History remembers Ann Mills holding a cutlass in one hand and the severed head of a Frenchman in the other. Almost everything that happened before and after that moment has been lost.
Born sometime in the early eighteenth century, Ann Mills vanished into one of the most dangerous occupations available to anyone of her generation. Disguised as a man, she went to sea and became what a later account called a "common sailor" aboard the Maidstone. There was nothing common about what she accomplished.
In Ann Mills: Secret Sailor of the Maidstone, the fragments of Ann's real history become the foundation for a sweeping but carefully researched adventure through the waterfronts, merchant ships, and warships of eighteenth-century Britain. Ann learns early that the same labor valued in a man can be dismissed in a woman. What begins as a practical experiment in male clothing gradually opens a world previously closed to her. As John "Jack" Mills, she earns better wages, learns the unforgiving work of the sea, and eventually enters the King's service aboard the formidable HMS Maidstone.
This is a story about disguise, survival, war, work, friendship, and the strange machinery of historical memory. It asks not merely whether Ann Mills really held a severed head, but how a working sailor whose real life was almost entirely forgotten became one of the most striking women in maritime legend.