Abstract
This review contributes to the roundtable from a perspective informed by social psychology and recent queer sexology at a time when mobility and transport studies have taken a turn to emotions. It sees the Royal Navy in Britain's most thalassocratic period, struggling to insist on shipboard regimes based on heteronormative and cisgender values. Intimate human relations and individual agency were thus positioned as secondary to institutional macro-success in imperial enterprise. The regulatory attempt to maintain such a binary order was legitimated by Christian moral values about ‘abominable crimes’ and ‘unnatural practices’, including bestiality with ships’ animals. Simply put, an optimal unit of labour was a virtuous chap who only did it with his loyal wife, and to procreate. Sodomites were hanged.
In that room called ‘studying labour in the maritime past’, the elephant used to be taken-for-granted heteronormativity. Previous historiography once unquestioningly – and tellingly – assumed that Jack Tar was a healthily rollicking lad whose opportunistic rod ruled his time off. But in the past few decades, the male seafarer's intimate life has been usefully problematized by studies of their same-sex relations. 1 More recently, gendered sex at sea and ashore has been amplified by work on hegemonic maritime masculinity, not least following the Maritime Masculinity and Maritime Toxic Masculinity conferences (in 2016 and 2019, respectively).
Seth Stein LeJacq's Sexual and Gender Difference in the British Navy builds on this but goes further again. LeJacq writes as someone using current and growing general awareness of the need to understand, with real expansiveness, all that non-heteronormativity means. This trend is sometimes expressed by people writing of GSRD (gender, sexual and relationship diversity) rather than the usual LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, other). The term GSRD includes trans people and those who choose ethical polyamory. The concept of GSRD can be usefully applied to hypermotile people whose working lives are lived on ships and planes. Such an expansive approach is useful when considering the connection between motilities and sex – for example, the 1982 fearmongering about air cabin crew such as Gaëtan Dugas as high-risk food servers or the Sun's ill-informed attack on the National Maritime Museum's reimagining of Nelson as a ‘gay icon’ in January 2024. 2
By interrogating naval documents with a fresh GSRD perspective, LeJacq's superbly edited collection of sources does not simply offer an answer to the question ‘What was the extent and nature of LGBTQIA+ activity at sea?’ This book makes clear that sexuality is complex, and our understandings are necessarily shifting and still relevant.
These Admiralty records of trials are a major source of information about outlawed sexual practices that came to official attention. Many did not. Until now, there have been two principal options for researchers: first, reading secondary interpretations such as Gilbert’s and Burg’s or, second, visiting London and ploughing through court-martial records written in barely legible handwriting and sometimes poorly stored for centuries. The latter course is challenging: peering through physical records can be an obstacle to discerning social trends and subtleties.
LeJacq has made the research easier with this edited sourcebook. Not only are some of the most telling courts martial now beautifully typeset and legible – it is a book that visually delights the reader with its textures, not least when the trial reports are set out like a playscript – but LeJacq’s clear, lucid and succinct footnotes and headnotes also help us better interrogate the data. His editing has created the accessibility that has long been needed; we can now see the wood for the trees.
LeJacq points out that only 575 men were recorded as being prosecuted, and not all were formally found guilty in a navy that employed hundreds of thousands of people. So, what is the hidden story? Some sailors were intersex people and some ‘transed gender’; William Morris, in 1803, pleaded ‘neutrality of gender’ because they had ‘the Peculiarity of very small Testicles’ (132). An unknown number extended tender affinity with shipmates. They expressed love through rewards like laundering. Gifts included oranges, soup and leftover cakes from the gunroom. On moonlit decks, some kissed and stroked over mangers and guns. Some brutally indulged in sexual bullying, some bribed and some were what is now called MSM – men who, unremarkably, had sex with men, sometimes opportunistically. And the captain of the Princess Amelia orchestrated women into homophobia. He allegedly invited 20 ‘Amazonian’ wives to take the cat-o’-nine-tails and humiliate two men who had engaged in seemingly consensual sodomy.
In this rich collection, I was not always sure about the wisdom of the categories LeJacq applies, but these are useful heuristically. Thirteen cases are collected under the heading ‘Tolerance and Punishment’, nine under ‘Queer Tars’, seven under ‘In Print’, four under ‘Naval Buggery Scandals’, four under a ‘Man F–ing Ship’ and seven under ‘The Victorian Navy’. There is also a 12-page appendix summarizing trials, plus a reasonable index. LeJacq's aim was to make the documents accessible and legible, and he does so.
If I have any criticism, it is that the book could have benefited from giving intersectionality a higher profile too because, in the queer maritime past, class, disability (including neurodiversity, as is now recognized), education and race determined so much. But there is welcome detail about those men who were forbidden full ruggedly masculine status – such as non-British ship’s cooks – and were over-represented as defendants: Rafaelo Treake/Troyac (a Neapolitan on the Africaine) and Rafael Seraco (also a Neapolitan marine) were seemingly not the typical black amputees but were doubly Othered in the navy.
