Buying Naval Wages in the Mid-Seventeenth CenturyFootnote ¹⁵

Tickets for seamen's wages were first used in the early seventeenth century to deal with a problem arising from the tradition that sailors were paid only at the end of a ship's voyage. If a man was discharged ashore or transferred to another ship before then, he was given a paper stating his earnings—a ticket—redeemable for cash at the Navy's Pay Office in London. Tickets were also sometimes used to pay off whole crews at the end of a voyage.

The earliest tickets were entirely handwritten, until in 1654 officials introduced pre-printed forms, measuring about eight by ten inches.Footnote ¹⁶ The name of the ship, the man's name, and the dates of his service were listed, along with the reason he was discharged or, if transferred, the name of his new ship. Then came columns filled in with total wages less various deductions from his earnings. Throughout most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries those basic wages remained unchanged: an ordinary seaman earned nineteen shillings per lunar month of twenty-nine-and-a-half days; men ranked “able,” twenty-four shillings. Tickets were signed by the ship's commander and three other officers. A ticket included no promise to pay and, as it was subject to later cancellation, it was not an “IOU” that “guaranteed” payment as is often assumed. Rather, it was merely a warrant by which the seaman or another person could apply to collect the wages.

Not surprisingly, sailors immediately disliked the new tickets, complaining “a little bit of paper is soon lost.”Footnote ¹⁷ Protecting valuable bits of paper was difficult for ordinary folk, especially in the crowded environment of a ship where men's possessions were liable to theft, damage, or destruction. Consequently, sailors often disposed of the fragile scraps of paper as quickly as possible, conveying them to their wives or kin ashore (perhaps one-sixth of seamen were marriedFootnote ¹⁸) or selling them to ship's officers or buyers at dockside.

Selling a ticket, however, was legally problematic and drew sailors further into the world of printed paper forms. Dozens of scriveners and notaries around the Navy Office and in riverside communities supplied the elaborate pre-printed forms that selling the simple ticket required. The ticket represented a debt owed by the Navy to the seaman. By common law, one could not sell such a debt. But that inconvenient rule was circumvented by the legal fiction that the owner (in this case the seaman) was not actually selling the debt, but rather appointing the buyer as an attorney, or agent, to collect it.Footnote ¹⁹ Conveying the power of attorney, usually using a large, decorated form, closely pre-printed in italic type, was thus legally central to selling wages.Footnote ²⁰ Selling tickets also required that seamen, or their wives as their agents, put their hands to other large documents also prepared on pre-printed decorated forms. Rachel Rogers's papers include many “bills of assignment” in which the seller acknowledged receipt of the full value of the wages for the transfer to the attorney (not what the buyer actually paid). Additionally, Rogers and other buyers often demanded that the seller (usually with a guarantor) enter a bond (also on a pre-printed form) agreeing to pay double the value if the wages in question could not be collected.Footnote ²¹ The sellers paid for these elaborate documents, which together cost up to four shillings, amounting to nearly a week's wages.Footnote ²²

Men who chose not to sell brought their tickets to London to collect at the Pay Office on Broad Street.Footnote ²³ There they were joined by women collecting their husbands’ tickets. But before tickets could be paid, they needed to be validated at the Ticket Office attached to the Navy Office near the Tower of London. There a handful of clerks checked the thousands of tickets against the ships’ muster books (the monthly listings of men on board).Footnote ²⁴ They also searched the records of any other ships to which men had been transferred to confirm they had not subsequently deserted, since later desertion meant that a man lost all wages not yet paid, making his ticket worthless.Footnote ²⁵

Further delay occurred while the Ticket Office clerks also prepared the pay books to be used when ships were paid. Pay books were written on more pre-printed forms: heavy double folio sheets folded into a parchment sheet cover.Footnote ²⁶ Officers and men were listed in order of the date they entered service on the ship. Two columns noted when and where they left the ship if before the end of the pay period, either by discharge to another ship or ashore (noted D), or by death (DD), or by desertion (R for ran). Then more columns recorded the same information entered on the tickets: the full wages followed by deductions for on-board purchases of clothing, tobacco, and for the mandatory contribution to the pension fund known as the Chatham Chest (combined, where relevant, with a fee for the chaplain and the surgeon; in the 1690s a deduction for the new Greenwich Hospital was added), ending with the net wages due to be paid. If the man had deserted or “run” (recorded with the “fatal R”) he forfeited his wages, and nothing was entered in this column. Two more columns were to be filled in by the pay clerks. A narrow column was to be ticked when the wages were collected by the man himself. In a final column, untitled in early pay books, the pay clerks entered the name of anyone else who collected—wives, masters of apprentices serving at sea, and some buyers. While the Ticket Office clerks checked tickets and prepared the pay books, hundreds of impatient men and women gathered in the streets around the Navy Office waiting for their money. Occasionally they rioted and attacked the Ticket Office; more practically, many decided to sell their tickets to avoid even more delays.

