WOMEN AND THE PRESS-GANG.
The medieval writer who declared women to be "capable of disturbing the
air and exciting tempests" was not indulging a mere quip at the expense
of that limited storm area, his own domestic circle. He expressed
what in his day, and indeed for long after, was a cardinal article of
belief--that if you were so ill-advised as to take a woman to sea, she
would surely upset the weather and play the mischief with the ship.
To this ungallant superstition none subscribed more heartily than the
sailor, though always, be it understood, with a mental reservation.
Unlike many landsmen who held a similar belief, he limited the malign
influence of the sex strictly to the high-seas, where, for that reason,
he vastly preferred woman's room to her company; but once he was safe
in port, woman in his opinion ceased to be dangerous, and he then vastly
preferred her company to her room.
For her companionship he had neither far to seek nor long to wait. It
was a case of
"Deal, Dover and Harwich,
The devil gave his daughter in marriage."
All naval seaports were full of women, and to prevent the supply from
running short thoughtful parish officials--church-wardens and other
well-meaning but sadly misguided people--added constantly to the number
by consigning to such doubtful reformatories the undesirable females of
their respective petty jurisdictions. The practice of admitting women
on board the ships of the fleet, too--a practice as old as the Navy
itself--though always forbidden, was universally connived at and tacitly
sanctioned. Before the anchor of the returning man-of-war was let go a
flotilla of boats surrounded her, deeply laden with pitiful creatures
ready to sell themselves for a song and the chance of robbing their
sailor lovers. No sooner did the boats lay alongside than the last
vestige of Jack's superstitious dread of the malevolent sex went by the
board, and discipline with it. Like monkeys the sailors swarmed into
the boats, where each selected a mate, redeemed her from the grasping
boatman's hands with money or blows according to the state of his
finances or temper, and so brought his prize, save the mark! in triumph
to the gangway. It was a point of honour, not to say of policy, with
these poor creatures to supply their respective "husbands," as they
termed them, with a drop of good-cheer; so at the gangway they were
searched for concealed liquor. This was the only formality observed on
such occasions, and as it was enforced in the most perfunctory manner
imaginable, there was always plenty of drink going. Decency there was
none. The couples passed below and the hell of the besotted broke loose
between decks, where the orgies indulged in would have beggared the pen
of a Balzac. [Footnote: Statement of Certain Immoral Practices, 1822.]
During the earlier decades of the century these conditions, monstrous
though they were, passed almost unchallenged, but as time wore on and
their pernicious effects upon the _morale_ of the fleet became more and
more appalling, the service produced men who contended strenuously, and
in the end successfully, with a custom that, to say the least of it, did
violence to every notion of decency and clean living. In 1746 the ship's
company of the _Sunderland_ complained bitterly because not even their
wives were "suffer'd to come aboard to see them." [Footnote: _Admiralty
Records_ 1. 1482--Capt. Brett, 22 Feb. 1745-6.] It was a sign of the
times. By the year '78 the practice had been fined down to a point
where, if a wherry with a woman in it were seen hovering in a suspicious
manner about a ship of war, the boatman was immediately pressed and the
woman turned on shore. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1498--Capt.
Boteler, 18 April 1778.] Another twenty years, and the example of such
men as Jervis, Nelson and Collingwood laid the evil for good and all.
The seamen of the fleet themselves pronounced its requiescat when,
drawing up certain "Rules and Orders" for their own guidance during the
mutiny of '97, they ordained that "no woman shall be permitted to go
on shore from any ship, but as many come in as pleases." [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 5125--A Detail of the Proceedings on Board the
_Queen Charlotte_ in the Year 1797.]
An unforeseen consequence of thus suppressing the sailor's impromptu
liaisons was an alarming increase in the number of desertions. On shore
love laughs at locksmiths; on shipboard it derided the boatswain's mate.
To run and get caught meant at the worst "only a whipping bout," and,
the sailor's hide being as tough as his heart was tender, he ran and
took the consequences with all a sailor's stoicism. In this respect he
was perhaps not singular. The woman in the case so often counts for more
than the punishment she brings.