Sexual and Gender Difference in the British Navy will remain an important source for years to come, especially as the Merchant Navy did not have similar records and therefore can never have a companion volume.
Historical sources never simply argue for themselves, but this book comes pretty close to letting them do so. In his wonderful collection, Seth Stein LeJacq tests the ‘What if?’ that has undoubtedly crossed the mind of many a historian writing monographs. What if, rather than paraphrasing them or quoting parsimoniously, scholars merely juxtaposed their sources, allowing them to unfold on the page in their entirety? This volume differs from many anthologies or editions of primary materials because the selection and steering are explicit, and deliberately woven in. There is a clear argument here – or rather arguments – about tolerance, intolerance, diversity and, more generally, the fact that the naval world was far more complex than a single type of representation would suggest. As with any selection, no two curators would land on exactly the same constellation of choices – and I will have more to say on this shortly. But the format, in its relative openness, is refreshing and precious.
The study of sexual difference in the Royal Navy has a long pedigree, which is particularly well anchored in the work of A. N. Gilbert in the 1970s and B. R. Burg and LeJacq himself more recently. 4 Similarly, the question of gender – less represented here – has attracted significant attention, from historians of masculinity, like Joanne Begiato Bailey and Mary Conley, and from scholars such as Margarette Lincoln and Suzanne J. Stark, who have grappled with the complex histories of ‘cross-dressing’ and women's service in the navy. 5 These subjects have long captured the public imagination too, lending historical visibility to queer people and forming the focus of many anecdotes, stories, fictional portrayals and museum displays. A key question has always been the extent to which male homosexual practices were tolerated and commonplace in maritime spaces or, conversely, abhorred, and how far they shaped notions of masculinity among seafarers. But an important insight that LeJacq's collection drives home, and is very much applicable to any other aspects of naval life, is a simple one: it depends.
In his introduction, LeJacq stresses the notion of diversity among naval seamen: ‘Any population this large’, he writes, ‘must include many forms of gender expression and sexual activity, people with all sorts of different bodies, desires, and identities’ (1). This is absolutely true. Nonetheless, if we are interested in institutional dynamics and community interactions rather than simply personal experiences, we can also consider this situation at a higher taxonomical level than that of the individual. Looking at sodomy, more than most other matters, puts into sharp relief the fact that each vessel was a world of its own, where central naval rules and supposed shared ‘customs’ might be applied, disregarded or bent through specific inflections. In particular, one is struck by the variability in the use of space: while elsewhere LeJacq has convincingly discussed the link between ‘privacy’ and shipboard sexual relationships, 6 here we also read of seamen having intercourse in the foretop, on the main deck and in the galley – all very open and ‘public’ locations. Naturally, the cases brought to trial already represent a bias towards those caught and/or frowned upon, as opposed to being representative of the whole. However, the internal variability of circumstances and attitudes even among these may caution us against blanket appraisals of a ‘common’ institutional way of seeing matters, particularly across such a long time period. Even if we confine ourselves to a given decade, it seems clear that the same fleet could simultaneously host vessels in which tolerance was non-existent, and tight communal policing firmly in place, and a notorious ‘man f–ing ship’ like HMS Africaine, where the trial records make it look like many of the men and young gentlemen did little else but have sex with each other, everywhere, and at all times of the day and night.
Even for the historian who is not specifically studying sexual relationships, the sources in this book can be a gold mine of information on the lives of naval sailors, in all their disparate forms: on what they ate, how they socialized, what languages they spoke and how they related to each other. And, very often, we also get a vivid, concrete sense of the physical existence aboard a ship – perhaps, this time, any ship. Many of the trials, for example, revolved around the question of whether the witnesses had had sufficient light to identify the defendants conclusively. What emerges is a distinct image of a world that, at night, with all lights extinguished, turned into absolute and utter darkness. The wealth of detail, in short, allows us to tease out both differences and patterns.
It is in this respect, wearing my social historian hat, that I find the only slight matter of regret while reading the collection. The sources presented here set public representation and printed materials alongside internal naval documents. As a result, it is not always clear whether the topic under consideration is the lives and beliefs of sailors or the ways in which these were depicted in the press, often by partially or ill-informed writers. Both subjects are interesting and important, but somewhat different from each other, and they do not necessarily lead to the same conclusions. Of course, there was no neat segregation between cultures and mores aboard and ashore. The tension between manuscript and printed sources, too, has perhaps been overly contentious in naval historiography: it goes without saying that manuscript narratives do not simply reflect ‘the Truth’. Yet, at times here, the use of printed materials seems to add little to our knowledge of the events and the individuals directly concerned; in one example in particular – the trial of William Renwick – the court-martial record, while available, is left out altogether in preference to three newspaper extracts, and perhaps could have accompanied it instead (371–4). Many of the printed sources reproduced in the collection are illuminating, but some, such as Roderick Random or Edward Hawker's Statement, are very readily accessible elsewhere. Others, like the long pornographic extract from Fanny Hill or the sources reporting the episode of Captain Edward Rigby attempting to seduce a young man in a tavern, seem somewhat tangentially relevant to the theme under discussion. Conversely, as James Davey's recent work brilliantly illustrates, there are few sources that can help us to reconstruct seamen's experiences and voices as vividly and richly as court-martial transcripts. 7 Some were published by John Byrn in a 2009 Navy Records Society volume, and a few others by Burg, but, particularly for scholars not based in the United Kingdom, it might have been useful to have an accessible edition of yet more of these manuscripts. 8 As LeJacq's very helpful appendix illustrates, the list is long and tantalizing. Handling them with all the caution owed to judicial sources, they continue to beckon the historian as the main, still largely untapped, dish – to which newspaper cuttings may occasionally appear to serve as poorer side servings.
