Selina’s troubled Indian voyages

By guest contributor Paul Martinovich

I'm delighted that museologist and author Paul Martinovich has agreed to share his knowledge and images about the different voyages of Selina Du Charles Shee Holwell (1783-1825). The stories are important, not least because having extra-marital sex at sea, with an East India ship captain, changed her life.

Many young women experienced romantic episodes on long journeys aboard ship. But few can have both met and married their spouses aboard ship. 

Even fewer can have later had the marriage end dramatically while travelling on another vessel. However this was the case for a young woman named Selina Cordelia St Charles around the end of the 18th century, on East India company ships.

SELINA SAILS FROM QUEBEC

Selina Cordelia was almost certainly the illegitimate daughter of William Henry Birch. He was a British Army engineer stationed in Quebec City in the early 1780s. Her mother is an enigma. On Selina's baptismal certificate she is shown as Elizabeth DunReid, though her 'natural daughter' is given the surname DuCharles. 

At some point 'DuCharles' became ‘St Charles’.  And Selina St Charles travelled across the Atlantic, without her mother, to live with her Birch grandparents, at Pinner just outside of London.

FROM PINNER TO CALCUTTA: 1796 

In 1796, possibly as a result of the death of her father, it was decided to send Selina to India, even though she was only 14 years old. There she would live with her Birch uncles. They were prominent businessmen with the East India Company (see coat of arms above). She would be expected eventually to find a husband. 

The dispatching of children to live with relatives in distant countries was not unknown in Georgian times. And the annual flow of young women travelling to India to seek a husband was so regular that it came to be nicknamed ‘the fishing fleet’.

'The dispatching of children to live with relatives in distant countries was not unknown.' 

Selina travelled on the East Indiaman William Pitt  via the Cape of Good Hope. She was ‘under the protection of the captain’ (Captain Charles Mitchell). Such patriarchal care was normal for ‘unaccompanied’ women. 

Stratfield Saye Preservation Trust

They made the  journey south and then headed north-east to Calcutta (modern Kolkata). Another passenger was John Shee (pictured) a British Army officer going out to join his regiment (the 33rd Foot) in Bengal. 

Their shipboard acquaintance led the young Selina (she was still playing with dolls) to marry the 26-year-old major when the ship stopped at Cape Town.  (See image from ships' log).

Marriages of 16- or even 15-year-old girls were not unheard of in the Georgian period. But it is difficult to understand how, under any circumstances, a child of 14 could be allowed to wed a man of 26.

The Shees lived, apparently happily, in Fort William, India, in 1797. 

Image by Zoffany, fourteen years earlier, representing  a much wealthier British household  in Fort William: Sir Elijah Impey, the first Chief Justice of the new supreme court at Calcutta,  Lady Mary Impey and his legitimate children

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GOING TO ENGLAND: 1798 

In 1798 Selina returned to England alone, supposedly because of her health. She sailed on the East Indiamen Lord Hawke, arriving in February 1799. 

John Shee had made no provision for her support while she was in England. He also failed to communicate with her in any way, for more than two years. 

GOING BACK FOR HER MAN: 1801

And yet in 1801, against the advice of friends and relatives, she returned to India. On the East Indiaman the Duke of Montrose, under Captain Patrick Burt, she sailed from Portsmouth in March and arrived at Madras in July. (See pic of women arriving Madras, which had no harbour for large vessels, in 1856, detail, by JB East.)

John Shee had meanwhile risen to the rank of brevet lieutenant-colonel in the 33rd, which happened to be the regiment of Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington. There is ample evidence that Arthur Wellesley considered John a brutal officer, and 'a species of assassin', who practiced with a pistol in order to be able to kill his opponents in duels more efficiently. 

After reaching India in July Selina did not stay long, since John (probably partly because of Arthur’s enmity) decided to return to England and sell his commission. 

RETURNING IN MONTHS

Just six months after her five-month voyage she accompanied her husband back on this December 1801 journey. The marriage was now breaking down. It seems likely that her husband was physically abusing her; ‘intimate partner violence’ is now recognised as more prevalent in military populations.

'The marriage was now breaking down.'

Captain Pulteney Malcolm (left) of the Royal Navy was a tall, handsome Scotsman who had spent four years commanding ships in Indian waters. He offered the couple passage from Cape Town to England in his ship of the line, the Victorious. As part of the naval reductions during the Peace of Amiens, it was returning home. 

