Women Sailors & Sailors' Women by David Cordingly Page A

the end of her life at sea. She was only nineteen years old and spent the remaining years of her life in London. She made several applications to the navy pay office in Somerset House and apparently received most of the pay due to her for her service aboard the
Brunswick
and the
Vesuvius.
She seems to have drifted from job to job but found difficulty in making ends meet. She joined the Thespian Society in Tottenham Court Road and performed onstage in several women’s parts. Sometimes she dressed in male clothes and frequented sailors’ taverns. Eventually her debts mounted up, and she was consigned to Newgate prison. Her time there was made more bearable by the devoted attention of a woman friend she had been living with before her arrest. The woman joined her in the prison and helped to support her with her needlework: “She has continued with me ever since and remains a constant friend in every change I have since experienced.”
    The wounds in her leg constantly gave her trouble, and at various times she was treated in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, St. George’s Hospital, and the Middlesex Hospital. While a patient at Middlesex, she was interviewed by a reporter from
The Times
of London. He described her as “a young and delicate female” and published his interview with her in the issue of November 4, 1799. The account that she gave him of her adventures differed in several respects from the story she later told the publisher Robert Kirby. She maintained that she was related to some families of distinction but said that at an early age she had been villainously deprived of a sum of money bequeathed to her by a deceased relation of high rank. She had fallen in love with a young naval officer and followed him to sea, where she had impersonated a common sailor before the mast. During a cruise on the North Sea, she had quarreled with her lover, left the ship, and gone into the army. However, her passion for the sea caused her to rejoin the navy. Instead of describing her experiences with Howe’s fleet at the Battle of the Glorious First of June, she told the reporter that she “received a severe wound, on board Earl St. Vincent’s ship, on the glorious 14th of February [the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, February 14, 1797], and again bled in the cause of her country in the engagement off Camperdown [October 11, 1797].” She told the reporter that her knee was shattered in the battle, which was not what she subsequently told Kirby.
    The name that Mary went by when she was masquerading as a boy in the army and the navy was John Taylor. The research of Stark has shown that there was a John Taylor who was a fourteen-year-old captain’s servant on board the
Brunswick.
22 According to the ship’s muster book, he had joined the ship at Portsmouth on December 18, 1793 (and not been taken from a French privateer) and was discharged by request together with his brother Isaac on July 4, 1794. There is no mention of his being wounded at the battle on June 1, 1794, nor does his name appear in the muster books of Haslar Hospital for June and July 1794. Mary Talbot told Kirby that the bomb ketch
Vesuvius
was captured by the French in the English Channel, but the
Vesuvius
was in the West Indies at this time and was never captured by the French. There are also discrepancies in her description of her life in the army. There was no officer named Captain Bowen in the army lists of 1791 to 1796, and the 82nd Regiment of Foot was not in existence in 1792 nor was it sent to the West Indies until 1795, by which time Mary Talbot, according to her story, was in the navy. Her description of herself as “a natural [i.e., illegitimate] daughter of the late Earl Talbot” is equally suspect. Lord William Talbot never became an earl, and the late earl in 1804 was the fourteenth, George, who died in 1787.
    Perhaps we should not dismiss Mary Talbot’s story completely. It seems possible that she