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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Errant women on a convict ship to Australia in the 1780s were sexual playthings, potential mothers and sometimes romantic partners -- if they didn't succumb to scurvy first.
Mar 20, 2002 | The 1780s were not a pretty time to be a working-class lass in Mad King George's England. If you were lucky enough to have a job, say, as a milkmaid or a shopgirl or a laborer, you were likely to lose it to one of the 130,000 military men just returning home after a rousing defeat in America. Or perhaps you'd get booted from your job because of a new tax on maidservants over the age of 15.
Utterly abandoned by your government, you would likely end up living in a boarding house, sharing a mattress with a few other "disorderly girls" and paying for your gin and your fatty meat by shoplifting or prostitution or other petty crimes. If you were picked up by the police you'd be thrown into a crowded, typhoid-riddled jail to await one of several dismal fates including death by burning at the stake or "Transportation to Parts Beyond the Sea" -- namely, Sydney, Australia, a starving, muddy colony surrounded by tribes of Aborigines.
Sian Rees' "The Floating Brothel" chronicles the voyage of the Lady Julian, a ship that transported 237 female British convicts to Sydney, Australia, in 1789, part of the so-called "Second Fleet" (the First Fleet sailed in 1788). The women were sent off to colonize Australia for two convenient reasons. The first was to empty the jails, which, thanks to an epidemic of disorderly girls who had hit hard times, were seething pits of filth and disease. The second was so the girls could serve as brides, wombs and sexual playthings for the lonely men of Australia -- a motley collection of convicts, researchers, colonialists and marines -- who at the time outnumbered female colonists by roughly 5 to 1. It wasn't a lovely fate.
Make no mistake: "The Floating Brothel" is not a titillating tale of 18th century high-seas hanky-panky. Despite its evocative title and bawdy cover, which features a bare-breasted lass lecherously grasping a portly gentleman, "The Floating Brothel" discloses very few details about lustier aspects of sex-for-hire in the late 1700s. Rather, it is a meticulously researched historical treatise that chronicles the sexual, physical and emotional exploitation of the Lady Julian women from a lively feminist perspective.
Readers will, however, learn plenty of other fascinating facts from this period, such as the menus served to sailors of the era (salted cabbage); the symptoms of scurvy (black pustules all over the body); the nature of waste removal on ships (think "floating piles of excrement"); and the percentage of monstrously deformed babies born in the 1780s (one in every 241). Not exactly sexy stuff, but interesting just the same.
