Of all the veracious yarns that are told of girl-sailors, there is perhaps none more remarkable than the story of Rebecca Anne Johnson, the girl-sailor of Whitby. One night a hundred and some odd years ago a Mrs. Lesley, who kept the "Bull" inn in Halfmoon Alley, Bishopsgate Street, found at her door a handsome sailor-lad begging for food. He had eaten nothing for four and twenty hours, he declared, and when plied with supper and questions by the kind-hearted but inquisitive old lady, he explained that he was an apprentice to the sea, and had run from his ship at Woolwich because of the mate's unduly basting him with a rope's-end. "What! you a 'prentice?" cried the landlady; and turning his face to the light, she subjected him to a scrutiny that read him through and through.
Next day, at his own request, he was taken before the Lord Mayor, to whom he told his story. That he was a girl he freely admitted, and he accounted for his appearing in sailor rig by asserting that a brutal father had apprenticed him to the sea in his thirteenth year. More astounding still, the same unnatural parent had actually bound her, the sailor-girl's, mother, apprentice to the sea, and in that capacity she was not only pressed into the navy, but killed at the battle of Copenhagen, up to which time, though she had followed the sea for many years and borne this child in the meantime, her sex had never once been called in question. [Footnote: _Naval Chronicle_, vol. xx. 1808, p. 293.]
While woman was thus invading man's province at sea, that universal feeder of the Navy, the pressgang, made little or no appeal to her as a sphere of activity. On Portland Island, it is true, Lieut. McKey, who commanded both the Sea-Fencibles and the press-gang there, rated his daughter as a midshipman; [Footnote: _Admiralty Records_ 1. 581--Admiral Berkeley, Report on Rendezvous, 15 April 1805] but with this exception no woman is known to have added the hanger to her adornment. The three merry maids of Taunton, who as gangsmen put the Denny Bowl quarrymen to rout, were of course impostors.
But if the ganger's life was not for woman, there was ample compensation for its loss in the wider activities the gang opened up for her. The gangsman was nothing if not practical. He took the poetic dictum that "men must work and women must weep"--a conception in his opinion too sentimentally onesided to be tolerated as one of the eternal verities of human existence--and improved upon it. By virtue of the rough-and-ready authority vested in him he abolished the distinction between toil and tears, decreeing instead that women should suffer both.