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

.

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.

Empire Windrush's voyage from the Caribbean: 1948. White expat women among would-be residents

Voyage stories can be told from many vantage points. Often 'the Windrush story' is told simplistically, mono-racially and omits women.

So let me offer you this unusual version, which I've melded from the letters of a veteran travel writer escaping her new husband (who's turned out to be tedious), plus passenger lists, and extracts from the Kingston Gleaner. 

Two footloose white women are the focus. Their voyages begin separately, in Barbados, late April three years after war’s end. Boredom is their trigger.  

Barbados 1948

On the Anglicised island nicknamed ‘Bimshire’ and ‘Little England’  (Barbados) ennui is inevitable for these visitors whose usual lives involve voracious discovering in new location after new location.  

After three months Freya Stark (left), the famous travel writer, has exhausted her capacity to play the diplomat’s wife there. She wants to escape to her home in Asola.  

Her cabin mate, scandalous writer-publisher and black rights activist Nancy Cunard (right), is similarly bored with the Bridge-playing world at her cousin Edward’s  beachside house in Glitter Bay. She’s been recovering there for two months after a Horrible Holiday in Mexico where a cactus pieced her cornea and her latest lover careered away.

Perishable berths going begging

So here's the story. Around Easter-time in 1948 Caribbean newspapers offer a batch of one-way cheap passages to Britain. The shipping company wants to avoid loss by filling up perishable berths, just as tramp ships traditionally take on non-human cargo too 'as inducemnt offers'.  

Carpe Diem, the women say. They each. separately, book a bargain basement ticket that costs as much as five cows, or forty weeks' wages for a banana loader.  It’s £43, because females are all, by definition, 'ladies' and must therefore travel 'A' class, in cabins. By contrast men prepared to rough it in 'C' class dormitories pay only £28.10s. 

In May Freya tells Jock Murray, her London publisher, that she is unfortumately leaving just as all the frangipani are in flower. The Caribbean Sea is ‘emerald green because of the Orinoco waters.’ As she starts the 251-nautical miles crossing it’s strange to see Bimshire ‘vanishing back into the waves and clouds from which I saw it emerge so few months ago.’ 

Via Trinidad and Xaymaica 

Port of Spain, six years earlier). 

Like the other Britain-bound passengers from British Guiana, Grenada and St Lucia, Freya goes to a hub: the nearest embarkation port, Trinidad. 

According to Nancy’s biographer, Daphne Fielding,  Nancy waits for  ‘three suffocating days ... in evil-smelling Port-of-Spain after which she felt she really knew what it was like to be a poor Negro living in one of those wretched wooden shacks in Cock-Crow Alley or Barking-Dog Lane.’  

The passengers are joining the ship for the last two legs of its outward voyage from Southampton: Jamaica, then Bermuda, before it heads north east and back home to the UK.

Just after 20 May, Captain John Almond’s under-full ship bears them away from Trinidad. Passing the French West Indies and British Virgin Islands they make the 1,299-nautical mile journey north to the island once called Xaymaica (the Taino word for ‘land of wood and water’). 

Man-free ladies at their typewriters

Is it a recipe for ructions, to coop up two headstrong, grand public figures - one radical, one conservative? Impeccable manners and busyness help.  Nancy is writing about Mexico. Freya is doing her autobiographical Traveller’s Prelude (published 1950). 

Maybe they share personal stories as both are struggling with failing relationships with younger bisexual partners.  Nancy, age 52, has been ditched by wealthy wanderer William Le Page Finley. 

Freya, three years older, has recently married the Hon. Stewart Perowne, Colonial Secretary to Barbados who has metamorphosed into ‘the perfect Civil Servant.’

When they get to the Royal Mail Lines pier at Kingston, Jamaica  they find that, like all freshness-hungry newspapers in any small port, the Gleaner details all arrivals and departures. 

In this case it records the many disembarking: 57 A-class passengers;  175 of the homeward-bound second Gloucester Regiment who'd been based there; and 215 demobilised Jamaican RAF men, who had recognised there are absolutely no opportunities in the UK for Caribbean men, now that the war is over. 

Nancy as anthropologist-celeb in Ja

Miss Cunard, ‘whose affinity for the cause of the coloured peoples of the world caused such a furore in the middle 1930s’ is one of the celebrity arrivals who is scooped: ‘During her [two-and-a-half-day] stay, short though it is, she hopes to see as much of the island as possible. 

'She is particularly keen to observe at close hand the mental and political changes which have taken place in Jamaica’ since her 1932 visit. 

What the ladies see - differently

So Nancy notes the new and quotidian, thinking about what could happen politically, including the forthcoming West Indies Federation 1958-62.  

