Women Sailors & Sailors' Women by David Cordingly Page B

became a prostitute in the red-light district of the port. After six weeks of this, she traveled to New York and then on to Boston, where she joined the prostitutes on West Boston Hill. The story ends with her imprisonment in a Boston jail for failing to pay her landlord.
    While the adventures of Almira Paul might seem to stretch our credulity to the limit, the story of Lucy Brewer is by no means far-fetched. A real-life parallel can be found for most of the incidents in Brewer’s life: a number of female sailors left home because they had been seduced and become pregnant; many sailors’ wives resorted to prostitution in order to support themselves and their families; there is at least one account of a female sailor binding her breasts to conceal her sex; many women disguised as men took part in sea battles; and at least three female sailors subsequently had accounts of their lives published. 7 It is possible that the publisher or the author of the stories in
The Female Marine
had read or heard of some of these accounts and made use of them in much the same way as Daniel Defoe drew on the life of the shipwrecked mariner Alexander Selkirk as his inspiration for the character of Robinson Crusoe.
    The most famous of the women who served in the Royal Navy were Hannah Snell and Mary Anne Talbot, whose lives will be examined in the next chapter, but there are a number of other women whose lives are equally fascinating. The American writer Suzanne Stark has investigated the stories of twenty of the women who are believed to have served in the Royal Navy between 1650 and 1815, and by checking with captains’ logs, ships’ musters, and contemporary newspaper articles, she has been able to sort out fact from fiction. 8 The most impressive naval career of all the female sailors is that of William Brown, a black woman who spent at least twelve years on British warships, much of this time in the extremely demanding role of captain of the foretop. A good description of her appeared in London’s
Annual Register
in September 1815: “She is a smart, well-formed figure, about five feet four inches in height, possessed of considerable strength and great activity; her features are rather handsome for a black, and she appears to be about twenty-six years of age.” The article also noted that “in her manner she exhibits all the traits of a British tar and takes her grog with her late messmates with the greatest gaiety.” 9
    Brown was a married woman and had joined the navy around 1804 following a quarrel with her husband. For several years she served on the
Queen Charlotte,
a three-decker with 104 guns and one of the largest ships in the Royal Navy. The
Queen Charlotte
had a crew of 850 men and usually served as the flagship of the fleet. Brown must have had nerve, strength, and unusual ability to have been made captain of the foretop on such a ship. The topmen were responsible for going aloft in all weathers and furling or setting the highest sails (the topsails and topgallants). The captain of the foretop had to lead a team of seamen up the shrouds of the foremast, and then up the shrouds of the fore-topmast and out along the yards a hundred feet or more above the deck. With their feet on a swaying foot-rope, the men had to heave up or let go of the heavy canvas sails, difficult enough in fine weather but a hard and dangerous job in driving rain and rough seas.
    At some point in 1815, it was discovered that Brown was a woman and her story was published in the papers, but this does not seem to have affected her naval career. She had by this stage earned a large sum of prize money, and she visited the pay office on Somerset Place to collect this. Her husband attempted to cheat her out of the money, though whether he was successful in this is not known. What is certain is that Brown returned to the
Queen Charlotte
and rejoined the crew. The entry in the ship’s muster book for the period December 31, 1815, to