Booty: The Love Boat

Ahoy, Brethren, and welcome to another Friday Booty. And this time, we're actually talking booty.

My First Mate, who seems to have a nose for this sort of thing, sent me a Reuters article via Yahoo! about a very unusual voyage from Deptford port in England to Adelaide, New South Wales. The ship was transporting criminals from England to Australia in 1838, and apparently things got out of hand.

Aboard Planter was James Bell, a gentleman the article calls a "junior officer". From what I can tell in what little research material I could find, he was probably what passed for a midshipman - known as a "ship's boy" aboard merchant vessels - and may have been somewhere between 15 and 18 years old.

Bell kept a diary of his experiences over the course of the voyage. This diary was thought lost to history (it had evidently been mentioned in the letters of the friend for whose edification he was keeping it) but was found last year purely by accident in what the article calls "a market stall".


Evidently there was little or no discipline aboard Planter. The mixed-gender prisoners seem to have had the freedom of the ship and a lot of alcohol was involved in the shenanigans. From the article:

Alcohol-fueled acts of "great violence"involving officers, mates and even the ship's doctor are recounted.

Dr. McGowan, it seems, brought his own form of vice to temp the crew and "passengers" of Planter: his 11 daughters. Quoting from the diary, the article continues:

"...our captain of course could not want a mistress till he returned to his own in England, but made love to two of McGowan's daughters... The Capt was allowed to keep the daughters company at all hours, and during the whole time of our being in warm weather our bed on deck sufficed for all three."

Bell goes on to say that his Captain's lieutenants took up with a group of "...natives of some obscene alley, in some obscene street." Ah yes, the whores being transported were nothing but an invitation to vice on such a ship, and the mates took full advantage.

Finally, the article notes that Bell was writing all this down for a "female friend in England." The writer seems surprised at this, but the date of the diary is telling in my opinion. The rigid morals of the Victorian era had not yet cracked people on both sides of the Pond over the head yet. Even "nice" women could openly understand that people had sex and got drunk, for another few years anyway.

Bell seems to wrap the story up quite nicely with this little bit of insight:

"With all this whoring and drunkenness, it is amazing this ship ever arrived in Australia."

The article indicates that the diary will go up for auction at Bonhams in London on March 23rd. For somewhere between three and six thousand dollars or two to four thousand pounds, you too could own a little slice of (very debauched) nautical history.

And they say pirates were drunk and lewd.