David Cordingly: Sailors and their ambivalence to women at sea

From a talk given by the author of 'Heroines and Harlots' at the Royal Over-Seas League in London

Nowadays, women can join the Navy, compete in Olympic yacht races, and sail single-handed round the world. In Nelson's day things were rather different. When Captain Collingwood learnt that there was a woman aboard one of the ships in his squadron, he ordered her to be sent home at once. "I never knew a woman brought to sea in a ship that some mischief did not befall the vessel," he wrote to Admiral Purvis. It was a view shared by seamen for centuries, which can still be found among some sailors and fishermen today.

Linda Greenlaw, the captain of the fishing boat Hannah Boden, and the heroine of the book and the movie The Perfect Storm, had to endure the Jonah-like forebodings of an old fisherman who made it clear that every time she set off for the fishing grounds he expected some disaster to befall her boat. For eight years he watched her comings and goings, and was always surprised when she returned safely.

What is curious about the superstition is that it is flatly contradicted by the long-hold belief that water is the female element and that women have powers over the sea. Pliny, in his influential Natural History of AD 77, maintained that hailstorms, whirlwinds and lightning would be scared away by a naked woman. In Catholic countries, the Virgin Mary was, and still is, widely regarded as the patron saint of sailors and fishermen. On the cliff tops overlooking innumerable ports and fishing villages around the Mediterranean will be found churches dedicated to the Virgin.

The mermaid is a reflection of the sailor's ambivalent feelings about women at sea. This beguiling creature appears in the myths of many countries, but the Western version seems to have descended from the sirens whose bewitching songs lured sailors to their deaths. Like Aphrodite, who was born from the sea in a scallop shell, the mermaid has long, flowing hair, a sure indication of an abundant sexual appetite. She is a temptress like Eve, and her fishy tail a reminder of the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

Admiralty regulations issued during the 18th century made clear that any women visiting a ship while it was in port must be put ashore before it put to sea. And yet there are at least 20 well-documented reports of women going to sea dressed as men between 1750 and 1850, and there were probably many more cases that never came to light. Hannah Snell, the most famous of female sailors, spent four and a half years in the Army and the Navy as a man in the 1740s, and astonished her companions when she finally revealed that she was a woman.

But what about the women left behind? The lot of a sailor's woman was not a happy one. "I wish you had been a parson or anything but a sailor," wrote Jenny, wife of Captain Rodney, in 1756. "Then I had not known the uneasiness of being parted from him I love better than life."

For some, the loneliness was the worst thing. For others, it was the prolonged separation and the anxiety that their husband and the father of their children might be lost at sea.

As for the sailors, they spent, and no doubt still do spend, a great deal of time thinking about women. Many of their songs and sea shanties featured women; they decorated their arms and chests with tattoos dedicated to their mothers and sweethearts; they collected souvenirs to take home to their women; and above all they wrote letters to their women.

Captain Collingwood, who would not tolerate women on board his ship, desperately missed his wife and two daughters. He told his wife that he had resolved that "when this war is happily terminated to think no more of ships, but pass the rest of my days in the bosom of my family, where I think my prospects of happiness are equal to any man's."

He never obtained his wish. He took command of the British fleet in the Mediterranean after the death of Nelson, and died at sea a few years later.