The counterpoint to this is that a variety of sources, from within and without the maritime world, can present a better-rounded taster of what is available, and offers a particularly useful catalogue for students. It shows, most starkly, that even a topic that is supposedly shrouded in secrecy and shame has left a vast and diverse documentary record for the historian who is armed with the skill and creativity to dig it out. LeJacq's work on this volume amply demonstrates that he was the person for the job; a monograph about his research, if one is in the works, will be another fantastic addition to the field.
University of Cambridge, UK
This book will be welcome reading for anyone interested in histories of sexuality, gender and maritime history, as well as those interested in civil and maritime law. As a historian who studies court-martial records from the later Victorian period and twentieth century, I am impressed not only by the cases Seth Stein LeJacq has organized in this compendium, but also by the rationale for sharing the historical record directly with readers, who now can navigate both contemporary official and press sources.
LeJacq's research has illuminated the intricate dynamics of maritime life and brought naval history into broader discourse among scholars of sexuality, medicine and gender. His earlier scholarship highlighted that same-sex intimacies were more common than previously acknowledged in naval social history. 10 He also showed that disciplinary procedures towards sodomitical acts varied significantly from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, compared to earlier research that emphasized either the rarity of sodomy trials or the likely executions that resulted from these trials. His contributions as a historian of medicine are noteworthy for analysing how medical forensics and the testimony of naval surgeons, in particular, influenced the outcomes of naval trials. 11 While navigating Admiralty records from any period can be challenging, LeJacq's latest project bridges this gap by directly presenting to the reader excerpts from early naval trial records involving sodomitical acts. Additionally, he includes selections from non-Admiralty sources, such as popular literature, pamphlets and periodicals.
Organized chronologically, the book is divided into thematic sections that highlight recurring themes across a wide range of naval trials related to sex and gender. Such a focus orients the reader to understand wider historiographical motifs that suggest opportunities for re-examination. LeJacq's editorial notes at the beginning of each section and document provide valuable context for understanding the cases and their implications for those on trial. For instance, the thematic section on tolerance and punishment demonstrates the varying degrees to which sodomitical acts were tolerated among sailors and officers, highlighting the privileged position of officers accused of, or implicated in, such acts. Another section, entitled ‘Queer Tars’, provides a selection of cases whose testimonies come from a range of witnesses and defendants, revealing queer identities in formation.
Despite the promise of such thematic organization, the chronological logic and thematic cohesion of these sections begins to unravel towards the end, particularly in the final section focused on the Victorian navy, which lacks clear explanation of its key themes. The book is strongest in providing cases before the Crimean War and before the 1861 Naval Discipline Act. Exploring cases that responded to subsequent changes to the 1861 Act or the 1889 Act that followed national criminal reforms would provide further insight into the changing dynamics of life at sea. The challenge that LeJacq acknowledges is that too few court-martial records for sodomitical trials exist in the later Victorian period, making such balanced treatment across time periods impossible.
This book excels in curating naval cases and providing supplementary texts from Admiralty files, contemporary publications and private archives. It offers a collection that alerts historians to the methodological obstacles inherent in trial records, while shedding light on the agency and gendered and queer identities of defendants accused of sodomitical crimes. Through close scrutiny of these records, one can discern that defendants brought to trial were involved in consensual encounters, coerced sexual acts, and instances potentially influenced by entrapment or blackmail.
In addition to appealing to historians of sexuality and gender, this volume provides invaluable insights for scholars of naval, maritime and social history. LeJacq notes that these trial records were preserved as precedents, reflecting Admiralty values and concerns, yet their public relevance beyond determining guilt or innocence was likely never considered by those involved in the cases. Drawing from my own work with Victorian and Edwardian files, the sources LeJacq includes in these trial folders are diverse and compelling – beyond testimonial transcripts, they encompass handwritten marginalia from the court and Admiralty, auxiliary evidence such as surgeons’ reports, subsequent Admiralty directives and correspondence from prisoners’ families. 12 LeJacq's decision to transcribe select cases makes research on sexual and gender difference more accessible, promoting ethical interrogation of how naval courts historically interpreted and administered justice regarding sodomy as defined in the Articles of War, which remained crimes in the British navy until 1999.
