Rees’ research began as a hobby with no intention of writing a book. “The great thing about doing that sort of research is that you can digress down any avenue that interests you. It’s not very pretty,” says Rees, “but I did a lot of reading up on women’s sexual health in the eighteenth century and the cures which were being used for syphilis and gonorrhea, as well as the so-called “lock hospitals,” or charitable hospitals, that took in unmarried mothers and prostitutes who had caught venereal disease.” Her search also led her to look for the log of the Lady Juliana — “which [had] been destroyed or at least it is not held in the National Archives.”

For Rees, the first process is tracking down available documents. “Most of the documents of The Floating Brothel,” says Rees, “were court records of the women who were tried at the Old Bailey, the central court in London in the 1780s. They are now online, but when I was doing the research ten years ago, you had to go to the Guild Hall Library in London and get out enormous books and flip through them until you found the trials that you were interested in.”

Reviewing the Old Bailey court proceedings uncovered a shocking amount of men and women convicted of highway robbery for stealing no more than the equivalent of 16-pence. Prior to Georgian England, Parliament began to enact a series of strict penal codes, called the “Bloody Codes.” “The 18th-century was a time in which there was an enormous population increase,” explains Rees. “This had a pressure and effect on things like unemployment, hunger, a move of people away from the country towards the cities. In the 1780s, following the end of the American Revolutionary War, there was a perception of a crime wave. There was an enormous demobilized army who was fed up with having fought for King and Country for many years, only to find themselves crippled and in the streets. There was an awful lot of petty crime because there was a lot of destitution. And with this perception of increased crime, came greater severity from the magistrates.”

In the 18th-century, the punishments for crime were either transportation to “parts beyond the seas” or death. The idea of prison as a punishment — penitentiaries — did not catch on until the 19th-century. “So really the magistrates and the judges now seem to be terribly cruel, but they just didn’t have any alternative sentences to hand down.” Rees also explains that “one of the problems that they were up against at that time was that the value that the crimes were assessed — the value that might get you transported or killed if you were a pickpocket — could be as little as six-pence. Which at the time the legislation went through might have been worth something, but in the 1780s in London, it was almost worth nothing. There was no subtlety built into the sentencing system. So whether you stole six-pence or 600 pounds, it counted as the same crime and received the same one-size-fits-all punishment.

Rees found that court records only told part of the story. She needed additional resources to learn about the voyage aboard the Lady Juliana. “The key document,” explains Rees, “was a memoir, a book written by the ship’s steward, John Nicol. Three decades after the event, he wrote a book of his memoirs. One chapter of which is dedicated to the voyage of the Lady Juliana. In fact, while I was doing research, his memoir, which hadn’t been reprinted since 1822, was edited and re-released by an Australian press.”

While writing, Rees says, “The most challenging part was the bit that historians are not supposed to do — which is surmising what happens in the gaps. You have documents to tell you what happened, but you have to put in your best guess as to how things join together.” Rees comes from a sailing family. Her father and brother are both boat builders and delivery skippers. “Between them they have sailed practically the whole voyage of the Lady Juliana.” She used their descriptions of currents, wind, temperatures, and bird life to fill in the details of the journey at sea. Rees also called upon her personal experiences with sailing and seasickness to provided details of how it might have been for the women aboard the Lady Juliana.

Rees hopes that the story of the women aboard the Lady Juliana stimulates people to consider “the resilience of ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances and that there is no monolithic good and bad, heroes and villains.” She believes that history is much more complicated than “colonials and colonized, oppressed and oppressors, men and women, black and white.” Rees recently began researching a second book on the 19th-century history of the British Royal Navy’s suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade.

The Old Bailey and Newgate Prison

On January 14, 1789, eleven-year-old Mary Wade appeared before London’s Old Bailey court and was convicted of assaulting eight-year-old Mary Phillips and stealing her clothes. Sentencing her to death, the judge in Mary’s case stated that she and her accomplice’s crime was, “equivalent to holding a pistol to the breast of a grown person; therefore, I cannot state it to be any thing less than robbery; the consequence of that is, that they must answer it with their lives.”

