The medieval writer who declared women to be "capable of disturbing the air and exciting tempests" was not indulging a mere quip at the expense of that limited storm area, his own domestic circle. He expressed what in his day, and indeed for long after, was a cardinal article of belief—that if you were so ill-advised as to take a woman to sea, she would surely upset the weather and play the mischief with the ship.

To this ungallant superstition none subscribed more heartily than the sailor, though always, be it understood, with a mental reservation. Unlike many landsmen who held a similar belief, he limited the malign influence of the sex strictly to the high-seas, where, for that reason, he vastly preferred woman's room to her company; but once he was safe in port, woman in his opinion ceased to be dangerous, and he then vastly preferred her company to her room.

For her companionship he had neither far to seek nor long to wait. It was a case of

All naval seaports were full of women, and to prevent the supply from running short thoughtful parish officials—church-wardens and other well-meaning but sadly misguided people—added constantly to the number by consigning to such doubtful reformatories the undesirable females of their respective petty jurisdictions. The practice of admitting women on board the ships of the fleet, too—a practice as old as the Navy itself—though always forbidden, was universally connived at and tacitly sanctioned. Before the anchor of the returning man-of-war was let go a flotilla of boats surrounded her, deeply laden with pitiful creatures ready to sell themselves for a song and the chance of robbing their sailor lovers. No sooner did the boats lay alongside than the last vestige of Jack's superstitious dread of the malevolent sex went by the board, and discipline with it. Like monkeys the sailors swarmed into the boats, where each selected a mate, redeemed her from the grasping boatman's hands with money or blows according to the state of his finances or temper, and so brought his prize, save the mark! in triumph to the gangway. It was a point of honour, not to say of policy, with these poor creatures to supply their respective "husbands," as they termed them, with a drop of good-cheer; so at the gangway they were searched for concealed liquor. This was the only formality observed on such occasions, and as it was enforced in the most perfunctory manner imaginable, there was always plenty of drink going. Decency there was none. The couples passed below and the hell of the besotted broke loose between decks, where the orgies indulged in would have beggared the pen of a Balzac. [Footnote: Statement of Certain Immoral Practices, 1822.]

During the earlier decades of the century these conditions, monstrous though they were, passed almost unchallenged, but as time wore on and their pernicious effects upon the morale of the fleet became more and more appalling, the service produced men who contended strenuously, and in the end successfully, with a custom that, to say the least of it, did violence to every notion of decency and clean living. In 1746 the ship's company of the Sunderland complained bitterly because not even their wives were "suffer'd to come aboard to see them." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1482—Capt. Brett, 22 Feb. 1745-6.] It was a sign of the times. By the year '78 the practice had been fined down to a point where, if a wherry with a woman in it were seen hovering in a suspicious manner about a ship of war, the boatman was immediately pressed and the woman turned on shore. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1498—Capt. Boteler, 18 April 1778.] Another twenty years, and the example of such men as Jervis, Nelson and Collingwood laid the evil for good and all. The seamen of the fleet themselves pronounced its requiescat when, drawing up certain "Rules and Orders" for their own guidance during the mutiny of '97, they ordained that "no woman shall be permitted to go on shore from any ship, but as many come in as pleases." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 5125—A Detail of the Proceedings on Board the Queen Charlotte in the Year 1797.]

An unforeseen consequence of thus suppressing the sailor's impromptu liaisons was an alarming increase in the number of desertions. On shore love laughs at locksmiths; on shipboard it derided the boatswain's mate. To run and get caught meant at the worst "only a whipping bout," and, the sailor's hide being as tough as his heart was tender, he ran and took the consequences with all a sailor's stoicism. In this respect he was perhaps not singular. The woman in the case so often counts for more than the punishment she brings.

Few of those who deserted their ships for amatory reasons had the luck—viewing the escapade from the sailor's standpoint—that attended the schoolmaster of the Princess Louisa. Going ashore at Plymouth to fetch his chest from the London wagon, he succumbed to the blandishments of an itinerant fiddler's wife, whom he chanced to meet in the husband's temporary absence, and was in consequence "no more heard of." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1478—Capt. Boys, 5 April 1742.]