From the questions raised by prosecutors to the answers provided by witnesses, all these testimonies reveal glimpses into daily life aboard ships, particularly beyond naval duties. Testimonies reveal insights into how men and officers navigated ship spaces, from gun decks to officers’ quarters, and from fo’c'sles to foretops, and how they understood the passage of time from ships’ bells to the lightness in the sky. This scrutiny, in particular, can illuminate further inquiry into privacy aboard different ship types, especially considering technological shifts from wooden to steel hulls and from sail to steam propulsion. Court interrogations also detailed informal activities such as card games and clothing exchanges, and illustrate how men interacted across class, age and rank. Prosecutors often sought witness opinions not only on defendants’ whereabouts but also on their character, further revealing the attitudes and norms of shipmates and officers.
This collection of primary sources is so rich that singling out a particular case or theme proves difficult; each set of documents invites deeper exploration. The cases and publications shared by LeJacq suggest that same-sex intimacies were not only condemned as immoral, but also rationalized due to both the absence and prevalence of women aboard ships. For instance, a reported 1742 case of buggery aboard the Princess Amelia resulted in public lashings for the two offenders, allegedly administered by women aboard the ship (30–1). By 1821, Captain Edward Hawker had anonymously argued that enabling female sex workers aboard ship only propagated same sex relations because, when ‘our ships continue to be brothels at sea, as well as in port, the danger of unnatural crimes, will be increased' (215–7). Although naval trials for the later Victorian period are scarce, LeJacq’s work prompts further investigation into Admiralty efforts to manage men's sexual behaviours both at sea and ashore, and the increasing reliance on medical surveillance. By the 1860s, the passage of the Contagious Diseases Acts aimed to regulate the health of women suspected of prostitution in garrison towns and port cities in order to better promote the health of soldiers and sailors, reflecting evolving military and naval concerns correlating health with efficiency. The moral campaigner Josephine Butler argued against these Acts not only because they demoralized women, but also because they would not curb venereal disease: men would simply continue to ‘infect each other’, she argued, citing a case where 70 men who had not ‘seen the face of a woman for more than a year’ had acquired a venereal disease. 13
LeJacq's accounts highlight the pivotal roles that medical evidence and surgeons played in these cases, which could lead to conviction or potential exoneration. In the 1811 trial of Marine James Parker of HMS Niemen, who was accused of raping a 15-year-old ship's boy (45–65), the surgeon's examination of the boy suggested that penetrative sex had possibly occurred, the boy having testified in his presence that he had been sexually assaulted by the prisoner. Despite the wavering testimony of the surgeon and the court noting that there was a lack of ‘evidence of emission in the body, but only upon him’, the court convicted Parker of sodomy. Within months, the findings were overturned upon Admiralty review because of the improper influence of the surgeon's circumstantial testimony.
LeJacq’s inclusion of such cases underscores the need for further research into sexual violence aboard ships, particularly involving younger crew members. Prisoners’ defence strategies often depicted younger victims as resentful accusers, prone to fabricating charges against their superiors, which contributed to Admiralty concerns about potential entrapment and blackmail. These fears were articulated by naval jurists like John McArthur, who in 1813 warned of the risk of false charges, stressed the importance of prosecuting offenders regardless of the accusers’ ages, and emphasized the gravity of sodomy allegations.
This remarkable collection offers a diverse and dynamic range of sources that should be of interest to readers who want to learn more about the histories of gender, sexualities and law within and beyond the scope of British maritime history. This is a book that will remain within reach on my bookshelf as a comparative reference source for my study of later trials. While rich, the archive also conceals as much as it reveals. There is much to be gleaned about the limits of Admiralty records and the insights possible through studying gaps and omissions in the records. It would also be fitting if LeJacq's model could inspire historians to publish their own curated collections of compelling research files to foster collaborative study.
College of the Holy Cross, USA
Reading about sex and gender in the British navy from Australia is less odd than it might seem. Even today, 87 per cent of the Australian population is within 50 kilometres of the sea; its state capital cities began life as ports; its colonial history began with the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788; and the first four governors were navy men. On the 17,000-kilometre voyages they had taken, Arthur Philip, John Hunter, Philip Gidley King and William Bligh had surely become aware of all the intimate relationships that could occur. They had possibly turned a blind eye to the kind of sexuality the Admiralty abhorred, as well as glimpsed possibilities beyond heteronormativity.