Mary Wade was sent to Newgate Prison, one of London’s most notorious jails and a holding place for criminals awaiting “transportation” from Great Britain or facing death. Mary would have entered the prison through an underground tunnel that blocked out all natural light. Once inside, she would have been housed in one of a series of dark, wet, vermin-infested cells that were breeding grounds for diseases such as typhus. With over 750 men, women, and children contained within its walls — over twice its capacity — Newgate Prison was also severely overcrowded. Mary would have had the option of paying for a blanket or the privilege of sleeping on a wooden ramp at one end of the cell where she would have been slightly removed from the rats. But given that she was still a child, Mary likely slept on the floor huddled with the other poor female prisoners.

One of Mary’s fellow prisoners was prostitute Rachel Hoddy. Hoddy had stood trial at the Old Bailey on June 25, 1788 and had been sentenced to seven years transportation for stealing the clothes of her inebriated client, Nimrod Blampin. She, like Mary Wade and hundreds of other convicted criminals, had been sent to Newgate Prison in order either to wait for a ship to remove them from England or to take their final trip to the gallows. But neither woman could have guessed what fate had in store for her, or that her own journey would be retraced by her distant relatives over 200 years later.

Historical Records and Newspaper Archives

What became of Mary Wade and how did she, along with Rachel Hoddy and Ann Marsh, end up on the Lady Juliana? For Meagen Benson and Helen Phillips, the descendents of Mary Wade and Rachel Hoddy, the first steps to unlocking the mysteries of their ancestors were to be found in the archives of the Old Bailey’s court proceedings — found online and at The Guildhall Library and The British Library. From over 100,000 records compiled from 1674 to 1834, the two women were able to locate trial summaries, court transcripts, and images of the original court records from Wade and Hoddy’s trials at the Old Bailey.

Once Benson and Phillips had uncovered how their ancestors became convicted criminals, their search led them on to other sources. In the archives of the London Times — one of the world’s most important historical records — Meagen Benson discovered why Mary Wade, who was originally sentenced to death, had instead been sent to the Sydney Cove colony. On March 11, 1789, “Mad” King George III was proclaimed cured of an unnamed madness — today, it is assumed that he suffered from porphyria, a degenerative mental disease. Five days later, in the spirit of celebration, all women on death row, including Mary Wade, had their sentences commuted to transportation. Wade was subsequently put aboard the Lady Juliana, the first convict ship to hold a cargo made up entirely of women and children.

Little was known about Ann Marsh and her crime other than that she was from Exeter and had been convicted of stealing a bushel of wheat. But Delia Dray was able to find the first important clue to Marsh’s story in a copy of the Lady Juliana’s manifest. The ship’s original manifest — kept at the State Library in Sydney, Australia — lists the names of all the female convicts aboard the ship, their ages, and their towns of origin. Dray found an entry for her ancestor in the manifest as “Marsh, Ann / Age: 21 / Town of Origin: Exeter.”

John Nicol’s Memoir

The Lady Juliana’s female convicts’ stories were never recorded, but ship steward John Nicol’s memoir contained one chapter dedicated to his time aboard the Lady Juliana. His book, The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner, recently reprinted in Australia, provides a respectful description of the ship’s journey and significant insights into its female passengers’ crimes and characters. Nicol described life onboard the ship and the ways in which the women were pressured to use sex to improve their situation and status. He details the difficult conditions the women were forced to endure during the long journey and the extreme seasickness that overtook the female passengers as they left England’s shores. But Nicol also notes that some luxuries were afforded to the women, even if they were primarily little more than efforts to safeguard the ship’s human cargo. The women were provided clothes, the services of a doctor, and guaranteed food and drink. Nicol also writes of how many sailors and officers took a “wife” on the journey and records the birth of seven babies aboard the Lady Juliana, including one to he and his own “wife,” Sarah Whitelam.

