Belle: The True Story of Dido Belle. Paula Byrne

ship. In other words, wives, girlfriends and an abundance of prostitutes would pile on board when a ship was at anchor, and there would be an orgy of drunkenness and debauchery. Once the crew’s needs had been satisfied in this way, the women were all supposed to be removed.

      But the reality was that the rule against seagoing women was very often relaxed, especially for the wives of captains and officers.9 Estimates vary as to the numbers of women actually at sea with the fleet, but there is ample anecdotal evidence of their presence aboard in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One has only to consider the novels of one of English literature’s most navally connected novelists, Jane Austen.

      Her brother, Captain Charles Austen, took his wife Fanny and their three children to live aboard his ship, the Namur. Fanny Austen’s surviving letters describe her making clothes for her little girls, reading in the ship’s library, and attending the ship’s theatre. Whenever she spent time ashore she was anxious to get back to her ‘home’ on board, ‘however uncomfortable that home may be’.10 One of her daughters suffered from sea sickness, and Fanny discussed the possibility of leaving her to be raised by her aunt Jane, but in the end decided that the family should stay together on board ship.

      In Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion there is a long discussion about the suitability of women living aboard ship. Captain Wentworth’s old-fashioned belief that a ship is no place for a woman is given short shrift by his sister, Mrs Croft, who is married to an admiral and has lived aboard five vessels, including a battleship. ‘Women may be as comfortable on board, as in the best house in England,’ she says. ‘I believe I have lived as much on board as most women, and I know nothing superior to the accommodation of a man of war.’ She has crossed the Atlantic four times, and says that ‘the happiest part of my life has been spent on board a ship’.11

      Despite Mrs Croft’s protestations, life on board a man-of-war was hard for the wife of a sailor, even a captain. She had to share her husband’s hammock or bunk, and his daily ration of salted beef, dried peas, hardtack and cheese. She also had to try to stay out of the way of the ship’s daily activities. Outside the captain’s cabin, privacy was in short supply on a ship that might carry four hundred sailors and marines.

      Childbirth at sea was not unknown, and sometimes a ship’s guns would be fired to hasten a difficult birth – a practice that gave rise to the saying ‘a son of a gun’. During the Napoleonic Wars, Captain Glascock of the Royal Navy wrote: ‘This day the surgeon informed me that a woman on board had been labouring in childbirth for twelve hours, and if I could see my way to permit the firing of a broadside to leeward, nature would be assisted by the shock. I complied with the request, and she was delivered of a fine male child.’12 Fanny Austen gave birth to her fourth child on board the Namur, but tragically she died two weeks later, as did the baby. The Austen family lamented that she had not been removed to land sooner.

      There are even records of women assisting aboard a ship in battle, attending the wounded or carrying gunpowder.13 Maria the liberated slave may have tended to the wounded during the siege of Morro castle as well as tending to the sexual and domestic needs of Captain Lindsay. At the end of the war he appears to have avoided getting into any trouble for bringing her back to England. And when he returned to sea, he left behind an extraordinary arrangement for the care of his ‘mulatto’ daughter.

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      3. ‘The Abolition of the Slave Trade’: caricature by Isaac Cruikshank of a slave woman being lashed aboard ship

      The handsome Royal Navy captain with aristocratic blood in his veins takes his prize, an African slave. Like thousands of other slaves, the terrified woman had been branded with the initials of her former owner. Now, though, she belongs to Captain Lindsay. She knows what to expect: rape and further servitude. Never could she have dreamed that the encounter would bring into the world a daughter who would influence the course of history. Like those of thousands of other women who were taken from Africa and sold into slavery Maria’s inner life is unknown to us. We cannot know her, but it is possible to reconstruct the kind of life she lived before being taken aboard the Trent.

      The enforced removal of Africans as a labour force to work the West Indian sugar plantations was conducted via the slave ship. It has been estimated that through the long history of the slave trade some twelve million Africans were loaded and transported onto Atlantic slave vessels.1 Sometimes known as a ‘Guineaman’, the slave ship is the enduring symbol of the horrors of the transatlantic trade, a floating dungeon whose stench could be smelt from miles away, its wake trailed by dead-eyed sharks awaiting their prey. Cabin boy Samuel Robinson, aboard a slaver in 1800, was terrified by the sight of these predators, and the knowledge of what would happen to anyone unfortunate enough to go overboard: ‘The very sight of him slowly moving around the ship, with his black fin two feet above the water, his broad snout and small eyes, and the altogether villainous look of the fellow, make one shiver, even when at a safe distance.’2

      Before they set eyes on the ocean the Africans had been captured, marched in ‘coffles’, chained together, and sold at market. Many were bought and sold several times along the way to the coast. The process was brutal and degrading. Families were torn apart, and the captives prodded and poked like animals, assessed for their value and given a price. ‘Vendue’ (sale) masters knew what they were looking for: good teeth, clear eyes, strong limbs, full height and no obvious signs of disease. Women who were ‘long-breasted’ were passed over, since this was taken to be an indication of age.3 Bellies were checked for evidence of pregnancy.

      Slave ‘surgeons’ were brought in for preboarding triage, with painful and humiliating examinations being undertaken. Breasts and genitalia were scrutinised. Thomas Aubrey, an early-eighteenth-century slave surgeon, noted in his log that ‘Sometimes the Men have Gonorrhoeas, or Ulcers in the Rectum, or Fistulas, and the Women Ulcers in the Neck of the Matrix.’4 Slaves were checked for signs of smallpox, a disease that could wipe out most of the ‘cargo’.5

      Thanks to the testimony of ex-slave Mary Prince we have an eyewitness account, from a female perspective, of the desperate, shameful process of being sold at a vendue market.6 ‘I have been a slave,’ she wrote. ‘I have felt what a slave feels, and I know what a slave knows.’7 She was born in 1788, to an enslaved family in Bermuda. When she was a young girl she and each of her sisters was dressed in an osnaburg, a rough linen shroud-like garment, to be taken to the marketplace.

      At length the vendue master, who was to offer us for sale like sheep or cattle, arrived, and asked my mother which was the eldest. She said nothing, but pointed to me. He took me by the hand, and led me out into the middle of the street, and, turning me slowly round, exposed me to the view of those who attended the vendue. I was soon surrounded by strange men, who examined and handled me in the same manner that a butcher would a calf or a lamb he was about to purchase … The bidding started at a few pounds, and gradually rose to 57 … The people who stood by said that I had fetched a great sum for so young a slave. I then saw my sisters led forth, and sold to different owners. When the sale was over, my mother hugged and kissed us, and mourned over us, begging us to keep a good heart. It was a sad parting; one went one way, one another, and our poor mammy went home with nothing.8

      Mary Prince was sold to a family in the West Indies. She eventually came to England, secured her freedom and became an