And Mrs Perowne gazes upon evidence of much older colonial glories.  A brigadier whisks off Freya  and shipmate Lady Ivy Woolley, a veteran of her husband’s postings in Nigeria and Cyprus. They use the official residence of the Governor, Sir John Huggins as their day base.  

Freya visits Port Royal with a Nelson-revering naval guide. She finds it's no longer a swashbuckling buccanneer base but near-derelict waste land.  Determined to make the most of every opportunity, Freya obtains passes for a jaunt on an ordnance boat. Out in the waters round the Palisadoes it’s bliss, admiring the accompanying pelicans and dreaming of enjoying walks and wayside inns in those distant Blue Mountains. 

Back on board the troop ship - desolating and miltarised 

Then, bump, it’s back to the ship’s ‘desolating efficiency’. 

By the evening of 24 or 26 May 1948 (the accounts vary) tentative newcomers are finding their feet with the established communities in cabin and deck class. It’s full.  

And the atmosphere is more militarised. The public address system ‘blares’, Freya haughtily complains. ‘One’s time and thought taken up forcibly in listening to things one doesn’t want to hear. And [yet one has] only life in this world.’ 

Underway, luscious grapevines are a much more welcome form of communication than tannoys. Soon gossip reveals that one of the six stowaways who got on at Kingston is – gasp – a female! 

She’s dressmaker Evelyn Wauchope, aged 27. (pictured).  Enter gallant rescuers who collectively pay the fare for what the Gleaner calls ‘this adventurous woman [who would otherwise] be imprisoned on arrival in England. Jamaican musicians including Delroy Stephens give a benefit concert for her. 

‘From then on nothing very exciting happened,’ wrote one student passenger.

To Tampico for Poles, regimented

Detouring east, to Tampico to pick up Poles, makes Freya chafe:  ‘It seems wildly extravagant to send a huge ship, 2,000 on board, eight days out of its way for sixty passengers who could have been flown or taken by schooner to Bermuda’. 

Throughout the war she had coped overseas with distant Whitehall bureaucracy. Now she believes ‘it is just that someone in London was unable to realise the difference made by looking at a small-scale map ... [They must have] thought this was all on our way.’ 

For four days and 1,436 nautical miles there’s confinement, ‘chugging through the Mexique Bay, cutting its dark flat waters in swelter of heat and noise.’ Freya writes to her husband  ‘I hope I may never have to travel in a troopship again; regimented from morning to night... It really is sordid.’

No punkahs here

Perhaps it’s privation that intensifies British upper-crust solidarity. ‘It is a godsend to have Nancy Cunard. We omit breakfast and lie with very little on in our cabin till lunch, and then sit in hot shade with typewriter or Russian. Heat really exhausting.’  

At night the ship is ‘as bad as Delhi’, where she had enjoyed the Viceroy House’s elaborate hospitality. With not so much as a punkah to waft her now she finds: ‘the sheets scorching; and poor miserable people are down below in decks that descend to E without a breath of outside air.’

Going west, up the Pánuco River towards the lush grandeur of the ‘New Orleans of Mexico’ they’re dismayed at not being allowed ashore. Instead the sixty Poles join the ship by boat.  

Having been placed in Mexico for the last few years of the war the Polish women are now on their way to being reunited with their demobbed husbands in the Resettlement Corps in the UK. 

Diverting to Havana

Fresh water supplies are low. The ship’s desalination system isn’t adequate and currency problems mean no water can be bought in Mexico.  So there’s a new interim destination: Cuba, 93 nautical miles away. 

Over the next few days they head east past the tip of the Yucatan peninsula, then across to Havana on 3 June. Four years before the revolution, the city – ironically, architecturally similar to Tampico  –'gives a glance of opulence: wide, straight streets; porticoes, and shops; shiny rich cars: the waterfront finished off with a low parapet of stone and backed with gardens...  one has a feeling of a metropolis standing on its own feet.’  

Frying like the Ancient Mariner

But they are not allowed ashore in this city either:  ‘just frying like the Ancient Mariner on a painted ocean... how maddening not to be able to land,’ Freya tells Stewart. 

Water obtained, they can start heading north east, 4,310 nautical miles to Tilbury. 

Bermuda is a scheduled stop. However, they have to wait two days because of engine failure, which is handled at the British Royal navy dockyard. And they are held up again in Hamilton, the capital. 

The Royal Gazette reports that ‘Bermudians went all out to show hospitality to passengers and crew ... A major social event, with plenty to eat and drink, was a dance on the old Unity Patio in Happy Valley’. 

