A young lady of Plymouth, having illustrated her able-seamanlike capacity by diving from the masthead of a vessel at anchor in the Sound, proceeded some time afterwards to justify her marine enthusiasm by swimming from the Breakwater to the Hoe in a tumbling sea, the distance being three miles and the time occupied within an hour and a quarter. Now, if this young lady took it into her head to start away to sea, for what aforemast capacity, from boatswain down to boy, would she not be fit? Even as a skipper might she not excel after a proper course of ogling the sun through a sextant and a well-digested commitment of Norie or Raper to heart? A girl capable of measuring three miles of turbulent surges in seventy odd minutes ought to be equal to a weather top-sail ear-ring in a whole gale; whilst the lungs that could defy a league of flying spume should be able to wake some dancing silver pipings out of a boatswain’s whistle.

A good many ladies have gone to sea as sailors since the first chapters of the world’s maritime history were written, and the majority of them not only made excellent seamen, but fought their countries’ enemies with pike, cutlass, and pistol with a courage and determination equal to any exhibition of the same qualities in the bravest of their pig-tailed shipmates. And yet women are deemed unlucky at sea! A French tradition affirms that the ocean near Cape Finisterre swells at the sight of a woman. Possibly the old fear originated with the witches. Hideous crones who wrecked ships for lucre and drowned mariners to gratify their own spleen or that of others would necessarily taint Jack’s view of “the sex” in their maritime relations. An American writer^[28] quotes from Sandy’s Ovid: “I have heard of seafaring men, and some of Bristol, how a quartermaster in a Bristol ship, then trading in the Streights, going down into the hold saw a sort of women, his own neighbours, making merry together, and taking their cups liberally; who having espied him, and threatening that he should report their discovery, vanished suddenly out of sight; who thereupon was lame for ever after. The ship having made her voyage, nowe homeward bound, and neere her harbour, stuck fast in the deep sea before a fresh gaile, to their no small amazement, nor for all they could doe, together with the help that came from the shore, could they get her loose, until one (as Cynothea, the Trojan ship) shoved her off with his shoulder.” For bewitching the ship the ladies who had been seen taking their cups liberally in the hold were convicted and executed.

But, undeterred by forecastle superstitions, the girls, whenever they had a mind to go to sea, went. In Von Archenholtz’ “History of the Pirates” you read of Ann Bonny and Mary Read, two English women, as may be judged from the names, joining the buccaneers, “not from licentious motives to gratify their pleasures, but solely by a thirst of plunder, and as co-partners in their dangers as well as in their profits.” To appreciate the courage of Mary Read and Ann Bonny it is necessary to understand the kind of lives the buccaneers led—moral, physical, and intellectual. The typical pirate of the Antilles—in those times—was a bruised and battered rogue, dressed in a shirt and a pair of pantaloons, both made of coarse linen cloth, dyed with the blood of animals he had killed. His unstockinged feet were protected by boots formed from hogskins, and his head was covered with a round cap. He tied a raw hide girdle round him, hung a sabre upon it and filled it with knives. He also carried a firelock that shot two balls, each weighing an ounce.^[29]

Such was the dainty figure whom Ann Bonny and Mary Read made a comrade of, themselves retaining the apparel of their sex, to which they added long sailors’ trousers. With hair dishevelled, hangers at their waists, pistols on their breasts, and hatchets in their hands, they must have been objects nicely calculated to excite whatever of romantic enthusiasm there yet lingered in the bosoms of the cut-throats whose troop they had joined for love of blood and gold.

A more heroic female sailor, despite a fierceness that, though warrantable enough, makes an historical tigress of her, offers in the famous Jean de Belville, who vowing vengeance for the murder of her husband, De Clisson, at Paris, in 1343, fitted out a squadron of ships and swooped down upon the coast of Normandy, firing every castle that a torch could be put to, and reddening the seaboard with burning villages. She is represented to have been one of the finest women in Europe, and a sense of her beauty joining with perception of her wrongs and the brilliant loyalty of her very scheme of revenge, does unquestionably give a high quality of majesty to that posture of ferocity in which she is pictured by the historian.

In one of the old Dutch books of voyages—whether De Weert’s, Van Noort’s, or Schouten’s I cannot be sure—mention is made of a discovery, when the ship was off the Horn, of one of the crew as a woman. Even in these days of science, of canned meats, condensing apparatus, ice-houses, steam-winches, double-top-sail yards, clipper keels, and short voyages, a woman would find seafaring a calling bitter enough. But think of one of the sex a member of the crew of the Dutch ship of the seventeenth century, on a voyage of discovery, struggling against the western sleet-laden tempests of the bleak, iron melancholy Horn! Ships were butter-boxes in those times,^[30] sawed-off old wagons, as broad as they were long, with running gear that worked like drawing teeth, and a discipline composed of keel-hauling, fixing to the mast by driving a knife through the hand, and marooning, or, in other words, setting the culprit ashore on an uninhabited island, with a day’s provisions, and without the means of obtaining more if more was to be had. That men died by the scores in those days of scurvy, months of bitter bad meat and foul water, pestiferous ’tween-deck atmosphere, supplemented by the barbarous ignorance of the chirurgeons, is readily intelligible; but that a woman should have managed to exist under such conditions all the way from the Texel to the Straits Le Maire, doing the sailors’ work, and eating the sailors’ food, and living in the sailors’ quarters, is little short of a miracle and an amazing instance of female endurance.

