Sea Control - Sea Control 414 – Women and the Navy in the Age of Sail with Elaine Murphy

Episode Date: February 19, 2023

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain, James Davey and Richard J. Blakemore, Amsterdam University Press, 2020

Hello and welcome to the Sea Control Podcast. I'm Nathan Miller. In this episode, host Jared Samuelson speaks with Dr. Elaine Murphy, an Associate Professor of Maritime and Naval History at the University of Plymouth, about her research on women and the Navy in the Age of Sail. Jim Jarvey edited and produced today's podcast. SimSec is looking for a volunteer to join our technical team and support our web operations. We're looking for someone with a background in WordPress implementation and support, as well as a knowledge of web hosting and networking. Some knowledge of identity management and security operations is also helpful. Please reach out to content at simsec.org to share your background and discuss. I would like to pause

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going to be discussing her ongoing research on women in the Navy and the age of sail. So Elaine, welcome. Could you start by telling the listeners a little bit about your background, please? Thank you very much, Jared. It's lovely to have the chance to speak with you today. So I'm a lecturer at the University of Plymouth in England and for the last number of years I've been researching the Navy in the 17th century. So really the Stuart monarchs and their navies. I started off researching the period of the Civil Wars and privateering and piracy at sea.

And in recent years, my research has expanded out into women on board ships and working for the Navy in the 17th century and then into the kind of wider age of sail. Go from there. So that's really my background. Well, thanks again for coming aboard today, Elaine. As a reminder to the listeners, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So the article that I reviewed for this, Elaine, entitled The Water Body House, Women in the Navy and the British Civil Wars, appeared in the book The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain and focused on the period of the British Civil Wars. We'll have links to all this in the show notes at the end. But we correspond about the age of sail. What time period did you choose to focus on?

How did you get into this research topic? um i think this research topic really came about um when i was doing my phd which is quite a while ago now i was researching the civil wars and naval warfare privateering so there were a lot of different navies operating supporting the royalists the parliamentarians the confederates in ireland and various different forces and so i was very much interested in naval warfare high politics logistics and then a number of years ago I kind of went back to some of this research and I discovered there were actually a lot of women at sea in this period and there were a lot of women in my archives doing things with the navy working for the navy on board naval ships and it really

got to me thinking is well are there more if I go and look in the archives will I find more women at sea in the 17th century and I initially thought you know I'll find a handful one or two here and there and then I went into the archives and it wasn't one or two it was lots and lots of women doing business with the navy working for the navy women on ships in different capacities women nursing wounded sailors and all of a sudden what had been a very very narrow essay on the civil war period became something much much bigger with hundreds if not thousands of women involved with the 17th century navy so kind of it started off as something that I'd had for years and I never thought about and then just came back to it and started thinking about what's going on here.

Now, you wrote that it was difficult to find information on women on Navy vessels prior to the 1640s. Why was that the case and what changed in that time period? What sorts of materials are available after that? I think one of the real problems with finding women on board naval vessels is the way records are kept. Women were there, but it wasn't unusual. So sailors didn't necessarily write about them so if you think about ships logs and indeed I'm sure this is probably true today to some extent you cover important things the wind the weather and maybe stores coming on board a sailor being punished in the 17th and 18th century there's often a column called remarkable occurrences and you might note that you saw a whale or landfall or something interesting

like that but actually nobody puts down in these logs that there are women there because it's just the norm you only really find women in ship's logs when something unusual happens that's usually if they die or fall overboard an accident or something like that and so what you really have is and what I've had with my project is trying to find women can be difficult so if you just think initially I thought oh I'll read ship's logs but there are hundreds if not thousands of them and you go through them and you find nothing because it wasn't noteworthy to put it down but then I started thinking well where do you go what can you look at and what struck me was well you often find that women appear in times of crisis moments when something happened something went wrong so if

there's a storm and a ship goes down if a boat overturns going ashore from the ship if there's some sort of accident or disaster an explosion at sea and of course these are wooden warships think about candles loose gunpowder explosions are not uncommon and that's actually where i find a lot of women on ships so if that kind of moment so in 1665 there's a ship for london and it's sailing down and it's going out on a voyage and it explodes there's a gunpowder explosion and most of the crew are killed and it's if you read samuel peeps's diary he notes that there's about 24 sailors saved and one woman and so it's kind of those moments of crisis something going wrong that you often find women on board the ship now under what circumstances do women start to

