Women Sailors & Sailors' Women (34 page)

She seems to have taken the adulation and fame in stride. She made no changes in her way of life but continued to live a monastic existence, keeping watch during the day and waking through the night to mind the light. Her brother continued to help her, particularly with the upkeep of the lighthouse, but as she entered her sixties, the stream of visitors diminished and there was even a rumor that Lime Rock light was to be replaced with a small beacon on the neighboring Goat Island. Before this happened, Ida Lewis was dead. Her brother arrived one morning in 1911 and found her unconscious on the floor of the lantern room. She died later that day. The news was passed along the waterfront, and that evening, all the vessels in Newport Harbor rang their bells in her honor. She was buried in a local cemetery. The lighthouse she had made famous eventually became a yacht club, but the name of her small island was changed from Lime Rock to Ida Lewis Rock.

14

The Sailors' Return

A
LARGE WARSHIP
entering harbor under the command of a confident captain with a well-trained crew was a magnificent sight. She would surge toward the anchorage under full sail, with a hissing bow wave, and flags and pennants billowing in the breeze. When she drew level with the fort guarding the entrance of the harbor, her guns fired a salute to the port admiral. As the clouds of gunsmoke drifted across the harbor, she rounded up into the wind and let go the anchor, and the men high up on her yardarms heaved up her sails. Within minutes she was lying quietly to her anchor, and her boats were being lowered into the water.

This disciplined and orderly procedure was followed by the most disorderly scene imaginable. A small armada of rowboats and barges pushed off from various points along the waterfront and headed for the anchored ship. Most of these were bumboats, the name given to small boats used to sell provisions to ships lying at a distance from the shore. The bumboats were often owned by local women and were loaded like floating market stalls with piles of fruit and vegetables, baskets of bread and meat, dairy produce, tobacco, liquor, and anything else the sailors might buy. The other vessels were rowboats filled to the gunwales with cargoes of women. A few of the women were sailors' wives, who had probably traveled many miles in order to meet the incoming ship. Most of them were prostitutes who hoped to earn a few shillings by selling their favors to the men on board. The boatmen who rowed these women out to the ship treated the exercise as a speculative venture. No money changed hands until the boats jostled alongside the massive wooden hull of the ship; then, depending on the attitude of the ship's officers, the men could either climb into the boats or lean over the ship's side to choose a woman. The sailor then paid her fare, and she was allowed to clamber up the ship's side. The noise and confusion resulting from the various transactions may be imagined with the bumboat women bartering their produce, prostitutes clamoring to attract the sailors' attention, and the sailors themselves shouting and swearing ribald comments.

Within an hour or so, the ship was heaving with humanity. It was not uncommon for as many women to come aboard as there were men on the ship, so a 74-gun ship with a crew of 500 or 600 would find her 170-foot length crammed with more than a thousand men, women, and children. Most of these went belowdecks to the sailors' quarters. The officers had makeshift cabins constructed of canvas screens that allowed them some privacy, but the ordinary seamen hoisted their hammocks in a low-ceilinged, cavernous space with no privacy whatsoever. Here, among the guns and the seamen's chests, wives were reunited with their husbands, and prostitutes went about their business with the men who had paid for their services. Soon the confined space was teeming with people chattering, laughing, crying, shrieking, and swearing. As the liquor smuggled on board by some of the women took effect, the noise increased and scuffles broke out. Here and there a sailor struck up a tune on a fiddle or flute, and couples began dancing. Others gambled away their pay. Pervading all was the reek of unwashed humanity, mingling with the stench of bilge water and the more wholesome smells of tar, hemp, damp wood, and any livestock that had survived the voyage home without being eaten.

