| Popis: |
This chapter explores the links between women and seafaring, focusing for the most part on Western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet the girl herself had probably made a calculated life choice, based on information acquired in the maritime communities along the River Thames and on known accounts of women who had served at sea, both legitimately and disguised as men. Women who accompanied seamen or troops on voyages, or who just travelled overseas, were subject to the same dangers of piracy, shipwreck, or battle. If shipwrecked women survived to be captured by native peoples on non-European shores, they were assumed to suffer a fate worse than death. The role of women in maritime communities, therefore, differed from that of women in urban economies where, in early modern times, trade became more regulated and women’s formal involvement in it declined. |