Few of those who deserted their ships for amatory reasons had the
luck--viewing the escapade from the sailor's standpoint--that attended
the schoolmaster of the _Princess Louisa_. Going ashore at Plymouth to
fetch his chest from the London wagon, he succumbed to the blandishments
of an itinerant fiddler's wife, whom he chanced to meet in the husband's
temporary absence, and was in consequence "no more heard of." [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 1478--Capt. Boys, 5 April 1742.]
Had it always been a case of the travelling woman, the sailor's flight
in response to the voice of the charmer would seldom have landed him in
the cells or exposed his back to the caress of the ship's cat. Where he
was handicapped in his love flights was this. The haunt or home of his
seducer was generally known to one or other of his officers, and when
this was not the case there were often other women who gladly gave
him away. "Captain Barrington, Sir," writes "Nancy of Deptford" to the
commander of a man-o'-war in the Thames, "there is a Desarter of yours
at the upper water Gate. Lives at the sine of the mantion house. He is
an Irishman, gose by the name of Youe (Hugh) MackMullins, and is trying
to Ruing a Wido and three Children, for he has Insenuated into the Old
Woman's faver so far that she must Sartingly come to poverty, and you
by Sarching the Cook's will find what I have related to be true and much
oblidge the hole parrish of St. Pickles Deptford." [Footnote: _Admiralty
Records_ 1. 1495--Capt. Barrington, 22 Oct. 1771, enclosure.]
A favourite resort of the amatory tar was that extra-parochial spot
known as the Liberty of the Fleet, where the nuptial knot could be tied
without the irksome formalities of banns or licence. The fact strongly
commended it to the sailor and brought him to the precinct in great
numbers.
"I remember once on a time," says Keith, the notorious Fleet parson, "I
was at a public-house at Ratcliffe, which was then full of Sailors and
their Girls. There was fiddling, piping, jigging and eating. At length
one of the Tars starts up and says: 'Damn ye, Jack! I'll be married just
now; I will have my partner.' The joke took, and in less than two hours
Ten Couples set out for the Flete. They returned in Coaches, five Women
in each Coach; the Tars, some running before, some riding on the Coach
Box, and others behind. The Cavalcade being over, the Couples went up
into an upper Room, where they concluded the evening with great Jollity.
The landlord said it was a common thing, when a Fleet comes in, to have
2 or 3 Hundred Marriages in a week's time among the Sailors." [Footnote:
Keith, Observations on the Act for Preventing Clandestine Marriages,
1753.]
In the "Press-Gang, or Love in Low Life," a play produced at Covent
Garden Theatre in 1755, Trueblue is pressed, not in, but out of the
arms of his tearful Nancy. The situation is distressingly typical. The
sailor's happiness was the gangsman's opportunity, however Nancy might
suffer in consequence.
For the average gangsman was as void of sentiment as an Admiralty
warrant, pressing you with equal avidity and absence of feeling whether
he caught you returning from a festival or a funeral. To this callosity
of nature it was due that William Castle, a foreign denizen of Bristol
who had the hardihood to incur the marital tie there, was called
upon, as related elsewhere, to serve at sea in the very heyday of his
honeymoon. Similarly, if four seamen belonging to the _Dundee_ Greenland
whaler had not stolen ashore one night at Shields "to see some women,"
they would probably have gone down to their graves, seawards or
landwards, under the pleasing illusion that the ganger was a man of like
indulgent passions with themselves. The negation of love, as exemplified
in that unsentimental individual, was thus brought home to many a
seafaring man, long debarred from the society of the gentler sex,
with startling abruptness and force. The pitiful case of the "Maidens
Pressed," whose names are enrolled in the pages of Camden Hotten,
[Footnote: Hotten, List of Persons of Quality, etc., who Went from
England to the American Plantations.] is in no way connected with
pressing for naval purposes. Those unfortunates were not victims of the
gangsman's notorious hardness of heart, but of their own misdeeds. Like
the female disciples of the "diving hand" stated by Lutterell [Footnote:
Lutterell, Historical Relation of State Affairs, 12 March 1706.] to have
been "sent away to follow the army," they were one and all criminals of
the Moll Flanders type who "left their country for their country's good"
under compulsion that differed widely, both in form and purpose, from
that described in these pages.