Had it always been a case of the travelling woman, the sailor's flight in response to the voice of the charmer would seldom have landed him in the cells or exposed his back to the caress of the ship's cat. Where he was handicapped in his love flights was this. The haunt or home of his seducer was generally known to one or other of his officers, and when this was not the case there were often other women who gladly gave him away. "Captain Barrington, Sir," writes "Nancy of Deptford" to the commander of a man-o'-war in the Thames, "there is a Desarter of yours at the upper water Gate. Lives at the sine of the mantion house. He is an Irishman, gose by the name of Youe (Hugh) MackMullins, and is trying to Ruing a Wido and three Children, for he has Insenuated into the Old Woman's faver so far that she must Sartingly come to poverty, and you by Sarching the Cook's will find what I have related to be true and much oblidge the hole parrish of St. Pickles Deptford." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1495—Capt. Barrington, 22 Oct. 1771, enclosure.]

A favourite resort of the amatory tar was that extra-parochial spot known as the Liberty of the Fleet, where the nuptial knot could be tied without the irksome formalities of banns or licence. The fact strongly commended it to the sailor and brought him to the precinct in great numbers.

"I remember once on a time," says Keith, the notorious Fleet parson, "I was at a public-house at Ratcliffe, which was then full of Sailors and their Girls. There was fiddling, piping, jigging and eating. At length one of the Tars starts up and says: 'Damn ye, Jack! I'll be married just now; I will have my partner.' The joke took, and in less than two hours Ten Couples set out for the Flete. They returned in Coaches, five Women in each Coach; the Tars, some running before, some riding on the Coach Box, and others behind. The Cavalcade being over, the Couples went up into an upper Room, where they concluded the evening with great Jollity. The landlord said it was a common thing, when a Fleet comes in, to have 2 or 3 Hundred Marriages in a week's time among the Sailors." [Footnote: Keith, Observations on the Act for Preventing Clandestine Marriages, 1753.]

In the "Press-Gang, or Love in Low Life," a play produced at Covent Garden Theatre in 1755, Trueblue is pressed, not in, but out of the arms of his tearful Nancy. The situation is distressingly typical. The sailor's happiness was the gangsman's opportunity, however Nancy might suffer in consequence.

For the average gangsman was as void of sentiment as an Admiralty warrant, pressing you with equal avidity and absence of feeling whether he caught you returning from a festival or a funeral. To this callosity of nature it was due that William Castle, a foreign denizen of Bristol who had the hardihood to incur the marital tie there, was called upon, as related elsewhere, to serve at sea in the very heyday of his honeymoon. Similarly, if four seamen belonging to the Dundee Greenland whaler had not stolen ashore one night at Shields "to see some women," they would probably have gone down to their graves, seawards or landwards, under the pleasing illusion that the ganger was a man of like indulgent passions with themselves. The negation of love, as exemplified in that unsentimental individual, was thus brought home to many a seafaring man, long debarred from the society of the gentler sex, with startling abruptness and force. The pitiful case of the "Maidens Pressed," whose names are enrolled in the pages of Camden Hotten, [Footnote: Hotten, List of Persons of Quality, etc., who Went from England to the American Plantations.] is in no way connected with pressing for naval purposes. Those unfortunates were not victims of the gangsman's notorious hardness of heart, but of their own misdeeds. Like the female disciples of the "diving hand" stated by Lutterell [Footnote: Lutterell, Historical Relation of State Affairs, 12 March 1706.] to have been "sent away to follow the army," they were one and all criminals of the Moll Flanders type who "left their country for their country's good" under compulsion that differed widely, both in form and purpose, from that described in these pages.

To assert, however, that women were never pressed, in the enigmatic sense of their being taken by the gang for the manning of the fleet, would be to do violence to the truth as we find it in naval and other records. As a matter of fact, the direct contrary was the case, and there were in the kingdom few gangs of which, at one time or another in their career, it could not be said, as Southey said of the gang at Bristol, that "they pressed a woman."

The incident alluded to will be familiar to all who know the poet as distinguished from the Bard of Avon. It is found in the second "English Eclogue," under the caption of the "Grandmother's Tale," and has to do with the escapade, long famous in the more humorous annals of Southey's native city, of blear-eyed Moll, a collier's wife, a great, ugly creature whose voice was as gruff as a mastiff's bark, and who wore habitually a man's hat and coat, so that at a few yards' distance you were at a loss to know whether she was man or woman.

A case of pressing on all-fours with this is said to have once occurred at Portsmouth. A number of sailors, alarmed by the rumoured approach of a gang while they were a-fairing, took it into their heads, so the story goes, to effect a partial exchange of clothing with their sweethearts, in the hope that the hasty shifting of garments would deceive the gang and so protect them from the press. It did. In their parti-garb make-up the women looked more sailorly than the sailors themselves. The gang consequently pressed them, and there were hilarious scenes at the rendezvous when the fair recruits were "regulated" and the ludicrous mistake brought to light.

