they take up with that of men simply that they may be allowed to employ themselves in those manly avocations for which their taste and nature are fitted.”  In Caulfield’s “Portraits of Remarkable Persons,” we find a portrait of Anne Mills, styled the female sailor, who is represented as standing on what appears to be the end of a pier and holding in one hand a human head, while the other bears a sword, the instrument doubtless with which the decapitation was effected.  In the year 1740, she was serving on board the Maidstone, a frigate, and in an action between that vessel and the enemy, she exhibited such desperate and daring valour as to be particularly noticed by the whole crew.  But her motives for assuming the male habit do not seem to have transpired.[43]

A far more exciting career was that of Mary Anne Talbot, the youngest of sixteen illegitimate children, whom her mother bore to one of the heads of the noble house of Talbot.  She was born on February 2nd, 1778, and educated under the eye of a married sister, at whose death she was committed to the care of a gentleman named Sucker, “who treated her with great severity, and who appears to have taken advantage of her friendless situation in order to transfer her, for the vilest of purposes, to the hands of a Captain Bowen, whom he directed her to look upon as her future guardian.”  Although barely fourteen years old, Captain Bowen made her his mistress; and, on being ordered to join his regiment at St. Domingo, he compelled the girl to go with him in the disguise of a footboy and under the name of John Taylor.  But Captain Bowen had scarcely reached St. Domingo when he was remanded with his regiment to Europe to join the Duke of York’s Flanders Expedition.  And this time she was made to enrol herself as a drummer in the corps.

She was in several skirmishes, being wounded once by a ball which struck one of her ribs, and another time by a sabre stroke on the side.  At Valenciennes, however, Captain Bowen was killed; and, finding among his effects several letters relating to herself, which proved that she had been cruelly defrauded of money left to her, she resolved to leave the regiment, and to return, if possible, to England.  Accordingly she set out attired as a sailor boy, and eventually hired herself to the Commander of a French lugger, which turned out to be a privateer.  But when the vessel fell in with some of Lord Howe’s vessels in the Channel, she refused to fight against her countrymen, “notwithstanding all the blows and menaces the French captain could use.”  The privateer was taken, and our heroine was carried before Lord Howe, to whom she told candidly all that had happened to her—­keeping her sex a secret.