To assert, however, that women were never pressed, in the enigmatic
sense of their being taken by the gang for the manning of the fleet,
would be to do violence to the truth as we find it in naval and other
records. As a matter of fact, the direct contrary was the case, and
there were in the kingdom few gangs of which, at one time or another
in their career, it could not be said, as Southey said of the gang at
Bristol, that "they pressed a woman."
The incident alluded to will be familiar to all who know the poet as
distinguished from the Bard of Avon. It is found in the second "English
Eclogue," under the caption of the "Grandmother's Tale," and has to do
with the escapade, long famous in the more humorous annals of Southey's
native city, of blear-eyed Moll, a collier's wife, a great, ugly
creature whose voice was as gruff as a mastiff's bark, and who wore
habitually a man's hat and coat, so that at a few yards' distance you
were at a loss to know whether she was man or woman.
"There was a merry story told of her,
How when the press-gang came to take her husband
As they were both in bed, she heard them coming,
Drest John up in her nightcap, and herself
Put on his clothes and went before the captain."
A case of pressing on all-fours with this is said to have once occurred
at Portsmouth. A number of sailors, alarmed by the rumoured approach of
a gang while they were a-fairing, took it into their heads, so the story
goes, to effect a partial exchange of clothing with their sweethearts,
in the hope that the hasty shifting of garments would deceive the gang
and so protect them from the press. It did. In their parti-garb make-up
the women looked more sailorly than the sailors themselves. The gang
consequently pressed them, and there were hilarious scenes at the
rendezvous when the fair recruits were "regulated" and the ludicrous
mistake brought to light.
It was not only on shore, however, or on special occasions such as
this, that women played the sailor. A naval commander, accounting to
the Admiralty for his shortness of complement, attributes it mainly to
sickness, partly to desertion, and incidentally to the discharge of one
of the ship's company, "who was discovered to be a woman." [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 1503--Capt. Burney, 15 Feb. 1782.]
His experience is capped by that of the master of the _Edmund and Mary_,
a vessel engaged in carrying coals to Ipswich. Shrewdly suspecting
one of his apprentices, a clever, active lad, to be other than what he
seemed, he taxed him with the deception. Taken unawares, the lad burst
into womanly tears and confessed himself to be the runaway daughter of
a north-country widow. Disgrace had driven her to sea. [Footnote: _Naval
Chronicle_, vol. xxx. 1813, p. 184.]
These instances are far from being unique, for both in the navy and the
mercantile marine the masquerading of women in male attire was a not
uncommon occurrence. The incentives to the adoption of a mode of life
so foreign to all the gentler traditions of the sex were various, though
not inadequate to so surprising a change. Amongst them unhappiness
at home, blighted virtue, the secret love of a sailor and an abnormal
craving for adventure and the romantic life were perhaps the most
common and the most powerful. The question of clothing presented little
difficulty. Sailors' slops could be procured almost anywhere, and no
questions asked. The effectual concealment of sex was not so easy, and
when we consider the necessarily intimate relations subsisting between
the members of a ship's crew, the narrowness of their environment, the
danger of unconscious betrayal and the risks of accidental discovery,
the wonder is that any woman, however masculine in appearance or skilled
in the arts of deception, could ever have played so unnatural a part for
any length of time without detection. The secret of her success perhaps
lay mainly in two assisting circumstances. In theory there were no women
at sea, and despite his occasional vices the sailor was of all men the
most unsophisticated and simple-minded.
Conspicuous among women who threw the dust of successful deception in
the eyes of masters and shipmates is Mary Anne Talbot. Taking to the sea
as a girl in order to "follow the fortunes" of a young naval officer for
whom she had conceived a violent but unrequited affection, she was known
afloat as John Taylor. In stature tall, angular and singularly lacking
in the physical graces so characteristic of the average woman,
she passed for years as a true shellback, her sex unsuspected and
unquestioned. Accident at length revealed her secret. Wounded in an
engagement, she was admitted to hospital in consequence of a shattered
knee, and under the operating knife the identity of John Taylor merged
into that of Mary Anne Talbot. [Footnote: Times, 4 Nov. 1799.]
