Customer Reviews

The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ship and Its Cargo of Female Convicts

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In the foreward to this engaging narrative, Ms. Rees informs us that "when the American colonies defeated British soldiers and tax collectors, they also stopped accepting British criminals. By 1783, therefore, Britain had to find somewhere else in the world to transport its criminals." Australia was the place. Just as Jamestown, the early colony in Virginia, needed an infusion of marriageable women to allow it to grow (one of the three events of the red-letter year, 1619, was the arrival of a shipload of unmarried women), so would the penal colony in Sydney Cove.

Beginning with a description of the "crimes" for which women were sentenced to capital punishment and proceeding through the trials, prison conditions, and alternate punishment of banishment, Ms. Rees traces the voyage of the first group of women convicts to Australia. From the onset, she admits that her primary sources are limited and one, the diary of one of the crew of the Lady Julian, is somewhat doubtful because it was written so long after the fact. Even so, she has pulled together court records, contemporary British accounts of prison conditions, accounts of later voyages and other sources into a very impressive piece of research, and a very readable story.

In particular, her accounts of ship-board births, the pecking order among the female prisoners, the rights the crew assumed (both for sexual favors and for selling them in the ports of call) are fascinating reading.

Sometimes, history is written by but a handful of individuals; that certainly was the case with the first British settlements in Australia. The term "Empire" is to some extent misleading, in that it gives an exaggerated idea of monolitihic power: the totality of the resources that the British Empire had committed to colonizing Australia in 1789 were a few decrepit ships laden with convict women and supplies, and a ragged band of half-starved colonists left on the Australian coast for over a year without any contact with the rest of the world. Sian Rees vividly evokes the vastness of the oceans separating these early settler ships from their homeland and from each other as they traveled the high seas, not encountering a soul for weeks or months at a time, and lets the reader feel the isolation of the early colonists - those on the second ship, wondering if there was even still a settlement in Australia to be reached, and those already on land, wondering if the promised relief from Great Britain would ever arrive, or if the authorities in London had forsaken them.

Unfortunately, while this book succeeds in giving one a better understanding of the general process surrounding British colonization of Australia, and the many hardships involved, this was not its primary goal and otherwise I found it lacking. It is not precisely, as the cover claims, "the true story" of the ship and its convict women, since none of the women left any written record at all of their experience. It is rather a mixture of the women's names and the crimes they were convicted of (gleaned from London criminal records) braided together with an assortment of facts from contemporary travellers' accounts, sailors' reminiscences, and other source material which gives the flavor of the period but does not directly relate to the story of the ship and its women. Far, far too many times, Sian Rees resorts to phrases including "it is possible that..." or "must have been" or "would have started" or "presumably" or "probably"... Rees does rely heavily on the published memoirs of John Nicol, a sailor on the Lady Julian; her reliance on Nicol makes it all the more jarring that she freely dismisses him whenever his memoirs contradict her assumptions, as when after quoting him dozens of times she dismisses his memory of a particular incident saying "this was in memoirs written when he was an old man, which are inaccurate in other details."

I really wanted to like this book, and the author is to be commended for trying to rescue the forgotten story of the female convicts. But this is light reading, not rigorous history, and where the documentary sources just aren't there she might have done better to write a historical novel and fictionalize freely rather than build a "non-fiction" book out of a tapestry of conditional statements.

Sian Rees set herself up for a difficult task but she succeeded in flying colours. It is notoriously hard to find any information about the people who were transported to Australia as convicts let alone details about female convicts. Thanks to a little known memoir of one of the ship's officers, John Nicol, Sian Rees has been able to put a small amount flesh onto the bones of the women who were among the very first convicts to be sent to Australia. We learn about the offences of some of the women, how they supported themselves as prostitutes at ports of call (or by sleeping with the ship's company) in order to survive and, in some cases, their extraordinary life stories (both failures and successes) once they arrived in Sydney Cove. I very much enjoyed this book - it was a fascinating insight into late 18th century morals and the creation of the colony in New South Wales.

Sian Rees has written an extremely readable book, which is not in the least 'dry' or 'dusty' although it is history.
The Floating Brothel of the title is the ship 'The Lady Julian' used to transport 250 female prisoners to Australia in the late 18th century. It is quite horrifying to see how these some of these women could be sentenced to seven years 'in land beyond the seas' for what today would be classed as minor misdemeanours.
However, the women aboard the Lady Julian were more fortunate than many being aboard a ship with a decent, honest agent and captain to ensure their welfare was taken care of. Many of them became 'wives' to the crew for the duration of the voyage, which of course gave them certain advantages. Nonetheless this book still manages to convey the horror of this punishment and the harsh conditions of the day.
Sian Rees manages to inject a little humour at times (such as the antics of some of the women in Tenerife) which provides a welcome relief and stops the book becoming too grim. She also adds some nice touches of history by recounting snippets about Captain Cook and Lieutenant Bligh and the Bounty.
This is a good account of crime, punishment and survival in Georgian England and well worth a read.

The book isn't as bawdy as the description would lead one to believe. I'd say the book is evenly divided between the convicts and sea faring information. I learned quite a bit about bilges, tar, shipwrecks, and the history of sea travel in the 1700s. I bought the book for the stories of the convicts, so I was a bit disappointed, but learned so much about a topic I knew absolutely nothing about, sailing the high seas, it evened the score. Great book.

