Women in Nelson's Navy

Attitudes then and now

The Royal Navy of Nelson's period has generally been painted in terms of men being pressed into service against their will, living in hellish conditions, and being tyrannised with the lash. As one historian has put it, the sailors toiled on a sort of 'floating concentration camp'.

It would seem unlikely, however, that men pressed and beaten into servitude would provide the manpower that delivered such crushing victories as the battles of the Nile (1798) and Trafalgar (1805), and current research is doing much to re-cast the lives of the men and women of the lower deck. This new perspective shows a much more complex, rounded picture of life in Nelson's Navy.

In Nelson's time Admiralty Regulations stated that women were not allowed to be taken to sea and that '... no women be ever permitted to be on board but such as are really the wives of the men they come to, and the ship not too much pestered even with them'. Whatever the rulebook said, however, it is nevertheless clear that women did travel aboard Nelson's ships - and in large numbers, although senior officers were not necessarily in favour of this.

When a great personal friend of Nelson, Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood, discovered that women had been brought onboard his flagship, he ordered the women ashore because of '... the mischief they never fail to create wherever they are'. He also wrote that 'I never knew a woman brought to sea in a ship that some mischief did not befall the vessel'. The Earl Saint Vincent, another friend of Nelson's, was also against women coming to sea, largely due to their washing their clothes in the ship's fresh water.

In our own day, following some passionate debate, official attitudes towards women serving onboard Royal Navy vessels have recently changed. In 1993 women were officially allowed to go to sea onboard Royal Navy vessels, and the current Equal Opportunities Policy of the Royal Navy states that:

On-board wives

Viscount Horatio Nelson © In Nelson's navy, warrant officers were the ship's specialist officers, and included the carpenter, gunner, cooper, purser and master (the person responsible for the ship's navigation and sailing). Their name comes from the fact that they received a warrant from the Admiralty, rather than a commission, which is what the captain and his lieutenants received. A number of these men took their wives and children to sea with them.

The presence of the women was largely hidden, for official purposes, as they were not paid or fed by the Navy, and therefore were not entered onto the ships' muster books. However other records, such as order books written by ships' captains, refer to their existence, as do memoirs and records of courts martial.

The story of George Casey, his wife, and Nicholas Maeger is a good example. On Friday 5 January 1797, Commodore Horatio Nelson was presiding over the court martial of Lieutenant Nicholas Meager of HMS Dromedary. Lieutenant Meager was charged by George Casey, the ship's Master, because he '... took hold of me by the nose and pulled with all his strength', in public view on the deck of the ship.

Prior to the attack one witness recalled that 'I was walking on the larboard [left] side of the quarter deck, Mr Casey and his wife were walking on the starboard [right] side, the prisoner [Meager] came out of his cabin and as he passed Mrs Casey he spit in her face'. It is not recorded why Maeger spat in Mrs Casey's face, but this record attests to the fact that a warrant officer had his wife with him while at sea, was promenading with her in public view, and the court saw nothing unusual in this. And what is more, in a separate court martial also involving Casey and Maeger, it came to light that the Caseys also had a child, which stayed onboard with them.

Women on the lower deck

Prostitutes being taken onboard a naval ship © Whenever Royal Navy ships of the period came into port, an armada of 'bumboats' immediately besieged them. Bumboats were small vessels that brought fresh vegetables, supplies and, most notoriously, prostitutes and drink to the warships. In port, most ships' captains allowed prostitutes onboard, and the men were in any case already issued with large quantities of drink - the standard allowance was a gallon of beer a man per day. If beer was not available, then a pint of wine or half a pint of spirits could be substituted.

The warships of the day were very overcrowded, and each man was only allowed 14 inches in which to hang his hammock. Add large numbers of prostitutes to the overcrowding and heavy drinking, and the scenes below decks where the men lived must have been something to behold. A sailor wrote that,

Other women, disguised as men, are also known to have entered the Royal Navy, and to have served for some considerable time without detection. Much has been written about them, and while some of these stories are likely to be folk myths, there are a number of attested cases in which the women involved became minor celebrities.

For instance Hanna Snell, the daughter of a dyer from Worcester, enlisted in the army in 1745, deserted, and then enlisted in the marines - who were shipboard soldiers (later to become the Royal Marines) who helped keep discipline onboard ship. Hanna saw action in this capacity, and was eventually badly wounded in both thighs. Despite this, her true sex was never identified, and she recovered from her wounds. In 1750 she revealed her true identity, became a celebrity and starred on the stage.