Navy officials were suspicious of ticket selling not just because it created uncertainty as to who was entitled to collect,Footnote ²⁷ but also because buying was a trade often conducted by women. In 1666 an anonymous letter to Sir William Coventry, a Navy commissioner, reported that five seamen from the Plymouth area had sold their tickets for what they could get rather than wait in London for payment.Footnote ²⁸

Five shillings in the pound was a 25 percent discount. Bankers were reportedly buying tickets at a 50 percent discount,Footnote ²⁹ but the anonymous writer was particularly suspicious of a woman, and doubted she acted on her own and without some special access to quicker payment. It is “worthy of yor Consideracion to know by whome she is employed & how she can came [sic] by Money beter then ye Seamen.” Coventry forwarded the report to Samuel Pepys, secretary of the Navy Board, to investigate. Pepys reported back. “I have spoken with the woman you gave me advice of for a Buyer of tickets. She proves an able Citizen's wife.”Footnote ³⁰

Katherine Salisbury was indeed a young city matron, wife of William, a London barber surgeon, whom she had married in Stepney in 1659.Footnote ³¹ Unlike most women buyers discussed below, Salisbury had no maritime connection other than her place of birth in a riverside suburb. She defended her business in charitable terms: she was “relieving” the poor, and she had no corrupt way of getting paid. Pepys reported:

Despite her complaint Salisbury continued to buy wages, suggesting this informal economy was central to her subsistence. Indeed, her story also introduced another group of women involved in ticket buying who, lacking capital, made a business of facilitating sales in exchange for some small fee or perhaps a “treat.” The poor woman Addle (about whom I have learned no more) is a typical figure. Pepys refers to her as “the Broker.” Elsewhere such women are called “solicitors.”Footnote ³² No pay books survive from the 1660s to confirm Pepys's report about Salisbury. Yet in the earliest handful of surviving books from the 1670s the buyers included numerous women, of whom the busiest were Johanna Lash (wife of a mariner from Shadwell), Anne Lowe (called “the ticket monger” in 1682Footnote ³³) and Alice Gover, another mariner's wife. Lowe and Gover, like Salisbury, were still in business in the 1690s.

Ticket Buying After 1689

By the early 1690s selling tickets was well established and women were experienced buyers and broker-solicitors. During the wars against the French (1689–97, 1702–13), conducted on a far larger scale than the earlier Dutch wars, the numbers of tickets grew exponentially. The Navy thus bowed to the inevitability of wage-selling and the pages in the pay books were changed to acknowledge it. At the far right of the form the previously untitled column was now headed “to whom paid.” The pay clerks sometimes ticked the column for seamen still serving on the ship who collected their own wages. But when men had been discharged or transferred, the new column was filled with the names of other collectors, sometimes the man's wife, but more often a buyer. Pay books have therefore become a source not just for the biographies of seamen, but also for the work of ticket buyers.

The number and size of the pay books reflect the new large scale of warfare. About thirty-five pay books per year were generated in the early 1680s, but from 1688 to 1720 they number about 130 a year.Footnote ³⁴ The numbers of men listed also ballooned. Except for the smallest ships, pay periods were no longer defined by the few months of a single sailing season. Now three years, previously rare, was standard, and pay periods often stretched to four, five, sometimes six years.Footnote ³⁵ In a few months a small ship with a crew of thirty still generated a book of just a few sheets. However, the pay books of the largest ships filled close to a hundred folios after just five years. The crew for such ships was about 750, but during the longer pay periods the pay books listed thousands of men who served for some short time on board. Men bitterly resented this policy of rapidly discharging men from ship to ship, known as the “turnover.”Footnote ³⁶

Turnovers vastly increased the numbers of tickets. Each time a man was transferred to a new ship, he received another ticket: three years’ service might yield half a dozen tickets from different ships for a given man. Pay periods of the ships usually continued long after the end of a man's service on board, and since it was now the practice that no tickets would be paid until the end of the pay period for the whole ship, most discharged men sold their tickets quickly to get cash at once. The numbers of ticket buyers thus also ballooned. Buyers took on the risk, or rather likelihood, of long delays before the ticket would be paid.