Using court records, the Lady Juliana’s manifest, and newspaper archives, the 21st-century women — Meagen Benson, Helen Phillips, and Delia Dray — were able to piece together the fates of their banished ancestors. Viewing a September 29, 1823 copy of the Hobart Town Gazette, Phillips learned that a license had been granted to Rachel Williams (formerly Hoddy) to sell liquor, wine, and beer in Hobart Town. To her surprise, Dray discovered that her ancestor Ann Marsh had founded the Parramatta River Boat Service, a line that still runs today. In the Sydney archives, Dray also found a copy of an unusual letter Marsh had written to the Governor of the Sydney Cove colony in 1811 requesting the services of a manservant to help operate her successful business. Benson was able to find out little more about Mary Wade until she uncovered her ancestor’s 1859 obituary in a local newspaper. The death notice stated that Wade had died at 87 years of age at her son’s residence. She is credited with being the matriarch of one of the largest families in the world, which grew to include five generations and over 300 descendents in her lifetime. She died highly esteemed and widely known throughout the colony.

In 1788, British Home Secretary Lord Sydney launched the “First Fleet” under the command of Governor Phillip, shipping some 759 convicts and 13 children of convicts along with marines, seamen, merchants and officials as well as sheep, cows, and seed to Australia to create Botany Bay penal colony in present-day Sydney. Upon arrival, Governor Phillip found that Botany Bay lacked both green fields and a water supply. It was also too exposed for ships. So he sailed up the coast into Sydney Harbor and settled at Sydney Cove. The cove had a much bigger natural harbor and its own water supply.

The new colony struggled from the start. Diseases like scurvy and dysentery had taken a toll on the settlers even before they had arrived, and food rations quickly began to run low. To make matters worse, the settlers were inexperienced farmers and lacked sufficient labor, so their crops were meager and they lost much of their livestock. Distraught, the colonists turned their anger toward the local aboriginal peoples and, in the summer of 1789, a Botany Bay marine was accused of raping an eight-year-old girl. Reports of such atrocities as well as the colonist’s difficulties soon reached Lord Sydney’s right-hand man, British Home Under-Secretary Evan Nepean. Nepean decided that, in order for the new colony to prosper, it would need more than just increased provisions and supplies — it would need the stability created by more women, children, and families. To this end, Nepean ordered a shipment of female convicts to immediately be sent to Sydney Cove and “upon landing, promote a matrimonial connection to improve morals and secure settlement.”

In response to Nepean’s command, 225 female thieves, prostitutes, con artists, and some five infants were rounded up from prisons in London and the English countryside to be shipped off to the failing Sydney Cove colony aboard the Lady Juliana. For the English government, the female convicts were to serve two purposes: to prevent the starving and isolated male colonists from engaging in “gross irregularities” and to act as a breeding stock for the troubled settlement.

The Lady Juliana left the shores of England the first week in July 1789. Its ten-month journey would take it through the Canary Islands and to Cape Verde, then on to Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town before arriving at Sydney Cove. The women slept in the orlop deck, just above the ship’s bilge, which contained the ship’s holding water, human waste, and remnants of food. Despite such hardships, the ship’s conditions may have seemed preferable to many of the women compared with those they had left behind in London’s prisons. For some of these women, the journey to Sydney Cove itself offered an opportunity for them to better their positions. Women who became “wives” of crewmembers aboard the ship could get access to better provisions and sleeping arrangements. Some women, like Elizabeth Barnsley — a wealthy and successful shoplifter convicted of theft — used their money and influence to procure better lodging and even to create business opportunities on the ship. Prostitution was not unusual in Georgian England or within the shipping industry, and the Lady Juliana soon became something of a “floating brothel.” Crewmembers and, possibly, some of the ship’s female cargo profited from the sex trade in various ports of call, and money earned from prostitution could in turn be used to gain influence on the ship or upon arrival at Sydney Cove.