Up to the Second World War, Australia was protected by the British navy. That vast institution, in ruling the waves, provided a bulwark against the much-feared threat from the Near North. In the nineteenth century, the colonies had little or nothing by way of warships of their own. And, when Commonwealth and colonial navies were built, Australia's relied on the British navy’s rules, regulations and hegemonic moral culture to govern its operations, including its treatment of all who laboured within and without its extensive wooden walls. Such regulation created contradictions, which came to a head in 1942 when a stoker, Jack Riley, was brutally murdered by two other stokers on the flagship of the Royal Australian Navy, HMAS Australia, in the Coral Sea. He claimed, on his deathbed, that his murderers were in a homosexual relationship. The murderers were condemned to death by the British authorities (the Royal Australian Navy and its crews were controlled by the United Kingdom during the War). This provoked a constitutional crisis, as the Australia government insisted on asserting its national sovereignty. 15
The sea was Australia's link to the world for the movement of goods and people. And while those links were various, they were, for much of the past 200 plus years, focused on Britain. The history of the British navy in the nineteenth century, which this book reveals, is therefore of immediate significance to Australia during this period. And, as in Britain, queer history is thriving, including queer maritime history. This book implicitly points to a number of questions that need to be tackled in Australian naval and/or queer histories. We have some evidence of the ways in which the long journeys on merchant vessels provided space for relationships to develop. The Reverend William Yate, travelling in the 1830s from Britain to New Zealand, attracted adverse comments from his fellow passengers for his overly familiar relationship with Third Mate Edwin Denison – to the point of them sharing a hammock (the relationship endured even after the dismissed missionary's return to England). 16 Assisted immigrant ‘housemaid’ Ellen Tremayne arrived by the Ocean Monarch in 1856 and almost immediately adopted a male persona – Edward De Lacy Evans – and married a fellow shipmate, the governess Mary Delahunty. 17
LeJacq's book is a remarkable compilation of legislation, trial records, newspaper reports, pamphlets and personal letters, from obscure and isolated cases through to great national scandals. It reveals a seaborne world as complex as the terrestrial, which is, after all, where it has its roots, but from which it diverged too. LeJacq's records show just how extensive same-sex behaviour was on board. It is difficult to imagine that this was less common on voyages to Australia, and work needs to be done to find evidence.
The fact that the British navy was governed by law codes and practices (necessarily adapted to the needs of the seagoing communities), with trials, evidence and jurisprudential debates – and that it kept records of all these – means that we have remarkable access to the voices of sodomites and gender-diverse people, their friends and their enemies. We have information on sexual acts: oral sex is notably absent; anal sex and masturbation seem to be the norm. We have access to the rich vocabulary of the authorities and of ordinary men, and, very occasionally, women. I counted about 20 words used to describe acts and body parts. Most of these are still in use today: arse, arsehole, fuck, prick and bum. Others are more obscure: punk, to roger and fundament. Some I had never heard of: pego and backdoor man. There is work here into which lexicographers can sink their teeth.
LeJacq provides useful introductions to the chapters and documents, drawing our attention to the existence of sodomitical shipboard communities and the role of class in shaping who was charged with what and how they were sentenced. Officers and ordinary crew almost always received very different treatment for the same acts. But, for me, the most important work this volume does is to provide evidence of what sodomites thought about themselves. Some of what is revealed was known, but in the context of longer documents, these ideas are opened up to a greater appreciation. While the authorities are driven by their concerns about nature, reason and God, and the importance of exemplary punishment to discourage others, some sodomites saw the world differently. Attempting to seduce William Minton, Captain Edward Rigby of HMS Dragon assured him that such acts were well known to great men – the French King, the Czar of Muscovy, and even Christ and St John, the ‘handsome apostle’. This was a justification that homosexuals were still using in the mid twentieth century.
In 1809 on HMS Jamaica, the surgeon James Nehemiah Taylor, condemned to death and repenting his past, recalled that he used to believe that ‘he had a right to do with himself as he pleased’ (268). He described how he found support for his desires in France and the Mediterranean, where sodomy was not a crime, and claimed the offence was much more common than people believed and that there was even ‘a society formed for the practice of it’ (270). Reflecting on the Taylor scandal and writing in his diary the following year, a farmer, Matthew Tomlinson, toyed with the idea that the desire was God-given – either natural or as a defect – and, in either case, death seemed too harsh a penalty (274; he was not himself of that persuasion).
These insights into what individuals thought, and what they surely must have shared with others, give us ways of encompassing the richness of British society. And they offer much to Australian historians of sodomy. While Captain Arthur Phillip was preparing his First Fleet to bring hundreds of convicts to New South Wales in 1787, he declared that there were only two crimes that he thought deserved death – murder and sodomy. Given the hundreds of capital crimes, this was a remarkably liberal view – and it is certain that he never executed any sodomites. 18
Phillip probably reflects a growing tolerance around the problem of crime and punishment in England at the time that LeJacq's collection reveals: although the last application of the death penalty in Britain occurred in 1835, convictions continued in a series of statistical spikes over the following decades (and in the Australian colony of Tasmania, the last execution for sodomy was in 1867). But, in the wake of the great scandals, there were often debates about the severity of penalties and the sloppy application of judicial procedure displayed by the officer-juries in their judgements.
LeJacq has done a remarkable job in identifying and transcribing these documents; it is striking how rarely ‘[illegible]’ appears. The editorial headnotes are succinct but thorough. Read alongside the work of Rictor Norton, the listings of Peter de Waal for Australia and the digitization of Australian newspapers by the National Library of Australia, 19 among others, we can get close to really understanding sodomite lives and times for this period. If there is a complaint, it is the cost of the volume – a complaint, of course, properly directed to the publishers rather than LeJacq.
