In 1815 a woman boarded the HMS Queen Charlotte, not as an on-board wife, a passenger or a nurse, but as a sailor.
Following an alleged dispute with her husband, ‘William Brown’ (her birth name unknown) made history by becoming both a cross-dressing sailor and the first black woman to join the Royal Navy, just eight years after the passing of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
Cross-dressing, historically considered a perversion, had seen the involvement of women since the Middle Ages; a strategic decision for some who wanted to participate in the wider world.
