I was recently browsing the overflowing bookshelves in my basement where I keep nautical nonfiction, looking for something I might have filed without reading first. I found a copy of Seafaring Women: Adventures of Pirate Queens, Female Stowaways, & Sailors' Wives by David Cordingly, whose book Under the Black Flag is one of the best books on pirates I've read, and so I decided to give it a long overdue perusal.

Then I noticed that, at some point, I had also acquired a copy of Cordingly's Women Sailors & Sailors' Women: An Untold Maritime History, not realizing at the time of purchase that it was an earlier printing of the same book. Honestly, I prefer the original title to the reprint's, since many of the women revealed in this text never actually went to sea. In fact, let's take a look at the book's 14 chapters to see how faithful the book is to the topic at hand.

The first three chapters are entirely about land-bound women. The first takes a look at the prostitutes who thrived in port towns, while the second discusses the wives and girlfriends who stayed behind when their men set sail. The third focuses on one woman, Ann Parker, wife of the leader of the notorious mutiny at the Nore; with rare devotion, she tried but failed to reach him before his inevitable execution.

The fourth chapter at last begins to examine the facts of women (some of whom, it turns out, were entirely fictional) who disguised themselves as men so they could go to sea, while the fifth chapter digs a little deeper into several specific and well-known female sailors, including infamous lady pirates Ann Bonny and Mary Read. Chapter six introduces us to women, mostly the wives of officers, who accompanied their husbands on long voyages, sometimes serving useful functions such as nursing the sick and wounded or carrying gunpowder during battles ... or in a few cases, as we learn in chapter seven, taking command of the ship in times of dire necessity. Chapter eight is about the wives of whalers, some of whom sailed with their husbands, some of whom stayed home and lonely ... again, veering away from the "seafaring" part of the title.

Chapter nine again goes off-topic. With the heading "Men without Women," it begins by providing graphic testimony in the court-martial of a sailor and a ship's boy accused of sodomy on a British warship, which under the Articles of War was a capital offense. (While the topic might be of some historical interest, it defies the description of "seafaring women" entirely, and doesn't even fall under the auspices of the original intent, "women sailors and sailors' women.") After expounding on that subject for a while, Cordingly swerves again, concluding the chapter with a summation of letters between captains and their wives back home (which seems more appropriate to chapter two).

Chapter 10, "Women & Water, Sirens & Mermaids," doesn't deal with actual women on ships, but with superstitions about women on ships -- they are lucky or unlucky, depending which superstition you subscribe to -- as well as the growing prevalence in the Age of Sail for bare-breasted female figureheads on ships. The chapter also includes observations of supposedly real mermaids, some of which were reported by the likes of captains Christopher Columbus, Henry Hudson and John Smith.

"A Wife in Every Port" spends most of its ink on the sexual exploits of Augustus Hervey, a British vice-admiral and "a womanizer on an epic scale," although it also examines sailors' encounters with island girls. "Two Naval Heroes and Their Women" is all about John Paul Jones and his many affairs, and Horatio Nelson's infamous relationship with Lady Emma Hamilton, although here Cordingly pays more attention to their naval glories than their romantic entanglements.

The penultimate chapter takes us back to shore to introduce some dedicated women who manned lighthouses and, in some cases, enacted heroic rescues of men who otherwise would have been lost at sea. The book concludes with "The Sailors' Return," dealing with the women who waited -- sometimes in vain -- for their husbands to come back to them. Cordingly explains some of the efforts to take care of naval widows, although those efforts often fell short of satisfying their desperate needs for survival.

The text is a bit dry at times, but overall Cordingly presents the information in an interesting and educational fashion. His research is, as I expected after reading Under the Black Flag, thorough and comprehensive. My criticism of the title aside, Seafaring Women is a useful and informative book for anyone who enjoys naval history and wants to learn more about the role that women -- often overlooked -- played in the Age of Sail. Some of the details will surprise you!