It is said, perhaps none too kindly or truthfully, that the lady doctor
of the present day no sooner sets up in practice than she incontinently
marries the medical man around the corner, and in many instances the
sailor-girl of former days brought her career on the ocean wave to an
equally romantic conclusion. However skilled in the art of navigation
she might become, she experienced a constitutional difficulty in
steering clear of matrimony. Maybe she steered for it.
A romance of this description that occasioned no little stir in its day
is associated with a name at one time famous in the West-India trade.
Through bankruptcy the name suffered eclipse, and the unfortunate
possessor of it retired to a remote neighbourhood, taking with him his
two daughters, his sole remaining family. There he presently sank under
his misfortunes. Left alone in the world, with scarce a penny-piece to
call their own, the daughters resolved on a daring departure from the
conventional paths of poverty.
Making their way to Portsmouth, they there dressed themselves as sailors
and in that capacity entered on board a man-o'-war bound for the West
Indies. At the first reduction of Curaçoa, in 1798, as in subsequent
naval engagements, both acquitted themselves like men. No suspicion of
the part they were playing, and playing with such success, appears to
have been aroused till a year or two later, when one of them, in a brush
with the enemy, was wounded in the side. The surgeon's report terminated
her career as a seaman.
[Illustration: MARY ANNE TALBOT.]
Meanwhile the other sister contracted tropical fever, and whilst
lying ill was visited by one of the junior officers of the ship.
Believing herself to be dying, she told him her secret, doubtless with
a view to averting its discovery after death. He confessed that the news
was no surprise to him. In fact, not only had he suspected her sex, he
had so far persuaded himself of the truth of his suspicions as to fall
in love with one of his own crew. The tonic effect of such avowals is
well known. The fever-stricken patient recovered, and on the return of
the ship to home waters the officer in question made his late foremast
hand his wife. [Footnote: Naval Chronicle, vol. viii. 1802, p. 60.]
Of all the veracious yarns that are told of girl-sailors, there is
perhaps none more remarkable than the story of Rebecca Anne Johnson, the
girl-sailor of Whitby. One night a hundred and some odd years ago a Mrs.
Lesley, who kept the "Bull" inn in Halfmoon Alley, Bishopsgate Street,
found at her door a handsome sailor-lad begging for food. He had eaten
nothing for four and twenty hours, he declared, and when plied with
supper and questions by the kind-hearted but inquisitive old lady, he
explained that he was an apprentice to the sea, and had run from
his ship at Woolwich because of the mate's unduly basting him with a
rope's-end. "What! you a 'prentice?" cried the landlady; and turning his
face to the light, she subjected him to a scrutiny that read him through
and through.
Next day, at his own request, he was taken before the Lord Mayor, to
whom he told his story. That he was a girl he freely admitted, and he
accounted for his appearing in sailor rig by asserting that a brutal
father had apprenticed him to the sea in his thirteenth year. More
astounding still, the same unnatural parent had actually bound her, the
sailor-girl's, mother, apprentice to the sea, and in that capacity
she was not only pressed into the navy, but killed at the battle of
Copenhagen, up to which time, though she had followed the sea for many
years and borne this child in the meantime, her sex had never once been
called in question. [Footnote: _Naval Chronicle_, vol. xx. 1808, p.
293.]
While woman was thus invading man's province at sea, that universal
feeder of the Navy, the pressgang, made little or no appeal to her as
a sphere of activity. On Portland Island, it is true, Lieut. McKey, who
commanded both the Sea-Fencibles and the press-gang there, rated his
daughter as a midshipman; [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 581--Admiral
Berkeley, Report on Rendezvous, 15 April 1805] but with this exception
no woman is known to have added the hanger to her adornment. The three
merry maids of Taunton, who as gangsmen put the Denny Bowl quarrymen to
rout, were of course impostors.
But if the ganger's life was not for woman, there was ample compensation
for its loss in the wider activities the gang opened up for her. The
gangsman was nothing if not practical. He took the poetic dictum that
"men must work and women must weep"--a conception in his opinion too
sentimentally onesided to be tolerated as one of the eternal verities of
human existence--and improved upon it. By virtue of the rough-and-ready
authority vested in him he abolished the distinction between toil and
tears, decreeing instead that women should suffer both.
