On international women's day, Scarborough's Maritime Heritage Centre is running an exhibition detailing the long history of women at sea.
Museum Chair - Mark Vesey - says there research shows that despite superstitions that having women on sea going vessels was unlucky there have been female sailors going back thousands of years.
A new exhibition at the Scarborough Maritime Heritage Centre entitled “Women @ Sea” shows that females have actually been at sea for many centuries. The earliest records show that Artemisia I of Caria, Queen of Halicarnassus, was recorded as a successful naval commander in 500 BC. Princess Sela is recorded as the first recorded Norwegian pirate in 400 AD.
Records go on to show women as captains and pirates through the 13th to 16th centuries. Jeanne de Clisson was a privateer targeting French ships. She was known as the 'Lioness of Britain' in the 1300s. Sayyida al Hurra turned to piracy and ruled as queen of Tétouan in the 1500s.
Mark Vesey says:
"Once we enter the great age of sail in the 1700s we find Besty and Hannah Miller listed as Captains and Managers of the brig Clytus on Scotland's North-East coast. Anne Bonny and Mary Read are the most famous female pirates in history and sailed the Caribbean in the 1700s.
Hannah Snell, known as James Gray, was the first recorded woman in the Royal Navy. Jeanne Baret was a working botanist who travelled around the world by ship in the late 1700s. The first black woman to serve in the Royal Navy, who went by the name of William Brown, served in the early part of the 19th century.
Dora Walker was the first female boat skipper on the Yorkshire Coast at the end of the 19th century and Victoria Drummond was the first woman marine engineer in the UK in the early 20th century. The first trained woman in the RNLI was 18-year-old Elizabeth Hostvedt in 1969.
Since that time many women have single handedly sailed around the world including Ellen MacArthur, who set the record for the fastest solo circumnavigation of the globe in 2019. Laura Dekker was the youngest woman to circumnavigate the globe single-handedly, aged 16 in 2012.
Four Yorkshire women, Yorkshire Rows, were the oldest female crew to cross the Atlantic in 2016. In 2014, women started working in Royal Navy submarines, and in 2022, Jude Terry became the first female admiral in Royal Navy history.
Closer to home, the Scarborough RNLI took on its first female crew member, Tabz Nixon, in 2018. They now have four women crew members.
Looking forward at the next generation we see there are 62 females, cadets and staff, in the local Sea Cadets group. "
There are now 1.2 million seafarers working across the world with women making up just 2% of the workforce.
Mark says their research has shown that women have been in seafaring roles for thousands of years, but have often been overlooked by the history books.
The Women at Sea exhibition runs until June at the Scarborough Maritime Heritage Centre which is now in its fifteenth year of operation and is run entirely by volunteers and public donations.
The exhibition is free to visit and open from 11am to 4pm, Wednesdays to Sundays, at 45 Eastborough, Scarborough.
There are more details at https://www.scarboroughsmaritimeheritage.org.uk/
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