Inside The 18th Century Brothel Ship

Summary

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Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society

Host: Kate Lister
Guest: Sian Rees, maritime historian and author of The Floating Brothel
Episode: Inside The 18th Century Brothel Ship
Date: September 30, 2025

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Main Theme:

This episode explores the incredible and often unsettling story of the Lady Juliana, an 18th-century convict ship that transported over 200 women from Britain to Australia. Host Kate Lister and maritime historian Sian Rees discuss the social context, selection of the convicts, life on board, relationships between crew and convicts, and the impact these women had on the emerging Australian colony.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Background: The Colonisation of Australia and Convict Transportation

• Purpose of Transportation:
  • Britain sent convicts to colonies as a source of forced colonists, especially when free settlers were reluctant to go. ([06:06])
  • Early American colonies established the model—land was granted to sponsors who received convicts as labor. ([06:06])
  • When America closed to British convicts after independence, Britain looked elsewhere, eventually choosing Australia. ([08:24])
• Crimes Punishable by Transportation:
  • Primarily petty crimes: pickpocketing (“privy theft” or theft from the person), shoplifting, and theft by servants from employers. The goal was to punish crimes considered too severe for fines/whippings but not worthy of hanging. ([09:39])
  • The “Bloody Code” era saw people hanged for minor theft, but attitudes were slowly changing (especially for female offenders). ([09:23], [09:39])

2. Selection and Purpose of the Lady Juliana’s Female Convicts

• Why Send Female Convicts?:
  • Governor Phillip and early colonial authorities requested women to serve as wives, “comfort women,” and breeding stock to stabilize the male-heavy colony. ([05:20], [17:52])
  • Overcrowded women’s prisons in Britain provided a surplus of potential “colonists.” ([20:17])
• Selection Process:
  • Most women selected were of breeding age (late teens to early 20s), with the youngest at 11 and the oldest at 68. There was a pragmatic approach to age and utility. ([20:34])
  • Selection based both on clearing out prisons and matching the colony’s gender imbalance. ([20:34])

3. Voyage Conditions and Shipboard Life

• Ship’s Structure:
  • Visualized as three double-decker buses lengthwise, stacked three decks high. Women were kept “below the waterline” on the orlop deck, essentially as cargo. ([22:24])
• Life on Board:
  • Despite grim conditions, these were arguably better than the prisons or poverty most women came from. ([22:24])
  • Women initially arrived in “fetters” (handcuffs/irons) which were removed after boarding. They were not caged but were, at times, locked below at night or in port. ([24:29])
• Relationships & Sex at Sea:
  • Crewmen customarily “chose a wife” for the voyage—a practice sanctioned by the Admiralty, if not formal law. ([25:49])
  • Relationships ranged from pragmatic alliances for better food and safety to complex mixtures of coercion and agency. ([25:49], [27:51])
  • “If you could get yourself out of [the orlop deck], even if it meant sharing a hammock with a seaman who washed once a year, you might prefer it.” – Sian Rees ([28:02])
• Births on Board:
  • Some women began the voyage with children (children under six allowed), and many became pregnant during the year-long journey; about 20 babies were born at sea. ([31:49])

4. Arrival in Australia and the Colony’s Struggle

• Arrival & Separation:
  • Once in Sydney, “there was very nearly a mutiny because the men…wanted to stay with the women.” Marines had to forcibly separate couples for the ship’s onward journey to China. ([32:44])
• Records and Fate of the Women:
  • The ship’s documentation of sentences was lost, so colonial administrators were unaware of the women’s official terms. Some took advantage of this to claim early freedom. ([11:55])
  • Women often “strategically” remarried or partnered upon arrival for protection or opportunity, as in the famous case of Sarah Whitlam. ([34:10])
• Impact on the Colony:
  • The arrival of Lady Juliana and a subsequent supply ship are credited with saving the early Australian settlement, which was near collapse due to malnutrition and crop failures. ([39:08])

5. Notable Lives & Legacies

• Sarah Whitlam:
  • Partnered with cooper John Nicholl during the voyage, had a son in Rio, but remarried quickly after arrival—an example of adaptability and pragmatism. ([34:08])
• Mary Wade:
  • “A little thug,” sentenced for a violent robbery as a child. Became one of the most prolific matriarchs in Australia, with over a thousand descendants who now embrace their convict heritage. ([35:55])
• Nelly Kerwin:
  • Sentenced to life for fraud but managed to return to Britain by claiming freedom after seven years, exploiting the “lost” records. ([37:42])

