ABSTRACT
Audiences were fond of stories of people who cross dressed or otherwise claimed new genders to go to sea. Ballads like The Cabin Boy and fictional stories of cross-dressing mariners were popular. So too were tales of seafaring “female husbands” and memoirs by those who claimed to have assumed a different gender and taken to the waves. Scholars have been able to confirm details from some of these accounts. 1 This newspaper report provides one brief example of this type of story. It follows a common arc, in which the captain of a ship discovers to his delight that his servant is in fact a young woman. The story also hints at the complexity of thinking about gender at this time. The captain considers whether the servant may be a “hermaphrodite” – a term that could refer to someone with male and female sex organs but could also be used to signal gender nonconformity or as a synonym for “catamite.” Other sailors also invoked this concept when discussing gender difference at sea. The story also ends unexpectedly: While the sailor’s gender is revealed, she still insists that she dress in traditional male sailor’s garb.
