Good Vibrations Magazine

For most of human history, sailing has largely been a male enterprise. Historical prejudices and assumptions have for the most part kept women off of ships. In many cultures, one of those assumptions was that sex on the high seas would spell disaster.

But that’s not to say that the ships didn’t rock and roll, or the crew didn’t do their own kind of rhythm magic. But there were extreme penalties in many cases for any attempts to bring women on board a ship — and sex and the sea have always been part of a sailor’s life.

The logic behind keeping crews all male appears sound — for about a minute. The idea was to prevent romantic and sexual conflict among the crew, not to mention preventing the disaster of a pregnancy at sea during eras that had no effective birth control. But it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in History to guess that banning women from ships certainly didn’t eliminate nautical sex. Whether onboard masturbation was encouraged is unknown, but homosexual behavior must have been pretty common, given how much energy was spent prohibiting it.

In response to homosexual behavior on ships, the nations of the West during the age of sail expressly prohibited sex between crewmates, with penalties ranging from simple monetary fines to floggings — British ships being the strictest. However, the big-wigs with the fruit salad on their chests were hundreds or thousands of miles away, so it was usually the discretion of the ship’s captain as to whether sex between men was a good thing or a bad thing. The same went for the ban on female shipmates.

Some captains and ships bent the rules considerably, and thus was born the custom of the “Captain’s Wife” or “Captain’s Daughter” — a female courtesan (or occasionally a man cross-dressed as a woman) brought on board simply to service the officers of the ship. Other captains allowed their crews to smuggle women aboard ship, cross-dressed as men.

Pirates, on the other hand, were quite stern in their banning of women; some pirate captains went as far as issuing severe floggings or stranding crewmembers on islands for bringing women aboard.

Ironically enough, however, two of the most well known pirates in the Western age of sail, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, were women. When captured, they both escaped the gallows by saying “We plead our bellies,” meaning they were pregnant at the time. Another famous female pirate, this one in 19th-century China, there was the pirate Cheng I Sao, who ruled the Chinese pirate fleets during the 1810s. She was an equal-opportunity pirate, including women in her battle parties, and is known as the most successful pirate captain in all of world history.

Male pirates from the West kept any number of common-law wives in a variety of ports. Many of their wives were also the wives of more than one sailor sailing on different ships. The only time there was a problem was when there was a question of seniority, such as when a husband died and his goods had to be divided among his wives — in such cases the women he was married to the longest usually won out, unless a younger one had children. Pirates, despite their bad reputation, were often remarkably civilized.

Other pirate societies, such as the buccaneers, created a form of partnership that often included homosexual love. “Matelots” were a form of permanent relationship between two men that served in many ways the needs of both financial and emotional well-being. Many men were more protective and emotionally tied to their matelots than their own wives — going so far as to will them their lands and goods. Early Christian missionaries as well as pirate-hunters often used these forms of same-sex marriage to condemn pirate society.

In more rough-and-tumble pirate societies, such as among the famous South China sea pirates, sex and love between men became a political force as well as a sexual one. Kidnapped as children from raided ships, these boys would often form long-lasting sexual relationships among themselves and with their captors that later helped hold together the scattered pirate tribes.

There was also a long-standing tradition of having a cabin boy on board. For many years, the position of cabin boy entailed “positions” that weren’t on the official job description. Depending on the ship, this involved sexually servicing either the officers or the entire crew. Most of those hired on as cabin boy were clear from the outset about these duties.

But for those not familiar with these duties, the crew had a special tradition to “enlighten” a new cabin boy; they would lure the crewmember into the bowels of the ship. Each and every ship, it was said, was given a special, good-luck, gold rivet when its keel was laid. This could be found in the bottom of the ship.

The “golden rivet,” of course, was a fiction, just like the lack of sex on ships.