Hazards of Ticket Buying: Desertion and Deferral

Delay caused a more serious risk for ticket buyers: potential desertion. A deserter got no ticket from the ship from which he had deserted, of course, but all his tickets from any previous ships not yet paid were also forfeited. This rule was all the more offensive because “desertion” was often not intentional. For example, if a man on leave from one ship was pressed into service on another, he was recorded as having deserted the first ship and “run out of his money.” Between 1691 and 1697 sick or wounded sailors were particularly vulnerable. They remained enrolled on their ship, marked as “Q(uery).” If the man did not return within a month the Q automatically changed to an R as though he had deserted.Footnote ³⁷

Men who had deserted naturally tried to sell their now worthless tickets as quickly as possible.Footnote ³⁸ The Navy hoped wives who had received men's tickets would try to discourage them from deserting, but instead it was just one more factor motivating wives to sell their husbands’ tickets quickly. Successful ticket buying thus depended on assessing the trustworthiness of the seller, not easy when dealing with hundreds of sellers, mostly strangers, at the Navy Office. Had the man already deserted? Would he choose (or be unlucky enough) to desert before “the pay of the ship”?Footnote ³⁹ Even skilled and experienced buyers were stuck with many unpayable tickets.

Potential desertion also complicated the work of the clerks preparing pay books since they had to trace each of the hundreds of men who had been transferred to other ships during the pay period to confirm they had not deserted from a subsequent ship. Until the clerks had traced the man in all the books of his subsequent ships his wages could not be safely paid on any of the ships. But paying off the ships could not be delayed indefinitely. Pay books were usually finalized while many men were not yet fully traced. Their tickets could not be paid and were “deferred” for possible later payment as “arrears” after considerable further delay. Consequently, potential desertion created a problem as great as desertion itself for anyone seeking to collect wages.

The extent of the problem of deferring payment of wages soon becomes apparent to anyone studying the pay books of the period. In dozens, sometimes hundreds, of entries the man and his service are duly recorded, but no total wages are entered. Rather, deductions for tobacco, the Chatham Chest pension, and other such expenses incurred during his service on the ship are listed and then totaled as “wages,” since those obligations had to be paid whether or not the man received any pay. But in the net-wages column the Ticket Office clerk recorded the abbreviation “Ch&c” (Chest etc.), and the collector column is empty. Yet no modern writer has discussed the problem of deferrals.Footnote ⁴⁰ Of contemporary pamphleteers only John Dennis, himself a professional wage collector who was well aware of the problem, denounced it.Footnote ⁴¹ Third on his “List of Grievances” in The Seamens Case published in 1699 is:

It was not a matter of no one attempting to collect. Rather as Dennis points out, buyers or other collectors had “attended” with documents to collect but were told with no explanation (“no colour of objection”) that the wages would not be paid.Footnote ⁴²

Some of these “Ch&c” wages were unpayable because the man had deserted from this ship. But since he would not have been issued a ticket, no collector would have been disappointed. A much larger proportion of “Ch&c” wages were for men who had been turned over to other ships and were still untraced. More surprisingly, payment of wages of men who had been discharged from service was also often deferred. Presumably the clerks suspected that the man could have later reenlisted and then deserted during the pay period.

The cumbersome and lengthy arrears system was the only recourse for the disappointed collector holding tickets for such men. Those tickets were to be registered at the Ticket Office, and there, if and when men were finally traced, they would be entered on lists of arrears to await payment when more funds became available. Payments of arrears were entered in a separate series of books; the latest surviving book lists payments for wages earned up to 1705.Footnote ⁴³ Although some of the wages listed in arrears may have been previously unclaimed, the vast majority of the roughly 20,000 wages in the surviving arrears books were uncollected because they were deferred.Footnote ⁴⁴

The experience of ticket buyer Rachel Rogers shows that deferred wages were a serious hazard. Dennis was right to rank it as a major grievance. Payment in fully half (forty out of eighty-one) of the wages in deals traced below in Rogers's papers were deferred and only fourteen of the forty were collected later. Even then it was only after serious delay: the interval between purchase and pay for wages collected in the pay books was a mean of about two years, but for deferred wages it was five years.Footnote ⁴⁵ Counting deferrals in a small sample of pay books suggests that Rogers's experience was not far out of line. On the Devonshire (crew 476 for pay period 1693 to 1698), the wages of 35 percent of men who had received tickets were deferred.Footnote ⁴⁶ On the Adventure (crew 170 for pay period 1693 to 1697), it was 46 percent,Footnote ⁴⁷ and on the Queenborough (crew 100, for pay period 1715 to 1719) it was 24 percent.Footnote ⁴⁸ Buyers of wage tickets thus faced a chance of between 20 percent to almost 50 percent that the wages would be deferred. And worse, many of these would never be collected at all: the roughly 20,000 wages paid in surviving arrears books are only about half of those deferred in pay books in the same period.

