ABSTRACT
Captain Edward Hawker’s anonymously published Statement Respecting the Prevalence of Certain Immoral Practices in His Majesty’s Navy (1821) took up the question of whether the navy should allow female sex workers on warships. This was a longstanding tradition when ships were in port, particularly when sailors were not allowed shore leave. Observers had long disputed whether lack of access to women increased the incidence of same-sex intimacy. One noted in 1824 that during the Napoleonic wars:
the crime … increased to a most alarming extent. Whether the very lengthened periods at sea, and the consequent absence of female society produced this, I will not say; but it at least may create a doubt and hesitation, and is a matter of too high import not to be taken into consideration. 1
He was responding to Hawker’s counterintuitive argument that allowing female sex workers on board actually promoted same-sex acts. In the following selection from his Statement, Hawker lays out this surprising argument.