6. Framing and Myths: ‘The Floating Brothel’

• Origins of the Title:
  • The book’s title arose from a dismissive line in a male historian’s work blaming the women for turning the ship into a brothel—reflecting a historical tendency to assign moral failing to the female convicts, not the men. ([40:28])
• Rees’s Intention:
  • Challenge one-sided narratives and showcase the complexity of women’s agency, the harshness of their situation, and the legacy of their forced journey. ([41:10])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“The bloody period... where they just decided they were going to hang people for quite minor, like theft… judges were just not prepared to send a woman... to the gallows for theft of sixpence.”
— Kate Lister ([09:23])

“The women aboard the Lady Juliana, most of them were pickpockets… shoplifters… maidservants who pinched things from their employers. Those three crimes... covered probably about 80 or 90% of the women aboard the ship.”
— Sian Rees ([09:39])

“To them, going to Cornwall would be exotic, let alone going to Australia.”
— Sian Rees ([14:28])

“The seamen had the right to choose a wife when they were out of port... I set my fancy on her when I knocked the rivets from her fetters. I courted her for upward of a week, and then she moved into his berth.”
— Sian Rees, quoting John Nicholl ([25:49])

“It's a toss. I know, I know it's a difficult one, but, oh, I'd take the hammock every time.”
— Kate Lister ([29:02])

“There was very nearly a mutiny because... the men... wanted to stay with the women... attempts by some of the sailors to swim ashore to run away because they wanted to stay in Australia.”
— Sian Rees ([32:44])

“That was a much... she was a smart girl. She was a smart girl.”
— Kate Lister, on Sarah Whitlam’s strategic marriage ([35:55])

“Her crime was that she enticed an infant... to a well in London or a privy, stole all the clothing... left it to... but her family... there were hundreds of them... more than a thousand.”
— Sian Rees, on Mary Wade and embracing convict ancestry ([35:59])

“A passage in one book by a male historian... women ‘turned the ship into a floating brothel.’ It... took me back to the 18th century. It was their fault. All the responsibility lay with them, you know, not the men. What else could they possibly have done?”
— Sian Rees ([40:28], [41:10])

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Episode Timeline & Timestamps

| Segment/Topic | Timestamp | |-------------------|:------------:| | Adult warning & intro | 01:46 | | Lady Juliana background & colonization | 05:20 | | Crimes & sentencing for transportation | 06:06–10:45 | | Life sentences and separation from records | 11:00–11:55 | | What early colonial Australia was like | 12:23–14:28 | | Selection of female convicts/ship roles | 17:41–21:25 | | Voyage duration and shipboard life | 21:43–25:36 | | Relationships & sex at sea | 25:36–29:11 | | Pregnancies, babies on board | 31:49–32:27 | | Arrival in Australia, aftermath | 32:27–34:08 | | Notable women (Sarah Whitlam, Mary Wade) | 34:08–37:30 | | Did any get home again? | 37:42–38:49 | | The voyage's legacy for the British colony| 39:08–40:08 | | Title: “The Floating Brothel” & intent | 40:28–41:18 |

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Additional Notes

• Tone: Witty, irreverent, but historically thorough; Kate Lister frequently makes playful asides even as the conversation confronts deeply uncomfortable topics.
• Careful Language: Both Lister and Rees are careful to acknowledge the limitations and biases in surviving records and the difficulty of parsing agency vs. coercion.
• Legacy: The episode concludes with a sharp feminist critique of how history remembers these women and the importance of retelling their stories.

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For those interested in further reading, Sian Rees’s book The Floating Brothel provides a detailed narrative of the Lady Juliana, while the podcast continues to explore tales of sex, scandal, and survival through the ages.

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Transcript

[Kate Lister]

Thanks for listening to Betwixt the Sheets. To get all history hit podcasts, ad free early access and bonus episodes, head over to historyhit.com subscribe or you can sign up on Apple Podcasts with just one click.

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[Kate Lister]

Experian hello my lovely betwixters. It's me, Catalysta. You are listening to Betwixt the Sheets. Welcome back. Gather round. We have an episode for you. But before we can go any further, further, I have to tell you this is an adult podcast spoken by adults, other adults about adulty things and adultery way covering a range of subjects. And you should be an adult too. We have to tell you that because if you keep listening and start clutching your pearls, well, I mean fair dues. We did let you know it would be naughty, didn't we? Yeah, we did. See that one's on you. Right, on with the show. You are joining me on board a ship in 1789 and this is a pleasure cruise from Britain to Australia. Although I have to be honest, it's not quite what was promised to us in the brochure. No, I mean, the bed situation is frankly appalling. We're all sleeping on planks of wood. Four of us or more to one. Then there's the manacles that they've got us in. I mean, no one at the travel agents mentioned anything about that. I'm not sure I'm on the right ship. In order to ensure better sleeping arrangements, some of my fellow female travellers are actually bunking up with male members of the crew. Yes, I am aboard the Lady Julian. An all female convict ship that was sent out to the colonies to help repopulate it. Oh, dear. And the legacy that they would go on to have is truly fascinating. And it's thanks to one remarkable historian that we know all about it. So join me on board the Lady Julian and let's find out more.