Collecting the Wages

Buying tickets and collecting wages was clearly not a simple exercise. Payments denied or deferred were all the more frustrating because collecting the wages in the 1690s was arduous and often expensive. During the earlier Dutch wars most seamen's wages were paid at the Pay Office in London. Now, except for the smallest ships or those sunk or captured, ships were paid off initially at out-port dockyards (Portsmouth, Plymouth, or, at best, nearby Chatham) and only months later “re-called” in London.Footnote ⁴⁹ Payment at out ports entailed expenses for travel and accommodation for most collectors. Since dates announced for a pay were sketchy at best, collectors might wait days or weeks for the arrival of money, clerks, and the commissioner who would supervise. What was a buyer or wife to do? She must either pay for room and board or wait months longer in London. One option was to hire an agent. A letter in Rogers's papers dated 1697 reflects the dilemma. Elizabeth Lovell, waiting for a pay at Portsmouth, writes to her husband in London:

She adds that it was costing her “only” five shillings a week (about what a seaman earned) to stay in Portsmouth.Footnote ⁵⁰

When the pay finally occurred, it was usually conducted at a pay table set up on shipboard. At the “call” a clerk read out the names in the pay book. Men still present stepped up to the table and the coins due them were counted out. Meanwhile, on shore, other claimants waited impatiently for the second reading of the pay list, the first “re-call,” perhaps taking place on that day, or maybe the following week, provided any money remained. Then the pay books would be returned to the Pay Office in London for more recalls (the dates are often listed on the first pages of pay books). Recalls for numerous ships were conducted on the same day and “motley crowds” gathered.Footnote ⁵¹ The press of anxious collectors at the door is recorded in a suit in the London mayor's court. The crowd pushing from behind unbalanced one buyer and, fearing to fall backward down the steps, he grabbed at the woman in front of him, allegedly tearing her clothes. Four of the ten witnesses were women.Footnote ⁵²

“Public Receivers”

One option for a wage claimant like Lovell was to hire a member of the Navy Office staff to collect their pay, either at the ports or in London. In the early 1690s the payee columns are dominated by the names or initials of Navy clerks collecting as agents. There was little to stop the clerks from privileging their collections over those of seamen, wives, and buyers. Not able to end the unfairness of the ticket system, officials fell back on minimizing the “corruption” of the clerks’ special access. In summer 1694 the Navy Board ordered that clerks could no longer be agents.Footnote ⁵³ At once a new occupation opened: the “public receiver” of wages.Footnote ⁵⁴ For a fee of a shilling in the pound (six pence for collections in London), receivers collected on behalf of buyers, wives, kin, and occasionally for the seaman himself. Names of the new receivers quickly replaced those of the clerks in the payee columns.

Historian Joan Thirsk has observed that whenever “new [economic] openings have appeared” women have usually “been prominent alongside men, sometimes even out-numbering them.” Yet, she argues, “that situation has only lasted until the venture has been satisfactorily and firmly established.”Footnote ⁵⁵ This holds true for public receivers, as about a third of those moving into this new role were women. Dozens grasped the opportunity. This new work lacked any of the usual barriers to women's equal participation. No guild rules barred the unapprenticed; no degree or license was required (in contrast to notaries for example); no institutional traditions barred women. Equally important for women, little capital was required: the prerequisites for the trade were literacyFootnote ⁵⁶ and knowledge of the workings of the naval bureaucracy, often learned from handling their husbands’ affairs.

These women became part of the culture of the Navy Office. Within a decade, two of the busiest receivers, Frances Worgan and Anne Plumb,Footnote ⁵⁷ were so fully integrated as to have their own spaces at the Pay Office where they stored their documents and from which they ran their businesses.Footnote ⁵⁸ But women's equal participation as receivers was short-lived, as Thirsk observed. By the 1740s when the occupation of Navy receiver was fully established, women receivers have disappeared from pay books. This may have been because the work conferred social status. Male receivers often identified themselves as “gentleman”; at least one was a university graduate.Footnote ⁵⁹ The women were regularly named with the polite “Mrs,” but they were from modest maritime backgrounds. Elizabeth Scollay, discussed below, was from Stepney, wife of a serving seaman. Jane Comins was “widow of Shadwell”; Prudence Dolby was a widow from Stepney. Women would thus have had a more difficult time establishing their status so as to serve in this role.

Receivers’ main work was as agents collecting at pays. They also bought tickets for themselves or on behalf of clients, connected sellers with buyers, and arranged for the requisite documentation. They served as repositories for the many papers that documented sales for their clients. They no doubt sometimes helped to trace a discharged seaman to avoid the deferral of his wages. They used their superior knowledge to advantage in negotiating conflicting claims before the pay clerks.Footnote ⁶⁰ Prudence Dolby appeared in a role similar to that of a modern solicitor when she recruited legal representation for a London client in a case in Portsmouth and assisted in preparing his case.Footnote ⁶¹

Evaluating Ticket Buying

How profitable was ticket buying? On the one hand, there is the virulent criticism by Hodges and other pamphleteers of the profits made by the extortionate discounts demanded from seamen by Cruelty and his Sisters. But on the other hand, desertion and deferrals made ticket buying a difficult trade. Measuring whether ticket buying was profitable requires knowing when buyers acquired tickets, what they paid, what wages they collected, and most importantly, once one is aware of how many wages were not paid, what they did not collect. The papers of ticket buyer Rachel Rogers in The National Archives provide a unique source for doing this.