It was not only on shore, however, or on special occasions such as this, that women played the sailor. A naval commander, accounting to the Admiralty for his shortness of complement, attributes it mainly to sickness, partly to desertion, and incidentally to the discharge of one of the ship's company, "who was discovered to be a woman." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1503—Capt. Burney, 15 Feb. 1782.]

His experience is capped by that of the master of the Edmund and Mary, a vessel engaged in carrying coals to Ipswich. Shrewdly suspecting one of his apprentices, a clever, active lad, to be other than what he seemed, he taxed him with the deception. Taken unawares, the lad burst into womanly tears and confessed himself to be the runaway daughter of a north-country widow. Disgrace had driven her to sea. [Footnote: Naval Chronicle, vol. xxx. 1813, p. 184.]

These instances are far from being unique, for both in the navy and the mercantile marine the masquerading of women in male attire was a not uncommon occurrence. The incentives to the adoption of a mode of life so foreign to all the gentler traditions of the sex were various, though not inadequate to so surprising a change. Amongst them unhappiness at home, blighted virtue, the secret love of a sailor and an abnormal craving for adventure and the romantic life were perhaps the most common and the most powerful. The question of clothing presented little difficulty. Sailors' slops could be procured almost anywhere, and no questions asked. The effectual concealment of sex was not so easy, and when we consider the necessarily intimate relations subsisting between the members of a ship's crew, the narrowness of their environment, the danger of unconscious betrayal and the risks of accidental discovery, the wonder is that any woman, however masculine in appearance or skilled in the arts of deception, could ever have played so unnatural a part for any length of time without detection. The secret of her success perhaps lay mainly in two assisting circumstances. In theory there were no women at sea, and despite his occasional vices the sailor was of all men the most unsophisticated and simple-minded.

Conspicuous among women who threw the dust of successful deception in the eyes of masters and shipmates is Mary Anne Talbot. Taking to the sea as a girl in order to "follow the fortunes" of a young naval officer for whom she had conceived a violent but unrequited affection, she was known afloat as John Taylor. In stature tall, angular and singularly lacking in the physical graces so characteristic of the average woman, she passed for years as a true shellback, her sex unsuspected and unquestioned. Accident at length revealed her secret. Wounded in an engagement, she was admitted to hospital in consequence of a shattered knee, and under the operating knife the identity of John Taylor merged into that of Mary Anne Talbot. [Footnote: Times, 4 Nov. 1799.]

It is said, perhaps none too kindly or truthfully, that the lady doctor of the present day no sooner sets up in practice than she incontinently marries the medical man around the corner, and in many instances the sailor-girl of former days brought her career on the ocean wave to an equally romantic conclusion. However skilled in the art of navigation she might become, she experienced a constitutional difficulty in steering clear of matrimony. Maybe she steered for it.

A romance of this description that occasioned no little stir in its day is associated with a name at one time famous in the West-India trade. Through bankruptcy the name suffered eclipse, and the unfortunate possessor of it retired to a remote neighbourhood, taking with him his two daughters, his sole remaining family. There he presently sank under his misfortunes. Left alone in the world, with scarce a penny-piece to call their own, the daughters resolved on a daring departure from the conventional paths of poverty.

Making their way to Portsmouth, they there dressed themselves as sailors and in that capacity entered on board a man-o'-war bound for the West Indies. At the first reduction of CuraÇoa, in 1798, as in subsequent naval engagements, both acquitted themselves like men. No suspicion of the part they were playing, and playing with such success, appears to have been aroused till a year or two later, when one of them, in a brush with the enemy, was wounded in the side. The surgeon's report terminated her career as a seaman.

Of all the veracious yarns that are told of girl-sailors, there is perhaps none more remarkable than the story of Rebecca Anne Johnson, the girl-sailor of Whitby. One night a hundred and some odd years ago a Mrs. Lesley, who kept the "Bull" inn in Halfmoon Alley, Bishopsgate Street, found at her door a handsome sailor-lad begging for food. He had eaten nothing for four and twenty hours, he declared, and when plied with supper and questions by the kind-hearted but inquisitive old lady, he explained that he was an apprentice to the sea, and had run from his ship at Woolwich because of the mate's unduly basting him with a rope's-end. "What! you a 'prentice?" cried the landlady; and turning his face to the light, she subjected him to a scrutiny that read him through and through.