The calypsonians aboard oblige with extra music.  However passengers are shocked at the apartheid on the then-racist British imperial fortress colony island. Discrimination is especially visible in the education system. 

Posh hospitality

As in Jamaica, Freya manages a brief civilised respite ashore in Hamilton, thanks to her elite network. Vice-Admiral William Tennant (pictured). A WW2 veteran, he is briefly Commander-in-Chief of the America and West Indies Station, and hosts her overnight. 

She enjoys ‘a bathe before breakfast...  slipping down barefoot over the wet grass and finding the little cove all pure and quiet from the night and swimming out among the white birds in an almost waveless sea.’ 

On 11 June she calculates: ‘This depressing boat, eleven more days to go’. Then, as they cross the North Atlantic, two days out the weather changes from hot to cold and dry. They have rough weather for the first time. 

This is the Thames. You lot are a problem

Finally, after a thirty-two-day trip, the two women arrive at Tilbury on 21 June 1948. There they discover that their ship is being seen as not just another vesel but a floating political problem in a cash-strapped UK dis-inclined to support Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DEI) . 

The rest is known history – and modern spin. Nancy and Freya’s Caribbean shipmates disembark absolutely believing they have arrived as British subjects. That’s what the label says. 

But the post-2018 scandal about citizenship rights was to up-end that. See https://jcwi.org.uk/reportsbriefings/windrush-scandal-explained/

More info from me

• A version of this article was published in Maritime Quarterly. 
• See also my 'Women of Windrush: Britain's adventurous arrivals that history forgot,' New Statesman, 22 June 2018.   https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2018/06/women-windrush-britain-s-adventurous-arrivals-history-forgot
• Re Nancy Cunard. See my 'The nonconformist who sailed on Empire Windrush,' Morning Star, 22 June 2018. https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/nonconformist-who-sailed-empire-windrush

Reading more from various refreshing authors

There's much unusual reading about Windrush and its aftermath at Historycal Roots: Windrush: https://www.historycalroots.com/the-empire-windrush/

Woman on Costa Concordia: a missing story of heroic alacrity

Passenger Concetta Robi seem to be to be the oddly obscured principal female character and a hero in the Costa Concordia disaster story.There’s no picture of her on the internet. She’s  barely visible in the public discussions. Her helpful daughter is un-named. 

This absence got my attention when I was reading one of the latest analyses of the ship that ran aground off Isola del Gigli, in January 2012. The Tuscany sinking brought 32 deaths and major publicity about the captain’s behaviour.

Marine consultant Captain Michael Lloyd has just (22 April) posted part 3 of his discussion: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/voices-costa-concordia-part-3-damage-decisions-michael-lloyd/ 

Prompt action - unofficial

His evaluation contains very useful material about the way people – even captains - freeze and act irrationally in such disasters.But among the people who did not freeze was Concetta Robi. 

The story is that initially the crew gave false information to passengers to allay panic telling them it’s only an electrical problem, go back to your cabins. We’ve got it all in hand.

In fact, as Lloyd says, 

'instead began a loss of confidence in the shipboard leadership. As the delay in any decisive action continued, passengers now began to make their own decisions regardless of those in authority. 

'Indeed, it was a passenger, not the bridge staff, who alerted the shore authorities. 

'Somewhere on the ship, an Italian woman, named Concetta Robi, took out her cell phone and dialled her daughter in the central Italian town of Prato, near Florence.

‘She described scenes of chaos, ceiling panels falling, waiters stumbling, passengers scrambling to put on life jackets.

'The daughter telephoned the police.’

As a result the rescue process got under way, helped by Senora Robi’s accuracy after the misreporting by ship’s crew.

Why no recognition?

Why is this woman not credited for her role? 

Because she’s not a maritime professional, but  a passenger and a woman - and one who excelled, implicitly showing up male crew?

Women sailing on the actual Windrush

Pic: Mona Baptiste, Trinidadian singer who came to UK on the Windrush, 1948

Windrush women. Want to know more about the women-specifically-who sailed on this now-iconised ship 70 years ago? If so, you may like to use these links to lite items I've done while researching the hidden history (for a longer academic piece).

# New Statesman online, June 22
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2018/06/women-windrush-britain-s-adventurous-arrivals-history-forgot

# Woman's Hour, BBC Radio Four, Wednesday June 20, Woman's Hour
https://player.fm/…/boney-ms-marcia-barrett-pregnancy-and-t…. (It's about 30 minutes into the programme, the fourth item)

# Morning Star, Friday June 22.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/the-non-conformist-heiress-who-sailed-on-the-windrush

# ... and to come in Sept: 'That voyage' in Marine Quarterly
www.themarinequarterly.com/

Pic: The Colonial Girls Hostel where Mona and some other Windrush women stayed in, at 18 Collingham Gardens,Earls Court.

