Anne Jane Thornton (1817–1877), also spelt Ann Jane Thornton, was a 19th-century adventurer from Donegal who in 1832 posed as a boy to go to sea, in pursuit of a lost lover who had gone to the United States. She continued her career as a seaman until her arrival in London in 1835, when she was interviewed by the Lord Mayor of London. She later wrote a book about her adventures.
Early life
Born in Gloucestershire, in the west of England, in 1817, Thornton was the daughter of a prosperous shop-keeper. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, in 1823 her mother died, and her father moved to Donegal in Ireland where he opened a successful shop. The Lady magazine for 1835 adds a further detail: "...when six years old she accompanied her father to Ireland, where he afterwards possessed profitable stores and subsequently failed".
Life
At the age of thirteen, Thornton met Captain Alexander Burke, an Englishman whose father lived in New York, and before she was fifteen the two had become strongly attached to each other. In 1832, Burke left Donegal to travel to New York, and Thornton made up her mind to go after him. Attended by a maid and a boy, she left Donegal, obtained a suit of cabin boy's clothes, and posing as a boy, made a safe passage to New York. On arrival, she went to Burke's father's house, where she said that she had worked under the captain's orders and wished to be engaged by him again. She learnt from Burke's father that the man she loved had died a few days before.
Without money, Thornton needed to find employment. By now, she had a swarthy complexion, which helped to make her look less like a young woman, and still posing as a boy she got a position at nine dollars a month as ship's cook and steward on board The Adelaide. After this, she had a berth in The Rover. She later served on the Belfast, "dressed in a red worsted Jacket and duck trousers". Between ships, she once walked seventy miles from Eastport, Maine, to St Andrew's, dressed as a sailor.
Eventually, Thornton took a position as a ship's cook on another ship, The Sarah, bound for London, giving her name as Jim Thornton from Donegal. As Jim, she proved a great asset to the ship, cooking and also helping out on deck when needed, as the ship was sailing with an under-strength crew.
It was on this vessel that Thornton was discovered as a woman:
The sailor who discovered Thornton threatened that unless she agreed to sexual intercourse with him, he would report her to the ship's master, Captain McIntyre. Thornton refused, and when she was revealed to the master he "turned her out to work amongst the men, by whom she upon all occasions was most grossly insulted".
McIntyre recorded his astonishment on learning that Thornton was a woman:
The Sarah was bound at the time for London, where she docked in February 1835. Before this arrival, other crew members had suspicions about Thornton's identity, and McIntyre later told The Times that she had been abused by the other sailors and that she had worked hard aboard the ship. McIntyre reported that Thornton
The story was reported in the London newspapers after a customs officer on the River Thames had intervened to stop a member of The Sarah'''s crew from mistreating a young sailor, finding to his amazement that the sailor was a young woman. The customs man then lodged Thornton at the Cooper's Arms Tavern in Lower Thames Street and reported the case to his superiors.
After the Lord Mayor of London had read the reports, he sent a police inspector to investigate and subsequently held an inquiry at the Mansion House, himself interviewing all parties concerned, including Thornton and McIntyre. The captain said he had had no suspicion when employing Thornton that she was female and insisted that he had every intention of paying her the money she had earned on the voyage. Called on by McIntyre to say whether he had ever been unkind to her, Thornton replied "No, you were always most considerate. But some of the men struck me cruelly when I could not work as hard as they were in the rough weather".
The Lord Mayor berated Thornton for running away from her father, while praising her seafaring conduct, and offered her money to help her to return home to her father in Ireland.