[Upwork/Experian/Lifelock Advertiser]

What do you look for in a man?

[Sian Rees]

Oh, money, of course.

[Upwork/Experian/Lifelock Advertiser]

You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

[Sian Rees]

I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing a button.

[Upwork/Experian/Lifelock Advertiser]

Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

[Sian Rees]

Goodness.

[Kate Lister]

What a beautiful dime.

[Sian Rees]

Goodness has nothing to do with it, dearie.

[Kate Lister]

Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society. With me, Kate Lister. In July 1789, a ship set out from Britain loaded with a very unusual cargo. This was a convict ship bound for the newly colonized Australia. And all of the convicts were women. And today I'm joined by Sian Rees to find out more about the Lady Julian, the women on board it, what happened to them, and to try and shed light on a very disturbing part of our history. Have you got your life jackets and your sick bags at the ready? Well, let's do this. Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Sian Rees. How are you doing?

[Sian Rees]

I'm very, very well, Kate, thank you.

[Kate Lister]

We are here to talk about. Well, some serious maritime history. Would you feel comfortable with my saying that you're a maritime historian.

[Sian Rees]

Yes. I'll take that because you've written a.

[Kate Lister]

Number of books on the subject. But the one that we're looking at today, it's the one that I'm most familiar with. I was going to say it's your most famous one, but. The Floating Brothel. The extraordinary story of the Lady Juliana and its cargo of female convicts bound for Botany Bay. I read this book when it first came out and it blew me away. But could you just Give the listeners a sort of a quick overview of what this book is about and then we'll really dive into it.

[Sian Rees]

So the Lady Juliana, or the Lady Julian as it was known at the time, was a convict ship which, right at the beginning of the British colonisation or occupation or invasion, whichever way you want to describe it, of Australia, sailed from London to the new port of Sydney with approximately 230 female convicts on board who was being sent over to act as wives and comfort women and all round breeding stock for the new colony.

[Kate Lister]

It's such a wild piece of history. Right, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start with this. Why in the 18th century were we sending convicts off to Australia and to Jamaica and to the Americas? What was that system about?

[Sian Rees]

Well, there are various reasons for it really. One was because they were a source of colonists. If you started an infant colony in a place that nobody knew anything about other than it was rumoured to be inhabited by south savages and cannibals, you weren't going to get a lot of colonists who wanted to go over there and set up. So you had to find people who had no choice in the matter. So generally the early model for a colony, certainly for the American colonies were the most famous ones, was that the king or a noble sponsor would give a massive great chunk of land, like Maryland, for example, to their mate. And that mate would pay a certain number of farmers, people with skills, to go over there. And then he would promise them that in return for doing this they could have 30 convicts, 80 convicts, 100 convicts or however many. And that pattern had been established way back in the 1600s as a model of building colonies. And it was still in operation more or less when Australia was set up as part of that. One of the things that male colonists were, because it was always males who were sent over there, one of the things that they were promised, sometimes outright and sometimes it was implied, was that there would be women available to become their help meets, which covered a variety of activities.

[Kate Lister]

Right, okay, so this is punishment. What kind of crimes were people being sent abroad for?

[Sian Rees]

Well, the women were being sent abroad for. Well, all of them were being sent abroad for petty crimes because transportation was considered the step down from execution. Basically, there were very, very few sentencing options because jails were not built for imprisonment. Most people now are sentenced to periods of custody. You go to prison for a amount of time. That wasn't an option in the 18th, really into, well into the 19th century, you had a fine or a whipping at one end and then There was pretty much nothing else until you got to transportation or hanging. So if you committed something which was too bad to be fined or whipped for, but it wasn't regarded as sufficiently bad to be hanged for, you got transportation. And a lot of the time, if you got transportation, what it meant was you sat in a jail until your sentence expired because there wasn't anywhere to send you to.

[Kate Lister]

Wow, I didn't know that.

[Sian Rees]

Yeah, especially in the period we're talking about in the 1780s, because when America became independent, America had been the dumping ground for about 60,000 convicts. People like Molt Flanders were sent to America as a convict. And that had been going on through the 1700s. And not unsurprisingly, when America became independent, they decided they didn't want. Well, mainly most of them decided they didn't want convicts anymore because they had a supply of slaves, and slaves were cheaper. There were more of them, they caused less trouble, they had fewer rights, et cetera, et cetera. So they said, no thanks, no more convicts for us. So the British state had. Comical to look at, not comical if you were going through them experiments to set up other penal colonies to find a replacement for America, mainly on the west coast of Africa, around Sierra Leone, places like that, which failed dismally. And then they thought, well, okay, Australia, I suppose, has to be Australia. We can't think of anywhere else. Let's do Australia. Wow.