Pregnancy and Mothering at sea in the nineteenth century

Today on cruiseships voyaging with your children can be a pleasure. On Mother's Day, as on any day, amusements, crèches, and babysitters abound. Usually no-one gets seasick. Falling overboard is rare. And women don’t give birth there because shipping lines don’t allow you to sail after 27 weeks.
Refugee mothers, of course, have a frightening time. Survival is the issue on their risky ships and on voyages that take days,not months. See http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/europe-migrants-ship/.Picture by Reuter/Alkis Konstantinidis

Mothering at sea in the nineteenth century
In the past mothering at sea meant not only keeping the kids amused (Ooh, look at that porpoise) and safe (Christine, do not climb on that rail, you’ll fall and drown).
It also meant risking being where illnesses such as measles and dysentery could spread, fatally for you and your offspring.
On top of that, the dehydration caused by seasickness led some nursing mothers to stop lactating. Their babies then were distressed and colicky, causing the mother more distress. One or both might die.
Did mums get any help? Yes, they did, in the nineteenth century depending on the circumstances. Busy stewardesses helped with childcare. Other passengers looked after the children and even gave their own milk to breast-fed babies
And wealthier women had their own servants to help them, especially if they thought they were going to give birth on the voyage. Details of this can be found in the 1826 voyage story of two of Australia’s founding families: that of pregnant sisters-in-law Harriet Parker King and Mary Copland Lethbridge (nee Parker King).

Mothers of Oz’s founding families, afloat
Harriet Parker King, nee Lethbridge (above pic), a thirty-year old Launceston-born woman (1796-1874,) was travelling to Australia in September 1826. She was emigrating to Dunhevid, in New South Wales, the farm of her distinguished husband’s family.
While Harriet and the children were sailing by merchant vessel ship her husband was leading an expedition to Patagonia on the HMS Adventure, accompanied by HMS Beagle. Phillip Parker King (1791-1856) was to become an increasingly famous Royal Naval hydrographer, and surveyor. Phillip was later celebrated on postage stamps.

Harriet had married 26-year-old Phillip in January 1817 when she was 21. By the time of her 1826 journey she had six sons. Four (Robert, Essington, Charles and Baby) sailed with her to Australia, when Harriet was five months pregnant with her seventh or eighth child.

In their large party on the sailing ship Cumberland were also Mary Copland Lethbridge (1805-72) (Phillip’s sister, and also the wife of Harriet’s brother Robert).
The couple sailed too, along with Harriet's Nanny, Phillip’s brother-in-law Hannibal Macarthur, and Miss Waring, the future governess of Hannibal’s family.
Mary Copland Lethbridge had only married on 25 July. Age twenty-one, Mary too was pregnant. perhaps just three months by comparison to Harriet’s more advanced stage.


Help needed on the trip, whatever the price
On arriving at the port of Plymouth, Harriet wrote her husband that she had found that on their pre-arranged ship ‘there was no surgeon engaged, and as it is almost probable I will confined ere I get to Port Jackson I could not [make myself]….sail without a nurse.’
She found one, Mrs Rowland, for £100 (the equivalent today of between £740 and £40,000 depending on what conversion method is used).
‘I did not expect to give her so large a sum but no woman, who was qualified for such an event, would give up her practice here without a handsome remuneration.’ And Harriet liked her ‘very much.’
It sounds as if Mrs Rowlands who a professional midwife and children’s nurse who was using the opportunity to leave her business and settle in Australia if she took to it.
On the four-month voyage Harriet was feeling the stress of mothering her big family at sea.
‘Our dear Charles’ was poorly but ‘rallied amazingly the last month we were at Sea, and I now beginning to hope he will be spared... but my Nurse says, he is too sensible to live.
Harriet was also ‘most anxious’ about Essy as he had ‘much spirit’.
Seeing so much of their (cooped up) children on ship must have meant mothers got to know them better than at home, and worried about their developing characters.
‘Mrs Rowland, my nurse, I find very handy with them. I do not now I should have done without her as Charles is quite as much, if not more trouble, than the Baby.’
But at least the party on the Cumberland weren’t in livid seas beset by fierce winds. And there were no epidemics. ‘We have had a fine breeze and … the Weather is beautiful’

Miscarrying at sea
Without a surgeon, women on ships had to help each other if they started losing their foetuses, as roughly 30 per cent of all women did at that time.
On 13 October Harriet wrote that after several days of Mary being poorly, 'This morning I was called up to her at 3 o’clock as she was very ill, she has since been very bad and it has ended in a miscarriage. She is now doing well.’ Seemingly Mrs Rowland wasn’t expected to help.
~~
Their voyage took four months. Published extracts from Harriet’s letters don’t speak of homesickness or of expectations of NSW or even the discomforts of pregnancy on sailing ships.
Her main feelings are that she misses her husband and is concerned for the welfare of those in her party.

