[BITList] Sailor, soldier, adventurer

[John Feltham]

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Talbot,  Mary Anne  [alias John Taylor]  (1778-1808), sailor and soldier, was born on 2 February 1778 at 62 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, the youngest of her mother's sixteen children. Mary Anne was purportedly the illegitimate daughter of William Talbot, the first earl of Talbot (1710-1782), and her mother died while giving birth to her. Using the alias John Taylor, Talbot became one of Britain's most famous 'Amazons' of the eighteenth century, and joined the ranks of others such as Hannah Snell and Christian Davies who either chose or were forced to disguise themselves as men to join the military.

According to Talbot's autobiography in the 1804 edition of R. S. Kirby's Wonderful ... Museum, her father died at the age of seventy-one, when she was four years old. She was raised in Worthen, Shropshire, by a wet-nurse from her birth until aged five, then attended Mrs Tapperly's boarding-school at Chester until she was fourteen. 'Here I remained nine years, unacquainted with the views of the world, and knew no happiness but that of seeing children more fortunate than myself receiving the embraces of their parents and friends'  (Dowie, 140). Her misery was relieved only by an older sister, known as the Hon. Miss Dyer, whom she believed was her mother. But the sister died in childbirth when Talbot was nine.

From Miss Dyer, who was the first to tell Talbot about her parents, she inherited a fortune of £30,000 with an annual income of £1500. But her sister chose an unscrupulous guardian, a Mr Sucker, who placed Talbot under the care of Captain Essex Bowen of the 82nd regiment of foot. He took her to London where, instead of sending her to school as he had promised, he forced her to become his unwilling sexual partner.

Talbot then learned of Captain Bowen's plans:

Conceiving me properly subjugated to his purpose and remarking my figure was extremely well calculated for the situation he had assigned me, he produced a complete suit of male attire and for the first time made me acquainted with the unmanly design he had formed of taking me with him to the West Indies, in the menial capacity of foot boy [personal servant]. (Dowie, 143)
Disguised as John Taylor, Talbot sailed aboard Captain Bishop's Crown from Falmouth for the Spanish colony of San Domingo. When a gale blew up en route Talbot was forced to man the pumps and received a crash course in nautical skills.

Talbot vividly evokes the hardships of life at sea and the difficulty of her situation, living in virtual servitude to Captain Bowen. Upon arrival in Port-au-Prince in June 1792, the ship's captain received orders to join the duke of York's troops in France. Captain Bowen threatened to have her sold into slavery unless she agreed to be enrolled as a drummer. In Flanders she was 'obliged to keep up a continual roll to drown the cries and confusion' on the battlefield. She was wounded at the capture of Valenciennes in north-eastern France, but took advantage of Captain Bowen's death to desert the regiment to avoid detection. In her sailor's clothes she travelled east through Luxembourg to the Rhine, avoiding towns, and sleeping under trees and hayracks. On 17 September 1793 she signed on with a French ship under Captain Le Sage without realizing that it was a privateer (an armed vessel with a government commission to capture the merchant vessels of an enemy nation) until a sea battle with a British ship four months later. Lord Howe's crew captured the French ship and she was taken aboard the Queen Charlotte for interrogation. Although she avoided mentioning her desertion from the duke of York's regiment, Lord Howe accepted her account and sent her to sail with Captain John Hervey's Brunswick (74 guns) as a powder monkey.

Captain Hervey noticed 'Taylor's' superior manner and education and so promoted her to principal cabin-boy. Three months after coming on board, while serving as an assistant to the gunners, the Brunswick fell into battle with the French on 1 June 1794. Talbot was badly wounded when a grapeshot shattered her left ankle and spent four months recuperating at the Haslar Royal Naval Hospital, Gosport, near Portsmouth. She then signed on with the Vesuvius bomb (a vessel armed with mortar for throwing bombs) as midshipman. The crew, however, was taken by two privateers along the Normandy coast and she languished in a Dunkirk prison for eighteen months. After her release she signed on with an American, Captain John Field of the Ariel, and set sail for New York in August 1796. After her return to London aboard the same ship in November, she was captured by a press-gang while ashore in Wapping and forced to reveal her true sex to avoid service. 'The officers upbraided each other with ignorance at not discovering before, my being a woman, and readily gave me a discharge'  (Kirby, Life and Surprising Adventures, 186).

Talbot's retirement from sea marked the beginning of a precarious string of occupations which included jewellery making, acting on the London stage, and domestic service. Her ill health added to her financial troubles and she was frequently hospitalized for treatment of her left ankle. She confessed, however, that her frequent forays into the pubs in seaman's clothes to drink grog with her former mess-mates exacerbated her difficulties-'The reason of which, I imagine, proceeded from the wound breaking out afresh in consequence of my too free use of spirituous liquors'  (Kirby, Life and Surprising Adventures, 189). Meanwhile she battled the navy pay-office in Somerset House for a pension (which she eventually was granted) and received 'presents' from Queen Caroline, the duke of Norfolk, and others who had heard of her naval exploits. Her final employment was with the publisher Robert S. Kirby, chronicler of her story, as a domestic at his house in St Paul's Churchyard. After three years her deteriorating health forced her to retire to a friend's home in Shropshire. She lived for only a few weeks, and died there on 4 February 1808.

Julie Wheelwright 

Sources  Kirby's wonderful ... museum, 6 vols. (1803-20), vol. 2, p. 160 + R. S. Kirby, Life and surprising adventures of Mary Anne Talbot (1809) [repr. in Women adventurers, 1893] + European Magazine and London Review, 53 (1808), 234 + Chambers's Journal (30 May 1863) + J. Wheelwright, Amazons and military maids, new edn (1994) + M. M. Dowie, ed., Women adventurers (1893) + The Times (4 Nov 1799) + S. J. Stark, Female tars (1996) + DNB
Likenesses  G. Scott, two stipple engravings (after J. Green), BM, NPG; repro. in Kirby's Wonderful ... museum (1804) [see illus.]



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