[Kate Lister]

So when you say petty crimes, because this was a point in history and it was called, like, the bloody period, where they just decided that they were going to hang people for quite minor, like theft and things like that. So when you say petty crimes, what kind of crimes were people committing that would result in transportation?

[Sian Rees]

Well, in fact, the bloody period that you're sort of 1750s, and there had been a bit of a revulsion against that, particularly where women were concerned. And one of the reasons that the jails were so overcrowded, people backing up in the cells, was because judges were just not prepared to send a woman, specifically a woman, but often a young man, to the gallows for a theft of sixpence. So the women aboard the Lady Juliana, there are a few outliers who committed quite exotic crimes, crimes with exotic elements in them. Most of them were pickpockets, which was known as privy theft or theft from the person. And because it was privy theft, even if they only picked a handkerchief, because of those specific circumstances that this was theft from the person, it was a felony, not a misdemeanor. And felonies were liable for transportation. And Execution. So there were pickpockets, there were shoplifters, lots and lots of shoplifters and maidservants who pinched things from their employers. And those three crimes, they were the staples of 18th century female crime, and they covered probably about 80 or 90% of the women aboard the ship.

[Kate Lister]

So when you've stolen a hanky from somebody and you've been transported to Australia, which at the time must have seemed like you were going to Mars, quite frankly. Were they transported there indefinitely? Did they have a time period before they could come back?

[Sian Rees]

Technically, they were given specific terms of transportation. The terms of transportation were 7 years, 14 years or life. Those are the standard terms handing out depending on the severity of the. Or the perceived severity of the crime. The vast majority got seven years. And convicts who'd been going to there was a sort of institute, a sort of folk memory of convictory to America. And a lot of convicts returned from America after their time had expired and they returned with, you know, money in their pocket. It was quite a good option. Australia, of course, was a very different option. Even if you got sentenced to seven years, it was very unlikely that there would be a ship coming back that you could hitch a lift on after seven years, because there was masses of maritime traffic between America and Britain. There was nothing between Britain and Australia. So even if they were only sent down for seven years, it must have seemed to them that this was a life sentence.

[Kate Lister]

Yeah.

[Sian Rees]

And in fact, when they arrived in Sydney, the document that was sent with all convict ships to the governor of whatever colony they went with, giving the list of crimes and the list of sentences, so the governor would know when they were eligible for parole and release had been left behind. So nobody in Sydney knew what these women's sentences were, what the lengths of their sentences were, and a couple of people turned that to their advantage and a couple of people weren't able to.

[Kate Lister]

What would Australia have been like in the 18th century? What kind of world were these people being shipped off to?

[Sian Rees]

Were utterly, utterly, completely alien. Nobody from the Western world, other than a few shiploads of Dutch, a few French, had set foot on the continent. And when we say set foot on the continent, we're talking about setting foot on the minute fringe of coastal area of the continent and the minute part of the fringe of the coastal area around what is now Sydney. Cook's expeditions had famously brought back botany and kangaroos and that sort of thing. So there was some idea that it was this exotic, alien continent. It had also brought back tales of, again using 18th century language, you know, savages with spears and who are, you know, eating each other in the hinterland. So there was a sort of. Definitely a fear that if you ran away. And this fear was turned to the advantage of the people in charge, that if you ran away from camp, you weren't going anywhere except, you know, into the port. Other than that, there was a very weird idea around the early convicts that there was a land route out of Australia because nobody knew what the contours of Australia were, were at this time, really. And a lot of the convicts thought that if you went far enough into the hinterland, you know, you went north and didn't stop, you'd end up in China. So not having the best grasp of geography. And so there were various expeditions over the course of the convict colony when people, you know, departed in the night, making for China and were either brought back by the guards or some of them went to live with Aboriginals and just stayed there.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, wow. What was the survival rate? Because I'm just thinking, like, even today, Australia is a lovely place, by the way. Hello, Australians listening. But, like, even today, their wildlife seems so insanely exotic to, at least to this northern woman. Like, you know, spiders the size of plates and things in the sea that want to eat you. And the worst thing we've got here are, like, adder snakes and some jellyfish. Did people survive? I mean, obviously they did, but what were their chances?

[Sian Rees]

Almost the most alien part for most of the convicts, certainly the ones on the Lady Juliana, was not so much that it was Australia, but that it wasn't a city. And these are women. The vast majority come from inner city London. They come from around the docks of London or Bristol. To them, going to Cornwall would be exotic, let alone going to Australia. It's not just that you've been transposed into this alien culture and botanical and, you know, fauna and flora environment, but also that you've been transposed into a tiny village which has none of the infrastructure or the social relations that you've grown up knowing.