University of Melbourne, Australia
A response: The queer Age of Sail
It is a privilege to have this book reviewed by such a distinguished group of scholars. One of my greatest hopes for this volume was for it to catalyse further scholarly discussion of, and research into, queer maritime history. These generous reviews show how rich this area of study has become, bringing together a wide range of relevant historiographies and pointing towards many promising avenues for future research. When it came to the queer history of Britain's navy in the Age of Sail, it was once a truism that few primary sources existed and that serious research into the topic was therefore impossible. Some wondered whether there even was any queer history of which to speak. I collected the body of sources contained in this book – only a small sample of what is available – in order to challenge that perception and suggest new directions for teaching, research and creative work that deals with queer seafarers. These reviews point the way towards yet more sources, questions and scholarly literatures that will further enrich our understanding of sex, gender and the sea.
As Sara Caputo notes, there is now a long tradition of studying both male same-sex relationships at sea, particularly in Britain's navy, and maritime gender history. The historiography of male homosexuality in the navy has relied chiefly on court-martial records, and accordingly has been preoccupied with regulation and punishment. Arthur Gilbert pioneered academic research into the navy's sodomy trials in the 1970s, which was part of the early wave of gay history that emerged in the wake of post-Wolfenden Report reforms in Britain, the Stonewall Uprising and the rise of the modern gay rights movement. 21 As is true of much of the gay history written in that period and since, his focus in his influential series of articles is on condemnation, policing and punishment. He concludes that the navy and its sailors nourished a special hatred of same-sex intimacy – a view that has powerfully shaped historians’ understanding of this topic.
Early maritime gender history often focused in particular on cisgender women at sea, working to establish the presence and importance of women on ships and in seagoing communities. 22 Despite flourishing queer historiographies exploring women's sexualities, these studies generally do not investigate topics such as same-sex erotic relationships between women. We still have a great deal to learn about queer women in the Age of Sail. More recently, historians have applied approaches from the study of masculinities to investigate cisgender male sailors. Sex and sexuality are important topics in this literature, although they also require much further research. Oddly, this historiography has generally skirted serious engagement with queer history and theory, and the historiographical tradition that began with Gilbert and was further developed by the work of B. R. Burg. There are important exceptions, including the work of Mary Conley and Isaac Land, but most work on maritime masculinities has not reckoned with queer history or the deep cultural connections that bind sailors and queerness in popular media and historical memory. 23 For instance, the recent collection Negotiating Masculinities and Modernity in the Maritime World is an essential contribution to this literature. But it is surprising that the essays it collects have little to say about sex and less still about queer history. 24
In her review, Jo Stanley suggests several ways to develop these literatures. She argues for the value of categories such as GSRD for helping us to understand the lives that many sailors lived. Insights from the study of practices such as polyamory and polygamy may be useful in investigating the romantic and sexual lives of highly mobile people who, famously, had a partner in every port. Stanley alludes to right-wing complaints about the National Maritime Museum's queer history programming, which included queer perspectives on figures such as Horatio Nelson. 25 Applying that lens to such a cherished icon may produce discomfort for some, but GSRD and polyamorous perspectives unquestionably fit the good admiral. While he neglected his wife back in England, Nelson carried on a very public affair with his patron's younger wife, Emma Hamilton. The three travelled and lived together, and Hamilton gave birth to her and Nelson's daughter while her husband was still alive. Nelson and Hamilton denied they were the parents, and they also named the child Horatia. Using modern concepts such as ‘throuple’ is, of course, anachronistic, but certainly this behaviour did not fit official norms around sex, marriage and reproduction. How close it was to the practical norms for sailors, officers and celebrities is another question, and one that scholars should be free to examine. 26
Trans history and theory also promise to develop our understanding of gender and sex on ships and in maritime communities. Gender was hardly fixed or immutable in the Age of Sail, either in theory or in practice. Early modern medicine, for example, saw bodies as highly mutable; the humoral system could allow for dramatic bodily change. And early modern societies recognized and had categories for people who did not neatly fit any simple gender binary. While modern transgender identities were not available to people that long ago, practices of transing gender certainly existed and sometimes flourished, as in the large number of surviving stories (fictional and supposedly factual) of people who had lived as girls or women but took up male gender identities to go to sea. 27
Traditionally, maritime gender history did not approach this sort of evidence from trans perspectives, but more recent work, such as the portion of Jen Manion's Female Husbands devoted to seafarers who transed gender, shows the value of doing so. 28 Certainly, many sailors transed gender. One navy sailor faced trial in 1783 for dressing in women's clothing, allegedly for the purpose of deserting from his ship. Two decades later, the sailor William Morris also faced desertion charges and offered the defence that they were neither male nor female, and therefore not subject to the navy's regulations (125–31). 29 Sailors transed gender in many different ways and for many different reasons. Trans theory and research methodologies will help researchers document and understand them.
