarkably convincing. In the tradition of Daniel Defoe, he concealed his own identity and cunningly combined real events and real places with entirely imaginary characters.
    Encouraged by the success of
The Female Marine,
Coverly published another story about a female sailor in September 1816. This was entitled
The Surprising Adventures of Almira Paul.
Like Coverly’s earlier publications, this has often been regarded as a true account although the story is harder to believe than the story of Lucy Brewer. It was also written in the form of an autobiography and described how Almira Paul was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1790. At the age of fifteen, she married William Paul, a sailor, by whom she had two children. When her husband was killed in a sea battle in 1811, she decided to go to sea herself. Leaving her children with her mother, she dressed as a man and joined the British cutter
Dolphin
as the cook’s mate. She took the name of Jack Brown and subsequently saw action on a variety of British and American ships.
    During the course of the next three years, she survived some difficult times. She was bullied by the ship’s cook and took her revenge by kicking him overboard. For this offense she was ordered to be flogged, and she avoided revealing her sex by wearing a shirt during the flogging. She fell from the main yard onto the deck and fractured her skull but recovered. She was captured by Algerian pirates in the Mediterranean and was released in Algiers by the British consul. She made her way to Portsmouth, where she married a woman who had lost her sailor husband at the Battle of Trafalgar. Before the widow had time to discover that she had married a woman, Almira Paul was on a ship bound for Jamaica. She went down with fever in Demerara but recovered with the aid of a black nurse. She then sailed to Liverpool, where she went ashore and was wooed by the local girls who attempted “by their expressions of love and regard for me, to decoy me into their favorite ports; where they might be the better enabled to induce me to part with a few guineas.” She returned to the Mediterranean and joined the crew of the
Macedonian,
which she deserted in Baltimore; to avoid being arrested as a deserter she resumed female clothes. However, after three years associating with sailors, she was reluctant to leave their company and therefore