interact more with the navy after the 1640 time period i have a whole list of these here i can follow up as necessary but i know you've i think you've got the same list in front of you yeah um well really in the 1640s the civil war takes place and the english navy as it was its parliamentarian controlled by parliament oliver cromwell at this point in time as it will become and essentially because of the war the navy starts expanding under charles the first the navy hadn't been that large there'd been a couple of very big very famous ships like the sovereign of the seas but from the 1640s onwards the navy starts expanding and people often start referring to this later in the 18th century as the fiscal naval state but really what you see through the 1660s king charles ii

is a massive naval expansion and what you're really looking at here is the anglo-dutch wars of the 17th century so there are three of them in the 1650s 1660s and 1670s and you have this massive naval expansion going from a very very small navy of approximately 20 ships to having hundreds of ships and so what you have is a mass influx of men sailors into the navy obviously their female relations women their families their friends coming to visit more sailors on ships means more women visiting ships more women traveling on ships military expeditions campaigns abroad means soldiers traveling on naval ships means their wives are traveling on naval ships and then of course if you're building more and more ships you're looking at more and

dockyards women working in dockyards working for the navy doing these things and of course battles means wounded sailors so you have more and more injured um seamen and then you need how do you cope with all of these this isn't an era of specialist military and naval hospitals it's really not until the 18th century that you see the kind of specialist naval hospitals being built in places like Plymouth and Haslar and Portsmouth so essentially sailors are just landed in nearby port towns and put up in local people's houses or local inns and cared for by local women and so essentially what you have is this massive naval expansion which means more and more women become involved with the navy and more and more women appear in the naval records one of the things i

always tell my students is you've got to love bureaucracy and the navy is a bureaucracy that keeps records and it keeps really detailed records and this is how you can find these women what sort of work were women doing in the dockyards in particular well what surprised me about this i think initially as a historian i didn't expect so many women and so many different types of work so you have women involved in every aspect of ship building some of them are actually building owning companies that are building the entire ships but you have women in the dockyards as ships painters so going on board ships and painting them glaziers iron work a lot of women involved in woodworking supplying wood to the navy but every aspect anything you can think of

that went on a wooden ship then women were involved in building it or making it often as contractors so it's not just so much that a woman is going into the dockyard and building the ship she might be employing men who build the ship so a lot of women are involved as contractors in the sail making business so they're involved in getting protections for their workers so that their workers aren't impressed and forced to join the navy you have women directly involved in making things especially textiles which was very big women's employment in the 17th 18th century so flag making is often done by women and when you think about how many flags are going to be destroyed by at sea by rats in dockyards and also by the constant changes of politics in the 17th

century so you've lots of women involved in making flags my favorite woman workers are actually the rat poisoners so there's a woman called ann pearson and you know she's so effective that she gets the contracts to do different dockyards and she essentially goes around the dockyards and onto the ships laying poison to kill all the rats and of course the rats are eating the supplies they're eating the flags so that there's these kind of lovely interactions between it but the rat poisoners are just really good fun so tell me if my analogy is wrong here but this sounds to me a lot when we talk about the expansion of the women's participation in the dockyard workforce a lot of like world war ii type things where the men are going to these

ships and then the women are used to fill those roles um of course at the end of world war ii you saw women kind of like go back to the households as the men came back after the war do you see that kind of thing in the historical record or they just continue to occupy these dockyard roles because of the size of the royal navy or the course of the age of sail i think they actually continue in this this isn't um a short-term kind of world war ii in the grand scheme of things is relatively short war this is a long-term long-term wars here so that these women get in and they're doing business for a long time with the navy and they continue to do so you see their families continuing often their sons and some of these women have been involved as their husbands were

involved and these businesses continue for a very long time and these women are trusted and there's a lovely example of a woman in the 1640s Mrs Leverland sometimes called Loverland in the records and essentially she starts off doing business in one place and the navy is expanding in Portsmouth and they need a new nail shop so a shop making nails in the dockyard in Portsmouth and she bids for the contract and the local dockyard officials don't want to give her the contract but the person who's in charge of the navy the Earl of Warwick the Lord High Admiral he actually writes a letter and says no we're giving her the contract because she's the most reliable she provides credit when other people won't and we see this with other women

