Read Online Women Sailors & Sailors' Women by David Cordingly - Free Book Online

February 1, 1816, reads, “William Brown, AB, entered 31 December, 1815, 1 st Warrt., place of origin, Edinburgh, age 32.” 10 This indicates that she was rated as able seaman and confirms her age as thirty-two, not twenty-six as recorded in the newspapers. In January 1816, she was made captain of the forecastle, which was a more senior role but did not usually entail going aloft. In the summer of 1816, she and several other seamen were transferred from the
Queen Charlotte
to the
Bombay,
a 74-gun ship; according to the
Bombay
’s muster book, William Brown joined the ship on June 29. The muster books for the succeeding years are missing, so we do not know what happened to her after that date.
    William Prothero, like the fictional Lucy Brewer, was a marine; that is to say, she served on board ship as a soldier rather than as a sailor. The details about her are tantalizingly brief. The muster books of HMS
Amazon
tell us that Private William Prothero entered the ship on December 1, 1760, and was discharged on April 30, 1761. The
Amazon
was a Sixth Rate ship of 22 guns under the command of Captain Basil Keith. On April 20, 1761, the ship was at Yarmouth and the captain noted in his log, “One of the marines going by the name of Wm. Protherow was discovered to be a woman. She had done her duty on board nine months.” A further snippet of information is provided in the journal of J. C. Atkinson, who was a surgeon’s mate on the
Amazon.
He noted that she was “an eighteen-year-old Welsh girl who had followed her sweetheart to sea.”
    The extraordinary life of Mary Lacy is recorded in almost as much detail as that of Lucy Brewer and Almira Paul but with the vital difference that at several points it checks out with surviving documents. 11 Her story was first published in London in 1773, under the title
The History of the Female Shipwright . . . Written by Herself,
and an American edition was published in New York with a similar title in 1807. Mary Lacy was born of poor parents on January 12, 1740, at Wickham in Kent. She was the eldest of three children and received a good education in a charity school. When she was about twelve, she went into domestic service in the town of Ash and worked in various households for the next seven years. An unrequited love affair so unsettled her that she decided to leave Ash. Carrying an old frock coat and pair of breeches, a pair of stockings and pumps, and a hat, she left the town at six o’clock on the morning of May 1, 1759. As soon as she was out in the countryside, she changed into the men’s clothes and left her own under a hedge. She traveled via Canterbury to Chatham, home of one of the royal dockyards. There she learned that the 90-gun ship
Sandwich
had recently been launched and was still short of her full complement of crew. She went on board and introduced herself to the gunner, telling him her name was William Chandler. He gave her some biscuits and cheese and suggested that she apply to Richard Baker, the carpenter, who promptly took her on as his servant. Her duties included making his bed, fetching him beer, boiling him beefsteak, and cleaning his shoes. Unfortunately, Baker had a quick temper and would suddenly fly into a rage and beat her. When not working aboard the ship, Baker lived with his wife in a house in Chatham; Mrs. Baker proved kinder than her husband to Mary Lacy. She provided the young carpenter’s mate with “a clean shirt, a pair of stockings, a pair of shoes, a coat and a waistcoat, a checked handkerchief, and a red nightcap for me to wear at sea.”
    On May 20, 1759, the
Sandwich
was moved downstream to take her guns aboard. Three weeks later she was at the Nore to take on the rest of her crew, and on June 21 she set sail down the Thames estuary and headed across the English Channel to join Admiral Hawke’s squadron off Brest. In July, Rear Admiral Francis Geary came aboard and raised his flag at the