Were the Asp and Laconia based on real ships? Why did Captain Wentworth take the time to have a “lovely cruise” in the middle of the war? How common was it for women to be on naval ships? Learn the answers to these questions and more in this episode of My Cousin Jane.
Hey everybody, welcome back to My Cousin Jane. Today we’re going to be talking about Persuasion Chapter 8.
This chapter is interesting because we transition into what we might call the new normal between Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth. The beginning of this chapter opens up and says, from this point forward they were frequently in one another’s company. Despite that, even though there’s this familiarity now, there’s still a lot of tension, especially on Anne’s side. We don’t really know what Captain Wentworth is thinking, but we know he’s stiff and cold towards Anne.
There’s still this interesting dualism inside of Anne’s brain, because on one hand, she’s trying to pretend to be this dispassionate observer about what’s happening between Captain Wentworth and the Miss Musgroves. On the other hand, there’s still these little things that go on that show that she still has a strong attachment to Captain Wentworth: her emotional response to some of the things, the things that she notices that nobody else does.
It’s an interesting tension that starts in this chapter and ends up building up until, well, we don’t want to spoil it for anyone, but to some certain things that take place in Lyme.
The Navy List
For now, we’re going to focus on a couple more naval related things in this chapter, and then we’re going to take a break from that. In this chapter, one of the things that’s interesting, we have the return of the Navy lists, and we have a discussion of some of Captain Wentworth’s ships.
Let’s start out. We’ve talked about the naval list a few times before in previous episodes, so I’m not going to go into a lot of detail there. The naval list, just as a summary, was a way for people to keep up with what was happening with the Royal Navy during this time period. They were essentially a magazine periodical that were published and sold through various booksellers in different port towns and around London, that would tell you who was being promoted, which ships were still in service, how many men were stationed on them, etc.
The Miss Musgroves have a copy of the naval list, the first one that’s ever been had, as far as we know, in the Musgroves’ home. They’re going to look through and try to find some of Captain Wentworth’s ships.
The Asp
We’ll start with the Asp.
When she could let her attention take its natural course again, she found the Miss Musgroves just fetching the Navy List (their own navy list, the first that had ever been at Uppercross), and sitting down together to pore over it, with the professed view of finding out the ships that Captain Wentworth had commanded.
“Your first was the Asp, I remember; we will look for the Asp.”
“You will not find her there. Quite worn out and broken up. I was the last man who commanded her. Hardly fit for service then. Reported fit for home service for a year or two, and so I was sent off to the West Indies.”
The girls looked all amazement. Persuasion, Chapter 8
This is an interesting little side note here about service versus home service. Service meant it was fit for warfare. You could send it out fighting against the French, fighting against privateers, whatever you were fighting against, and it would be fine.
Fit for home service meant we’re going to maybe send you on cargo runs. We’re going to transport people or different supplies to some of our outlying colonies. Even though the ship wasn’t good enough for naval service in combat, it was good enough to sail all the way to the West Indies. That’s quite a long trip, which you can see is probably why the Miss Musgroves were so astonished at this pronouncement.
There were a few small ships during Jane Austen’s time that had the name the Asp. Hazel Jones wrote an interesting article that I highly recommend, in the Jane Austen Society of North America in 2018, all about the naval lists and how they relate to Captain Wentworth, and the Asp in particular, and some interesting connections there.
I want to point out one thing that she talks about here. In this time period, right around the turn of the century, there was a pretty prominent court-martialing that took place with Captain Popham. Captain Popham was leading the squadron in the Royal Navy, and he, against the orders of the Admiralty, took his squadron somewhere else. There was a lot of public outcry about his court-martialing, because the public felt that he was in the right for his actions. You can read all about the details of this in Jane Austen and the Navy.
What’s interesting is that Jane Austen was also a fan of Captain Popham, and actually wrote a poem in his defense. One of the things that Hazel Jones points out is that a lot of the words used to describe Captain Popham, Jane Austen also uses to describe Captain Wentworth, both for good and ill. Some of Lady Russell’s comments about Wentworth are what some of Captain Popham’s detractors used to comment about him. Just a little interesting side note there.
I bring this up because one of the ships in the squadron that Popham commanded was called the Asp. Just a little interesting coincidence there. Again, you can get more details in that article by Hazel Jones in the Jane Austen Society of North America, or you can get even more details in the book Jane Austen and the Navy.
Oh, and before I forget, the other interesting thing about Hazel Jones’s article is that she actually has some pictures of naval lists from the time period in that article. You can go over there if you want to know what a naval list actually looks like. Check that out as a great resource.
The Laconia
Let’s talk about Captain Wentworth’s other ship, the Laconia. First, let’s hear a clip. Once again, all of our audio clips come from the narrations of the talented Karen Savage, who did these for LibriVox, and they’re in the public domain.
If you’re interested in Jane Austen audiobooks, there are some great versions of these out there, but I highly recommend Karen Savage’s. First of all, they’re free; you can go to LibriVox.org and download those. They have different mobile apps, but they’re also well done.
Let’s take a look, or rather a listen, to what the Miss Musgroves find out about the Laconia.
The girls were now hunting for the Laconia; and Captain Wentworth could not deny himself the pleasure of taking the precious volume into his own hands to save them the trouble, and once more read aloud the little statement of her name and rate, and present non-commissioned class, observing over it that she too had been one of the best friends man ever had.