These different theoretical approaches can also be valuable for expanding the study of sex work at sea. The growing literature on ports and sailortowns has highlighted the importance of sex work in the lives of many women in, and to the economies of, seafaring communities. The general contours of the practices of commercial sex on ships and at sea are also well known now, although this topic still awaits more detailed study. Historians have almost entirely overlooked practices of male sex work in these settings, despite there being abundant evidence of it and research on male sex work in other parts of the British armed forces. 30 One important exception is the work of Burg, who has reported evidence of male transactional and survival sex in both the British and American navies. 31 But we still have a great deal to learn about male sex work both on land and at sea. Maritime records can be a key body of sources for this research. I included pre-trial statements from the HMS Africaine scandal of 1815–1816 in this collection. In this case, the naval authorities came to believe that dozens of members of the ship's crew were involved in a same-sex subculture in which sailors routinely paid for sex – with food, clothing, alcohol, chores and more. Evidence from throughout the naval archive, including other documents in the collection, suggests that such practices were well known or even common at sea.
In British maritime and military historiography, sex work and sexual disease are closely associated. The Victorian Contagious Diseases Acts targeted female sex workers in port cities and military towns – at ‘certain Naval and Military Stations’, as the full title of the legislation put it. Research such as N. A. M. Rodger's investigation of Seven Years War-era ships’ paybooks has established that there was truth to the stereotype of the ‘poxy sailor’. Venereal disease was at an epidemic level in pre-antibiotic Britain, and rates were often high on individual ships. 32
The historical study of same-sex transmission of sexual disease in the Age of Sail is still in its infancy, but this, too, is a promising avenue for research. It is clear from navy sodomy trials, for instance, that shipmates sometimes passed sexual diseases on to each other. On ships like the Africaine, with same-sex subcultures, diseases could spread even more widely through the crew. The medical providers’ discomfort with the issue stifled open discussion of it, and may have driven the misapprehension that men could not, or were less likely to, infect each other. In the Captain Edward Rigby scandal of 1698, the public learned that Rigby had tried to seduce another man by reminding him that women were no longer safe partners: ‘they were all poxt’, he argued. It was better to enjoy the safety – and great pleasure – of another man. A few years later, two sailors on HMS York were reported to have discussed the same idea. One explained that he ‘was afraid to lay with any women, they were all so poxed of late’. The other agreed that ‘it was much better to lay with one another’, and insisted ‘in plain terms’ that it was better for men to ‘fuck one another’ (222). 33
Conley calls for greater attention to sexual violence, especially against young crew members – something she has explored in the Edwardian navy. 34 Sodomy trials naturally raise the question of coercion and sexual violence. Most sex-crime trials in the early modern and Victorian periods, whatever the genders of those involved, included allegations of unwanted sexual activity. Rape, sexual assault and sodomy trials also frequently centred on allegations of acts committed against young people – boys, girls and adolescents. The British navy's sex-crime trials follow this general pattern: roughly 60 per cent of them dealt with cases in which adult men were accused of sexual activity with boys or adolescents while at sea. Burg's book on the trials observes this pattern and is named after it – Boys at Sea. Yet his account does little to develop this evidence and research into the navy's judicial archive within the history of male sexual violence. More than a decade ago, a leading historian of rape, Garthine Walker, observed that ‘the history of male rape is yet to be written’. 35 This observation still holds today. Maritime history can be an important site for exploring it, not least because of the scope of the navy's judicial archives.
These judicial archives tell us relatively little about sexual violence against girls and women. There is no question that it occurred at sea, but the navy only used its courts to police such sexual crimes on rare occasions. Yet the search for queer history sources does uncover valuable examples for the study of this sort of sexual violence as well. In 1813, a midshipman on the Solebay, Joseph Sheppard, was punished harshly after he was found guilty of sexually assaulting young Charlotte Romney, the daughter of his captain's coxswain, causing serious injury and infecting her with a venereal disease. Despite strong evidence that would have warranted it, however, the officials involved chose not to charge Sheppard with the capital crime of felony rape. 36 Two decades later, Captain Isham Fleming Chapman was found guilty of, inter alia, purchasing an enslaved woman in Zanzibar ‘for the purposes of prostitution’. 37 He was one of a group of officers in this era who were reprimanded for trafficking sex workers, female prisoners, women of colour and even enslaved people in this way. These are isolated examples, which give us only a limited view of coercion and violence of this sort. In an odd irony, same-sex relationships and sexual violence are much better documented than opposite-sex ones. However, this sort of evidence, along with other scattered material such as sailor-diarist Edward Barlow's concealed rape confession, can allow deeper study of this painful history. 38
Bringing intersectional analysis to this research is essential, as Stanley notes. Racial, ethnic, linguistic, religious and other forms of difference mattered a great deal to life at sea. Caputo's valuable recent book on foreign sailors in the British navy shows this clearly. 39 Attending to education, disability, race and more helps us to understand the workings of sex and gender in these communities, and efforts to regulate them. As documents in the collection show, Othered men were heavily over-represented among those who faced trial and punishment for ‘unnatural’ sexual behaviour. This is not surprising. Popular stereotypes held that same-sex desire and activity were the vices of various others – Catholics, the French and southern Europeans, supposedly primitive and savage peoples.
