"Mansion House - Before the Lord Mayor

Female Sailor

Yesterday Marianne Rebecca Johnson, alias William Johnson, was brought before the Chief Magistrate, 
in consequence of being found, on the preceding evening, wandering in the vicinity of Bishopsgate 
Street, in a forlorn and distressed situation; she was attired as a sailor, in a shabby jacket and 
trowsers, and wore her own black hair cropped. The circumstances which led to the discovery of her 
sex, as well as the singular circumstances of her family fortunes, were as follows :-

A Master Bricklayer, who was employed about some buildings in Dunnings-lane, Bishopsgate-street, on 
Tuesday evening, saw, as he thought, a sailor boy sitting on the threshold of a door, near the Black 
Bull public house, drenched with rain, shivering with cold, and weeping bitterly. Attracted by the 
appearance of the lad, he questioned him as to his situation, and found that the sailor belonged to a 
northern coal-ship now in the Pool, and had run away from the vessel on board which he had sailed 
four years as an apprentice, and said he would rather be hanged than return on board. The man asked 
the boy into the Bull's Head, and offered him some refreshment; but he had scarcely entered the house 
ere he fainted away; and on loosening his neck handkerchief and opening his bosom to aid his revival, 
the real sex of the poor truant was discovered. The woman of the house immediately paid the poor girl 
every humane attention, and obtained from her the following narrative:-

She declared herself to be a native of Whitby, in Yorkshire, and the daughter of a seaman who was 
killed in the service of his country early in the last war. After her father's death, her mother married 
another man, and lived with him for some years at Whitby. She herself had been at service in that town, 
from the time she was able to work until she was thirteen years old, and was last employed in attending 
a female of that town in her lying-in. Her father-in-law came for her there, took her away, and made her 
put on sailor's clothes, with threats that if ever she disclosed her sex he would murder her. He had often 
treated her barbarously, and she exhibited the mark of a blow he had given her, with a poker, under her 
left ear. He, in a few days after, bound her apprentice on board a coal-ship, the Mayflower, of Sunderland, 
at present lying off Woolwich, and on board of which she had now served four years, without her sex being 
discovered. On Monday morning she was ill, and in a very delicate situation, unable to turn-out to her 
usual duties on deck, in consequence of which, the mate, supposing her disinclination to work arose from 
laziness, flogged her severely: this determined her to run away from the ship, which she effected on 
Tuesday morning. 
The poor girl also stated that her step father had disposed of her mother in the same manner he had served 
her, three years before, and forced her on board a ship of war, in seaman's clothes, after having for 
several years treated her most cruelly. Nobody ever knew what became of her, until after the late taking 
of Copenhagen, when she was mortally wounded in action; and a letter written immediately before her death, 
to a friend at Whitby, explained the circumstances of her fate. She had served seven years on board 
different ships of war, never disclosing her sex and preferred the hardships of her situation to returning 
to her friends, at the risk of meeting her unnatural husband. The girl is not eighteen years old, and of a 
person, aspect and 
demeanour, by no means uninteresting; nor have the hard drudgeries of a seaman's life in any degree 
impaired the natural softness and submissive modesty of her sex. 
An incident not inappropriate to this extraordinary denouement is, that the humane hostess of the Black 
Bull public house (who felt and marked all the sensations of a true daughter of John Bull for the female 
orphan of a British seaman, in much singular adversity) was, herself, for some years, Cook to the 
immortal NELSON, at his residence at Merton, and was now the means of bringing the poor girl before 
the Lord Mayor, in order to her disposal in some way more appropriate to her sex."