Passengers and nurses

Royal Navy ships were constantly carrying passengers on board. These could be government officials coming or going to foreign stations, discharged invalids going home, or soldiers being transferred from one post to another - and a number of them were women.

During the 1801 Egyptian campaign, over 60 Royal Navy vessels carried and escorted 12,000 troops to Aboukir Bay, Egypt, in an attempt to drive French forces out of Egypt. Out of every 100 men, three soldiers were allowed to bring their wives, which meant that there were at least 360 women in the fleet, as well as their children. These women and children are recorded in the ships' muster books. For instance the muster book of HMS Charon records that there were 30 women and 20 children onboard 'belonging to the 30th Regiment [now the Queen's Lancashire Regiment]'.

After the successful landing in Aboukir Bay, many of the troopships were turned into hospital ships, and although some of the women and children left to join the army now camped ashore, many stayed on board ship, and volunteered to act as nurses to the sick and wounded. In appreciation of this, Admiral Lord Keith, the expedition's naval commander, allowed them to be fed from the ships' stores, and encouraged them to volunteer for this service.

The Royal Navy of the time had a comprehensive health care system, which included compulsory vaccination against smallpox, free medical treatment for sailors, a sick bay and a surgeon on every ship - as well as an extensive network of hospitals and hospital ships. However, the nurses who attended the sick and wounded at these establishments had quite a bad reputation, and were continually being sacked for prostitution, drunkenness and helping the sailors desert.

One sailor wrote that, '... those ladies are exceedingly bold and audacious ... I had a great deal to do to repulse the temptations I met with from these sirens'.

Burials on Nelson's Island

Nelson's Island from the sea © In 2000, Italian archaeologist Dr Paolo Gallo, while excavating Hellenistic and Pharaonic structures on Nelson's Island, Aboukir Bay, discovered a lost Royal Navy burial ground from Nelson's time. A British team was invited by Dr Gallo to excavate these burials, which subsequently revealed graves containing officers, sailors, soldiers, marines, women and children.

A poignant discovery was that of three infants. Two were either stillborn or had died shortly after birth, and one had died at just a few months old. Each was buried in a wooden coffin, wrapped in a shroud held together with small bronze pins, and one had been carefully packed in wood shavings.

Directly next to one infant was the grave of a woman in a wooden coffin, and it is likely that this was her child. She had been laid to rest in a dress, and her face had been covered with what looks like a handkerchief. On the coffin lid had been nailed a large metal letter 'G'. There are currently three possible candidates for this burial. John Nicol, one of Nelson's sailors who took part in the Battle of the Nile (1798), wrote that a woman from Leith, Scotland, was injured whilst serving the guns on HMS Goliath, subsequently died of her wounds, and was 'buried on a small island in the Bay'.

Two other women from the army regiments from the 1801 expedition were recorded to have died on board the ships moored in Aboukir Bay. One was Mrs Lambe, of the 3rd Guards Regiment (now the Scots Guards), and the other was Sarah Webber of the Coldstream Guards. Any one of these could have merited the mysterious 'G' (standing perhaps for 'Goliath' or 'Guards').

The historical and archaeological record thus makes it clear that women fought, nursed, accompanied their husbands, gave birth, entertained and even enlisted in disguise to serve in Nelson's Navy. These findings have forced us to re-examine the social and organisational nature of Nelson's crews, and has painted a much fuller and more complex picture of those who inhabited the 'wooden world'.

Find out more

Books

Nelson's Navy: The Ships, Men and Organisation 1793-1815 by B Lavery (Conway Maritime Press, 1989)

Nelson and the Nile: The Naval War against Bonaparte 1798 by B Lavery (Chatham, 1998)

A Voice from the Main Deck: Being a record of the thirty years adventures of Samuel Leech by S Leech (Chatham, 1999; originally published in 1857)

British Victory in Egypt, 1801: The End of Napoleon's Conquest by P Mackesy (Routledge, 1995)

Nautical Economy or Forecastle Recollections of Events during the Last War by J Nastyface (Chatham, 1836)

The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner edited by Gordon Grant (Edinburgh, 1822; reprinted London, 1937)

The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy by NAM Rodger (Fontana, 1988)

Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail by SJ Stark (Constable, 1996)

About the author

Nick Slope is an independent archaeologist and military historian. He has been involved in excavations in the UK, Israel/Palestine and Egypt from 1979 - including the on-going excavations of Royal Navy burial sites on Nelson's Island, Aboukir Bay. He is currently working on a PhD on the application of database technology in the social history of the Royal Navy, 1795-1811.