in the dockyard sometimes some of the male contractors write in and say you shouldn't give that contract to her i'm a man i should have it the navy just looks at who can provide the best quality at the best price and if it's a woman they will give the business to a woman now there is the caveat on that sometimes it's harder for women to get paid than men so for occasionally it may be just that it well it's easier to not pay x woman but i mean the women are very good at standing up for themselves writing letters and demanding that they're paid but also withdrawing their services refusing to do any more work deliver any more supplies and writing to important members and more parliament important lords important naval commissioners

they're very active they've great agency on their own behalves and yeah you and i discussed offline as well the sort of where spouses start to appear in the historical record so where do you see that yeah when you start seeing obviously um women contractors um often they start off as widows their husband had business what's impressive to me is actually sometimes their husband's business is actually quite small scale with the navy and they take and they grow this business but you also see um sailors wives we tend to think of the navy and sailors in the age of sail as being very young and fancy free a wife in every port and these ideas but actually if you um peel back the details you find a lot of sailors in the 17th and 18th century were actually married they did

have families at home and they were concerned about the welfare of their wives and children how are they going to survive when they were away what happens if your pay is years in arrears which it can be in this period how are your family going to survive what happens to a woman if her husband is killed how does she get his back pay how does she get any bonuses due to him what happens if she's starving what happens if she's living somewhere hundreds of miles away from a major naval port and has to go there to get her pay it's not like nowadays where people are paid every week or every two weeks and you know the pay goes directly into your bank in this period you might have to as a woman travel hundreds of miles up to london to the navy pay office

with a docket to try and get the money off them and how much does that cost you and that you know so it's very difficult so it's interesting seeing that the strategies women have for surviving for coping with their husbands away at sea and how they they deal with this what experiences were unique to women going to sea well i think we have to think about what a wooden warship was now obviously modern warships tend to be a lot bigger than in this period so if you actually look at the size of the smallest warships I'm dealing with are probably about the size of a double-decker bus in terms of length so you know these are not huge ships so women are going on to a wooden warship that's not designed for them if you think about their clothing it's going to be long skirts not

going to be wearing trousers not short clothing easy and they're going into a space that's especially naval ships it's not designed for women it's not designed for passengers it's designed to fight it's got lots of guns lots of men so a merchant ship sails with the smallest possible crew to make a profit a naval ship sails with a much larger crew because you have to fight the guns on board in this period so women are going into this very cramped conditions these cramped spaces with a lot of men about where they're going to have very little privacy so even if you're an elite woman uh a noble or that you might say well you have access to the great cabin you have a cabin to sleep in, but you won't be sleeping there on your own. You won't necessarily have

any private space. So a lack of privacy is going to be something that's going to affect a lot of women. Or if you have got any privacy, it's not real privacy in the modern sense. You might just be putting up some canvas screens at night to kind of create a bit of an air of a cabin. So it's not great. But also think about practical things like where do you go to the toilet on a wooden warship again a space designed for men and so you have the heads at the front of the ship which which are effectively just a public toilet seat where anybody can see you there along the side of the ship you can have urinals called pistails but again not very practical for women to use in this period so that's a difficulty but of course the early modern world the age of

sail world is very different to our world we expect privacy nowadays how much do people expect privacy at that point in time so it's very different to us and there's a great example of a chaplain in the 17th century called Henry Tung and when he first goes to sea and chaplains are brilliant because they're often not experienced with the naval world so when he first goes to sea in his diary he writes about his experiences and seeing women and he talks about seeing the men and women on board his ship and the women are half drunk half sober and they're in a quiet corner half dressed with the man or women are in the hammocks and they're publicly having sex with as far as he's concerned with their husbands or their sweethearts they're not not even necessarily

their husbands and henry tongues a bit i don't know you can almost see him with his kind of his mouth open aghast at some of this but he gets used to this and it's just a very different world very different concepts of privacy that than we have nowadays well that's a great transition because my next question is how the british public perceive women's presence aboard naval vessels? And then how did that change over time? I think in this period, there's not necessarily a huge amount of public perception of women on board vessels. Women are just there. So members of the royal family go on board naval vessels all the time. They travel on them, they visit them. The monarchs are often very invested and very interested in their navies. So queens and

princesses travel on them, they go and visit them, they launch them. So I think there's quite a lot of publicity there you occasionally get a lot of publicity around women in disguise on board ships so occasionally if they're revealed and this um publicity is often quite positive kind of almost like it's a joke and good on them type thing but in terms of most of the women on board ships that most of the public if they're away from a naval port probably just don't know about it don't think about it sailors on the other hand a very different perception of women on board their ships and we have the idea i think nowadays that this idea that sailors thought women on board ships were bad luck that sailors were very superstitious and you do get some examples of