"M'Gugan's wife?" growled Capt. Brenton, gang-master at Greenock, when
the corporation of that town ventured to point out to him that
M'Gugan's wife and children must inevitably come to want unless
their bread-winner, recently pressed, were forthwith restored to
them,--"_M'Gugan's wife is as able to get her bread as any woman in the
town!_" [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1511--Capt. Brenton, 15 Jan.
1795.]
For two hundred and fifty years, off and on--ever since, in fact, the
press-masters of bluff King Hal denuded the Dorset coast of fishermen
and drove the starving women of that region to sea in quest of food
[Footnote: _State Papers Domestic, Henry VIII_.: Lord Russell to the
Privy Council, 22 Aug. 1545.]--the press-gang had been laboriously
teaching English housewives this very lesson, the simple economic truth
that if they wanted bread for themselves and their families while their
husbands were fagging for their country at sea, they must turn to and
work for it. Yet in face of this fact here was M'Gugan's wife trying to
shirk the common lot. It was monstrous!
M'Gugan's wife ought really to have known better. The simplest
calculation, had she cared to make it, would have shown her the utter
futility of hoping to live on the munificent wage which a grateful
country allowed to M'Gugan, less certain deductions for M'Gugan's slops
and contingent sick-benefit, in return for his aid in protecting it from
its enemies; and almost any parish official could have told her, what
she ought in reason to have known already, that she was no longer merely
M'Gugan's wife, dependent upon his exertions for the bread she ate, but
a Daughter of the State and own sister to thousands of women to whom the
gang in its passage brought toil and poverty, tears and shame--not, mark
you, the shame of labour, if there be such a thing, but the bedraggled,
gin-sodden shame of the street, or, in the scarce less dreadful
alternative, the shame of the goodwife of the ballad who lamented her
husband's absence because, worse luck, sundry of her bairns "were gotten
quhan he was awa'."
Lamentable as this state of things undoubtedly was, it was nevertheless
one of the inevitables of pressing. You could not take forcibly one
hundred husbands and fathers out of a community of five hundred souls,
and pay that hundred husbands and fathers the barest pittance instead of
a living wage, without condemning one hundred wives and mothers to hard
labour on behalf of the three hundred children who hungered. Out of
this hundred wives and mothers a certain percentage, again, lacked the
ability to work, while a certain other percentage lacked the will. These
recruited the ranks of the outcast, or with their families burdened
the parish. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 5125--Memorial of the
Churchwardens and Overseers of the Poor of the Parish of Portsmouth,
3 Dec 1793, and numerous instances.] The direct social and economic
outcome of this mode of manning the Navy, coupled with the payment of
a starvation wage, was thus threefold. It reversed the natural
sex-incidence of labour; it fostered vice; it bred paupers. The first
was a calamity personal to those who suffered it. The other two were
national in their calamitous effects.
In that great diurnal of the eighteenth-century navy, the Captains'
Letters and Admirals' Dispatches, no volume can be opened without
striking the broad trail of destitution, misery and heart-break, to
mention no worse consequences, left by the gang. At nearly every turn of
the page, indeed, we come upon recitals or petitions recalling vividly
the exclamation involuntarily let fall by Pepys the tender-hearted when,
standing over against the Tower late one summer's night, he watched
by moonlight the pressed men sent away: "Lord! how some poor women did
cry."
A hundred years later and their heritors in sorrow are crying still. Now
it is a bed-ridden mother bewailing her only son, "the principal prop
and stay of her old age"; again a wife, left destitute "with three
hopeful babes, and pregnant." And here, bringing up the rear of the sad
procession--lending to it, moreover, a touch of humour in itself not far
removed from tears--comes Lachlan M'Quarry. The gang have him, and amid
the Stirling hills, where he was late an indweller, a motley gathering
of kinsfolk mourn his loss--"me, his wife, two Small helpless Children,
an Aged Mother who is Blind, an Aged Man who is lame and unfit for work,
his father in Law, and a sister Insane, with his Mother in Law who is
Infirm." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1454--The Humble Petition of
Jullions Thomson, Spouse to Lachlan M'Quarry, 2 May 1812.] The fact
is attested by the minister and elders of the parish, being otherwise
unbelievable; and Lachlan is doubtless proportionately grieved to find
himself at sea. Men whose wives "divorced" them through the medium of
the gang--a not uncommon practice--experienced a similar grief.
