The Floating Brothel : The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ship and its Cargo of Female Convict

Rating:
Summary: Blown off-course
Review: Sometimes, history is written by but a handful of individuals; that certainly was the case with the first British settlements in Australia. The term "Empire" is to some extent misleading, in that it gives an exaggerated idea of monolitihic power: the totality of the resources that the British Empire had committed to colonizing Australia in 1789 were a few decrepit ships laden with convict women and supplies, and a ragged band of half-starved colonists left on the Australian coast for over a year without any contact with the rest of the world. Sian Rees vividly evokes the vastness of the oceans separating these early settler ships from their homeland and from each other as they traveled the high seas, not encountering a soul for weeks or months at a time, and lets the reader feel the isolation of the early colonists - those on the second ship, wondering if there was even still a settlement in Australia to be reached, and those already on land, wondering if the promised relief from Great Britain would ever arrive, or if the authorities in London had forsaken them.

Unfortunately, while this book succeeds in giving one a better understanding of the general process surrounding British colonization of Australia, and the many hardships involved, this was not its primary goal and otherwise I found it lacking. It is not precisely, as the cover claims, "the true story" of the ship and its convict women, since none of the women left any written record at all of their experience. It is rather a mixture of the women's names and the crimes they were convicted of (gleaned from London criminal records) braided together with an assortment of facts from contemporary travellers' accounts, sailors' reminiscences, and other source material which gives the flavor of the period but does not directly relate to the story of the ship and its women. Far, far too many times, Sian Rees resorts to phrases including "it is possible that..." or "must have been" or "would have started" or "presumably" or "probably"... Rees does rely heavily on the published memoirs of John Nicol, a sailor on the Lady Julian; her reliance on Nicol makes it all the more jarring that she freely dismisses him whenever his memoirs contradict her assumptions, as when after quoting him dozens of times she dismisses his memory of a particular incident saying "this was in memoirs written when he was an old man, which are inaccurate in other details."

I really wanted to like this book, and the author is to be commended for trying to rescue the forgotten story of the female convicts. But this is light reading, not rigorous history, and where the documentary sources just aren't there she might have done better to write a historical novel and fictionalize freely rather than build a "non-fiction" book out of a tapestry of conditional statements.

Rating:
Summary: Blown off-course
Review: Sometimes, history is written by but a handful of individuals; that certainly was the case with the first British settlements in Australia. The term "Empire" is to some extent misleading, in that it gives an exaggerated idea of monolitihic power: the totality of the resources that the British Empire had committed to colonizing Australia in 1789 were a few decrepit ships laden with convict women and supplies, and a ragged band of half-starved colonists left on the Australian coast for over a year without any contact with the rest of the world. Sian Rees vividly evokes the vastness of the oceans separating these early settler ships from their homeland and from each other as they traveled the high seas, not encountering a soul for weeks or months at a time, and lets the reader feel the isolation of the early colonists - those on the second ship, wondering if there was even still a settlement in Australia to be reached, and those already on land, wondering if the promised relief from Great Britain would ever arrive, or if the authorities in London had forsaken them.

Unfortunately, while this book succeeds in giving one a better understanding of the general process surrounding British colonization of Australia, and the many hardships involved, this was not its primary goal and otherwise I found it lacking. It is not precisely, as the cover claims, "the true story" of the ship and its convict women, since none of the women left any written record at all of their experience. It is rather a mixture of the women's names and the crimes they were convicted of (gleaned from London criminal records) braided together with an assortment of facts from contemporary travellers' accounts, sailors' reminiscences, and other source material which gives the flavor of the period but does not directly relate to the story of the ship and its women. Far, far too many times, Sian Rees resorts to phrases including "it is possible that..." or "must have been" or "would have started" or "presumably" or "probably"... Rees does rely heavily on the published memoirs of John Nicol, a sailor on the Lady Julian; her reliance on Nicol makes it all the more jarring that she freely dismisses him whenever his memoirs contradict her assumptions, as when after quoting him dozens of times she dismisses his memory of a particular incident saying "this was in memoirs written when he was an old man, which are inaccurate in other details."

I really wanted to like this book, and the author is to be commended for trying to rescue the forgotten story of the female convicts. But this is light reading, not rigorous history, and where the documentary sources just aren't there she might have done better to write a historical novel and fictionalize freely rather than build a "non-fiction" book out of a tapestry of conditional statements.

Rating:
Summary: Truth, always stranger than fiction!
Review: We live in the times of crime and punishment on the level of modernity, determining the fairness of TV rights for inmates, etc. How unbelievably different our world. Not pleasant, the thought of imprisonment in the modern world, but how bizarre in comparison to 18th century English times.

This excellent read of Sian Rees presents another page in women's history studies as the reader becomes a part of the voyage of the "Lady Julian" in her job as a convict transport ship to the New South Wales (Australia) colony from July 1789 to June 1790.

Rees' title hints at a much more licentious atmosphere than the book's contents actually reveal. Instead, a very harsh world of English "justice" for crimes of theft and mugging result in penalties of transportation to a world of most primitive norms. Early chapters dwell on the circumstances of the women and their male cohorts who are caught and sent to jail (gaol) and then tried and sentenced to no less than seven years, sometimes life, and often burning. All those documented details impress the severity of English life on a modern reader who is more accustomed to a diversity of laws, appeals, stays, sentences.

Once Rees' tale puts the "Lady Julian" at sea, the book becomes decidedly more interesting. Rees obviously understands the workings of ships of the 18th century and provides the most factual of details concerning life aboard such a vessel, including the most basic of human needs: food, shelter, procreation, bodily functions. It is clear that a bonding between sailors and convicts was inevitable and accepted, and that the Puritanical considerations that might have governed communities on land did not hold or cause concern while at sea. In fact, the pairing of seaman, officers, and "wives" produced a hierarchal status during the extra long voyage.

Interestingly, the brothel itself did not enter into being until the ship made port, and then it provided commerce for its prisoners that an uninitiated reader might have found enlightening. Most important was the order of maintenance and cleanliness that was adhered to and the wonder that the convicts who arrived in Botany Bay at the future port of Sydney, Australia, actually were in better health than when they left England.

This story frames a part of the history of the fatal shore, the beginnings of Anglo immigration to the Down Under. It is a pivotal read in understanding how a "civilized nation" dispensed with its "human garbage" and created a new nation in the offing. As a student of women's studies, this is a must read in 18th century history.
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