that where sailors will turn around and blame women for misfortune so bad weather is occasionally blamed on witchcraft and women um accidental gunpowder explosions are on a couple of occasions blamed on women and misfortunes like that so you do have these examples um in the mid-17th century you have a major outbreak of plague in england and again this idea that the ship is pest the fleet pestered with women and that they bring disease with them is quite common especially among senior naval officials but i think what really interests me is actually once you dig past that a bit and actually if you look at the ordinary sailors and some of the ordinary things the women are there And when the women go ashore, and you read this in officers' letters, the diary of that chaplain Henry Tung, the men are sad to see the women go ashore.

They want them there. They enjoy their company. So other than a few people who blame women for misfortune, most sailors are actually pretty happy having women on board and enjoy their presence. And women seem to partake in the activities of the ship. The Stuart Age is a very sociable age. There's a lot of social drinking on ships in this period. And you see women participating on this in the revelry and the toasting and the dining. And you hear about sailors talking about dancing on their ships. And again, they enjoy having women there.

So this idea of women as bad luck that sailors didn't want on the ships, I think, is a bit of a cliche and not really true in this period. Did the Royal Navy have an institutional position on the presence of women aboard its ships? this is one of those things that's really difficult to find out because um in the mid-17th century the navy starts issuing rules and regulations uh kind of naval instructions articles of war that set out the rules for sailors so they'll say things about um you know um no smoking in certain areas um not to blaspheme about not deserting not wasting gunpowder all of these things as you go through the mid 17th century these rules and regulations become more and more elaborate and they're printed and they're issued and quite a lot of them survive

the first set of rules i've found that actually explicitly ban women from naval ships stated sometime around 1699 and after that as you move into the 18th century it varies again some rules say that you know you're the captains can have women on board the ships so long as they're the wives of the sailors and not prostitutes but it's very difficult how do you find out that somebody is the wife of a sailor you know everybody doesn't necessarily carry their marriage certificate around them and captains seem to just turn a blind eye to this so it's really really difficult it's up to individual admirals and captains a lot of the time about what they do so as you move later into the 18th century you'll see admirals like John Jervis in the Mediterranean ordering

women off the ships because he feels they're wasting fresh water and washing laundry and that if he catches any more he'll send them home to England and he orders captains to stop bringing them but then other orders happily say women are allowed. The Swedish navy in the mid-17th century for example um explicitly allowed women on ships so long as they're the wives of sailors and also that the women had to go ashore before there was any action so i think the kind of mid-17th century navy took a practical approach to these things and women at sea traveling on ships but i've never actually found any english women on a ship during the anglo-dutch wars so the women are clearly going ashore before the ships go into action if that makes sense absolutely uh can you speak at

all to the motivation of why the wives would want to go to sea with their husbands other than just like being close to one another because you and i talked about this offline there's actually a very practical reason for it that we probably don't think about today because of the way our pay functions yeah in this period um pay is often in arrears but the pay is given to the sailor himself or a pay ticket which he could leave to his wife but pay isn't remittances aren't sent home so if a sailor is away at sea his wife and family at home won't receive any wages they won't receive any remittances it's not until quite late in the 18th century that it's possible for sailors to have some of their pay set to their wives or families every week so essentially if you're a

sailor and you go to sea and you have a wife and family at home they have no income from your wages unless they have some other means of working so for some families this was a practical solution it's common enough for warrant officers the skilled men like the carpenter the same bring your wife along she can help with the business she can possibly help do the work for other sailors it just makes sense now we see a lot of sailors wives involved in businesses on shore and they run lodging houses ale houses all sorts of different work but it is difficult to make ends meet and a lot of them will end up on the charity of a parish and of course that the parish charity won't necessarily want the poor laws won't want to pay out for them so for some

women and especially soldiers wives sailors wives traveling with your husband is much more desirable because you'll have food and supplies you'll have his protection so it's um it's more complicated than nowadays where presumably most sailors are going to allocate their pay to their family at home i'm sorry that's all that we have time for today i'd like to thank my guest dr elaine murphy elaine where can we find you online and what are you working on next i'm hoping to finish a book on women and the navy in the 17th century so that'll be my kind of next major publication and i'm online i'm on twitter at plum privateer so it can be found there and on the university of plummet's website as well well thank you again for joining us to listeners thanks for

tuning in. We'll see you next time. We'll be right back.