In 1695 when Rogers began buying tickets she was 45 years old, married to her fourth husband, a waterman who had served in the Navy.Footnote ⁶² Although married, she controlled her money as a result of a premarital contract in which her husband-to-be joined with her to convey all her real estate and moveable assets to her widowed mother as her trustee.Footnote ⁶³ While she lived in a maritime community by the Thames in Southwark and sometimes bought from neighbors, most of her deals were made near the Navy Office. She was an avowed investor who had decided “according to the best of her judgement” to purchase seamen's wages to “improve” income earned from the rent for small properties she owned as result of her previous marriages.Footnote ⁶⁴ Rogers may have been inspired by her sister-in-law Alice Body, a pub-keeper who had about two hundred pounds invested in tickets.Footnote ⁶⁵

Dealing in tickets, like her main investment of mortgage lending, drew Rogers into the world of paper and print. She was “semi-literate,” having received only the first stages of education.Footnote ⁶⁶ She could read large print, but as she states in various pleadings, “she could neither write or read written hand.” She signed most papers with a printed capital R.Footnote ⁶⁷ Her endorsements printed in block capitals on the outside of the dozens of powers of attorney, bills of assignment and bonds in her files, otherwise labeled by a scrivener's or lawyer's elaborate italic script, suggest how she managed documents printed in italic type she could not read.

At first Rogers relied on one of the most prominent of the new receivers, Richard Preston. But the relationship soured when one of the wage claims she deposited with him was collected by an imposter. The bitter dispute with Preston generated Chancery pleadings and depositions that reveal much about the work of buyers and receivers.Footnote ⁶⁸ After her break with Preston, Rogers arranged her own deals and made almost all of her own collections, often working with Jane Bond, a broker-solicitor who lived near the Navy Office.Footnote ⁶⁹

Rogers's career as ticket-buyer is documented mainly in the papers that survive as a result of the most serious and final crisis of her life in 1720. Aged 70, she was kidnapped and forced into marriage by a 27-year-old fortune-seeking suitor, who as “husband,” and with his co-conspirators, stole her papers and financial documents from her lodgings, bundled in a bed sheet. After Rogers escaped, she, and after her death in 1721, her son, and finally her son's cousin, battled the conspirators in church courts and Chancery for more than a decade. Her papers, held as evidence in Chancery, were never reclaimed, and now are gathered in uncategorized bundles in six boxes of Chancery Masters Exhibits in C104 at The National Archives.Footnote ⁷⁰ Amongst the stolen mortgage deeds, receipts, and drafts of law pleadings was “a brown striped bag of sailors tickets … … and other loose papers”Footnote ⁷¹ now mainly in C104/69.

How Rogers acquired tickets can be deduced from the powers of attorney, bills of assignment, and bonds in these “loose papers.” The witnesses and sureties in these documents often indicate the circumstances of the purchase. Most of the documents were created on pre-printed forms by notaries and scriveners near the Navy Office. The purchases were mainly from the mariner himself, although Rogers acquired some tickets from seamen's wives and some from other buyers.

Evaluating Rogers's trade began with identifying 117 purchases she made (seventy-five documented in her papers, six more mentioned in the pleadings in the Preston Chancery case, and twenty-six others named in tickets and powers of attorney deposited for reasons unknown with the Navy Board, now in two folders in Admiralty files).Footnote ⁷² For eighty-one of these 117 cases there was enough information to find the relevant pay book in the ADM 33 volumes, and by searching the lists of crew, to discover the man in question. Then the net wage and payee columns showed the outcome of the deals. This revealed that the hazards of what looked like a good short-term investment were clear. Between desertions and deferrals, Rogers collected nothing at all in forty of the eighty-one cases when she attended a pay. Eight of these were later collected in arrears but in thirty-two of the eighty-one cases (40 percent) Rogers was apparently completely unsuccessful.Footnote ⁷³ It may be that the documents remaining in Rogers's papers over-represent failed purchases, but those known only from the Preston pleadings failed at a similar rate, while more than 30 percent of the deals found only in the Admiralty files were also unsuccessful.