After landing
Luckily Harriet landed on 24 Jan 1827, sixteen days before baby Arthur Septimus Parker King was born on 9 February. He seems to have been her last child.
Mary went on to have eight live children.
Finally settled, Harriet wrote to Phillip on 20 March that their Nanny was going to carry on working for the family, despite her brother trying to persuade her to marry a man he knew in Sydney.
And the nurse, Mrs Rowland, decided to ‘return to England, her time with me is nearly up.’
Five years later Harriet’s (poorly) husband and eldest son returned safely from Patagonia in 1832.
Harriet and Mary founded some of Australia's 'royalty'.

(Sources include Dorothy Walsh, ed, The Admiral's Wife: Mrs. Phillip Parker King: A Selection of Letters 1817-56, Melbourne, 1967. Hawthorn Press; http://person.ancestry.co.uk/tree/28094330/person/12850836018/facts).

Picture: Mary in 1874, 47 years after her momentous voyage.

Wet nursing on ships: sisterly support and a necessary business

A hot topic today
Breast-feeding other women’s babies at sea. Where in maritime historiography are these lost stories of generosity, of life-saving, of sisterly support -- or, more practically, women’s private enterprise in a monopoly situation, the ship in mid-ocean?
Is it the general lack of work on travellers' emotions,including necessary trust, that means we don't we know much about situations of heightened mutual dependency at sea, apart from during the wrecking of ships and in lifeboats?
I'm thinking about those troubled intense times on voyages when people absolutely have to supplement for each other when (sea- or other) sickness hits. That includes seafarers generously covering each other's jobs when a shipmate is ill or distressed, or ships' passengers looking after the children of mothers too incapacitated to do anything? (This can be taken as a proof of the African adage that it takes a whole village to bring up a child).

The question comes up because wet nursing is a hot topic in the UK this month. Today BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour focused on wet nursing (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007qlvb). Debate has been triggered because a picture of Jessica Anne Colletti (pictured above) breastfeeding her son and a friend’s child went viral. (http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/598028/What-is-wet-nursing-how-to-breastfeed-milk-bank-netmums).
Also a survey by Netmums, the website for mothers, last week found one in 25 British mothers are already wet nursing another's baby. Two in five women said they would do so.

Wet nursing at sea in the past
On ships this intimate supplementing happened too. However, the extent is not known because the subject, like menstruation at sea, has been regarded as not quite seemly.
Passengers' letters and diaries certainly make clear that some women on ships helped each other, with child care and especially when ill.
But there's little detail about the physical realities and emotions, so we can only speculate on the meanings of these intimate exchanges.
*
How far did that help extend? It’s partly dictated by the weather.
Wet nursing and seasickness are crucially linked because if nursing mothers suffer badly from mal-de-mer they become dehydrated and eventually stop lactating. At least one in ten people suffer from seasickness, and effective remedies were rare before the 1940s.
No-one would stand by and let a baby die of starvation. Of course shipmates who had copious enough milk would have stepped in. Peer pressure might have propelled them, too, if the child was so very distressed that the crying disturbed the whole ship.
Class relations and custom meant that the family of an elite mother would think it quite normal to send down to steerage for a labouring-class woman to do this job.

Wet nurse saves Manuel Lagos Besteiro’s life
In 1912 when Pepita Lagos Besteiro was returning to Havana from Madrid with her husband and baby Manolo, the six-month-old became so sick that the ship's surgeon pronounced that he would probably not survive the voyage.
But a willing wet nurse was found on board. And, says the family’s website, this unnamed woman (pictured with Manolo) successfully suckled Manolo back to health, ’to the point where it was noted that he had a ruddy complexion by the time the boat arrived in Cuba.’(http://www.emilito.org/family/emilito/lagos_us1/index.html)

Different ships, same needy babies
Without doubt other nursing mothers fed their shipmates’ babies too, on:
~ convict ships in the 1700s
~ migrant ships in the 1800s and 1900s
~ floating nurseries, post-war bride ships in WW1 and WW2

(WW2 brideship babies, mothers and nurses dine on board. Pic by Barney J. Gloster/Canada. Dept. of National Defence/Library and Archives Canada/PA-175792)

After world war one, women on bride ships were in a particularly intense mothering situation, which could become a health-care crisis. Mothers of babies and children were traveling to the homes of their new servicemen husbands, on troop-ships unsuited for this new purpose.
On some WW2 brideships nursing mothers were much more officially controlled by the military than in WW1, partly to avoid epidemics of infection. On Canadian ships infants' mothers were made to switch to using formula milk - which of course caused stress. It was a hard situation for both babies and mothers to adjust to.
At least one in ten people are seasick. So on choppy voyages to the Antipodes and South Africa warbrides, and later Ten Pound Poms, would surely have assisted each other in providing breast milk.