Besides the regular employment it so generously provided for wives
bereft of their lawful support, the press-gang found for the women of
the land many an odd job that bore no direct relation to the earning of
their bread. When the mob demolished the Whitby rendezvous in '93, it
was the industrious fishwives of the town who collected the stones
used as ammunition on that occasion; and when, again, Lieut. M'Kenzie
unwisely impressed an able seaman in the house of Joseph Hook,
inn-keeper at Pill, it was none other than "Mrs. Hook, her daughter and
female servant" who fell upon him and tore his uniform in shreds, thus
facilitating the pressed man's escape "through a back way." [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 1534--Lieut. M'Kenzie, 20 Oct. 1805.]
The good people of Sunderland at one time indulged themselves in the
use of a peculiar catch-phrase. Whenever any feat of more than ordinary
daring came under their observation, they spoke of it as "a case of
Dryden's sister." The saying originated in this way. The Sunderland gang
pressed the mate of a vessel, one Michael Dryden, and confined him in
the tender's hold. One night Dryden's sister, having in vain bribed the
lieutenant in command to let him go, at the risk of her life smuggled
some carpenter's tools on board under the very muzzles of the sentinel's
muskets, and with these her brother and fifteen other men cut their way
to freedom. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 2740--Lieut. Atkinson, 24
June and 10 July 1798.]
A tender lying in King Road, at the entrance to Bristol River, was the
scene of another episode of the "Dryden's sister" type. Going ashore
one morning, the lieutenant in command fell from the bank and broke
his sword. It was an ill omen, for in his absence the hard fate of the
twenty pressed men who lay in the tender's hold, "all handcuft to each
other," made an irresistible appeal to two women, pressed men's wives,
who had been with singular lack of caution admitted on board. Whilst the
younger and prettier of the two cajoled the sentinel from his post, the
elder and uglier secured an axe and a hatchet and passed them unobserved
through the scuttle to the prisoners below, who on their part made such
good use of them that when at length the lieutenant returned he found
the cage empty and the birds flown. The shackles strewing the press-room
bore eloquent testimony to the manner of their flight. The irons had
been hacked asunder, some of them with as many as "six or seven Cutts."
[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 1490--Capt. Brown, 12 May 1759.]
Never, surely, did the gang provide an odder job for any woman than the
one it threw in the way of Richard Parker's wife. The story of his part
in the historic mutiny at the Nore is common knowledge. Her's, being
less familiar, will bear retelling. But first certain incidents in the
life of the man himself, some of them hitherto unknown, call for brief
narration.
Born at Exeter in or about the year 1764, it is not till some nineteen
years later, or, to be precise, the 5th of May 1783, that Richard Parker
makes his debut in naval records. On that date he appears on board
the _Mediator_ tender at Plymouth, in the capacity of a pressed man.
[Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ Ships' Musters, 1. 9307--Muster Book of
H.M. Tender the _Mediator_.]
The tender carried him to London, where in due course he was delivered
up to the regulating officers, and by them turned over to the _Ganges_,
Captain the Honourable James Lutterell. This was prior to the 30th of
June 1783, the date of his official "appearance" on board that ship.
On the _Ganges_ he served as a midshipman--a noteworthy fact [Footnote:
Though one of rare occurrence, Parker's case was not altogether unique;
for now and then a pressed man by some lucky chance "got his foot on the
ladder," as Nelson put it, and succeeded in bettering himself. Admiral
Sir David Mitchell, pressed as the master of a merchantman, is a notable
example. Admiral Campbell, "Hawke's right hand at Quiberon," who entered
the service as a substitute for a pressed man, is another; and James
Clephen, pressed as a sea-going apprentice, became master's-mate of the
Doris, and taking part in the cutting out of the Chevrette, a corvette
of twenty guns, from Cameret Bay, in 1801, was for his gallantry on that
occasion made a lieutenant, fought at Trafalgar and died a captain. On
the other hand, John Norris, pressed at Gallions Reach out of a collier
and "ordered to walk the quarter-deck as a midshipman," proved such a
"laisie, sculking, idle fellow," and so "filled the sloop and men
with vermin," that his promoter had serious thoughts of "turning him
ashore."--_Admiralty Records_ 1. 1477--Capt. Bruce, undated letter,
1741.]--till the 4th of September following, when he was discharged to
the _Bull-Dog_ sloop by order of Admiral Montagu. [Footnote: _Admiralty
Records_ Ships' Musters, 1. 10614--Muster Book of H.M.S. _Ganges_.]