[Kate Lister]

I'll be back with Sian after this short break.

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[Kate Lister]

Let's talk about the Lady Juliana. Absolutely terrifying. Whose idea was it to say, let's round up a load of women and put them on a boat and send them to Australia to be wives for.

[Sian Rees]

The convicts there around the late 1780s. So the First Fleet to Australia, what we know as the First Fleet to Australia was the first 11 ships carrying convicts went off in May 1787, and they arrived in January 1788. Hence what Australia has as its founding day. Now, with some controversy obviously around that it had all been done in great haste to clear the jails. Not terribly well planned, and only a small minority of the people sent out on those 11 ships were women. So it was in the back of everyone's minds from the start that more women would have to be sent out if the colony was going to survive. You know, you need sort of breeding pairs to make a colony survive. Otherwise you get a great deal of civil unrest and not enough babies. So there was a need for women out there, an obvious need for women out there. And that was reinforced by the first governor, Governor Phillip who wrote home specifically, we need women. No, send us. We need tools, we need men with skills and we need women. These are the sort of three priorities. And the other reason that women specifically had to be rounded up was because the number of females in the jails in London at that time was swelling. A lot of women specifically had been put out of work because there was a long period of war that ended in 1783 with the biggest army and navy that had ever been amassed. And all these men were suddenly demobilized. And what traditionally happens when an army comes home happened. The men go back to work and the women lose the jobs that they doing during the war. So a lot of it was called losing your place or being put out of your place at the time. So people who had been working in shops or working in domestic service or working on farms, for example, would find themselves suddenly with no means to survive and would turn to usually petty crime or a mixture of petty crime and prostitution when necessary. I use the word prostitution, even though I know sex workers preferred. Now simply because it's the term that was used at the time. I don't attach any moral weight to the word at all. So there were lots of women in the jails, and the jails had been built with segregated cells, large cells for the men and small cells for the ladies, because they were not supposed to commit crime in such numbers. So there was this big problem. Something needed to be done with them.

[Kate Lister]

I can see what's happened here. So we have too many women in the prisons and we've got letters coming from Australia of people going, send us women. It just seemed so brutal, this idea of just like a bunch of men got together and they just. How did they even pick the women? Was it just eeny, meeny, miny, mo. Did they ask them who wanted to go?

[Sian Rees]

Well, this is really difficult. I mean, the only way we can understand it is through inference, because at least I never found any smoking gun which said, right, we're gonna pick the young pretty ones. You know, I've never found anything as explicit as that. But the ages of the women, nearly all of them are in their late teens and early 20s. So they're breeding age. Not all of them. The youngest was 11 and the oldest was 68. So not a breed. The 11 year old you can see still in brutal terms you can see would have future breeding potential. The 68 year old, not. So some of it was just getting rid of, you know, people who are hanging around, clogging up the system. But that I think they were, yes, they were selected as breeders.

[Kate Lister]

About 226 women were chosen, is that right?

[Sian Rees]

Yeah, something like that. 222 arrived in Sydney. We know that because the records that end were a bit less chaotic than they were at this end. And somewhere between 240 and 250, best guess, left Britain.

[Kate Lister]

How long would it take to get from Britain to Australia at this time?

[Sian Rees]

If you went hell for leather, you could get there in sort of six months. Oh, that's really going hell for leather with, you know, with a fair wind and luck on your side. The Lady Juliana took 12 months. I say six months. Some of the supply ships took six months because they were going as fast as they could and they didn't have to take care of the convicts or the sort of, you know, human problems that they created. The Lady Juliana took 12 months. 12 months, partly because they had to stop in Rio de Janeiro for lots of them to have babies. I mean, there were reasons it took a long time and also because, you know, a lot of the men didn't want to get there because they were sleeping with the women.

[Hannah Burner]

Oh my God.

[Kate Lister]

So we've got 220 odd women on a boat surrounded by men. What were the conditions on board this ship?

[Sian Rees]

The condition, again, it sounds incredibly brutal when you describe the conditions in which the women lived, indeed in which the seamen, the ordinary seamen, lived in an 18th century sailing ship. But they were probably better than the conditions that an awful lot of them had come out of. Definitely better than the jails they'd come out of and probably better than the sort of flop houses that most of them had been spent their lives bearing that in mind. We don't have specific dimensions for the ship, but if you imagine something like three double deckers put end to end and then you add an extra layer on top of that. So there's three decks and the length of three double deckers. Top deck, called the weather deck, which is where everything happens. You've got the master there and the men are running around with ropes and things. And then the middle deck, you'd have a sort of hatch in the top deck like on a fishing trawler where they throw the fish into a big area in the middle. Do you know what I mean? There'd be like that. The next deck down is called the tween deck and that would be divided into lots of cabins for accommodation and stores and the surgeon's quarters and all that sort of thing. Lots of partition walls. You go down to the next deck, which is now below sea level, below the water level, and that's called the orlop deck. And that on any ship is where the cargo is kept. And in this ship, the cargo was the convicts. So that's where they were. And then going back to the three double deckers, on either end of the three double deckers at the stern, you've got a little bit which is built up and that's the quarter deck, which is the captain's territory. And at the bow, the pointy bit at the front you've got something called the forecastle. And that's where the men before the mast, the ordinary seamen slept. And everything happened in that three double deckers bouncing across the oceans for 12 months with 200 odd women on board and about 30 men.

