discharged many prisoners who had been captured in Havana onto a place called Belle Island. Perhaps Maria was retained from the group and Dido conceived at this time, the association inspiring the name Belle.
But this is speculation. All we know for sure is that the encounter between Captain Lindsay and Maria was the beginning of Dido’s story. There is evidence that Dido was about five years old late in the year 1766. This would suggest a date of birth before the siege of the castle of Morro and the surrender of Havana, and strongly suggests that Dido was conceived in the captain’s cabin aboard the Trent.
Maria appears to have remained on board the Trent until the summer of 1763, when the vessel returned to England and was decommissioned.7 Lord Mansfield was later reported as saying that the negro woman was with child when the ship returned home, and that Dido was born in England, but a later Murray–Mansfield family tradition has it that she was born at sea. Unlikely as it may now seem, it was not uncommon for wives, mistresses and even babies to be present on Royal Navy warships in the eighteenth century.
Captain Lindsay would have possessed a well-thumbed copy of the Regulations and Instructions relating to His Majesty’s Service at Sea. Article XXXVIII of the rules for the captain or commander clearly stated that ‘He is not to carry Women to Sea, nor to entertain any Foreigners to serve in the Ship, who are Officers or Gentlemen, without Orders from the Admiralty.’8 The official navy line was that wives could come on board when a ship was in port, but not go to sea. Prior to the Battle of Trafalgar, when the ship of the line HMS Prince was in dock in Portsmouth, one eyewitness reported that 450 women came on board, but that only fifty were actually wives of sailors serving on the ship. In other words, wives, girlfriends and an abundance of prostitutes would pile on board when a ship was at anchor, and there would be an orgy of drunkenness and debauchery. Once the crew’s needs had been satisfied in this way, the women were all supposed to be removed.
But the reality was that the rule against seagoing women was very often relaxed, especially for the wives of captains and officers.9 Estimates vary as to the numbers of women actually at sea with the fleet, but there is ample anecdotal evidence of their presence aboard in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One has only to consider the novels of one of English literature’s most navally connected novelists, Jane Austen.
Her brother, Captain Charles Austen, took his wife Fanny and their three children to live aboard his ship, the Namur. Fanny Austen’s surviving letters describe her making clothes for her little girls, reading in the ship’s library, and attending the ship’s theatre. Whenever she spent time ashore she was anxious to get back to her ‘home’ on board, ‘however uncomfortable that home may be’.10 One of her daughters suffered from sea sickness, and Fanny discussed the possibility of leaving her to be raised by her aunt Jane, but in the end decided that the family should stay together on board ship.
In Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion there is a long discussion about the suitability of women living aboard ship. Captain Wentworth’s old-fashioned belief that a ship is no place for a woman is given short shrift by his sister, Mrs Croft, who is married to an admiral and has lived aboard five vessels, including a battleship. ‘Women may be as comfortable on board, as in the best house in England,’ she says. ‘I believe I have lived as much on board as most women, and I know nothing superior to the accommodation of a man of war.’ She has crossed the Atlantic four times, and says that ‘the happiest part of my life has been spent on board a ship’.11
Despite Mrs Croft’s protestations, life on board a man-of-war was hard for the wife of a sailor, even a captain. She had to share her husband’s hammock or bunk, and his daily ration of salted beef, dried peas, hardtack and cheese. She also had to try to stay out of the way of the ship’s daily activities. Outside the captain’s cabin, privacy was in short supply on a ship that might carry four hundred sailors and marines.
Childbirth at sea was not unknown, and sometimes a ship’s guns would be fired to hasten a difficult birth – a practice that gave rise to the saying ‘a son of a gun’. During the Napoleonic Wars, Captain Glascock of the Royal Navy wrote: ‘This day the surgeon informed me that a woman on board had been labouring in childbirth for twelve hours, and if I could see my way to permit the firing of a broadside to leeward, nature would be assisted by the shock. I complied with the request, and she was delivered of a fine male child.’12 Fanny Austen gave birth to her fourth child on board the Namur, but tragically she died two weeks later, as did the baby. The Austen family lamented that she had not been removed to land sooner.
There are even records of women assisting aboard a ship in battle, attending the wounded or carrying gunpowder.13 Maria the liberated slave may have tended to the wounded during the siege of Morro castle as well as tending to the sexual and domestic needs of Captain Lindsay. At the end of the war he appears to have avoided getting into any trouble for bringing her back to England. And when he returned to sea, he left behind an extraordinary arrangement for the care of his ‘mulatto’ daughter.
3. ‘The Abolition of the Slave Trade’: caricature by Isaac Cruikshank of a slave woman being lashed aboard ship
The handsome Royal Navy captain with aristocratic blood in his veins takes his prize, an African slave. Like thousands of other slaves, the terrified woman had been branded with the initials of her former owner. Now, though, she belongs to Captain Lindsay. She knows what to expect: rape and further servitude. Never could she have dreamed that the encounter would bring into the world a daughter who would influence the course of history. Like those of thousands of other women who were taken from Africa and sold into slavery Maria’s inner life is unknown to us. We cannot know her, but it is possible to reconstruct the kind of life she lived before being taken aboard the Trent.
The enforced removal of Africans as a labour force to work the West Indian sugar plantations was conducted via the slave ship. It has been estimated that through the long history of the slave trade some twelve million Africans were loaded and transported onto Atlantic slave vessels.1 Sometimes known as a ‘Guineaman’, the slave ship is the enduring symbol of the horrors of the transatlantic trade, a floating dungeon whose stench could be smelt from miles away, its wake trailed by dead-eyed sharks awaiting their prey. Cabin boy Samuel Robinson, aboard a slaver in 1800, was terrified by the sight of these predators, and the knowledge of what would happen to anyone unfortunate enough to go overboard: ‘The very sight of him slowly moving around the ship, with his black fin two feet above the water, his broad snout and small eyes, and the altogether villainous look of the fellow, make one shiver, even when at a safe distance.’2
Before they set eyes on the ocean the Africans had been captured, marched in ‘coffles’, chained together, and sold at market. Many were bought and sold several times along the way to the coast. The process was brutal and degrading. Families were torn apart, and the captives prodded and poked like animals, assessed for their value and given a price. ‘Vendue’ (sale) masters knew what they were looking for: good teeth, clear eyes, strong limbs, full height and no obvious signs of disease. Women who were ‘long-breasted’ were passed over, since this was taken to be an indication of age.3 Bellies were checked for evidence of pregnancy.
Slave
