The Mariner’s Mirror 103:4 (November 2017), 431–449 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00253359.2017.1376481 © The Society for Nautical Research Mariners Ashore in the Eighteenth Century: The role of boarding-house keepers and victuallers Derek Morris and Ken Cozens Seamen from Royal Navy ships were boarded in the 1740s with Betty Wright, a lodging-house keeper of Gosport, Hampshire. Her surviving account books together with the wills of hundreds of mariners open up a new light on the life onshore for these men, in a previously unrecorded manner, and enable lodging houses, victuallers and the families of mariners, to be brought into the wider economic and social context of sailortowns. The authors’ research on London’s sailortown was based on a methodology that took advantage of the increasing availability of online records, especially London’s land tax and insurance records, wills and other archives. Together, they provide a basis for exploring the many ways that women coped with households and work, when their men folk were away. They also reveal the strong links between mariners and victuallers and the variety of services that the latter provided to a constantly changing international clientele. Key words: Mariners, lodging houses, victuallers, wills, Gosport, Shadwell, Wapping T he authors’ re-appraisal of the account books of Betty Wright’s lodging house has shed new light on the role played by women in eighteenth-century sailortowns. Our research on London’s sailortown was based on a methodology that took advantage of the increasing availability of online records, especially London’s land tax and insurance records, wills and other archives. Together, they provide a basis for exploring the many ways that women coped with households and work, when their men folk were away. They also reveal the strong links between mariners and victuallers. 1 From the earliest times to the present, sailortowns have been recognized as having distinct cultures from other nearby neighbourhoods. Brad Beavan notes that: ‘sailortowns were the districts of merchant and naval ports where sailors visited, often lived, and were entertained’ and that they were areas characterised by their ‘public houses, brothels, and low entertainment that employed signifcant numbers of working people’. 2 As Stan Hugill, a former sailor, noted, ‘Sailortown was a world in, but not of, that of the landsman. It was a world of sordid pleasure, unlimited vice, and lashings of booze, but a dangerous place too.’ 3 Beavan points out that sailortowns and their cultural representation remain a much underdeveloped theme in urban and maritime history. It is the culture and life that sailors enjoyed or endured during their periods ashore that has attracted academic research into the emerging feld of ‘New Coastal History’. One revelation from the Port Towns and Urban Cultures Project at the 1 Morris and Cozens, London’s Sailortown, 182–3; Creaton, Unpublished London Diaries. 2 Beaven, ‘From Jolly Sailor to Proletarian Jack’, 160–2. 3 Ibid.