Next day, at his own request, he was taken before the Lord Mayor, to whom he told his story. That he was a girl he freely admitted, and he accounted for his appearing in sailor rig by asserting that a brutal father had apprenticed him to the sea in his thirteenth year. More astounding still, the same unnatural parent had actually bound her, the sailor-girl's, mother, apprentice to the sea, and in that capacity she was not only pressed into the navy, but killed at the battle of Copenhagen, up to which time, though she had followed the sea for many years and borne this child in the meantime, her sex had never once been called in question. [Footnote: Naval Chronicle, vol. xx. 1808, p. 293.]

While woman was thus invading man's province at sea, that universal feeder of the Navy, the pressgang, made little or no appeal to her as a sphere of activity. On Portland Island, it is true, Lieut. McKey, who commanded both the Sea-Fencibles and the press-gang there, rated his daughter as a midshipman; [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 581—Admiral Berkeley, Report on Rendezvous, 15 April 1805] but with this exception no woman is known to have added the hanger to her adornment. The three merry maids of Taunton, who as gangsmen put the Denny Bowl quarrymen to rout, were of course impostors.

But if the ganger's life was not for woman, there was ample compensation for its loss in the wider activities the gang opened up for her. The gangsman was nothing if not practical. He took the poetic dictum that "men must work and women must weep"—a conception in his opinion too sentimentally onesided to be tolerated as one of the eternal verities of human existence—and improved upon it. By virtue of the rough-and-ready authority vested in him he abolished the distinction between toil and tears, decreeing instead that women should suffer both.

"M'Gugan's wife?" growled Capt. Brenton, gang-master at Greenock, when the corporation of that town ventured to point out to him that M'Gugan's wife and children must inevitably come to want unless their bread-winner, recently pressed, were forthwith restored to them,—"M'Gugan's wife is as able to get her bread as any woman in the town!" [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1511—Capt. Brenton, 15 Jan. 1795.]

For two hundred and fifty years, off and on—ever since, in fact, the press-masters of bluff King Hal denuded the Dorset coast of fishermen and drove the starving women of that region to sea in quest of food [Footnote: State Papers Domestic, Henry VIII.: Lord Russell to the Privy Council, 22 Aug. 1545.]—the press-gang had been laboriously teaching English housewives this very lesson, the simple economic truth that if they wanted bread for themselves and their families while their husbands were fagging for their country at sea, they must turn to and work for it. Yet in face of this fact here was M'Gugan's wife trying to shirk the common lot. It was monstrous!

M'Gugan's wife ought really to have known better. The simplest calculation, had she cared to make it, would have shown her the utter futility of hoping to live on the munificent wage which a grateful country allowed to M'Gugan, less certain deductions for M'Gugan's slops and contingent sick-benefit, in return for his aid in protecting it from its enemies; and almost any parish official could have told her, what she ought in reason to have known already, that she was no longer merely M'Gugan's wife, dependent upon his exertions for the bread she ate, but a Daughter of the State and own sister to thousands of women to whom the gang in its passage brought toil and poverty, tears and shame—not, mark you, the shame of labour, if there be such a thing, but the bedraggled, gin-sodden shame of the street, or, in the scarce less dreadful alternative, the shame of the goodwife of the ballad who lamented her husband's absence because, worse luck, sundry of her bairns "were gotten quhan he was awa'."

Lamentable as this state of things undoubtedly was, it was nevertheless one of the inevitables of pressing. You could not take forcibly one hundred husbands and fathers out of a community of five hundred souls, and pay that hundred husbands and fathers the barest pittance instead of a living wage, without condemning one hundred wives and mothers to hard labour on behalf of the three hundred children who hungered. Out of this hundred wives and mothers a certain percentage, again, lacked the ability to work, while a certain other percentage lacked the will. These recruited the ranks of the outcast, or with their families burdened the parish. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 5125—Memorial of the Churchwardens and Overseers of the Poor of the Parish of Portsmouth, 3 Dec 1793, and numerous instances.] The direct social and economic outcome of this mode of manning the Navy, coupled with the payment of a starvation wage, was thus threefold. It reversed the natural sex-incidence of labour; it fostered vice; it bred paupers. The first was a calamity personal to those who suffered it. The other two were national in their calamitous effects.