Wet nursing at sea: the meanings
Historian Christina Hardyment, on Woman’s Hour, differentiated between two sorts of wet nursing arrangements on land:
~ between friends or family, when it was done out of kindness and concern
~ paid relationships, which would have meant both that an obliging woman was found, and employed on a casual basis, or that the passenger took her wet nurse with her

**
Wet nurse Margaret MacIwain (probably a mis-spelling), aged 26, sailed on the Manhattan from Liverpool to New York in September 1857. If she was lactating at that point she would have helped any needy baby -- for money, or at least for a grateful gift.
However, if she was sailing with a family by whom she was already engaged as a wet nurse, then she might not have been able to be generous. This would be especially true if she had a small supply of milk, perhaps because she was already feeding more than one greedy baby, or because she was too poorly.

**
Feminist journalist Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), by contrast, prepared for her voyage from Italy home to New York by weaning her son in spring 1850. Angelino had been born in early September 1848, so he was nineteen months old.
Margaret and her revolutionary marquis partner couldn't afford to pay for his 'great stout Roman mother of the flesh’, the wet nurse, to accompany them, even if the woman had been willing. Nino had to learn, in two months, how to do without the breast.
On the three-masted sail ship Elizabeth, Nino got his milk from the nanny goat. The five-week voyage ended fatally for them all when the ship foundered, and sank, says Margaret Fuller’s biographer Megan Marshall.

Conclusion
Voyages can often be very bonding experiences enriched by intense but fleeting friendships. Comradeship and the suspension of xenophobia are the most fascinating aspects of this heterotopic off-shore place.
For me it's rather a moving idea that not only did some people step off at the other side with new friends for life (which was particularly the case with WW2 bride ships). Children also left a ship with milk-kin, 'sisters and brothers' bonded by the shared breast.
The lost history of wet nursing at sea would be invaluable in helping us understand how gendered power relations were changed in these peculiar floating hotel and boarding houses so far from land.
**
My questions, which will probably never be answered, are:
~ how did this once-acceptable practice of hiring a wet nurse worked at sea when family were white and the wet nurse was a Chinese amah or Indian ayah. Did she have to feed the baby in private, to avoid onlookers’ racist distaste? Was she allowed to take her own baby?
~ Wet nurses' successful production of milk would have been crucial to their value on the voyage. Did their luggage include herbs to help promote copious milk production?
~ When late-nineteenth-century shipping companies advertised that their passenger ships carried a cow, was this a recognition that taking a wet nurse was something fewer people could now afford? Were children weaned early if they were involved in migration?

Enslaved women on ships

Adjua (June Carryl) and Dembi (Kimberly Scott) in 'The Liquid Plain'. Photo by Jenny Graham

Today in Britain there are estimated to be 10,000 to 13,000 slaves, mainly women (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30255084). We have a Modern Slavery Bill going through parliament and a Minister for Modern Slavery and Organised Crime, Karen Bradley (pictured)


In these days of increased trafficking (mainly by air) it's telling to look back and see the parallels with the 15-18C slave trade, in which 4-5 million women slaves were transported (about a third of the estimated 12-15 million.)
Not many experts have written about gender on slave ships, let alone written for popular audiences.

The Liquid Plain
But US playwright Naomi Wallace has, in The Liquid Plain, a play that won the 2012 Horton Foote Prize for Promising New American Play. So far it has only been staged in the US, not here in the UK. (http://www.tcg.org/tools/newplays/details2012a.cfm?ShowID=213)
It's about two runaway slaves, Adjua and Dembi, and the docklands community in late-18C Bristol, Rhode Island, which was a major slave marketplace. With sailors Adjua and Dembi make common cause and plan to return to Africa and 'freedom'.
The play's title comes from a poem by Phillis Wheatley (c1753-1784),who was herself transported from West Africa as a child but became the first African-American to have a book published, and at only twenty.
In her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral she writes:
While for Britannia's distant shore
We sweep the liquid plain,
And with astonished eyes explore
The wide-extended main



Naomi Wallace was inspired to write the play after reading Marcus Rediker’s book The Slave Ship. She refers to the 1791 indictment for murder of slave ship captain James D'Wolf.
He'd wanted the crew of the Polly to heave the nameless woman overboard because he thought she had small pox and would infect the whole crew and thereby cause him to lose his profitable cargo. The sailors refused so,according to seaman John Cranston:
D'Wolf 'himself ran up the Shrowds [he'd had the woman put high up in the mainmast two days earlier] ..then he lash'd her in a Chair & ty'd a mask round her Eyes & Mouth & there was a tackle hooked upon the Slings round the chair when we lowered her down on the larboard side of the Vessel.