Old seamen writing their memoirs recalled with shame some of the scenes that took place. Samuel Leech, who had been on HMS
Macedonian
as a boy, seen action in the War of 1812, and later joined the crew of the U.S. brig
Swan,
thought there were few worse places for the moral development of young boys than a man-of-war, where there was: “Profanity in its most revolting aspect; licentiousness in its most shameful and beastly garb; vice in the worst Proteus-like shapes.”
¹
He recalled the boatloads of women who came on board at Portsmouth and Plymouth: “Many of these lost unfortunate creatures are in the springtime of life, some of them not without pretensions of beauty.” Samuel Stokes, who had been an able seaman on the
Dreadnought
in 1809, thought: “The sins of this ship was equal to the sins of Sodom, especially on the day we was paid, for we had on board thirteen women more than the number of our ship's company, and not fifty of them married women.”
²

Admiral Hawkins was so concerned about the effects of allowing women on board ships at anchor that he published a pamphlet in 1822 entitled
Statement of Certain Immoral Practices in HM Ships—
his descriptions of what went on were so graphic that it was widely circulated and went into a second edition. He thought the women were treated like cattle and was appalled at “the disgusting conversation; the indecent, beastly conduct and horrible scenes; the blasphemy and swearing.”
³
He described how men and women squeezed into hammocks a few inches away from each other so that they were witnesses of each other's actions. According to his account, they indulged in “every excess of debauchery that the grossest passions of human nature can lead them to.” Captain Griffiths, who had been in the Royal Navy for thirty-two years, could not recall any such scenes, though he agreed they might take place on hulks where the seamen were not on the same deck as the midshipmen. He did concede that admitting profligate women on board was an evil practice that offended the respectable married women on the ship and had a demoralizing effect on the younger members of the crew.
⁴

It was perhaps inevitable that admirals and captains whose first priority was the well-being of their ships and crew should show little sympathy for the women, who had to suffer the public humiliation and degrading treatment. Most of them blamed the women for what went on. Admiral Hawkins described them as “the vilest of women,” and Leech referred to them as “defiled and defiling women.” The women were certainly blamed for the increase in venereal disease that invariably occurred after a ship had spent time in port.

Alexander Whyte, the surgeon of HMS
Bellerophon,
wrote in his journal on November 19, 1804, at Spithead, “Heavy Rain—Ship very wet and extremely filthy from so many women being on board.”
⁵
The visit of these women resulted in four crew members' contracting the worst cases of venereal disease ever sent to the navy's hospital at Haslar. While the surgeon's sick list was usually dominated by men with fevers and fluxes, ulcers and catarrhal complaints, Whyte recorded that after the time at Spithead, 67 men out of a total of 287 sick were suffering from venereal disease, far more than were suffering from fevers, ulcers, wounds, and other illnesses. The effect of the loose women on the younger members of the crew is starkly illustrated by an entry in the journal of James Farquehar, surgeon of HMS
Captain.
On October 1, 1798, he treated William Farley, who was officially described as a third-class boy aged fifteen, but the surgeon noted that “Though he says he is fifteen years of age I have reason to believe he is not near so old as he has not the least appearance of having arrived at the age of puberty.”
⁶
The boy had slept with one of the seamen's girls the night before they sailed from Cawsand Bay and had contracted virulent gonorrhea; the swellings around his groin were so bad that he could hardly walk.

The sailor's return from the sea was usually portrayed in popular prints as a joyful occasion: the sailor returning to the arms of his sweetheart, or carousing in a waterfront tavern with the local women.

 

We'll spend our money merrily,

When we come home from sea;

With every man

A glass in his hand

And a pretty girl on his knee.

 

The more mischievous cartoons showed the innocent Jack-Tar being fleeced of his wages by a pretty girl and an aged crone, or returning to find that his girl had taken up with another man in his absence. And there were numerous accounts of sailors coming ashore after a long voyage, cheerfully and noisily squandering their money in the whorehouses, dance halls, and drinking dens to be found in every busy port. But the sailor's homecoming was not always an occasion for drunken revelry. There is a memorable picture in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, entitled
Home from the Sea.
It is a meticulously rendered oil painting of a country churchyard. It is summer, and a young girl dressed in black kneels on the grass beside her brother, who lies grief-stricken on the spot where their mother has recently been buried. The boy is dressed in a sailor suit, and next to him can be seen his straw sailor hat and a bundle containing his belongings wrapped in a large handkerchief. Beyond the two figures in the foreground are a few ancient gravestones, and beyond them the decaying walls of a small country church surrounded by yew trees. A sheep and a lamb have wandered into the churchyard from the distant fields, and so vivid is the painting that one can almost hear the leaves rustling in the trees overhead and the calls of distant jackdaws.