[Kate Lister]

Were they supposed to be chained up? If they were prisoners, were they in cages or restricted?

[Sian Rees]

No, they weren't in cage. I mean, some of the later convict ships, people were held in appalling, truly dreadful conditions. Conditions that created scandals when they became known back at home with, you know, questions raised in the House of Commons and that sort of thing. The women on the Lady Juliana were treated again, you know, everything is relative. We're looking at it from 2025 and this is in 1780, with relative kindness. So most of them were brought on board in what they called fetters in those, in handcuffs and iron handcuffs. And the man who later wrote a memoir of this voyage on which most of my book is based, he was the cooper and the blacksmith, and it was his job when the women came, they were sort of hauled up on board from the lighters, the small boats that brought them out from the shore, was to have them place their hands on the anvil and he would knock the rivets off. And then during the night, and sometimes when they're in port, the hatches on the all object would be locked so that they couldn't come up, but they were not chained.

[Kate Lister]

It's difficult to find the right language to ask the questions about this, but I want to say about what do we know about relations forming between the crewmen and the women? But obviously it feels slightly uncomfortable to call it a relationship because of the.

[Sian Rees]

Situation, but yeah, I know exactly what you mean. It's so difficult. One of the most fascinating things about this whole story and at the same time one of the most difficult to unpick and then to write about sensitively, was the balance between coercion and desire and agency and so on and so forth. And basically, as with any recovered story from history, you can Know a certain amount, you can infer a lot more. But without knowing the specific personalities of the people, who knows what goes? I mean, you know, you're called betwixt the sheets. It'd be literally betwixt. Who knows what goes on? Yeah, the seamen were, by custom. And again, I haven't been able to find a law about this, but certainly it was regarded. It was sanctioned by the Admiralty. The seamen had the right to choose a wife when they were out of port. So there's a lot hinging on the word choose. Did they just, you know, the women were lined up and they said, I'll have you, and I'll have you. What. What was the process? This we don't know about, except in one case going back to John Nicholl, who was the man who knocks the rivets off the handcuffs of the women as they become bored. He took a wife called Sarah Whitlam, or Whitelam, who'd been brought down from Lincolnshire. And he writes in his memoir, I set my fancy on her when I knocked the rivets from her fetters. And he then says, I courted her for upward of a week. And then she moved into his birth. So that whole those couple of lines, I think, encapsulates the impossibility of, well, what, you know, what does courted mean? Was she grateful to him? Did she think, okay, here's a protector. He looks like a nice guy. I'm going to have a much nicer time sharing a birth with him than I am down in the Orlock with a bunch of, you know, criminals. I'll have better food, et cetera, et cetera. And that story and that set of calculations must have been undertaken by every couple that formed on the boat.

[Kate Lister]

Without a doubt. Do you think it would have been better conditions to be in sharing a berth with one of the sailors?

[Sian Rees]

Yes. Or sharing a hammock with one of the sailors? Yes. Other than the nature of the relationship, just to use that word as a shorthand with the man concerned, you know, whether there was coercion within the individual hammocks, we can't know. But you would get respite from the horrible conditions of the orlop. You'd probably get better food. And we can romanticize the women on the orlop too much, because if you were a youngish woman who had not lived, you were not a hardened criminal. You'd done something daft or you'd done something because you were completely on your uppers and needed to buy something to eat, and you found yourself with 200 women who had been quite vicious criminals for a long time. All the gangs, the bullying, the violence that we know of from prisons, men's and women's prisons. Now that would all be going on on the bottom deck of the ship. And if you could get yourself out of there, even if it meant sharing a hammock with a seaman who washed once a year, you might prefer I can see your face, but you might. I know it's a. It's a toss. I know, I know it's a. It's a difficult one, but, oh, I'd.

[Kate Lister]

Take the hammock every time. Every time. What about the captain? What the hell was he doing? Was he just like going, yeah, lads, you help yourself. This is all grapes?