After ten months at sea, the Lady Juliana arrived at the desperate, starving Sydney Cove colony. They did not receive a warm reception. The colonists had expected food and supplies — not a cargo of over 200 women and as many as seven newborn infants — and they made their disappointment clear to the women of the Lady Juliana. However, the colonists’ ire eased after the supply ships Justinian, Surprize, Neptune, and Scarborough arrived in Sydney Cove just three weeks after the Lady Juliana. For their part, many of the women convicts experienced a newfound sense of freedom at Sydney Cove. Freed from the strictures of traditional society and class, these women saw their new home as a chance to create a new life for themselves — a life filled with unprecedented opportunities.

Over 200 years later, three contemporary Australian women set out to unravel the stories of how their ancestors came to be aboard the Lady Juliana: Helen Phillips, a senior Anglican minister for the diocese of Tasmania,is a descendent of a prostitute named Rachel Hoddy; Delia Dray, a sheep farmer and senior government horticulturist, traces her lineage back to Ann Marsh, who was convicted of stealing a bushel of wheat; and Meagen Benson, a successful bank communications manager, is a distant relative of Mary Wade, a destitute 11-year-old street urchin who was sentenced to death for stealing another child’s clothes. Using old court records, newspaper archives, shipping logs, and excerpts from an account of the Lady Juliana’s voyage set down by ship steward John Nicol, the three women find out just how their ancestors came to be imprisoned and transported to Australia, and what became of them once they reached the failing colony.

Ms. Phillips, Ms. Dray, and Ms. Benson ultimately discover that, despite being branded “criminals” and being exiled from their native country, their ancestors and many of the 225 women aboard the Lady Juliana were also the founding mothers of Australia. After becoming the colony’s midwife and serving out the remainder of her sentence, Elizabeth Barnsley is thought to have earned enough money to purchase her passage back to England. In 1823, Rachel Hoddy applied for a license to sell liquor, beer, and wine and became the only woman in Hobart Town to operate a pub, “The Horse and Groom.” Ann Marsh became Australia’s first great female entrepreneur founding the Parramatta River Boat Service, which still runs today. And by the time she died at 87, Mary Wade had become Australia’s greatest matriarch, heading a five generation family with more than 300 members.

In 1789, more than 200 female thieves, prostitutes, and con artists were rounded up from London’s most notorious prisons and shipped off to an Australian penal colony aboard a leaky vessel named the Lady Juliana. For the English government, the convicts had two uses: to prevent the starving and isolated male colonists from engaging in “gross irregularities,” and to act as breeding stock for the troubled outpost. But once aboard, the wily women turned their banishment into opportunity, transforming their ship into a rowdy floating brothel.

By the time they reached Sydney Cove, they were fit and healthy, and some had even amassed enough money to support themselves. Instead of an assured life of servitude, they took control, and — along with their offspring — helped guarantee a new world’s future.

Using intensive research and long-hidden historical records, SECRETS OF THE DEAD: “Voyage of the Courtesans” intertwines current investigations with actual details of the voyage of the Lady Juliana. Three 21st-century Australian women — each of their great-great-great-great-great grandmothers had been a convict in Georgian England — discover the startling story of their ancestors. Helen Phillips, a senior Anglican minister for the diocese of Tasmania, is a descendent of a prostitute named Rachel Hoddy. Delia Dray, a sheep farmer and senior government horticulturalist, traces her lineage back to Ann Marsh, who was convicted of stealing a bushel of wheat. Meagen Benson, a successful bank communications manager, descends from destitute street urchin Mary Wade, who was sentenced for stealing a child’s clothes in a public place.

How did Rachel Hoddy, Ann Marsh, and Mary Wade find themselves on a prison ship banished to the ends of the earth? What became of them once they reached Sydney Cove? Providing information from archived documents, detailed records and excerpts from the memoir of Lady Juliana steward John Nicol, and historians’ accounts, SECRETS OF THE DEAD: “Voyage of the Courtesans” follows the modern-day women as they return to the scenes of their ancestors’ crimes in London and discover how these derelict convicts became the founding mothers of Australia.