“Ah! those were pleasant days when I had the Laconia! How fast I made money in her. A friend of mine and I had such a lovely cruise together off the Western Islands. Poor Harville, sister! You know how much he wanted money: worse than myself. He had a wife. Excellent fellow. I shall never forget his happiness. He felt it all, so much for her sake. I wished for him again the next summer, when I had still the same luck in the Mediterranean.” Persuasion, Chapter 8
There’s a lot of interesting information here. First of all, the name, rate, and class of the ship. Again, you can see this in the article by Hazel Jones. The rate of a ship was how many men and how many cannons it had. Then the class was what the ship was doing. Is it in active service? Has it been decommissioned? Is it now just being used for civilian use or for cargo use? Things like that. All of this was published in the naval lists.
The other thing that’s interesting in this quote is this phrase, “a lovely cruise.” This was a euphemism used in the Royal Navy during this time period for, we’re going on a mission to attack the enemy and try to get as much prize money as we can. If you had success during this period, it was a lovely cruise. That’s an interesting phrase of that time period. I don’t know if it’s still in use today in the Royal Navy. If we have any listeners familiar with the Royal Navy, maybe you can chime in on that.
We’ve talked about prize money in the past. This is how Captain Wentworth made his fortune. The ship’s captain and his officers would distribute a certain amount of prize money based on how many ships they would destroy or capture, how big those ships were, how many men they would capture, all these different things. It was in your best interest to try to capture as many ships as you could.
The Laconia, the ship Laconia, is interesting, because although, as far as we know, there weren’t any ships called the Laconia during Jane Austen’s lifetime, there have been two since then, and both of them had infamous histories.
The first HMS Laconia, and if you’re not familiar with that term, HMS means His Majesty’s Ship or Her Majesty’s Ship, depending on if it’s a king or a queen at the time. The HMS Laconia was built by Cunard Cruise Lines. It was a civilian ship built as a cruise liner, and Cunard is still a cruise lining company in service today. The British Navy drafted it into service during World War I, and it served until around 1916. Then it had been returned to Cunard service and was now nominally acting as a civilian ship. A German submarine attacked and sunk the ship, killing 12 out of 75 passengers.
Two of those passengers were Americans. This is why the ship is so well known, because of the high level of press coverage this received in the United States at the time. A lot of scholars believe that this was the deciding factor, or at least one of the major factors, in swaying public interest in the United States for having the US enter World War I, which up until this point it had been hesitant about.
The second ship, also built by Cunard Cruise Lines, was built around the time of World War II. It was also drafted into service by the Royal Navy, and also attacked by a German submarine, in 1942. There were all kinds of terrible events that surrounded this that are collectively known as the Laconia Incident. Far-reaching consequences, not just during the war, but after the war, for how Germans would approach civilian prisoners, how prisoners of war were treated from that point on, all kinds of interesting things that happened because of the Laconia incident. If you’re interested in modern warfare history, I highly recommend you read about that.
Women on Ships
To introduce this next segment, we have a conversation going on between Captain Wentworth and his sister, and they’re talking about the conveyance of ladies on a ship, in particular officers’ wives. Let’s listen to this exchange, and then we’ll talk about this in context.
“But, if I know myself,” said he, “this is from no want of gallantry towards them. It is rather from feeling how impossible it is, with all one’s efforts, and all one’s sacrifices, to make the accommodations on board such as women ought to have. There can be no want of gallantry, Admiral, in rating the claims of women to every personal comfort high, and this is what I do. I hate to hear of women on board, or to see them on board; and no ship under my command shall ever convey a family of ladies anywhere, if I can help it.”
This brought his sister upon him.
“Oh! Frederick! But I cannot believe it of you.—All idle refinement!—Women may be as comfortable on board, as in the best house in England. I believe I have lived as much on board as most women, and I know nothing superior to the accommodations of a man-of-war. I declare I have not a comfort or an indulgence about me, even at Kellynch Hall,” (with a kind bow to Anne), “beyond what I always had in most of the ships I have lived in; and they have been five altogether.”
“Nothing to the purpose,” replied her brother. “You were living with your husband, and were the only woman on board.” Persuasion, Chapter 8
There’s some interesting history here. First of all, it was pretty common during this time period for women to be on board ships. I’m going to make the same distinction in this conversation that Captain Wentworth and his sister make: that there was a difference between the different classes of women. What we would consider ladies were typically the wives of officers, and the general women, who were the wives of crew in the lower deck.
Obviously, just like on land, the experience that these women would have compared to the wives of the officers would be very different, and it would depend on which class of society they belong to. Mrs. Croft here talks about how comfortable she was on a ship, and Captain Wentworth points out, well, yeah, you are the wife of an admiral, and you’re the only woman on board in this situation. That’s a very different situation than what a lot of women on board a ship experience.
There was also a fair amount of women who pretended to be men so that they could enter the naval service, even during this time period. There are a couple of famous cases of this. We’re not exactly sure how common this was, but we know it was fairly common, especially amongst the poor. If you were a poor woman with no family and you didn’t have any other options for making money, entering the Navy was a good way to at least earn a living wage.
During this time period, the idea of women on board a ship was debated pretty hotly amongst the Admiralty. There’s a good article that describes this situation. Roland McMaster wrote this in 2015 in the Jane Austen Society of North America, talking about how there was a big debate amongst the admirals about whether or not women should be on board, and also about the tendency of prostitutes to be brought on board in port. There was a lot of discussion, especially in Parliament, about whether this should be sanctioned, whether it should be forbidden.
There’s some famous incidents that Roland McMaster gets into and talks about. I believe his article talks about a particular case where the queen was brought on board a ship, and there were prostitutes on board, and some interesting things that took place because of that. I highly recommend you read that article if you’re interested in what life was like for women who were involved with the Royal Navy during this time period.
Conclusion
That wraps up this episode of My Cousin Jane. As always, if you enjoy the show and would like to help support us, please consider clicking the little donate button or subscribing to our newsletter. Either way, thanks so much for listening.