Still, if Rogers was buying at sufficiently deep discounts, tickets might still have been a good investment. What did she pay for the tickets she bought? Here the documents present a serious problem. Because of the fiction of assigning the power of attorney to collect a debt, “bills of assignment” drawn by scriveners necessarily refer to the whole value of the debt, not what Rogers actually paid. Consequently, what was paid must be estimated. A few hints survive. Preston reports paying about 80 percent of the value of wages in 1694.Footnote ⁷⁴ An annotation on a bill of sale from 1716 indicates Rogers paid £18 for £25, or 72 percent.Footnote ⁷⁵ In 1713 William Railton, a “chapman” for tickets, paid £24 for a ticket worth £34, about 70 percent.Footnote ⁷⁶

The story of one of Rogers's deals reveals the price and also illuminates the circumstances of some purchases. It is documented by an informal receipt scrawled on a scrap of paper, probably by the seller, the seaman's wife: “28 Sept 1703, Recd … 1-10-0 upon a Tickett by me Margett Chapman.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The pay book reveals how this deal was made. Rogers encountered Chapman when both were at the Pay Office in London to collect wages on the Mermaid. Chapman had her husband's ticket for service between June and September 1702, when he was discharged as “unserviceable.” Although no wages are listed on Francis Chapman's tattered ticket still in Rogers's files, for three months service as an able seaman, Francis Chapman would have earned almost £4 (less deductions), which Margaret expected to collect. But when the crowd was finally admitted to the Pay Office she learned that the Mermaid was being paid only to 30 June 1702. The rest of Francis's earnings would be available only when the next pay was declared at some unknown future date. Francis's wages to 30 June came only to 17 shillings, and he was also liable for bedding supplied to him worth 11 shillings plus the usual other deductions. So the clerk counted out only 4 shillings 11 pence, much less than Chapman had expected. She needed more of the money. Also, in the Pay Office line that day, Rogers was collecting the wages of another seaman on the Mermaid. The two women struck a deal. Rogers bought Chapman's ticket to collect the remaining wages whenever they would finally be paid. Chapman got the ready cash she needed.

One assumes that Hodges's Villainy would extort a steep discount under these circumstances. According to the receipt, Rogers paid 30 shillings for the two months’ able seaman's wages still due (about 48 shillings less 2s deductions), not quite 65 percent. Chapman did well to sell the ticket. When Rogers tried to collect the remainder of Francis's earnings three years later, his wages were deferred, and as the ticket is still in her files, she never collected. If Rogers paid Margaret Chapman more than 60 percent in these circumstances, it seems fair to assume that she rarely paid less. In calculating Rogers's profits, I have used 60 percent of the total wages as the average rate she paid, although she probably usually paid more.

The full amount of the wages involved is known in seventy-four of the eighty-one traceable purchases.Footnote ⁷⁸ If Rogers paid 60 percent, and assuming the seven “less certain” cases were failures, she would have spent £584 to collect only £540, a loss of £44. Even if she extracted the extortionate 50 percent discount Hodges imagines, her purchases cost £487, yielding a profit of £53. Averaged over the two decades from her first purchases in 1695 to the last in 1716, this amounted to less than £3 a year (only a fifth of an able seaman's yearly pay). And it is likely that Rogers often paid more than 50 or 60 percent.

Not all of Rogers's purchases are documented in the surviving papers. While tracing those known deals in the pay books, I discovered a further thirty-one collections she made. If these are added to the previously known deals in a “best case scenario” (that is, assuming that in the thirty-one added cases and in the seven “less certain cases” she collected the full value of the ticket), and if Rogers paid 60 percent, her purchases cost £718 to collect £809, a total 10 percent profit. At a 50 percent discount her profit would have totaled £210, almost 35 percent, but still amounting to only about £10 a year. But this makes no allowance for the unsuccessful purchases that must also be undocumented in her papers.

Ticket buying was not Rogers's only business, and she was investing a comparatively small amount. She began with about £150 in 1694 and by the end of 1695 she had collected nearly half of what she laid out. Encouraged, she kept buying tickets (at least 22 in 1698, 17 in 1701–02). But as collections were more often delayed, the total capital she had tied up in tickets increased to a high of between £300 and £400 by 1702. By then, the hazards of deferral and desertion were becoming more apparent, and her buying slowed before ceasing altogether after 1716.

Meanwhile, of course, Rogers was foregoing other economic opportunities. Had she, for example, invested the £400 in a government annuity loan at 14 percent, her return would have been £56 a year. After 1700 Rogers increasingly turned to lending on mortgages that returned £24 a year on £400 at the legal maximum interest of 6 percent (lowered to 5 percent in 1713). Mortgage lending, not ticket buying, was the source of her fortune, which exaggerated rumor set at £10,000.

The Experience of Other Buyers

Rogers's venture in sailors’ tickets may have given a modest return at best, but certainly no fortune. What of other buyers? I have found no similar collections of papers for other buyers, so I have relied on probate records and some Chancery and Exchequer pleadings for comparison. Surprisingly few ticket buyers, male or female, left wills proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury or Consistory Court of London (as compared with investors in other government securities for example). Perhaps that in itself is suggestive. Even fewer probate inventories survive, leaving only the possibility of an impressionistic account.