That chair, that mask
I know about the story because I've just finished reading Rediker's book. For me the most potent of all many potent images in this history is that chair, and the idea of a captain who was so afraid to touch her skin that he tied her to a chair (presumably she was too ill to move unaided.The sailors themselves were quite keen to get exposure to smallpox and thereby gain immunity).
And then there's the mask, which Cranston said was tied onto the woman so that she could not see what was happening to her so that she would not struggle.
'It was [also]done to prevent her making any Noise that the other Slaves might not hear, lest they should rise.'

Comprehending the full horror of appalling histories, such as slavery and the holocaust, can be hard to do. But the chair and mask somehow helped me take in the horror of a trade that treated human beings in this way. It is similar to the impact on me of seeing the mountains of human hair at Auschwitz: just a commodity.

James D'Wolf (pictured) got away with it, just as so many slave captains got away with their appalling 'business practices' over 244 years. On ship the millions of kidnapped African women were the sexual targets of officers and sometimes crew too. There was rape and there were relationships too.

Regulating women on ships
I started grasping slave women' stories when researching the chapter in my forthcoming book that discusses the regulation - and entertainment - of women passengers in transit. Over the centuries there were matrons, conductresses, escorts, social hostesses - and always natural leaders among the 'human cargo' too.

Rediker retells the stories of two such natural leaders on slave ships: both nicknamed ‘The Boatswain’ they were on the Nightingale in 1769 and the Hudibras in 1787.
On the Hudibras there was also a cultural leader and griot of enslaved women, a ‘songstress ‘ and ‘orator’ who would stand or kneel at the centre of concentric circles of women on the quarterdeck, elders in the outermost circle.
She sang ‘slow airs of a pathetic nature’, and gave orations. Watchers who didn’t speak their language thought these were epic poetry as the women all responded with a chorus at the end of significant sentences.
Seaman William Butterworth, watching, was so moved that he ‘shed tears of involuntary sympathy.’ Rediker reports that at least one captain found the songs of resistance ‘very disagreeable’ and had the singing women flogged so badly their wounds took two to three weeks to heal.

For the women it was, Rediker explains, ‘an effort to retain historical identity in a situation of utter social upheaval … a central element of an active and growing culture of opposition aboard ship.’
It was solidarity and comforting company - something the poor masked murdered woman in the chair so needed.

Not communicating - about seasickness and love

Seasickness is gendered. Women seem to be more afflicted than men, according to new research.
And men, it seems, feel unmanned by their stomach's acrobatics.
Certainly that's how funny historic postcards represented it.
Most of the cards I've bought from Ebay don't have anything written on the back that refers to actually feeling queasy or having mal de mer. But today I've just found one that does.
This postcard was sent in July 1926 to a young man in Northants. It's typical of a classic trope in historic cartoons about seasickness. People feel that in throwing up they are giving up all they posses in a donation to Neptune.
(Other tropes include a dialogue with the steward about how much they want to die: Coffee or Coffin. Some show green passengers desperately asking the crew on where one should do this impolite action.)
Young woman to man being sick over the ship's rail. 'Darling, I said I'd give up everything for your sake, and in five more minutes I'll have done it.'

On the back it says:

Dear E ...,
I knew you would not be able to resist seeing me. I know this card just says what you would wish me to know and so I am so happy darling. My heart is yours

[signature undecipherable, in Scarborough].

I like it because the young woman correspondent is so unaware of the potential meaning. And the irony! She's talking about incandescent love but sending her beloved a picture of a man enduring public humiliation and loss.
Who knows if it ever became a relationship.

Sailing through Xmas: women crew and women passengers

Ayah at children's party on ship, 1889. Painting by Godefroy Durand

Christmas on ship for women crew and women passengers in the past has varied depending upon the period and the vessel.
In the early and mid-twentieth century routinely stewardesses on liners and cruise ships decorated the public rooms with paper chains, lanterns and baubles. Sometimes the women passengers helped dress the tree with fairies and tinsel as they might at home. Male passengers didn’t; it seems to have been a feminine rite.