The picture was painted by Arthur Hughes in 1862. The setting is Old Chingford Church in Essex, and the model for the sister of the sailor boy was Hughes's young wife, but as far as we know, the picture was not based on any particular event or occasion known to the artist. However, many a young sailor came home from the sea to find that one of his family had died. There is a moving passage from the memoirs of William Richardson, who went to sea as a boy on merchant ships. Returning from a voyage to the Baltic, his ship was delayed by wind and weather but eventually reached the port of Shields and was moored alongside a quay to unload her cargo of tar barrels. Richardson recalled the occasion many years later:

I never remember being so anxious in getting on shore to see my mother again, as at this time. I never met with a greater shock. When I entered the house I perceived the family were in mourning, and inquiring the cause, was told that my poor mother had departed this life six weeks ago. I thought it impossible, and went up to her bedroom; but she was not there. I came down again almost distracted, then sat down and wept bitterly, but I could not rest—went out, and then on board, wept in silence, and thought I should never know happiness again.
⁷

For sailors' wives who had waited months for news of their husbands, the sailors' return was of critical concern, because all too often the sailors did not return. The great killer of seamen was not enemy action or shipwreck but disease. The figures speak for themselves. During the French Wars from 1793 to 1815, approximately 100,000 British seamen died. Of this number, about 12 percent died from enemy action, shipwreck, or similar disasters; 20 percent died from accidents; and no less than 65 percent died from disease.
⁸
The diseases that most afflicted seamen were scurvy, typhus, and yellow fever. Scurvy was the result of a lack of vitamin C in the diet, and it decimated crews on lengthy voyages until the recommendations of the naval surgeon Dr. James Lind were finally put into practice toward the end of the eighteenth century. Typhus was often brought aboard ships by press-ganged men who had been confined for weeks in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. With several hundred men crammed into a ship, it could spread rapidly, and men died horribly within two or three weeks of going down with the disease.

Even more feared by seamen and soldiers alike were the tropical fevers that made a posting to the West Indies or the tropical coast of Africa appear like a sentence of death. In 1726, an expedition to the Caribbean under Admiral Hosier lost more than 4,000 dead out of a squadron of 4,750. This was an unusually high proportion, but malignant yellow fever continued to wreak havoc among the crews of ships stationed in West Indian harbors. In 1806, William Turnbull published
The Naval Surgeon,
a massive volume based on his practical experience as a surgeon in the navy. He warned that the West Indies was the most unhealthy of all stations and advised captains of ships to anchor as far from land as possible. Of yellow fever, he wrote that “the first symptoms are sudden giddiness and loss of sight, to such a degree as to make the person fall down insensible.” During the final stages, “the foam issues from the mouth; the eyes roll dreadfully; and the extremities are convulsed, being thrown out and pulled back in violent and quick alternate succession.”
⁹

Many of the sailors who survived disease returned home with crippling injuries from shipboard accidents or wounds sustained in action. Nelson, who lost his sight in one eye during the siege of Calvi in 1794, and had his right arm amputated following a disastrous attack on Tenerife, was only the most famous of many. Disabled sailors with begging bowls were a familiar sight on the streets of London, Portsmouth, and other ports, and the naval hospitals were filled with men suffering from appalling injuries.

There is a passage in the memoirs of William Spavens that describes the state of the men in the queue for the Chatham Chest, the pension board for disabled seamen. After long service in the navy and on East Indiamen, Spavens suffered a major injury to his right leg while handling casks in a longboat alongside his ship and had to have the limb amputated. He was in good company at Chatham. There were men swinging on crutches with a wooden leg below the knee, or above the knee, or with both legs missing. There were men with their noses shot off, or pieces torn from their cheeks, or missing their jawbones or chins. One man had his skull fractured and trepanned and a silver plate substituted for the missing bone. There were many who had lost a hand, an arm, or both arms. Some had their limbs permanently contracted by their injuries; “some with a hand off and an eye out; another with an eye out and his face perforated with grains of battle-powder, which leaves as lasting impression as though they were injected by an Italian artist.”
¹⁰
These were the victims of the shipboard accidents and the naval wars of the Napoleonic period. At the Battle of Camperdown in 1797, for instance, there were 244 men killed and 796 wounded in the British fleet alone. At Trafalgar, 1,700 men were killed and wounded in the British ships, and three times that number among the French and Spanish ships.