Cover blurb

`A lively and intelligent study, not just of the diverse (and, by historians, largely unnoticed) roles of women in the British Navy, but of the broader question of morals and mores in Hanoverian England.'
John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph

The presence of women on board the ships of the Royal Navy in the Age of Sail has been disregarded by historians and ignored and even hidden by the navy. Suzanne Stark is the first to seriously address the issue of female 'tars', and here she presents an in-depth study of the women who lived and worked on British warships of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Stark thoroughly investigates the custom of allowing prostitutes to live with the crews of warships in port and why the Royal Navy unofficially condoned the practice. She offers revealing accounts of the wives of warrant officers and seamen who spent years at sea living — and fighting — beside their men without pay or even food rations, and of the women in male disguise who actually served as seamen or marines. Stark disentangles fact from fiction and explains such perplexing phenomena as the willingness of women to join the navy when most of the men had to be forced on board by press gangs. The final chapter is devoted to the autobiography of one redoubtable seagoing woman: Mary Lacy, who served as a seaman and shipwright in the Royal Navy for twelve years.

`The first comprehensive and thoroughly documented study of a side of naval history which, even today, orthodox official hypocrisy would prefer to expunge from the record....A gripping read.'
Alan Cameron, Lloyd's List

`Suzanne Stark's book has told me many, many things that I did not know, and I shall keep it on an honoured shelf.'
Patrick O'Brian

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