The Floating Brothel
By Sian Rees
Hyperion, $23.95
ISBN 0786867876

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A ship that sailed with human cargo

One of the lesser-known results of the American Revolution was the opening up of a world half a globe away. When North America was no longer available to assimilate the overflowing convict population of England, there was no choice but to turn to New South Wales (Australia), which until 1790 was a failed experiment where crops withered, disease flourished and people were forever lost.

"In June 1790 . . . four ships from England arrived and saved the colony," author Sian Rees writes in The Floating Brothel. (Never fear: the title is the randiest thing about the book.) "One of them was the Lady Julian," with "a cargo of fertile female convicts," some of whom would become "founding mothers of Australia," while others "would be lost along the way."

Rees develops her fascinating historical account of the ship and its passengers from court documents and from the memoirs, written in 1822, of John Nicol, the Lady Julian's steward and cooper. Beginning with an overview of the crimes that earned deportation for many of the women on board, Rees spins a consistently absorbing tale of imperfect people trying to survive in circumstances largely beyond their control.

Rees makes it clear that the awful expectations of the times, especially in regard to the fate of lower and lower-middle class women with no male protectors, guaranteed exploitative conditions that few Western women would put up with nowadays, including the use of the convicts as regular sex partners for the crew.

Rees, daughter of a family of shipbuilders, was born and raised in Cornwall and has lived in Australia, so she knows both ends of the journey -- and the middle as well. Her intimacy with ships and 18th century life enables her to weave a richly authentic background for a story that is at times elusive in personal detail, but full of the spirit of the era. Luckily, the memoirs of Nicol, which focus on his love affair with an 18-year-old convict named Sarah Whitelam (a union that resulted in a child and had an unexpected outcome) invests a story of generalities with a living, breathing humanity that is not easily forgotten.

Maude McDaniel writes from Cumberland, Maryland.