The travel writer Mary Ann Parker

By Charlotte MacKenzie

Mary Ann Parker was the first European woman to publish a travel memoir of New South Wales. After travelling with her husband, Captain John Parker of HMS Gorgon. Mary Ann Parker's family origins are revealed here for the first time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781678114770

Book preview

The Travel Writer Mary Ann Parker Origins and Family

Mary Ann Parker has long been recognised as the first European woman to publish a travel memoir of her voyage and visit to New South Wales in the 1790s.¹ Where she accompanied her husband, Captain John Parker, of HMS Gorgon. Mary Ann Parker occasionally mentioned her family in A voyage round the world in the Gorgon man of war (1795); and her later circumstances were briefly explained in applications for financial support from the writers’ charity the Literary Fund.² Beyond the information from these sources, Mary Ann Parker’s origins, family, and later biography have largely eluded researchers. Here I am publishing new research findings about Mary Ann Parker, and about her father, who I have historically identified as the Georgian medical practitioner John Burrows; and linking these findings to what was previously known about Mary Ann Parker, and about John Burrows.

Mary Ann Parker identified herself as ‘a physicians daughter formerly well known in the medical line’. Her father was John Burrows, a medical man making his way in the Georgian commercial world.³ An apothecary’s son who identified himself at different times as a ‘surgeon’, a ‘doctor of physick’, and an MD. A medical adviser who was sometimes favoured by wealthy patients and patrons; who travelled and worked as a doctor in other European countries; who translated, wrote, and published medical books; who obtained a patent in 1772 for a vegetable syrup, from the sales of which another man later succeeded in making a fortune; and who was described as a ‘druggist’ when he was declared bankrupt in August 1783, a few months after his daughter Mary Ann Burrows married a Royal Navy officer, John Parker, in London.

John Burrows’ father Gabriel Burrows was an apothecary in London; who had completed an indentured apprenticeship with Charles Fowler, a ‘Citizen & Apothecary of London’.⁴ After being widowed, Gabriel Burrows married Judith Cossley, the widow of a West Indian planter, and travelled with her to Jamaica; where his third son, Rosewell Burrows, was christened at Kingston in 1736. By then, John Burrows was a teenager, who may have been placed in education, or trained while working with his father. By the time he came of age, John Burrows was an orphan; sufficiently trained or cocksure to identify himself as a ‘surgeon’ when he married a widow in London; and when commencing a legal dispute, which he started on his brother William’s behalf, against his widowed stepmother and others.⁵

Apothecaries were permitted by case law to give medical advice, and some identified themselves as a ‘surgeon-apothecary’, or simply as a ‘surgeon’. If John Burrows trained as an apothecary, his initial experience might be compared to that of Joseph Fox of Falmouth, who completed an apprenticeship with an apothecary in Fowey; married the daughter of an apothecary in Penryn; and opened