In that great diurnal of the eighteenth-century navy, the Captains' Letters and Admirals' Dispatches, no volume can be opened without striking the broad trail of destitution, misery and heart-break, to mention no worse consequences, left by the gang. At nearly every turn of the page, indeed, we come upon recitals or petitions recalling vividly the exclamation involuntarily let fall by Pepys the tender-hearted when, standing over against the Tower late one summer's night, he watched by moonlight the pressed men sent away: "Lord! how some poor women did cry."

A hundred years later and their heritors in sorrow are crying still. Now it is a bed-ridden mother bewailing her only son, "the principal prop and stay of her old age"; again a wife, left destitute "with three hopeful babes, and pregnant." And here, bringing up the rear of the sad procession—lending to it, moreover, a touch of humour in itself not far removed from tears—comes Lachlan M'Quarry. The gang have him, and amid the Stirling hills, where he was late an indweller, a motley gathering of kinsfolk mourn his loss—"me, his wife, two Small helpless Children, an Aged Mother who is Blind, an Aged Man who is lame and unfit for work, his father in Law, and a sister Insane, with his Mother in Law who is Infirm." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1454—The Humble Petition of Jullions Thomson, Spouse to Lachlan M'Quarry, 2 May 1812.] The fact is attested by the minister and elders of the parish, being otherwise unbelievable; and Lachlan is doubtless proportionately grieved to find himself at sea. Men whose wives "divorced" them through the medium of the gang—a not uncommon practice—experienced a similar grief.

Besides the regular employment it so generously provided for wives bereft of their lawful support, the press-gang found for the women of the land many an odd job that bore no direct relation to the earning of their bread. When the mob demolished the Whitby rendezvous in '93, it was the industrious fishwives of the town who collected the stones used as ammunition on that occasion; and when, again, Lieut. M'Kenzie unwisely impressed an able seaman in the house of Joseph Hook, inn-keeper at Pill, it was none other than "Mrs. Hook, her daughter and female servant" who fell upon him and tore his uniform in shreds, thus facilitating the pressed man's escape "through a back way." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1534—Lieut. M'Kenzie, 20 Oct. 1805.]

The good people of Sunderland at one time indulged themselves in the use of a peculiar catch-phrase. Whenever any feat of more than ordinary daring came under their observation, they spoke of it as "a case of Dryden's sister." The saying originated in this way. The Sunderland gang pressed the mate of a vessel, one Michael Dryden, and confined him in the tender's hold. One night Dryden's sister, having in vain bribed the lieutenant in command to let him go, at the risk of her life smuggled some carpenter's tools on board under the very muzzles of the sentinel's muskets, and with these her brother and fifteen other men cut their way to freedom. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 2740—Lieut. Atkinson, 24 June and 10 July 1798.]

A tender lying in King Road, at the entrance to Bristol River, was the scene of another episode of the "Dryden's sister" type. Going ashore one morning, the lieutenant in command fell from the bank and broke his sword. It was an ill omen, for in his absence the hard fate of the twenty pressed men who lay in the tender's hold, "all handcuft to each other," made an irresistible appeal to two women, pressed men's wives, who had been with singular lack of caution admitted on board. Whilst the younger and prettier of the two cajoled the sentinel from his post, the elder and uglier secured an axe and a hatchet and passed them unobserved through the scuttle to the prisoners below, who on their part made such good use of them that when at length the lieutenant returned he found the cage empty and the birds flown. The shackles strewing the press-room bore eloquent testimony to the manner of their flight. The irons had been hacked asunder, some of them with as many as "six or seven Cutts." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1490—Capt. Brown, 12 May 1759.]

Never, surely, did the gang provide an odder job for any woman than the one it threw in the way of Richard Parker's wife. The story of his part in the historic mutiny at the Nore is common knowledge. Her's, being less familiar, will bear retelling. But first certain incidents in the life of the man himself, some of them hitherto unknown, call for brief narration.

Born at Exeter in or about the year 1764, it is not till some nineteen years later, or, to be precise, the 5th of May 1783, that Richard Parker makes his debut in naval records. On that date he appears on board the Mediator tender at Plymouth, in the capacity of a pressed man. [Footnote: Admiralty Records Ships' Musters, 1. 9307—Muster Book of H.M. Tender the Mediator.]

