Heroines and Harlots: Women at Sea in the Great Age of Sail
David Cordingly
334pp, MacMillan, £20
Ladies of the Grand Tour
Brian Dolan
330pp, HarperCollins, £19.99
What a fab party of women to be stranded with at an airport terminal gate. High-born (salonista Lady Holland, "the only really undisputed monarchy in Europe") and lowlife (China Emma, the Limehouse sailors' whore, who growled "I'd die for a drink, I must have it, and I don't care what I does to get it"); horribly real (Helen Williams, in fear of the guillotine in the Luxembourg Palace) and wildly fictional (Hannah Hewitt, the "Female Crusoe", cast away en route to India in a 1792 novel). They take the waters at Spa and Aix; they take lovers in Paris and Naples; they shop and ship by the crate; they adopt riding habits and are called "Sir"; they put on white duck trousers and pass themselves off for years as sailors, presumably pissing very discreetly.
That last group, the female mariners, appear in Heroines and Harlots ; these superboys with tits hidden under canvas jackets had a Lara Croft-like appeal to the 18th-century popular imagination. Some 20 of them were known to have served at sea between 1650 and 1815, including "William Brown", young, black and handsome, who joined the British navy and spent 12 years as "captain of the foretop" - leader of the team that climbed aloft to set the riskiest sails on battleships of the Napoleonic wars. Cordingly's anecdotes make us want to buy the movie rights, and even when her sex was revealed it didn't end her career; she rejoined her fellow tars at a higher rank before evaporating from the records.
She was not the first to be lioness-ised: Mary Lacy, a carpenter's mate, put in 12-hour days plus serious drinking time in Chatham dockyard to qualify as a shipwright. She was at last awarded, by a confused Admiralty, a disability pension "equal to that granted to Superannuated Shipwrights" and probably better than she could draw now. Then there was Hannah Snell, a marine who was wounded 12 times in the siege of Pondicherry in India; she had to extract a musket ball from her own groin as she dared not let surgeons discover her secret. Well, that's what the contemporary biography claimed, although its other nasty incidents, including naked-torso'ed floggings, sound suspiciously like the male author's sadistic fantasies. Published in the US in 1815, and with even more blockbuster potential, were the adventures of Louisa Baker, a ruined Bostonian girl who, bandaging her bosom and pulling on a tight "pair of under draws" - which she apparently never changed - fled a life of prostitution to become a sharpshooter high in the rigging of famous men'o'war. She married a wealthy New Yorker and lived quietly ever after, which last improbable plot developments reveal that the miniseries was dreamed up by a scriptwriter employed by a Boston pop publisher: both men, natch.
In fact, and in fiction, the women are present mostly to serve masculine purposes - for a start, those of their authors. David Cordingly's work reads, right down to its trollopy title, as if he had expanded it from a minor chapter in an ocean-going history - the kind of segment that uses up a historian's spicier notes on the incidence of mermaids before he returns, with relief, to analysing the protein content of weevils in ships' biscuits.
I had the impression that the only time Cordingly felt safe using the word "she" was when he was writing of a vessel; he too often cites a woman merely so that he can give a detailed account of her menfolk. Or he introduces them as conquests, entitling one section "Two Naval Heroes and Their Women", permitting Their Women only supernumary roles - even carved wooden figureheads (and Cordingly has a chapter on those, too) are allowed more individual character than his Emma Hamilton. He also employs fake-empathetic "what must have been her feelings" formulas, as when he writes about Mary Patten, a merchant captain's young bride who took command of the ship round Cape Horn when her husband fell sick. But overall his approach is a nervous raise of the glass to the ladies, god bless 'em. I did appreciate, though, a nautical ballad in the appendix: "Oh cruel was the splinter to break my deary's leg / Now he's obliged to fiddle, and I'm obliged to beg . . . / Like me you'll be rewarded, and have your heart's delight, / With fiddling in the morning, and a drop of gin at night. " Bet that anon balladeer was a woman.
Brian Dolan admits to expanding Ladies of the Grand Tour from a file left over from research on 18th-century British travellers, and makes even such unbiddable biddies as the bluestocking educationalist Hannah More demonstrate his own (not uninteresting) history-of-medicine thesis about the therapeutic effects of continental travel upon grand ladies. But when he quotes his sources in proof of his postulations, his gloss gets in the way (especially since his prose tends to the smooth ponderousness of presenter-ese). Better to read their words unmediated: they constantly subvert his.
There is nothing in Dolan's own sentences as informative about the robustness required for Georgian journeying as the items he cites from Mariana Starke's 1792 "things most requisite list" - "Two large thick leather-sheets . . . Pistols, knives . . . Sugar-tongs". Nor is there anything as celebratory of newfound freedom as Hester Piozzi's description of Parisian boulevards: "People of Fashion sitting on chairs in little Parties of five & six . . . a sett of Footmen round a Table drinking beer, old Soldiers smoaking, Shopwomen and Abigails . . . Puppet Shews, raree Shews, Monsters, Dancing Dogs".
I confess I can hardly remember Dolan's final conclusions, and I reread them twice out of politeness. Something about the stock of female knowledge continuing to increase - and what does that mean? And yet, I've been prompted by him to think all week about Mary Wollstonecraft, pregnant by her American lover, in a hideaway outside Paris during the Terror. There she penned her proto the-personal-is-political sentence - "The face of things, public and private, vexes me" - and worried that her anguish about the disintegrating revolution might be "tormenting or perhaps killing, a poor little animal, about whom I am grown anxious and tender, now I feel it alive". I wish she could be sitting in the window seat next time I fly.