In the cases of women who have put on men’s clothes and shipped as sailors many were incited by love or jealousy. The old ballad of Billy Taylor is representative. The best known instance is that of Hannah Snell, whose story has been often told.^[31] This distinguished female was born in 1723, and married, at Wapping, one James Summs, a Dutch sailor, who spent her money and abandoned her. Thereupon Hannah made up her mind to go in quest of her faithless spouse. She dressed herself as a man, and started. Her adventures would fill three volumes. Romance and farce, tragedy and comedy are happily combined. She first went a soldiering, and, of course, a young woman fell in love with her. She deserted, re-enlisted as a marine, and saw a great deal of active service. How many men she killed is not stated, but it is conceivable that her love for the sex was not keen, and that she never discharged a musket without an emotion of joy mingled with hope that James Summs was not far off. She was wounded on several occasions, but contrived to conceal her sex until the news reached her that her Jim, whilst a prisoner at Geneva, had committed a murder, for which he was stitched up in a bag and thrown into the sea, when, without further ado, she resumed the petticoat and returned to London. From a grateful country she obtained an annuity of £50, which with her earnings as an actress—it seems she achieved a great popularity as Bill Bobstay, a sailor—enabled her to cut a genteel figure. Growing weary of the stage, she opened a public house in Wapping that was very handsomely supported down to the time of her death by the numerous jolly tars of that marine district.

A less known, but to the full as remarkable a case of a woman masquerading as a sailor occurs in the life of Mary Anne Talbot, “otherwise John Taylor.” Her story was written and published by herself at the beginning of the present century, and may be accepted as certainly not less accurate than the memoirs of George Ann Bellamy, whose sweet face crowned with feathers still looks laughingly over the mask in her hand from the plate after Ramberg in the old collections. Miss Talbot, otherwise John Taylor, was born in 1778, and was induced by an officer in an infantry regiment to assume male attire and accompany him as his foot-boy to the West Indies. Afterwards she acted in the capacity of a drummer at the siege of Valenciennes, and was twice wounded. It is observable that this young lady, who claimed to be the natural daughter of Lord William Talbot, Baron of Hensol, began her amazing career, like Hannah Snell, as a soldier. The infantry officer having been killed, Miss Talbot threw off her drummer’s dress, assumed that of a sailor, and, having made her way to Luxembourg, engaged with the captain of a French lugger, and sailed with him, in the belief that the vessel was a peaceful trader. After cruising about awhile the lugger fell in with the British fleet under the command of Lord Howe. Mary Ann refused to fight. The French captain swore at her and beat her, but she was not to be manhandled into firing upon her countrymen. The lugger hauled down her flag, and her captain and crew were taken on board the Queen Charlotte to be examined by Lord Howe. On being questioned Mary Anne replied that she was an English boy, and had shipped in the lugger in order to escape from France, and with the intention of deserting when the chance occurred. Fortunately Lord Howe’s questions were not very minute. She was dismissed, and stationed on board the Brunswick, Captain Harvey. In the great sea fight that followed Mary Anne was desperately wounded, and conveyed to the cockpit, and on the arrival of her ship at Spithead was sent to Haslar Hospital, from which, after four months’ attendance as an out-patient, she was discharged, partially cured. She then entered the Vesuvius bomb; the vessel was carried by privateers, and Mary Anne was taken to Dunkirk and lodged in the prison of St. Clair. On the prisoners being exchanged she met with an American captain, engaged with him and sailed to America as ship’s steward. She resided with the captain’s family at New York, and declares that she was subjected to much embarrassment on account of an attachment conceived for her by the captain’s niece, who actually proposed marriage, and obtained a miniature of her beloved in the full uniform of an American officer, for which Mary Anne paid eighteen dollars. Shortly after her return to England, the press being hot, she was seized by a gang, and in the scrimmage received a severe cutlass-wound on the head. She was carried on board the tender, but having probably had enough of the sea, she revealed her sex and recovered her liberty. How much truth there is in this narrative it would now be idle to conjecture. It is certain, however, that she obtained a pension of £20 a year, and that she received her money from the Navy Office as John Taylor, the name she had assumed when she followed the officer in the walking regiment to the West Indies.

