Read Women Sailors & Sailors' Women for Free Online Page A

where her husband was buried was alongside the walls of the garrison and was enclosed by a new stockade fence that was nearly ten feet high. She tried to find out who kept the key to the gate of the stockade, but failing to do so, she waited until nightfall and returned to the burial place. At about ten o’clock, she came across three women and persuaded them to help her recover the body of her husband. The women were probably sailors’ wives or prostitutes; the commissioner of the dockyard at Sheerness frequently complained that the area was “a common resort of Whores and Rogues by day and night.” 5 When the coast was clear, the four women climbed over the gate and into the stockaded area.
    Although Richard Parker’s coffin was buried in a shallow grave, the women had no tools and had to dig away the earth with their bare hands. They lifted the coffin from the ground, carried it across to the fence, and managed with some difficulty to heave it over the gate. They laid it on the ground outside, and in order to conceal it from the sentries manning the Barrier Gate nearby, they sat on the coffin for the remainder of the night. At four o’clock in the morning, the drawbridge of the fort was lowered and a fish cart rumbled through the gateway onto the road outside. Mrs. Parker accosted the driver and, finding that he was heading for Rochester, persuaded him to add the coffin to his load for the price of a guinea. Having arrived in the town she found the driver of a wagon who, for six guineas, agreed to take the coffin to London and to deliver it to the Hoop and Horseshoe, on Queen Street, Little Tower Hill. Mrs. Parker had hired a room there where she arranged for the coffin to be deposited.
    The mutiny of the seamen at the Nore and the subsequent court-martial of Richard Parker had been widely reported and had caused considerable interest not only among seafarers and their families, but among people from all classes, particularly in London. When the word got out that Parker’s corpse had been brought to the East End by his widow, a crowd began to gather outside the Hoop and Horseshoe. Some of the more unscrupulous women appear to have been charging people to see Parker’s body. By Monday, the crowds of the curious had grown so big that the local magistrates were forced to intervene. Ann Parker was called to the police office on Lambert Street, where she was asked why she had removed her husband’s body from its burial place at Sheerness. She said that she wished to take him to his family in Exeter or to her family in Scotland so that she could bury him like a Christian. She was asked whether the rumors were true that she had been charging people money to view the corpse. At this she burst into floods of tears and replied, “Do I appear like a monster so unnatural?” Subsequent inquiries confirmed that there was no truth in the accusation. The magistrates were concerned that elements in the population would use the occasion of the funeral to cause a riot, and they therefore decided that the coffin should be moved immediately to the workhouse on Nightingale Lane and then buried in the churchyard of Aldgate Church the next morning. However, the crowds continued to gather in the Minories all that evening, and fearing a tumultuous assembly the next day, they arranged for the body to be moved at one o’clock in the morning from the workhouse to the burying vault of the church of St. Mary at Whitechapel.
    In the afternoon of Tuesday, July 4, Ann Parker was permitted to attend the funeral service for her husband, which was officiated by Mr. Wright, the rector of St. Mary, Whitechapel. At her particular request, the coffin lid was taken off and she was allowed to look at her husband for the last time. After the ceremony was over she signed a certificate to confirm that the burial service had been duly performed. 6 No doubt to cover themselves in the event of any inquiry into the