MARY &THE KING'S BROADCAST, WW2
In wartime women and men in the armed forces sometimes were en route to overseas postings during the Yule period. When Territorial Army nurse (TANS) Mary Wrangham Hardy was sailing from the Middle East to Italy on the Melita, just before Christmas 1943:
‘It gave us a strange feeling …. On Christmas Eve everybody collected on one of the decks for carols. Next day we all sat on the steps and the floor to get as near as possible [to the wireless] for the King’s Christmas Broadcast. The reception was perfect – we could hear every word and felt that it was a link with our families at home. ‘

YVONNE IN PARADISE
For other women the principal feeling was not nationalistic nostalgia but wonder at the difference between their usual Christmas in Britain and the possible other versions of it in other countries. Women’s Auxiliary Air Force member Yvonne George loved docking in the Bay of Algiers on Christmas Day 1943.
‘When we saw the view confronting us we all thought we had been transported to Paradise. There before us under bright blue skies with the sun beating down stretched among leafy green trees in the hills where white villas, some looked like palaces all nestling among orange and lemon trees in full blossom with the sweet perfume … permeating the air. Coming direct from the dark gloom of blackened-out England … it seemed to us that we had suddenly fallen on a different planet.’

SENDING A CHRISTMAS MESSAGE
All seafarers are acutely aware that they can’t be with the people they care about back home. Today this can be remedied to some extent by Skype and mobile calls if they can get a signal. (You can’t in always in mid-ocean spaces).
People also phone via satellite communications, such as SAT-M and V-Sat, on bigger ships. Satcomm companies offer cheap rates for festive periods including Eid and Diwali (Quiet Time, Super Quiet Time) because business traffic is less on those days. The more generous shipping companies allow free phone calls and internet access.

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime/archive/displays/christmas/

In the past, cards and presents would have been snailmailed many weeks earlier – and wouldn’t necessarily have arrived at the right port on the right day. As on land, women tended to be the ones who organised sending cards; they were not likely to be the recipients to the same extent that men were. Today’s e-cards arrive more reliably -- if you’re within signal range.

FUN,NOT LONELINESS, ON PASSENGER SHIPS
Seafarers, especially young ones, often say that they expected their first Xmas at sea would be lonely and that they’d miss home. But then they actually have a wonderful time. This is not least because operators of cruise ships catering for the West European market put on so many festivities. (Profit-focused, they want passengers to have such a good experience that they come back, ideally with extra paying guests).
And staff are part of that fun, as well as helping organise it as cruise directors, social hostesses, shop assistants etc. Behind the scenes, Christmas is yet another excuse for a boozy staff party in someone’s cabin, although modern prohibitions on crew alcohol consumption mean no one is as legless as they were in fifty years ago.


On the Chusan in the Red Sea in 1955. a woman passenger wrote :
“25 December - went to breakfast and found that a menu and Christmas card was placed for each person. Church service was at 10.30…after lunch walk around the dining room to see the Christmas spread, the amount of work the chef had done, there was a boar’s head, two sucking pigs, a large ham, turkey, Christmas cake, a cake made into a clock and decorations were wonderfully done. After that went up in the lift and there was a piece of mistletoe right in the centre and one of the ship’s officers was standing right under it, when it was pointed out he was in a dangerous spot he quickly moved to the side. Then we heard the Queens speech, we are two hours ahead of English time…
And so to dinner. I wore my spotted cocktail dress and it was very comfortable. We had a super time, three bottles of bubbly, the Chief Radio Officer footing the bill and we wore our hats and were kicking up an awful din blowing whistles and playing the fool generally”.
http://www.poheritage.com/the-collection/galleries/Seasonal-Selections/Christmas-at-Sea.

As in hotels, work doesn’t stop for Bank Holidays. Most seafarers work a seven-day week, every day of a trip. So Xmas means being on duty as on every other day. It’s just that you might wear a pair of fake antlers and a Santa hat in Caribbean sun as the tannoy belts out songs about sleigh bells and you scatter fake snow by the pool.
The carnivalesque tradition of the upper ranks getting waited upon by the lower ranks in a Christmas meal was once a common occurrence.
Secular folks haven’t a snowflake in hell’s chance of avoiding traditions like carols and Christ’s manger if they’re on a British-operated passenger ships. But being in a floating hotel is a very good way to avoid having to cook a turkey and pud for a large family.

NOBODY ABOARD KNOWS WHAT XMAS IS
On tankers and cargo ships chefs used to pull out all the stops to create a festive day. Shipmates made up for the absence of relatives by being each other’s family.
Today almost all non-passenger ships have crews who may not speak English or celebrate Christian and European festivals. So a British person on board can feel lonely. Some ships are dry, too. So the difference to Christmas on land is very marked.