[Sian Rees]

Yeah, pretty much. I think so. I mean, he's also employed by the Admiralty. And the single most important thing for a captain of a sailing ship, which are routinely undermanned, I mean, they are all sailing ships, admiralty or merchant, are run on a skeleton staff. And the last thing you want in your men is any sort of upset. You do not want them to be sulky. You do not want them to be unhappy. You. You know, the Mutiny on the Bounty took place that year. An unhappy ship is not a good place for anyone. And it's worst of all for the captain. So if what it took was to allow this arrangement, that would be fine for the captain. And the other thing was, if they hadn't put this arrangement in place from the experience of the other convict ships, which carried both male and female convicts on board, which was common, it was going to happen anyway. And if it didn't happen in this ordered, regulated, sanctioned fashion, it was going to cause all sorts of trouble.

[Kate Lister]

I'll be back with Sian after this short break.

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[Kate Lister]

You mentioned earlier that they had to stop the ship and go to Portsmouth because they were all having babies. Where was that?

[Sian Rees]

Half a dozen children boarded in London because if prisoners had children under the age of six, they were allowed to take their children with them. And then, you know, there's all these young healthy couples having sex in the forecastle. So by the time they get to Rio, approximately nine months later, about 20 of them, we think, although it's not clear, had babies there. And then the ship sailed onto the Cape in Africa and from there finally to Sydney, by which time the babies would have been, you know, four, five, six months old.

[Kate Lister]

God. So the baby stayed with them on the ship then?

[Sian Rees]

Yes.

[Kate Lister]

Wow, there's so much to unpack here. So they arrive in Australia, then what happens? Do the guys just go, see you later, love. Thanks for the memories. Write me a postcard. And then they're off.

[Sian Rees]

Almost the opposite. The ship the Lady Julian, had been contracted to go on from Australia to Canton, big commercial port, to pick up a cargo of tea, which was a massively profitable trade. So they were supposed to do this with the captain and all the men aboard. They were just supposed to drop the women off, you know, plug up any holes, whatever, take some fresh fruit on board and set off for China. And there was very nearly a mutiny because the men, a lot of the men by now wanted to stay with the women. And the captain had to ask help from the marines, the marine guard in Sydney, to separate the men and the women because the couples, maybe not all of them, but several of them wanted to stay together. And there were attempts by some of the sailors to, you know, swim ashore to run away because they wanted to stay in Australia and they had to be rounded up and forced back on board the ship because otherwise the captain couldn't fulfill his contract to pick up the tea in China.

[Kate Lister]

Have you been able to find stories about who like some names of these women and what happened to them on the ship and after the ship?

[Sian Rees]

I mean, it's pretty difficult to piece together, as you can imagine.

[Kate Lister]

Yeah.

[Sian Rees]

But in fact, the early baptism, marriage, property records and things in Sydney are fairly complete. And those are normally the best way to track women, much less easily because they tend not to own property and because they change their name and because they're all called Sarah or Mary or Elizabeth.

[Kate Lister]

So frustrating, isn't it?

[Sian Rees]

There's something like 30 Marys on the ship and, you know, Mary Smith and Barry Jones, and so we can track a few of them. So Sarah Whitlam, who was the wife of John Nicholl, had a baby with him, Baby John in Rio. And John Nicholl, this is the Cooper blacksmith, desperately wanted to stay in Sydney with Sarah and was forced to go on to China with the rest of the ship. He promised, at least in his own memoir, he pledged to her and wrote it in the family Bible, that he would come back and get her and so on and so forth, off he went. And she, the day after the Lady Juliana left, married another man. So that's a very interesting twist on who.

[Kate Lister]

Yes, it is.

[Sian Rees]

On Agency.

[Kate Lister]

Wow.

[Sian Rees]

With the little one with Baby John.

[Kate Lister]

But then maybe she had to. I mean, what would life have been like for a woman with a newborn baby who was a convict, who'd just come off a ship?

[Sian Rees]

Yeah, quite. I mean, I think she made a strategic choice. She thought, either he's going to change his mind and not come back, or I'm going to have such awful time before he manages to get and, you know, get back to Australia after you've already sailed to Canton and then from Canton to London, and then you've waited for a ship to Australia. There weren't many of them. You know, she'd be at the end of her sentence by the time he came with the best will in the world before he got back. And she married a man who was about to be emancipated. He was a convict, but he was about to be freed and he very well considered in the colony, and he was going to be given, I think, 30 acres of land to start a farm. Smart girl. And that was a much. She was a smart girl. She was a smart girl.

[Kate Lister]

What about Mary Wade? I think her story is really interesting.