In the Africaine scandal, the men targeted as the ringleaders hailed from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a population understood as radically different from – and inferior to – the English. In many other cases, it was men of colour, non-native English speakers (or those who could not speak English at all) and others who did not fit the mould of the hardy, white, English Jack Tar who faced policing. And difference could operate in surprising ways. Claims of what we today would see as developmental disabilities or cognitive impairments became a way to argue for leniency in bestiality cases, for instance. When a marine from HMS Rippon was sentenced to death for sex with a goat in 1758, a naval chaplain pleaded for mercy. He wrote to the Admiralty that the unfortunate man was ‘the most illiterate, ignorant, stupid young fellow … being unfortunately deprived of all natural capacity and next to an idiot’ (124–25). 40 George II accordingly pardoned him. Others attempted the same sort of argument as well, as the surviving files of Home Office criminal petitions reveal. Cases like the marine's significantly predate the period normally associated with the medicalization of unauthorized sexual behaviour, but they show that medicine and what we would today identify as disability were already resources for explaining, and indeed forgiving, sexual crimes.
As Graham Willett observes, it makes sense to consider this British naval history from the perspective of many other parts of the world, including Australia. Sailors serving in Britain's navy travelled the globe; they were among the most mobile people of their time, and they brought their sexual cultures with them and into contact with a wide variety of others. 41 The Empire also spread British attitudes and English criminal law widely, profoundly shaping the treatment of categories such as sodomy around the world. As for Australia, William Bligh was indeed linked to sexual misconduct, not least by way of the embarrassing naval trial of one of his followers, Peter Mills, in 1806, just months before Bligh took up the governorship of New South Wales. 42 And there were other direct links between the British policing of sexual behaviour and Australia, including the transportation of military and civilian convicts who had been found guilty under English sodomy law.
As English courts stopped executing men for felony sodomy in the 1830s, transportation remained one of the harshest penalties available for those who were sentenced to ‘death recorded’ and then automatically saw their punishments reduced. More generally, a close study of sexuality among seafarers is essential for developing deeper understandings of encounters and interactions between individuals and different sexual cultures. And comparative research offers one route to addressing the paucity of sources for some maritime settings. Stanley observes that there are precious few queer history sources that survive from the British merchant marine, for example. But the navy can still help us understand merchant vessels as well. Sailors frequently moved between naval and merchant berths. Morris, the non-binary sailor put on trial in 1803, escaped the navy for a privateer, and their story of transing gender gives insight into gender performance on that vessel as well.
In different ways, several of these reviews question my categories of analysis and organization, as well as my source selection. These are valuable critiques, and they remind us that such selections are always fraught in the history of sexuality. Our understanding of actors’ categories, especially ordinary people’s, is still limited. Making more of the queer archive publicly available will help remedy that, as will further scholarly discussion of this sort. Conley’s and Caputo's critiques of my organizational approach, particularly in the closing section, are well taken. Despite Conley's research, the queer history of the Victorian navy is still terra incognita. This is not for a lack of sources, however. Just like Caputo, I too would cherish a publication on the full run of sodomy trials – or even just the surviving Victorian ones. Yet that is far too much material for a single volume or a single transcriber and editor. The loss of most of the Victorian sodomy trials is a serious obstacle, but not an insurmountable one. As John McCurdy's new microhistory shows, even a single case can illuminate widely. 43 We can see the world in a grain of sand, as it were. I hope that this volume will inspire researchers to plumb this history as well, and that it will help them as they do so.
A theme running through the reviews is the extraordinary richness of the British navy's judicial archive. It is a remarkable collection, comparable to the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, whose digitization and open public availability has transformed research and teaching in social history. 44 It has had a profound effect on queer history, as have online sourcebooks like Rictor Norton's, which Willett cites. 45 But as Stanley observes, the naval archive is forbidding, inaccessible and difficult to work with. One purpose of this volume is to provide students and scholars with a guide to these queer history materials so that they can consult them without developing deep knowledge of the naval archive. Only work to preserve and make these records broadly accessible will bring them to a wide audience, however. A large-scale transcription and digitization project would unlock a vast body of sources, much like the Old Bailey project has done. It would be another great achievement of public history.
It is clear that this history matters a great deal to the public. Caputo points out that queer maritime history plays an important role in historical memory, sea stories, fiction about the Age of Sail and, more recently, museum exhibits as well. In my years collecting this material and conducting this research, I have been contacted not only by many academics but also by many outside of the academy – history enthusiasts, novelists, members of fan communities and queer people interested in their own history. The sea has been a key space for remembering and imagining queer pasts. And as these reviews show, the maritime history of gender and sexuality is a thriving subfield. It offers us, as maritime historians, many opportunities for vital contributions to scholarly and popular discourses.
Hunter College, City University of New York, USA