Sian Rees has done a magnificent job of reconstructing the lives of some humble people in the late eighteenth century. The original facts relating to the love affair between John Nicol and Sarah Whitelam on their voyage to Botany Bay are scanty and unreliable but the author ekes these out with detailed research. For example, having established that their ship touched at Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, at Cape Verde and at Rio di Janeiro, she has found documents describing those places at that time, and how a British convict ship was received. She gives details of the ocean currents and winds and navigation problems involved in a sailing to Australia, of contemporary midwifery practices, and of how defecation and menstruation were managed on a ship at sea. It is true that she digresses a lot into accounts of people who may never have seen Nicol and Whitelam, but it all adds up to a vivid and convincing picture.
Incidentally I notice no Australian reviewers on this board or on the UK site. Was a separate edition published there?

"The Floating Brothel" is a wonderful book, and it will get under your skin. I'm not sure just why but the story of the women who were shipped from England for crimes to Australia in 1790, seem to really have gotten inside of me. Sian Rees did an admirable job of fleshing the lives of these women before and after their boat ride. She did this with scraps of information pulled together form many different sources, and with out becoming judgmental. You will find this to be an easy book to read, and it will leave with the need to find out more not just about the transport of convict to New South Wales, but also the earlier transports to the Americas. By the way despite the title of this book, you will be reading about very little sex. I also should warn you to watch out for the deep love shown and expressed by one of the seaman, for one of the convicts, it is better than any romance novel you'll ever read.

In 1787,1000 people, including a large number of male convicts, were sent from England to colonize the bay of Sydney Cove. Within a year the poorly prepared colony was failing, struggling to survive in the new world--the city-bred petty criminals were no match for the harsh elements of the Australian coast. England's leaders knew that for the colony to succeed, drastic measures would have to be taken. England had another problem it needed to solve. England's problem was about to become the colony's solution.

By 1788, post-war England was teeming with overpopulation. Those who couldn't find reputable work quickly found other ways, outside of the law, to survive. Criminals, both petty and hardened convicts, overflowed the "gaols," creating horrific living conditions for the prisoners. Overcrowding, disease, malnutrition-- This may sound like a 21st century newscast, but in reality it was the story "ripped from the 18th century headlines" of the "gaols" of England's major cities. Sian Rees' fast-moving book _The Floating Brothel_ reads more like a work of historical adventure fiction rather than a dry documentary based on real events. Taken largely from period documents, including letters, court papers, and the first-person memoirs of Lady Julian's ship steward John Nicol, _The Floating Brothel_ is a story of struggle, of despair, of politics and societal problems, but most of all a story of humanity. Some of the estimated 237 women convicts who arrived in New South Wales in 1790, after an eleven-month voyage at sea, became pioneers of the young community, the first true female entrepeneurs of their time, finding stability and prosperity in their strange new surroundings. A dozen or so of the women became pregnant by members of the ship's crew and bore their children at sea. John Nicols, upon whose memoirs much of the story of the Floating Brothel is based, dictates a heartfelt account of falling in love with teenage convict Sarah Whitelam, who gave birth to a son by Nicols several months into the voyage. Some of the new mothers, and many of the other women, found husbands among the colony's reformed convicts, had children, settled in the colony for life. Some of the women reverted to their old ways--stealing, cheating, prostituting themselves for a few small coins.

Dozens of these extraordinary individual stories are told in _The Floating Brothel_, from Rees' highly detailed accounts of the women's alleged criminal acts and arrests, to the characterization of individual members of the ship's crew. We can almost see the punishment of the "Transportation to Parts Beyond the Seas" through the eyes of those who lived through the experience, so raw and real is Rees' narrative.

There are no true "happy endings" in Rees' book; rather, she explores the spectrum of human nature through the experiences of these female convicts.

Although the text is not as "steamy" as the title implies, I enjoyed this fascinating portrayal of the displacement of British women who were sentenced to "life across the seas" for committing petty crimes. These marriagable women were transported on the "Lady Julian" and destined to colonize Australia...many would become founding mothers of this new territory. The book begins with accounts of the crimes and trials of the women. The story becomes more absorbing when the "Lady Julian" sets sail. The book reveals the cunning and determination of these women not only survive, but to set up a profitable trade at many ports along the way. A definite read for those interested in historical depictions of resourceful women in the 18th century.

Sian Rees has drummed up a very readable and very interesting account of the transport ship Lady Julian (strange name!) that set sail from England in 1789 to Sydney Cove, Australia.
The opening chapters are very dry and are clearly based on set of gaol lists etc. to try and get names onto the ship. Rees settles on the 'history' of nine or ten female convicts who cover as broad a spectrum as you can from the 'criminal' tier of Georgian society plus the usual faces - captain, purser, surgeon, cook.
In a strange way, once Lady Julian hits the open sea, Rees' narration changes, moves away from a slightly stilted historian to biographical free flowing ease. She even permits herself to 'set the scene' - that biographical method so frowned upon by strict historians.
This work succeeds all the more for it.
If you liked 'Further than Any Man' - the story of James Cook - you'll like this.
The journey down Africa, to Rio, through Cape Horn - all the while taking care to explain the current state of these 18th century places - is so readable, all the time giving updates on the desparate situation at Sydney Cove. In some respects Rees almost glamorizes the journey and is correct to point out that we cannot apply twenty-first century morality to an eighteenth century reality.
This is immensely readable, extremely interesting and provides a fascinating insight to a small snippet of history that almost defined an antipodean future. Highly recommended.