All Intensive Purposes

In The Atlantic Monthly's review of The Command of the Ocean: A Novel History of Britain, 1649-1815, by N. A. M. Rodger, Benjamin Schwarz discovers that conditions asea in the British Navy in those years were not as they have been portrayed since:

Women and children, he reveals, were common aboard ship (evidence suggests that one warship carried as many as a hundred wives), and were not infrequently killed in action (when one seaman and his wife died in combat, the wardroom goat suckled their three-week-old orphan). The vast number of people and wide variety of skills that war at sea demanded made the navy an astonishingly open institution: a senior petty officer during the Napoleonic Wars, for instance, was both black and a woman (though the latter fact was discovered only after she'd already served eleven years).