The power of human mores never ceases to amaze me. Racism and sexism, slavery and eugenics... Something can be perfectly normative in one generation and be perfectly abhorrent in another. We don't have a gene that encodes for decency, for morality; so we fall back on the cultural norms of our times to teach us good from bad, acceptable from objectionable. Is it any wonder, then, that each generation seems to reveal the sins of the one just prior? After all, these generational mores are the only judges of what is a virtue and what is a sin. The Floating Brothel is a wonderful and devastating example of this power and the inability of people to see beyond their own prejudices to truths which are, to us, now blindingly obvious.
Ms. Rees has put together, here, a chronicle of the systematic attempts of 18th century British authorities to gather up their country's petty, wasteful criminals, impose upon them punitive sentences, and then mercilessly banish them from their homeland and their families, consigning them to hardship and struggle in the new Australian colony. These authorities could not conceive of a truth so obvious to us now, that, in large part, crime flows from poverty. If the laws and customs of the land prevent human beings from pursuing and attaining their basic needs for sex, shelter, food and comfort within the law, then they will try to find extralegal, and even illegal, ways of satisfying those needs. Human need will always trump the laws of the land, especially when those laws are seen by the less fortunate to be unjust. As a consequence of this self-righteousness, politicians and judges of the period ordered ships bound for Australia to be filled with women who had stolen to feed themselves and their families. Not only were these ships rife with disease, many of the women in question were ordered to become the ship-wives of the sailors who lead them across half the known world to to an as-yet untamed land.
Ms. Rees does an exceptional job of illustrating the cruelty of not only the men who consigned these petty criminals to hazard and death, but the journey that followed their banishment from England. The narrative is more or less divided into three parts: the first covering the socioeconomic pressures that lead to their crimes and their sentences, the second illustrating their tempestuous journey to Australia, and the third detailing the existential challenges of staying alive in the new world. As successful as Ms. Rees is at revealing the inequities that launched these ships, parts two and three suffer from a descent into the dry recitation of dates, times, facts and figures typical of creaky histories. Nonetheless, part one empowers the story enough to carry it over the line. (3/5 Stars)
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