His transfer from the _Bull-Dog_ banished him from the quarter-deck and
sowed within him the seeds of that discontent which fourteen years later
made of him, as he himself expressed it, "a scape-goat for the sins of
many." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 5339--Dying Declaration of the
Late Unfortunate Richard Parker, 28 June 1797.] He was now, for what
reason we do not learn, rated as an ordinary seaman, and in that
capacity he served till the 15th of June 1784, when he was discharged
sick to Haslar Hospital. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ Ships' Musters,
1. 10420, 10421--Muster Books of H.M. Sloop _Bull-Dog_.]
At this point we lose track of him for a matter of nearly fourteen
years, but on the 31st of March 1797, the year which brought his period
of service to so tragic a conclusion, he suddenly reappears at the Leith
rendezvous as a Quota Man for the county of Perth. Questioned as to his
past, he told Brenton, then in charge of that rendezvous, "that he had
been a petty officer or acting lieutenant on board the _Mediator_, Capt.
James Lutterell, at the taking of five prizes in 1783, when he received
a very large proportion of prize-money." [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_
1. 1517--Capt. Brenton, 10 June 1797.] The inaccuracies evident on the
face of this statement are unquestionably due to Brenton's defective
recollection rather than to Parker's untruthfulness. Brenton wrote his
report nearly two and a half months after the event.
After a period of detention on board the tender at Leith, Parker, in
company with other Quota and pressed men, was conveyed to the Nore in
one of the revenue vessels occasionally utilised for that purpose, and
there put on board the _Sandwich_, the flag-ship for that division of
the fleet. At half-past nine on the morning of the 12th of May, upon the
2nd lieutenant's giving orders to "clear hawse," the ship's company got
on the booms and gave three cheers, which were at once answered from the
_Director_. They then reeved yard-ropes as a menace to those of the
crew who would not join them, and trained the forecastle guns on the
quarter-deck as a hint to the officers. The latter were presently put
on shore, and that same day the mutineers unanimously chose Parker to
be their "President" or leader. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
5339--Court-Martial on Richard Parker: Deposition of Lieut. Justice.]
The fact that he had been pressed in the first instance, and that
after having served for a time in the capacity of a "quarter-deck young
gentleman" he had been unceremoniously derated, singled him out for
this distinction. There was amongst the mutineers, moreover, no other so
eligible; for whatever Parker's faults, he was unquestionably a man of
superior ability and far from inferior attainments.
The reeving of yard-ropes was his idea, though he disclaimed it. An
extraordinary mixture of tenderness and savagery, he wept when it was
proposed to fire upon a runaway ship, the _Repulse_, but the next moment
drove a crowbar into the muzzle of the already heavily shotted gun and
bade the gunner "send her to hell where she belonged." "I'll make a
beefsteak of you at the yard-arm" was his favourite threat. [Footnote:
_Admiralty Records_ 1. 5339--Court-Martial on Richard Parker:
Depositions of Capt. John Wood, of H.M. Sloop _Hound_, William
Livingston, boat-swain of the _Director_, and Thomas Barry, seaman on
board the _Monmouth._] It was prophetic, for that way, as events quickly
proved, lay the finish of his own career.
At nine o'clock on the morning of the 30th of June Parker, convicted and
sentenced to death after a fair trial, stood on the scaffold awaiting
his now imminent end. The halter, greased to facilitate his passing, was
already about his neck, and in one of his hands, which had been freed at
his own request, he held a handkerchief borrowed for the occasion from
one of the officers of the ship. This he suddenly dropped. It was the
preconcerted signal, and as the fatal gun boomed out in response to it
he thrust his hands into his pockets with great rapidity and jumped
into mid-air, meeting his death without a tremor and with scarce a
convulsion. Thanks to the clearness of the atmosphere and the facility
with which the semaphores did their work that morning, the Admiralty
learnt the news within seven minutes. [Footnote: Trial and Life of
Richard Parker, Manchester, 1797.] Now comes the woman's part in the
drama on which the curtain rose with the pressing of Parker in '83, and
fell, not with his execution at the yard-arm of the _Sandwich_, as one
would suppose, but four days after that event.