[Sian Rees]

Mary Wade was one of the youngest convicts on the ship. And she is an interesting one because when a documentary was made about the Throat and brothel some time ago, my time watch. And they tracked down some descendants of Mary Wade and showed them the trial records. The reason why she was on the ship in the first place and the reason that she was on the ship in the first place was because she was a little thug. And she had been. I'm sure she had been completely brutalized. You know, I'm not. There are all sorts of reasons that 12 year old girls turn into thugs. They're not necessarily born that way. But her crime was that she enticed an infant, a two or three year toddler, to a well in London or a privy, possibly an outside privy, stole all the clothing of this little child and left it to. I know Mary, another Mary, you know. Fortunately it was rescued. So not for whatever reasons, an unfortunate upbringing, I'm sure. Not the nicest person. Mary Wade throve in the. Mary Wade was possibly the most successful in terms purely of number of descendants of any woman on the Lady Julian. And some time ago, I think possibly on the bicentenary of the ship's arrival in Australia, the whole of her descendants came together, her family, and there were hundreds of them, I think more than a thousand, and created a book and are very. That thing that happened in about the 1980s where Australians stopped being ashamed of their convict ancestors and instead started to absolutely embrace and celebrate them.

[Kate Lister]

Do we know if any of the relationships did survive? I mean, do we have any records at all of a man managing somehow to get back to Australia or his wife in inverted commas getting back to the uk?

[Sian Rees]

Yeah, several of the women got back to the uk, not necessarily with the men that they were with on the ship, but under their own steam. So one of the women, one of the most interesting women on board and one of the ones who, the few who wasn't a shoplifter, domestic servant or pickpocket, made her living by a sort of complicated fraud in Portsmouth. But she was literate, she was clever, she was numerate, she knew what she was doing and she had small children that she'd left in England and had every reason to want to get back to. She had been sentenced to transportation for life. Nelly Kerwin, she didn't marry in the colony, she remained independent. And because the records, I was saying earlier, the record of the women's sentences had not been taken to Australia and most of the women were sentenced to seven years. When seven years came up, she presented herself at the government, said, my years, I'm done, I'm free. And he said, yes, you are, well done. Off you. And off she went on the next ship to Prince. So she got back and several women did get back under their own steam. You know, they worked, they saved and they got back. Which seems incredible.

[Kate Lister]

It does, doesn't it?

[Sian Rees]

Involved, yeah.

[Kate Lister]

That's just wild. So was this mission considered a success then? Like, it seems mad to say it, but like with the brutality of it and the cruelty of it, the exploitation. But in their Terms of the people that organized this was this plan to send a load of women over. Did that work?

[Sian Rees]

Yeah. And a combination of this load of women and the next ship that arrived, which was a supply ship, together saved the colony. Because when the Lady Juliana turned up, the colony was absolutely on its last legs. People were dying all over the place. There was scurvy, there was starvation. The crops hadn't come up, you know, nothing was working. They'd lost a ship. They were very, very nearly at the end. And in fact, when 222 women turned up, they were the last thing that was want. They were just useless mouths to be fed. Unbelievably, after, the colonists had been waiting, desperately thinking they'd been abandoned by London for 18 months. Within a week, a supply ship. This was the ship that only took six months to cross the world. A supply ship turned up and starvation was averted. So those two ships between them, bringing a supply of women and a supply of seed, essentially agricultural seed between them, saved the British presence in Australia.

[Kate Lister]

We don't want to say these things too loudly in case certain tech bros get wind of it and then start thinking that they can ship women around the world to reverse declining death rates.

[Sian Rees]

Stamp on that one immediately.

[Kate Lister]

You never know immediately. It was a complete failure, this plan. So as a final question then, I'm wondering, why did you decide to call your book the Floating Brothel? It's a fabulous title. I love it.

[Sian Rees]

But I decided to call it that because at a very early stage of research, before I started doing any primary research for the records, I lived in Australia for a while and I read what was available on convict history, and there was very little available on female convicts. But there was a passage in one book by a male historian which struck me as encapsulating everything that is wrong with the masculine gaze on history, because it described the women as, quote, turned the ship into a floating brothel. And it seemed. It sort of took me back to the 18th century. It was their fault.

[Kate Lister]

Yeah.

[Sian Rees]

All the responsibility lay with them, you know, not the men. The poor men who just led by the nose. What could they. How could they resist?

[Kate Lister]

What else could they possibly have done apart from what they have done? Chad, you have been amazing to talk to. I knew that you would be. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

[Sian Rees]

Oh, God.

[Kate Lister]

Just buy the book. Just buy the book. Watch the documentary.

[Sian Rees]

Watch the documentary. Buy the book. That's all I can say. The book is far more interesting than me. Just. Just read that I don't believe that.

[Kate Lister]

But thank you so much. You have been so much fun to talk to.

[Sian Rees]

It's been a delight. Thank you very much.

[Kate Lister]

Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Sian for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like review and follow along whatever it is that you get. Your podcast guests Coming up, We're going to be taking a look at sex work, sex workers and brothels throughout history from Japan to the Wild west to the Second World War. If you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email [e-mail] this podcast was edited and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets the History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

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