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proceedings, the minister and officers of the parish asked her to state that she was perfectly satisfied with the mode of his interment and with the treatment that she had received. This she agreed to. The following inscription can still be found in the church register under the heading of burials: “4 July, 1797, Richard Parker, Sheerness, Kent, age 33. Cause of death, execution.” 7
    T HE STORY OF Ann Parker is obviously unusual and cannot be regarded as typical of the experiences of sailors’ women. Of the hundreds of thousands of sailors who served at sea in the eighteenth century, relatively few were hanged for mutiny, and it would be hard to find another sailor’s wife who went to such extreme lengths to rescue her husband’s corpse and give him a Christian burial. But the story does encapsulate, in an unusually dramatic form, the tragedy that was the lot of so many wives and families of seamen. We are allowed a glimpse of a few days in the life of Ann Parker because of the notoriety of her husband, and because the mutiny at the Nore aroused strong passions and was widely reported at the time. But what of the other seamen who were present that day and what of their families?
    On the morning of Parker’s execution, there were fourteen warships lying at anchor in the River Medway. Most of these ships had between 500 and 600 seamen on board, and we can therefore assume that around 8,000 seamen and marines were assembled on the decks of their ships to watch Parker die. The majority of these men were not allowed ashore and were confined to their ships for as long as they remained in the harbor. Only the officers and the more long-serving and reliable hands would be given permission to spend time ashore. The remainder must endure an existence that was hard but bearable for the younger and more adaptable, but for older men and for landsmen unaccustomed to the confined life on board, it was nothing less than a floating hell.
    Richard Hall was at the Nore in June 1800, when he wrote to his wife from HMS
Zealand.
He told her that it was worse than a prison: “If I had known it was so bad I would not have entered. I would give all I had if it was a hundred guineas if I could get on shore.” He said that they flogged men every day and that many other men would give all the world if they could get onshore. He concluded, “Dear wife, do the best you can for the children and God prosper them till I come back, which there is no fear of and send an answer as soon as possible.” 8
    The captains were very aware that many of the sailors had been impressed into the navy and had good reason to believe that they would run away if allowed ashore. Between 1795 and 1805, more men were court-martialed for desertion than for drunkenness, theft, or any other offense. The punishment for desertion was brutal: floggings of 200 or 300 lashes were common, and in some cases men were hanged.
    Richard Parker paid the ultimate price for leading a protest against some of the worst aspects of naval life, and his wife was left a widow. There was another wife of an impressed seaman whose story was equally dramatic but had a happier ending. Margaret Dickson was born around 1700 in Musselburgh, a tiny fishing village on the Firth of Forth, a few miles from Edinburgh. 9 Her parents were poor but ensured that she had a good religious education and was versed in the household duties that might be expected of her. She duly married a local fisherman and bore him several children. At some time around 1726 or 1727, her husband was taken by the press gang during one of the navy’s periodic recruitment sweeps of the Firth of Forth.
    Left on her own, Margaret Dickson had a brief affair with another Musselburgh man and became pregnant. She was so frightened of causing a scandal (it was a local custom that adulterous women should be publicly rebuked in church) that she attempted to hide her pregnant state until the last moment. She