Sex and the Sailor: Sexual Violence at Sea in the Early Modern British World, c. 1600-c. 1750

All who travelled by sea in the early modern period, regardless of class or gender, faced dangers and discomforts on their voyage. Everyone was in the same boat as storms tossed ships around and seasickness afflicted new travellers. Queen Henrietta Maria for example, wrote privately to her husband Charles I in 1642 after a series of eventful voyages that ‘I dread the sea so much, that the very thought of it frightens me’. Edward Coxere on his first sea crossing described himself as being ‘mostly very sea-sick’ and that he resolved ‘not to live that miserable sea-life’. Everyone endured these common perils but some women and young boys faced additional risks from unwanted sexual attention or sexual assaults by their fellow passengers or mariners on their own or other ships they encountered. Economic necessity, escaping religious persecution and war, or the prospect of new opportunities compelled many women and boys to undertake sea voyages and there was a ‘remarkable growth’ in travel by land and sea across all levels of British society from the seventeenth century onwards. There were often many more women on board Royal Navy vessels than is commonly credited in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until the nineteenth century when their numbers dwindled due to a variety of factors. At the same time there has been relatively little in-depth research into the wider experiences of British women at sea. The brutal treatment of enslaved women on slave ships has received much more attention from scholars such as Sowande' M. Mustakeem. This article therefore seeks to sheds light on one aspect of women’s seaborne experience – their vulnerability to shipboard sexual assault in the early modern British maritime world. In doing so it also examines the other group – young boys – who were subject to non-consensual shipboard sexual relations to assess the similarities and differences between the attacks they were subjected to and how they were treated and prosecuted.