A number of other passengers and several hundred troops were also crammed aboard the ship, which was in poor condition and urgently needed repairs. During the passage, the captain and Selina had sex in his cabin, despite the proximity of her husband in an adjacent compartment. 

She had sneaked out of the marital cabin when she thought her husband was asleep. John found out about the adultery, pulled her out of her hiding place, and threw her towards his rival, saying 'There, take your strumpet, and a pretty bargain you have of her'. 

'There, take your strumpet,  and a pretty bargain you have of her'.

SPOUSE AND SELINA SUNDERED, 1803

After abusing the lovers, John left the Victorious to complete his journey on another ship. The Victorious was so unseaworthy that it had to limp into Lisbon. The Admiralty decided to break up the ship on the spot. 

Pulteney Malcolm and the crew arrived in England several months later in hired ships. How and when Selina got back to England from Lisbon is not clear.

At this point John Shee brought a legal suit for ‘Crim.Con.’ (Criminal Conversation) against Pulteney Malcolm. In such actions, the plaintiff sued for damages as a result of the harm ‘done to him’ by the defendant's adultery with his wife. 

The London trial was reported in a number of papers. The most detailed version appeared in The Sporting Magazine of 1803, Vol 23, pp.125-127.Sporting Record. 

Selina’ is extremely unlikely to have been present, so her views in her own words were not reported in these articles.

DISSING THE ‘BURTHEN’

Several witnesses testified to the coldness of John Shee towards his wife and the events on board ship. The evidence suggested that John had been both mentally and physically abusive to Selina. 

But she was denigrated. Another witness said her conduct ‘was very bad in public; she was fawning on men in general.’ A surgeon on board attested to her ‘levity’. He had treated her for ‘hysterics’, which ‘she told him was owing to her husband’s conduct.’ 

After John’s confrontation with Pulteney Malcolm, he was quoted as saying that Selina 'was a foolish, depraved, vicious [bitch], and he was happy he had got rid of such a burthen'. 

Pulteney did not deny the accusation that he had had adulterous relations with Selina. But his lawyer entered letters into the record that showed that the differences between the Shees were long-standing, and not a result of the captain’s attentions to her.

Newspaper reports give the impression that the judge and jury were unsympathetic to both the wife and the ‘wronged’ husband.

In his summation, the judge Baron Alvanley (pictured) found that John Shee 'had not used due diligence to prevent his wife ... from throwing herself into the arms of the defendant'. 

He admonished British husbands to refrain from using excessive 'correction' (physical abuse) to curb their straying wives. 

The jury believed John to be legally in the right and  found Pulteney guilty. But the plaintiff was awarded the derisory sum of 40 shillings in damages (about £187 in today’s money). 

LATER SUPPORT

After these five voyages Selina’s subsequent life seems to have been relatively happy. John Shee went to an early grave. Pulteney married in 1809 and became an admiral. 

Selina’s liaison with Pulteney resulted in a child: Benjamin Basil was born in November 1803, and baptised two months later with the surname Shee. In March 1804 John Shee died at Dover, probably of alcohol-related problems. Selina was left the single mother of a four-month-old infant. 

Within a couple of weeks of John’s death, she married haberdasher James Martin Holwell, her second cousin. They began to make a new life in the west of England.

James and Selina raised the boy along with their two later children. Pulteney acknowledged Benjamin as his son, and visited the Holwells at least once. However, he kept his paternal relationship secret from the boy. Both his wife, Clementine Elphinstone, and his sister, knew of his ‘by-blow’. He occasionally mentioned Benjamin in his letters. 

After James Holwell went bankrupt with £400 debts in 1809 Pulteney found him a job. He also paid for the lad’s education at a good public school.

Later he used his Indian and family connections to get Benjamin into the East India Company’s Madras Army as an officer. There Benjamin had an interesting career (much of it in Persia, now Iran) before his early death at age 37.   

Selina and family emigrated to Montreal, where Selina died in 1825. (See burial record). 

For more information about these individuals, see my book ‘The Sea is my Element: the eventful life of Admiral Sir Pulteney Malcolm, 1768-1838.’  Sea

In these days of exploring narratives about mobilities and sexualities I thank Paul for this insight into a version of domestic violence at sea, and seemingly consensual sex between the ship's patriarch and his married passenger.