In October, 1759, a person named Samuel Bundy, twenty years old, married a girl named Mary Parlour. He said he was ill, and his bride patiently waited until the following March, hoping meanwhile that he would be cured. Her friends growing tired, insisted upon searching him, and to the general amazement the bridegroom proved a female. Her story was that seven years previously she had been betrayed by a sweetheart and taken away from her mother, and that to prevent her from being discovered he dressed her as a boy. They separated after a year, and she went to sea as a sailor. This life she quitted after twelve months of rough work, and apprenticed herself to a Mr. Angel who lived at the King’s Head, Gravel Lane, Southwark. A young woman, Mary Parlour, fell in love with Mr. Angel’s brisk and saucy-looking apprentice, and they were married. The “husband” declared that his “wife” speedily found out the mistake she had made, but determined not to expose the matter. After her marriage “Samuel Bundy,” as she called herself, entered on board a man-of-war, but deserted for fear of detection. She then tried a merchantman, but left her also to return to the “wife” whom, says the account, “she says she dearly loves.”

In 1761, as a sergeant was drilling some soldiers aboard a transport, he was struck with the prominent breast of one of them named Paul Daniel. When the drill was over he sent for him to the cabin, where, after taxing “him” she confessed her sex. Her story was that she had a husband whom she dearly loved, and who had been reduced to beggary; he enlisted in a marching regiment and was in Germany for two years, as she believed. She had not heard of or from him in all that time, and she finally decided to hunt for him the world over. On learning that troops were being despatched to Germany she enlisted. This, to be sure, is a tale of a female soldier, but I introduce it here for its strangeness and likewise for the scene of it being on board ship.

In 1771, a man named Charles Waddall, on board the Oxford man-of-war, was sentenced to receive two dozen lashes for desertion; but when tied up the sailor was discovered to be a woman. She said that she had travelled from Hull to London after a man with whom she was in love, and hearing that he was a sailor on the Oxford she entered for that ship. When she arrived on board she learnt that her sweetheart had deserted, on which she resolved to run away too. The admiral gave the poor creature half a guinea, and others connected with Chatham dockyard made up a purse for her.

The following is illustrative of the power of the passion that inspires the lass who loves a sailor: In 1808, the relatives of a girl who had given her heart to a sailor, hoped to end the attachment by procuring his impressment; but she resolved nevertheless to marry him, and he was accordingly brought ashore and escorted by the press-gang to the church, whence, after the marriage ceremony, he was again conveyed to the tender. I think I see the commiserating expression on the mahogany faces of those old Jacks, as they witness the impressed man saying good-bye to his Poll.

In 1807, a woman, dressed in sailor’s clothes, was brought before the Lord Mayor of London. She said that she had been apprenticed by her step-father at Whitby to a collier called the Mayflower; that she had served four years out of the seven without her sex being discovered; that she was bound when she was thirteen years old, and that her step-father had likewise bound her mother to the sea—this lady being killed, whilst serving as a sailor, at the battle of Copenhagen! She said that her ship was at Woolwich, and that she had run away because the mate had rope’s-ended her for not getting up. She was provided with female attire and sent to her parish.

In 1792, the Marchioness de BouillÉ and Madame de Noailles arrived at Brighton from Dieppe. The marchioness crossed the channel in an open boat, and was disguised as a sailor! The other, who was in mean male attire, crossed in one of the packets, the master of the vessel having pitied her and taken her under his protection.

Another romantic instance may be quoted: it is given in the Naval Chronicle (1802), and seems authentic enough. A gentleman, towards the end of the last century, became bankrupt. He went to Bradford with two daughters, and there died of a broken heart. The girls were left absolutely without provision. Rather than starve—or beg, which was worse than starving to these high-spirited women—they resolved to assume the character and dress of men and enter the navy. They went to Portsmouth and obtained a situation on the quarter-deck—as the term then was—of a troopship bound to the West Indies. They were engaged, we are told, in the reduction of CuraÇoa, “and served with credit in two or three actions in those seas, till one of them was wounded by a splinter in her side, when her sex being discovered, she was discharged, and came to England about six weeks since,” making the date about May, 1802. Meanwhile, the other sister was ill with fever, having been put ashore at Dominica. Believing herself to be dying, she sent for one of the officers of the ship, disclosed her sex to him, and related her story. “The discovery gave tenderness to the esteem he had before entertained for his young friend; his attentions contributed to her convalescence. In short, she recovered, they were married, and are now returned to England in possession of the means to render happy the remainder of their days.”

It is a common saying at sea on a fine bright day, “That if it were always such weather, ships would go manned with ladies.” Possibly if the romance of women sailors terminated with handsome lovers and well-to-do husbands, there might, even in these practical days, arise the same necessity for overhauling the forecastle for masquerading girls that is now found for overhauling the hold for stowaways. But the time for Hannah Snells, for Mary Anne Talbots, otherwise John Taylors, for Ann Bonnys and Mary Reads is dead and gone. Those heroines belonged to a seafaring age of which old salts are ridiculed for deploring the extinction. And in sober truth old salts must not grumble if they are laughed at for thus lamenting, for surely better six days to New York in a steamer wholly free of Hannah Snells than four months to the same port in a ship entirely worked by Mary Anne Talbots.