AUS-NSW-SURNAMES-L Archives

From: "Janet Flemming" <>
Subject: 'The Floating Brothel': Ship of Floozies (Juliana/Julian) 1789
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 17:53:08 +1100

Hi listers,
For those who had ancestors on the LADY JULIANA the book is available at Big
W stores for $18.66 as opposed to rrp $27.95...recently purchased a copy and
is a great read. Also there are 24 pages on display at amazon.com so
check it out....! Below is review information.... Janet

> The Floating Brothel
> By Sian Rees
>
> Among the second fleet of ships bringing British convicts to a new
> prison colony in New South Wales (later, Australia) was a ship
> "freighted with fertile female convicts who were to populate the
> fledgling settlement," as Sara Wheeler describes it in her review of
> "The Floating Brothel." Wheeler, the author of "Terra Incognita," writes
> that Sian Rees's book tells the "story of the women who traveled on this
> vessel: the quirks of fate that decided their exile, their 13,000-mile
> voyage and their reception in the stuttering colony."
>
> Wheeler calls the book "a vivid portrait of a corner of the 18th
> century," including "scenes of London lowlife" and later, evocations of
> life at sea. Wheeler also describes how "men from other vessels were
> rowed out for sexual commerce," which was how the ship came to be known
> as "the floating brothel."
> "The paucity of source material inevitably weakens the story," writes
> Wheeler, but "Rees fleshes out the skeletal story line with plenty of
> imaginative re-creation, and over all she makes the book work, largely
> because even the bones of this exotic tale are gripping."
>
> Read the Review
> March 17, 2002
> 'The Floating Brothel': Ship of Floozies
> By SARA WHEELER
>
> ore than two centuries ago, when America was a colony, it provided a
> convenient dumping ground for British convicts. But by 1783 a cowed and
> defeated Britain had to find somewhere else to send its undesirables.
> After several unsuccessful attempts in Africa, the government in London
> decided on New South Wales (the continent was not yet named Australia),
> and an advance party of just over a thousand people was duly dispatched
> in 1787.
>
> This first fleet named its landing place Sydney Cove. Disease was soon
> endemic, and the relief the settlers expected from Britain did not
> arrive -- they desperately needed tools, seeds and people. At last, in
> June 1790, a second fleet of four ships sailed in from England. One was
> freighted with fertile female convicts who were to populate the
> fledgling settlement: it was the Lady Julian. In ''The Floating
> Brothel,'' Sian Rees tells the story of the women who traveled on this
> vessel: the quirks of fate that decided their exile, their 13,000-mile
> voyage and their reception in the stuttering colony.
>
> The book opens with vivid scenes of London lowlife. Rees conjures the
> squalor of three-in-a-bed boardinghouses, a world ''where people moved
> from job to job with their possessions in a box on their back, looking
> constantly for an extra sixpence a week, a warmer bed or better food.''
> The supply of prostitutes swelled when Prime Minister William Pitt
> introduced a tax on maidservants over the age of 15.
>
> Many women were sentenced to transportation for petty theft, for as Rees
> writes, ''the penal code of the late 18th century was an inadequate and
> crude instrument.'' Not all belonged to the underclass. Some were girls
> ''of good family'' seduced and betrayed by cads. Often the parents of
> these tragic girls turned up at the dockside pleading fruitlessly for
> clemency.
>
> The Lady Julian, three-masted, two-decked and excessively leaky, sailed
> down the Thames in July 1789, the week the first refugees from the
> French Revolution landed in England. More than 220 female convicts were
> on board, their ages ranging from 11 to 68. Some had infants with them,
> though children over the age of 6 were left on the quayside.
>
> The only known firsthand account of the voyage is that of 34-year-old
> John Nicol, an unlettered Scottish steward and cooper. He dictated his
> memoirs to a journalist more than 30 years after the events (they were
> reissued in 1999 as ''The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner'').
> Rees is obliged to rely heavily on Nicol's account, even though it is
> known to be inaccurate, and as a result the reader is left wanting to
> hear the women speak for themselves. The paucity of source material
> inevitably weakens the story. Speculative sentences of the ''It is
> likely'' variety slow down the narrative drive, as does a plethora of
> words and phrases like ''perhaps,'' ''probably,'' ''unguessable,'' ''we
> cannot know'' and ''we enter the realm of pure hypothesis.'' Rees
> fleshes out the skeletal story line with plenty of imaginative
> re-creation, and over all she makes the book work, largely because even
> the bones of this exotic tale are gripping.
>
> Among the convicts, Sarah Whitelam was a 19-year-old Lincolnshire lass
> convicted of stealing a haul of clothes ''with force and arms,'' a
> charge she strenuously denied. When she was rowed out to the ship, at
> anchor in the Thames, she was manacled.
>
> (In March she had traveled for 36 hours strapped to the outside seat of
> a coach, exposed to an English winter.) John Nicol was ordered to set up
> his anvil on deck and remove the chains from the prisoners. It was love
> at first sight. ''I first fixed my fancy on her,'' he said, ''the moment
> I knocked the rivet from her irons upon my anvil.'' Within a week,
> Whitelam was installed in his bunk on the 'tween deck. It was not an
> unusual arrangement: almost every man on the ship took an unofficial
> ''wife'' for the duration of the voyage. Rees expounds on the ingenious
> forms of marine contraception, but still, 12 babies were conceived on
> board.
>
> Rees does her best to evoke the flap of the sail, the feel of timbers
> beneath bare feet and the smell of the ballast, a noxious mix of sand
> and gravel impregnated with years of human waste. In the tropics,
> melting tar dripped from the seams above the women's sleeping shelves
> and burned their faces and forearms. At port, men from other vessels
> were rowed out for sexual commerce (usually it was the local prostitutes
> who were rowed out to the men), and it was this that led to the
> sobriquet, adopted much later, ''the floating brothel.''
>
> On June 2, 1790, the lookout on the South Head of Sydney Cove sighted
> the mast of the Lady Julian. The colonists were so hungry that the first
> officers on board looked past the women and asked after the cows. The
> harvest had failed, rats had overrun the stores, civil unrest lurked.
> Ninety percent of the inhabitants' diet consisted of rice wriggling with
> weevil, and six marines had been hanged for stealing food. Governor
> Arthur Phillip had begun shipping his hungry people to Norfolk Island.
>
> John Nicol Jr. had been delivered in a makeshift maternity tent on deck
> while the ship was docked in Rio. His father now begged to be allowed to
> stay in New South Wales, to work as a freeman until Whitelam's sentence
> expired and he could take her home. But the Lady Julian was under
> contract to the East India Company and had to hurry up to Canton. The
> cooper could not be spared. ''The days flew on eagles' wings,'' he wrote
> of the brief period the pair enjoyed together at Sydney Cove. ''We
> dreaded the hour of separation.''
>
> On July 25, 1790, Nicol sailed away, and the next day his betrothed
> married another. Such is love. Nicol spent the rest of his life trying
> to find his way back to Sarah Whitelam, but he never did. ''Old as I
> am,'' he said at the end of his life, ''my heart is still unchanged.''
>
> It was bold of Rees to attempt this venture, her first book, considering
> the raw materials. She is a more than able writer, and her robust, clear
> prose carries the story. Despite the difficulties, she paints a vivid
> portrait of a corner of the 18th century in which women who had stolen a
> pair of breeches to pay for their children's food were sent to the ends
> of the unknown earth. Few saw home again.
>
> Sara Wheeler's books include ''Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica''
> and ''Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard,'' which will be published
> next month.
>

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