My Character Based On A Real Person

The real person I found that I am going to base my character on is Sarah Bishop, although she has had fiction based on her, I am only looking at the real facts about her. Sarah Bishop, from New York, was a victim of a British raiding party in I778. She got taken aboard a British privateer; she became a member of the crew with certain additional duties. Although she handled the wheel and stood watches, she was also expected to be a communal sex object, rape was a common occurrence in war times and on ships it wasn’t seen or considered wrong as the men had to have their pleasure some how. Over time Sarah and the captain of the privateer came to an understanding, after which she was strictly the captain's woman. However the captain was killed in an engagement with an American privateer, and it was another six months before Bishop found an opportunity to escape. It took two whole years after she was first captured to escape and Sarah Bishop slipped over the side of the ship and swam ashore at Stamford, Connecticut. Her experience had been so traumatic that she could not bear to return to normal human society. She made her way to Ridgefield, Connecticut, and climbed to a rocky cave, where she lived the rest of her life as a hermit. Bishop had become a seagoing prostitute against her will.

Later accounts say Bishop was forced to serve the crew aboard a British privateer. Some websites list her among female pirates. Some interpreted this account more realistically to present Bishop as a victim of rape and, possibly, post-traumatic stress syndrome

 

In 1839, the New England Gazetteer reported:

“She lived on Long Island at the time of the Revolutionary war. Her father’s house was burned by the British, and she was cruelly treated by a British officer. She then left society and wandered among the mountains near this part of the state: she found a kind of cave near Ridgefield, where she resided till about the time of her death, which took place in 1810.”

The Democrat of Boston published an essay about Bishop, “The Hermitess of North Salem,” on 22 Sept 1804, crediting a Poughkeepsie newspaper as the source. That article suggested a different history for her reclusiveness:

“Sarah Bishop, (for this was the name of this Hermitess) is a person of about fifty years of age. About thirty years ago [i.e., 1774] she was a young lady of considerable beauty, a competent share of mental endowments, and education; She was possessed of a handsome fortune, but she was of a tender of delicate constitution, and enjoyed but a low degree of health; and could hardly be comfortable without constant recourse to medicine, and careful attendance; and added to this, she always discovered an unusual antipathy to men; and was often heard to say that she had no dread of any animal on earth but man. Disgusted with them, and consequently with the world, about twenty-three years ago [i.e., about 1781], she withdrew herself from all human society...”