Guest post by Jenny Newbold ‘The ship was not the only “she” at sea’

I am thrilled to welcome a new guest to All Things Georgian, Jenny Newbold who has recently published a fictional book, ‘The Private Misadventures of Nell Nobody’  which was published in June 2022 by Luminare Press. It is an historical-fiction/adventure novel featuring Admiral Lord Nelson and a gender-ambiguous protagonist, examining from ‘Ned’s’ perspective the events of Horatio Nelson’s first tour of the Mediterranean.

Without further ado, I will hand over to Jenny to tell you more about women at sea.

When you envision the eighteenth century British navy, I can guess what you might see in your mind’s eye. Noble, self-sacrificing officers. Hardy tars with hearts of oak. The triumph of The Nile, the glory of Trafalgar, wreaths of laurel and cypress for the honour rolls of the wounded, dead, and missing. You could be forgiven for thinking that the Royal Navy during the heroic Age of Sail was exclusively a man’s world. After all, that’s what the Admiralty Board wanted you to believe.

There are no official records of women serving aboard warships in the Georgian Royal Navy, because officially, women were not allowed on board. With the possible exception of the captain’s wife (at his discretion), according to the Admiralty the only woman to be found on one of its ships would be the occasional passenger.

Reality, however, is a different story.

Yale Center for British Art

Women (and children) may not have been entered on the muster books and victualled, but they were part of the fabric of the warship. Most were probably wives: of officers, marines, and even occasionally ratings (ratings were seamen who were not commissioned or warrant officers). They had a legitimate reason for being there, even if they were not officially there. Interestingly, I have come across evidence of wives of captains, warrant officers, and marines shipboard, but no wives of lieutenants. Since wives were there at the discretion of the captain, it might have been an unspoken opinion that a lieutenant didn’t need a wife distracting him from executing his orders.

There were other women—of a certain persuasion—who came aboard when the ship was in port and who might not leave when the ship prepared to depart. There were wives, and then there were ‘wives’. If the officers’ wives were unofficial, one of these stowaways was practically invisible. Her survival aboard depended on the generosity of the man, or men, she was attached to, since she would have to share his hammock and his provisions.

Even for the legitimate wives, life on a warship cannot have been particularly pleasant. They would not have had their own quarters or their own rations. An officer’s wife might have the privacy of her husband’s partitioned-off sleeping place at night, but if you were the wife of a private soldier or an ordinary seaman, you slept in his hammock, both of you, 14 to 16 inches away from the next man (and whoever might or might not be sharing his hammock). Granted, you might get the hammock all to yourself for the four hours your husband was on watch, but you still slept in the same space with perhaps one hundred other men/wives/children.

Babies were inevitably born aboard. Presumably giving birth at sea was not much worse than giving birth on land—despite the apparent belief by some of the men that firing the great guns would hasten the birth process. I’m not sure science would back that up, but if the commander didn’t mind expending the powder, I don’t suppose it hurt to try.

On troopships, women travelling ‘on the strength’ were official – but on the army’s books, not those of the navy. These were soldiers’ wives, accompanying their husbands on campaign. The British Army allowed three women per one hundred men to travel with their regiment. Accommodations for them would not have been any better, but they were indisputably, officially, aboard.

What did these women do aboard? Unless they were passengers, they were almost certainly expected to contribute to the overall well-being of the ship. The Georgian military expected that if they were going to provision a woman, they would get their money’s worth.

So, a woman had to pull her own weight, although presumably not on the ship’s lines! In the official muster-rolls and quarter bills, however, all the roles in a well-governed warship were filled by men. What then, did she do?

I suppose we have to speculate a little here. It was very unlikely that she cooked. The ship had a cook whose job it was to manage the galley. The men in each mess (a mess was a group of men who ate together) rotated through the role of mess cook, retrieving the cooked food from the galley. I imagine no one wanted women anywhere near the stove. Rations were closely apportioned, and trust was not in great supply; everyone from the men to the officers probably suspected that the women were capable of thieving.

John Jervis Earl of St Vincent. Francis Cotes. NPG

A woman probably maintained her man’s clothing, and conceivably might have done the same occasionally for his mates. Sir John Jervis, Admiral St Vincent, got snappish now and then about the women aboard using the fresh water, intended for cooking and drinking, for washing clothes. (St Vincent also, at one point, decided that the fleet’s lieutenants were getting rather podgy and decreed that they should not be allowed to use the ships’ entry ports, but be made to climb over the side. He sounds as though he could be quite a curmudgeon: it must have been an experience to serve under him!)

Much is made—and rightly so—of women participating in battle. But on a warship, everyone participated in battle, with the exception of passengers, who might have chosen to but probably were not expected to do so. Untrained in naval warfare, women probably carried powder from the ship’s magazines to the guns, or assisted on the surgeon’s deck, mopping up or giving whatever comfort and assurance they could offer to the wounded. Either job would have been horrific. It is unlikely there were any tasks in battle that were not.

Finally, there were the fighting women, the ones who the navy really did not see. They were the ones whose presence was cloaked in disguise, determination, and/or desperation. It is possible to find a handful of documented accounts of women who served, disguised as men, in the armies and navies of the age, and I personally believe that in some cases it must have been known what gender they actually were, but nobody was acknowledging anything. (The modern American military cannot have thought that they were onto something new and clever with their ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ sexual-identity policy of the 1990s).

Although not genuine transformations, these images give an idea of how relatively easy it would have been for a woman to transform herself from female to male

Tolerance for women aboard depended largely on the command. For all that St Vincent groused about women and fresh water, he didn’t ban them from his ship. But some naval men considered women at sea bad luck. Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood thought they were disruptive to order and discipline and was known to have any woman he found on his ship put ashore. He much preferred his dog, Bounce, as a shipboard companion; presumably it was more obedient!

Vice Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood. by Henry Howard, after a painting by Giuseppe Politi. NPG

Admiral Horatio Nelson did not particularly care to have women aboard either, although he might justifiably be accused of hypocrisy in that regard. He always made sure his lady friends were ashore if he was contemplating a naval engagement, however. It has been said that Nelson once remarked that every man became a bachelor when he passed the Gut of Gibraltar. I personally do not think he meant that statement to provide a license for licentiousness. I believe it might have been an assertion that a man should put all concerns for home and family out of his head… or at least, put King and Country first! When Lady Hamilton, the love of his life, suggested that she come to the Mediterranean with their daughter Horatia and Horatia’s nurse, and that they all live aboard HMS Victory with him, his answer was an unqualified ‘NO’.

But obviously, regardless of what the Admiralty liked to pretend that the ship was not the only ‘she’ at sea!

Header Image

HMS Victory c1806. Royal Collection Trust