Some buyers died prosperous. Anne Lowe left cash legacies of £600 in 1695.Footnote ⁷⁹ Joseph Whittle, a busy buyer in the years around 1700, bequeathed legacies of more than £1,000 in cash decades later in 1722.Footnote ⁸⁰ Others who left fortunes probably gained their wealth by other means.Footnote ⁸¹ The early buyer, Katherine Salisbury, whom Pepys encountered in 1666, also died wealthy. She continued buying tickets into the 1690s, probably investing at least £800.Footnote ⁸² But after the mid- 1690s Salisbury turned instead to a less difficult mode of investment. In 1697 she bought £875 stock in the Bank of England, probably with capital she had been using to buy wages.Footnote ⁸³ She is the only female ticket buyer I have discovered in lists of investors in the Bank, East India Company, or other government securities. In 1726, widowed and remarried, she made her will as Katherine Kingsford. In addition to £3,000 settled on her second husband in exchange for control of her separate estate, she listed investments in stock, government annuities, and a mortgage worth at least £3,500.Footnote ⁸⁴ But little of this wealth came from ticket buying. Indeed, Thomas Guy, long believed to have made his immense fortune by using tickets to acquire South Sea stock,Footnote ⁸⁵ leaves no trace in the pay books; his accounts show he acquired his South Sea stock using cash, not tickets.Footnote ⁸⁶

Some buyers were clearly less successful than Rogers. For example, one can glimpse the downward trajectory of the career of Alice Gover, one of the busy ticket buyers in the 1670s and 1680s. By the mid-1690s she was selling off wages she held and seems to have turned to the work of solicitor, arranging deals for other buyers, only rarely appearing in pay books in the later 1690s. She was living in lodgings in 1710 when she died in poverty, her burial paid for by the parish.Footnote ⁸⁷ Unpaid tickets also fill the records of other unsuccessful traders. Take the example of Mary Duffett, wife of a pubkeeper in Southwark. A prominent buyer in the 1690s, her career ended after her husband Elias died deep in debt in January 1700. In her accounting of her husband's estate (which by rules of coverture also incorporated Mary's assets), which was appended to her answer in 1708 to a Chancery suit brought by one of the Duffetts's many creditors,Footnote ⁸⁸ Mary listed more than sixty tickets acquired before Elias died that were still outstanding after eight years. These totaled £185, more than double the value of the rest of the estate. William Waller, a mercer from Gosport near Portsmouth, was “very much used and accustomed to the buying of seamen's tickets” until he went bankrupt in 1711. In 1717 his bankruptcy assignee claimed 162 unpaid tickets still held by Waller's receiver, Palmer Crabtree.Footnote ⁸⁹

Receivers had the same problem of unpaid tickets. A probate inventory from 1723 for Crabtree himself shows his assets included more than a hundred unpaid tickets, only five or six of which were still collectable.Footnote ⁹⁰ Full probate records survive for receiver Elizabeth Scollay. The wife of a seaman, she moved with her three young children from Wapping to the Navy Office neighborhood and started business in 1697.Footnote ⁹¹ She was one of the busiest receivers in the largest surviving arrears book (1701–04).Footnote ⁹² A report from 1703 depicts Scollay collecting for a client, vigorously sweeping the coins from the pay table into her apron pinned up at the corners to make a pocket.Footnote ⁹³ Calculating her income from collecting arrears and estimating other collectionsFootnote ⁹⁴ suggests she was making about £100 per year, at the lower end of a “middle-class” income.Footnote ⁹⁵ But Scollay's career soon ended in failure. In February 1709, now widowed, she made her will and died.Footnote ⁹⁶ She had pawned jewelry and silver and borrowed £200 from one of her main clients, Joseph Whittle. She made him her executor. Her total assets were £290. Over the next six years Whittle collected £138 in wages for Scollay's estate (using receiver Frances Worgan), but there remained 130 “desperate debts,” mostly uncollectible wages, totaling about £500 pounds. In the end, settling debts and paying expenses cost Whittle £20 more than Scollay was worth.Footnote ⁹⁷ Other examples include the pamphleteer John Dennis, who was a prominent receiver for more than a decade but became insolvent in 1711 and seems to have spent time in debtors’ prisons.Footnote ⁹⁸ Receiver Frances Worgan bequeathed only household goods and £25 cash in 1735.Footnote ⁹⁹ No will was proved for Prudence Dolby. If she is the Prudence Dalby of Wapping buried in 1711, she died a pauper.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Other Hazards in Buying Tickets

