PMarione
Site Admin
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
Posts: 883
|
 Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2009 5:37 pm Post subject: |
 |
|
From the Life of the Day (DNB) http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/lotw/2009-02-05
| Quote: | Thornton, Anne Jane (b. 1817), sailor and cross-dresser, was born in Gloucestershire, the daughter of a prosperous merchant. After her mother's death in 1823 her father moved to Donegal, Ireland, where he opened another highly successful shop. At age fifteen she met an American, Captain Alexander Burke, with whom she fell in love. But when Captain Burke left Donegal to return to his father's home in New York in 1832, Thornton decided to follow him. She left Donegal with a maid-servant and a boy who helped her to find a suit of male clothes and to obtain a passage to England. There she engaged as a sailor aboard the Rover while the maid-servant carried a message about Anne Jane's plans back to Mr Thornton in Donegal.
Thornton, in her sailor's disguise, docked at East Port, Maine, and then walked 70 miles to the home of Captain Burke in St Andrew's, New York state, where she learned that her lover had recently married. Forced to support herself financially, she maintained her male disguise and obtained a situation as cook and steward aboard the Adelaide for $9 per month. The ship set sail for the Mediterranean and Anne Jane's ‘swarthy complexion favoured her deception’ for the next two years (Interesting Life, 5). While the ship was docked in Lisbon, Portugal, she engaged on the Sarah, but it was aboard that ship that her female identity was discovered. ‘One day as she was washing in her berth, with her jacket loose in the front, one of the crew caught an accidental view of her bosom’ (ibid.).
The sailor threatened that unless Anne Jane agreed to have sex with him, he would reveal her to the ship's Captain M'Intre. She refused her shipmate's advances, and he then went to the captain who, according to one account, ‘turned her out to work amongst the men, by whom she upon all occasions was most grossly insulted’ (Interesting Life, 5). The captain later described his astonishment upon learning that his young sailor was female: ‘I could scarcely credit the mate when he told me of it. I can bear testimony to the extraordinary propriety of her conduct and I ask again whether I have not acted properly towards her’ (The Times). However, her work was exemplary; until she arrived in London in February 1835, ‘she did the duty of a seaman without a murmur and had infinitely a better use of her hands than her tongue’ (ibid.).
Before the Sarah docked at London, several other crew members had already begun to have suspicions about Thornton's true identity. An interview in The Times with Captain M'Intre confirmed both that she had been abused by the other sailors and that she had worked hard aboard the ship. ‘She performed [the duties of a seaman] to admiration. She would run up the top gallant-sail in any sort of weather and we had a severe passage. Poor girl, she had a hard time of it, she suffered greatly from the wet but she bore it all excellently and was a capital seaman’, he said.
Anne Jane Thornton was interviewed by the lord mayor of London after he had read newspaper reports about her adventures and sent a city police inspector to investigate her story. The mayor scolded Anne Jane for abandoning her father while praising her courage and propriety aboard ship. He offered her financial support until she could be reunited with her father and return home to Ireland. Her story was popularized in an autobiographical chapbook and inspired the ballad ‘The Female Sailor’.
Julie Wheelwright
Sources
Weekly Dispatch (8–15 Feb 1835) · ‘A female sailor’, The Times (11 Feb 1835), 6 · Interesting life and wonderful adventures of that extraordinary woman Anne Jane Thornton, the female sailor, disclosing important secrets, unknown to the public, written by herself (1835)
|
Likenesses |
|