In one of his spells of idleness ashore Parker had married a Scotch
girl, the daughter of an Aberdeenshire farmer--a tragic figure of a
woman whose fate it was to be always too late. Hearing that her husband
had taken the bounty, she set out with all speed for Leith, only to
learn, upon her arrival there, that he was already on his way to the
fleet. At Leith she tarried till rumours of his pending trial reached
the north country. The magistrates would then have put her under arrest,
designing to examine her, but the Admiralty, to whom Brenton reported
their intention, vetoed the proceeding as superfluous. The case
against Parker was already complete. [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1.
1517--Capt. Brenton, 15 June 1797, and endorsement.] Left free to follow
the dictates of her tortured heart, the distracted woman posted south.
Eating his last breakfast in the gun-room of the _Sandwich_, Parker
talked affectionately of his wife, saying that he had made his will and
left her a small estate he was heir to. Little did he dream that she was
then within a few miles of him.
The _Sandwich_ lay that morning above Blackstakes, the headmost ship of
the fleet, and at the moment when Parker leapt from her cathead scaffold
a boat containing his wife shot out into the stream. He was run up to
the yard-arm before her very eyes. She was again too late.
He hung there for an hour. Meantime, with a tenacity of purpose as
touching as her devotion, the unhappy woman applied to the Admiral
for the body of her husband. She was denied, and Parker's remains were
committed to the new naval burial ground, beyond the Red-Barrier Gate
leading to Minster. The burial took place at noon. By nightfall the
grief-stricken woman had come to an amazing resolution. _She would steal
the body_.
Ten o'clock that night found her at the place of interment. Save for the
presence of the sentinel at the adjoining Barrier Gate, the loneliness
of the spot favoured her design, but a ten-foot palisade surrounded the
grounds, and she had neither tools nor helpers. Unexpectedly three women
came that way. To them she disclosed her purpose, praying them for the
love of God to help her. Perhaps they were sailors' wives. Anyhow, they
assented, and the four body-snatchers scaled the fence.
[Illustration: MARY ANNE TALBOT. Dressed as a sailor.]
The absence of tools, as it happened, presented no serious impediment to
the execution of their design. The grave was a shallow one, the freshly
turned mould loose and friable. Digging with their hands, they soon
uncovered the coffin, which they then contrived to raise and hoist over
the cemetery gates into the roadway, where they sat upon it to conceal
it from chance passers-by till four o'clock in the morning. It was then
daylight. The neighbouring drawbridge was let down, and, a fish-cart
opportunely passing on its way to Rochester, the driver was prevailed
upon to carry the "lady's box" into that town. A guinea served to allay
his suspicions.
Three days later a caravan drew up before the "Hoop and Horseshoe"
tavern, in Queen Street, Little Tower Hill. A woman alighted--furtively,
for it was now broad daylight, whereas she had planned to arrive while
it was still dark. A watchman chanced to pass at the moment, and the
woman's strange behaviour aroused his suspicions. Pulling aside the
covering of the van, he looked in and saw there the rough coffin
containing the body of Parker, which the driver of the caravan had
carried up from Rochester for the sum of six guineas. Later in the
day the magistrates sitting at Lambeth Street Police Court ordered
its removal, and it was deposited in the vaults of Whitechapel church.
[Footnote: Trial and Life of Richard Parker, Manchester, 1797.]
Full confirmation of this extraordinary story, should any doubt it, may
be found in the registers of the church in question. Amongst the burials
there we read this entry: "_July, 1797, Richard Parker, Sheerness, Kent,
age 33. Cause of death, execution. This was Parker, the President of
the Mutinous Delegates on board the fleet at the Nore. He was hanged
on board H.M.S._ Sandwich _on the 30th day of June_." [Footnote: Burial
Registers of St. Mary Matfellon, Whitechapel, 1797.]