Ticket buying was therefore a hazardous project, as likely to result in failure as success. Deferred and unpayable tickets were the most common problems, but buyers experienced other hazards as well. Katherine Salisbury was victim of one scheme in which tickets for non-existent men were issued, probably using ticket forms that had been pre-signed by the ship's officers. When she complained to the captain of the ship involved, he took offenseFootnote ¹⁰¹ and shortly thereafter Salisbury herself was indicted at the Old Bailey for forging a ticket. When no one appeared from the Navy Board to prove what must have been a purely nuisance indictment, she was acquitted.Footnote ¹⁰² Buyers could also be swindled by altered tickets, something that may have been more a problem for semi-literate buyers. In November 1715 Rogers bought a ticket altered, probably by the seaman's wife, with the period of service changed from just four days to three years, with total pay of £41 3s 9d instead of 4s 6d.Footnote ¹⁰³ A more common problem, judging from cases reported in OBSP, was losing money to imposters acting for another claimant on the basis of an easily forged power. In 1696 Rogers's sister-in-law Alice Body was convicted of using a false power of attorney to collect wages; she was fined a substantial twenty pounds and was pilloried.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

A case evoked by historian Margaret Hunt arose from another hazard often experienced by buyers: a seaman conveyed his wages in advance of a voyage to two different creditors, who then presented their competing documents at the pay.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ A similar problem sometimes arose when a seaman who had sold his wages died before the pay, and his probate administrator claimed the pay in competition with the buyer.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The thankless task of arbitrating between such competing claims fell to the Navy commissioner supervising the pay.

If deferred payment and uncollectible tickets were clearly the most serious problems for buyers, how could buyers defend themselves? Salisbury avoided losses by leaving the trade altogether. Converting unpaid tickets into shares in the South Sea Company may have offered limited protection. Using claims for unpaid wages as security for informal loans from neighbors was familiar enough to make its way into jest-book stories of the period.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Judging from the dozens of collections Elizabeth Scollay made for Stepney pawnbroker Anne Robinson, another common option was to pawn tickets rather than sell at a deep discount.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Pawning tickets was not only used by hard-pressed seamen; it could also be a useful investment strategy to deal with delayed or uncollectible wages. One astute buyer, Mary Ackerley Berry, a seaman's widow living in the maritime hamlet of Shadwell, bought only a few tickets a year.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ But then she pawned unpaid tickets to free her small capital to fund more purchases. Pawning had other advantages. Berry's pawnbroker, John Peters of Stepney, stored the bulky supporting documents and made collections for her; most importantly, it was Peters who was stuck with the unpaid tickets.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Ackerley Berry made no great fortune buying tickets, but neither did she sink in a sea of unpaid wages.

“A Small Piece of Meat and a Good Drink”

Knowing the seller helped to protect the careful buyer from loss by desertion or double selling. Although most ticket trading took place in the transient anonymity of the crowded streets and coffeehouses around the Navy Office, many tickets were also bought and sold in the small maritime hamlets along the Thames where continuing relationships among neighbors provided the context for the exchange.Footnote ¹¹¹ Sellers’ continuing reputation—“credit”—depended on the deal remaining valid. In 1685, for example, Jane Barnes wrote to the Navy Board that, having sold her husband's ticket to settle their debts, she now feared that “by the advice of ill living People” her husband would “address to your honors to obtaine his Ticket out of ye hands of them whom shee hath assigned it to.” She asks that “her creditors to who she has assigned it may receive the same without disturbance.”Footnote ¹¹²

Rogers's papers provide striking confirmation that buying from neighbors was a safer option. Of twelve tickets she acquired from neighbors, ten were successfully collected, and two were deferred, and likely eventually collected (a success rate of at least 83, perhaps 100 percent, compared with only 56 percent in Navy Office purchases). One of the deferred tickets was bought from a Southwark neighbor Margaret Hood in May 1699. Hood and Rogers worked to prove the ticket was valid for more than a decade, and the ticket (for wages of £7) was finally “given in to be listed” for collection in arrears in October 1713.Footnote ¹¹³

A key component of neighborhood ticket-buying is highlighted by Hodges's peculiar remark that Villainy demanded “a small piece of meat and a good drink” as part of the deal. Why was it only Villainy who required this? When men's commodity trading occurred in inns and coffee houses, a shared drink was part of deal-making.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Mutuality characterized their market sociality. What offended Hodges was that Villainy expected the seller to supply the treat—“hospitality” rather than “mutuality.” For many buyers, ticket trading at the Navy Office was an extension of the neighborhood market where business was conducted in cottage kitchens where, not surprisingly, “hospitality” framed the exchanges. Rogers's other businesses (such as mortgage lending) were also conducted in social settings. For example, the false marriage and kidnapping that ended with the theft of her papers occurred when a mortgage borrower entertained her for a meal. She had met the false husband when another potential borrower entertained her. Her naval business (in this case buying future yearly stipends or pensions given to wounded seamen) also involved hospitality. When Margery Body of Stepney was selling her husband's pension, someone wrote this note for the illiterate woman:

In that context Hodges's accusation that “Villainy” would expect “a small piece of meat and a good drink” is less surprising. Such hospitality was a core characteristic of neighborhood business, part of what made neighborhood buying safer than dealing with strangers at the Navy Office. “Treats” at the Navy Office echoed neighborhood hospitality but without the same context of “credit” and reliability.