The tender carried him to London, where in due course he was delivered up to the regulating officers, and by them turned over to the Ganges, Captain the Honourable James Lutterell. This was prior to the 30th of June 1783, the date of his official "appearance" on board that ship. On the Ganges he served as a midshipman—a noteworthy fact [Footnote: Though one of rare occurrence, Parker's case was not altogether unique; for now and then a pressed man by some lucky chance "got his foot on the ladder," as Nelson put it, and succeeded in bettering himself. Admiral Sir David Mitchell, pressed as the master of a merchantman, is a notable example. Admiral Campbell, "Hawke's right hand at Quiberon," who entered the service as a substitute for a pressed man, is another; and James Clephen, pressed as a sea-going apprentice, became master's-mate of the Doris, and taking part in the cutting out of the Chevrette, a corvette of twenty guns, from Cameret Bay, in 1801, was for his gallantry on that occasion made a lieutenant, fought at Trafalgar and died a captain. On the other hand, John Norris, pressed at Gallions Reach out of a collier and "ordered to walk the quarter-deck as a midshipman," proved such a "laisie, sculking, idle fellow," and so "filled the sloop and men with vermin," that his promoter had serious thoughts of "turning him ashore."—Admiralty Records 1. 1477—Capt. Bruce, undated letter, 1741.]—till the 4th of September following, when he was discharged to the Bull-Dog sloop by order of Admiral Montagu. [Footnote: Admiralty Records Ships' Musters, 1. 10614—Muster Book of H.M.S. Ganges.]

His transfer from the Bull-Dog banished him from the quarter-deck and sowed within him the seeds of that discontent which fourteen years later made of him, as he himself expressed it, "a scape-goat for the sins of many." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 5339—Dying Declaration of the Late Unfortunate Richard Parker, 28 June 1797.] He was now, for what reason we do not learn, rated as an ordinary seaman, and in that capacity he served till the 15th of June 1784, when he was discharged sick to Haslar Hospital. [Footnote: Admiralty Records Ships' Musters, 1. 10420, 10421—Muster Books of H.M. Sloop Bull-Dog.]

At this point we lose track of him for a matter of nearly fourteen years, but on the 31st of March 1797, the year which brought his period of service to so tragic a conclusion, he suddenly reappears at the Leith rendezvous as a Quota Man for the county of Perth. Questioned as to his past, he told Brenton, then in charge of that rendezvous, "that he had been a petty officer or acting lieutenant on board the Mediator, Capt. James Lutterell, at the taking of five prizes in 1783, when he received a very large proportion of prize-money." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1517—Capt. Brenton, 10 June 1797.] The inaccuracies evident on the face of this statement are unquestionably due to Brenton's defective recollection rather than to Parker's untruthfulness. Brenton wrote his report nearly two and a half months after the event.

After a period of detention on board the tender at Leith, Parker, in company with other Quota and pressed men, was conveyed to the Nore in one of the revenue vessels occasionally utilised for that purpose, and there put on board the Sandwich, the flag-ship for that division of the fleet. At half-past nine on the morning of the 12th of May, upon the 2nd lieutenant's giving orders to "clear hawse," the ship's company got on the booms and gave three cheers, which were at once answered from the Director. They then reeved yard-ropes as a menace to those of the crew who would not join them, and trained the forecastle guns on the quarter-deck as a hint to the officers. The latter were presently put on shore, and that same day the mutineers unanimously chose Parker to be their "President" or leader. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 5339—Court-Martial on Richard Parker: Deposition of Lieut. Justice.] The fact that he had been pressed in the first instance, and that after having served for a time in the capacity of a "quarter-deck young gentleman" he had been unceremoniously derated, singled him out for this distinction. There was amongst the mutineers, moreover, no other so eligible; for whatever Parker's faults, he was unquestionably a man of superior ability and far from inferior attainments.

The reeving of yard-ropes was his idea, though he disclaimed it. An extraordinary mixture of tenderness and savagery, he wept when it was proposed to fire upon a runaway ship, the Repulse, but the next moment drove a crowbar into the muzzle of the already heavily shotted gun and bade the gunner "send her to hell where she belonged." "I'll make a beefsteak of you at the yard-arm" was his favourite threat. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 5339—Court-Martial on Richard Parker: Depositions of Capt. John Wood, of H.M. Sloop Hound, William Livingston, boat-swain of the Director, and Thomas Barry, seaman on board the Monmouth.] It was prophetic, for that way, as events quickly proved, lay the finish of his own career.

