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

Love, adventure and seafaring around the world. A little known but very real story of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, at the time of the last great world discoveries. That the protagonists were often performing heroic feats against their will, as in the case of the deported prostitutes, makes the tale even more captivating. This was enjoyable reading, instructive history and made you feel like you were one of the crew!

"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.

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.

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.

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.