At nine o'clock on the morning of the 30th of June Parker, convicted and sentenced to death after a fair trial, stood on the scaffold awaiting his now imminent end. The halter, greased to facilitate his passing, was already about his neck, and in one of his hands, which had been freed at his own request, he held a handkerchief borrowed for the occasion from one of the officers of the ship. This he suddenly dropped. It was the preconcerted signal, and as the fatal gun boomed out in response to it he thrust his hands into his pockets with great rapidity and jumped into mid-air, meeting his death without a tremor and with scarce a convulsion. Thanks to the clearness of the atmosphere and the facility with which the semaphores did their work that morning, the Admiralty learnt the news within seven minutes. [Footnote: Trial and Life of Richard Parker, Manchester, 1797.] Now comes the woman's part in the drama on which the curtain rose with the pressing of Parker in '83, and fell, not with his execution at the yard-arm of the Sandwich, as one would suppose, but four days after that event.

In one of his spells of idleness ashore Parker had married a Scotch girl, the daughter of an Aberdeenshire farmer—a tragic figure of a woman whose fate it was to be always too late. Hearing that her husband had taken the bounty, she set out with all speed for Leith, only to learn, upon her arrival there, that he was already on his way to the fleet. At Leith she tarried till rumours of his pending trial reached the north country. The magistrates would then have put her under arrest, designing to examine her, but the Admiralty, to whom Brenton reported their intention, vetoed the proceeding as superfluous. The case against Parker was already complete. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1517—Capt. Brenton, 15 June 1797, and endorsement.] Left free to follow the dictates of her tortured heart, the distracted woman posted south.

Eating his last breakfast in the gun-room of the Sandwich, Parker talked affectionately of his wife, saying that he had made his will and left her a small estate he was heir to. Little did he dream that she was then within a few miles of him.

The Sandwich lay that morning above Blackstakes, the headmost ship of the fleet, and at the moment when Parker leapt from her cathead scaffold a boat containing his wife shot out into the stream. He was run up to the yard-arm before her very eyes. She was again too late.

He hung there for an hour. Meantime, with a tenacity of purpose as touching as her devotion, the unhappy woman applied to the Admiral for the body of her husband. She was denied, and Parker's remains were committed to the new naval burial ground, beyond the Red-Barrier Gate leading to Minster. The burial took place at noon. By nightfall the grief-stricken woman had come to an amazing resolution. She would steal the body.

Ten o'clock that night found her at the place of interment. Save for the presence of the sentinel at the adjoining Barrier Gate, the loneliness of the spot favoured her design, but a ten-foot palisade surrounded the grounds, and she had neither tools nor helpers. Unexpectedly three women came that way. To them she disclosed her purpose, praying them for the love of God to help her. Perhaps they were sailors' wives. Anyhow, they assented, and the four body-snatchers scaled the fence.

The absence of tools, as it happened, presented no serious impediment to the execution of their design. The grave was a shallow one, the freshly turned mould loose and friable. Digging with their hands, they soon uncovered the coffin, which they then contrived to raise and hoist over the cemetery gates into the roadway, where they sat upon it to conceal it from chance passers-by till four o'clock in the morning. It was then daylight. The neighbouring drawbridge was let down, and, a fish-cart opportunely passing on its way to Rochester, the driver was prevailed upon to carry the "lady's box" into that town. A guinea served to allay his suspicions.

Three days later a caravan drew up before the "Hoop and Horseshoe" tavern, in Queen Street, Little Tower Hill. A woman alighted—furtively, for it was now broad daylight, whereas she had planned to arrive while it was still dark. A watchman chanced to pass at the moment, and the woman's strange behaviour aroused his suspicions. Pulling aside the covering of the van, he looked in and saw there the rough coffin containing the body of Parker, which the driver of the caravan had carried up from Rochester for the sum of six guineas. Later in the day the magistrates sitting at Lambeth Street Police Court ordered its removal, and it was deposited in the vaults of Whitechapel church. [Footnote: Trial and Life of Richard Parker, Manchester, 1797.]

Full confirmation of this extraordinary story, should any doubt it, may be found in the registers of the church in question. Amongst the burials there we read this entry: "July, 1797, Richard Parker, Sheerness, Kent, age 33. Cause of death, execution. This was Parker, the President of the Mutinous Delegates on board the fleet at the Nore. He was hanged on board H.M.S. Sandwich on the 30th day of June." [Footnote: Burial Registers of St. Mary Matfellon, Whitechapel, 1797.]