A 17th-century sailor’s confession about a rape, of which he became so ashamed that he sought to cover it up for ever, has been exposed by conservation workers who discovered the note hidden under a rewritten version in his journal. 
 
 The confession went unseen for more than 300 years because the sailor pasted his second account so neatly over the top of the original that scholars missed it. 
 
 Edward Barlow’s lavishly illustrated journal of his extraordinary life is now held at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. The farm worker’s son joined the navy as a child, sailed as a teenager on the same ship as Samuel Pepys to bring Charles II back to England, survived several shipwrecks and captivity, and eventually rose to become a captain. 
 
 Maritime museum in choppy waters for offering superyacht owners art advice Read more 
 
 He began the journal when taken prisoner in the Dutch East Indies in 1671, and continued it when he got safely back to England. He originally wrote an excruciatingly frank account of his rape of Mary Symons, a young female servant in a house where he was lodging, an encounter he admitted was “much against her will, for indeed she was asleep but being gotten into the bed I could not easily be persuaded out again, and I confess that I did more than what was lawful or civil, but not in that manner that I could ever judge or, in the least, think that she should prove with child, for I take God to witness I did not enter her body, all though I did attempt something in that nature”. 
 
 Barlow inserted a line of warning: “I found by her that women’s wombs are of an attractive quality and dangerous for a young man to meddle with.” 
 
 He continued that though he wrote “a loving letter”, he wanted to “forget her and blot her out of my remembrance … as I had done with some before”. However, when his ship returned to England from Jamaica, he agreed to meet Symons and found her “weeping most pitifully and saying she was undone”. 
 
 Against the advice of friends urging him that he had a good chance of finding a rich wife, Barlow married her in Deal, “a very decent marriage where we had several people of good repute”. The union celebrated with a two-day party that cost him £10. 
 
 Their child was stillborn while Barlow was at sea, but they went on to have several more children and, despite initial doubts, he heaped praise on his wife: “Had I searched England over for a mate I could not have met with one more obliging and ready to do any thing that should give me content.” 
 
 It was Paul Cook, a senior paper conservator at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, who spotted the newly pasted page and exposed Barlow’s shame. 
 
 Cook was told the manuscriptwas “a problem” when he joined the museum in 1985. The document was bought at a country house sale in the early 20th century and partly published by the scholar Basil Lubbock, who then presented it to the museum. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest A page from Edward Barlow’s journal, written between 1659 and 1703. Photograph: Jon Stokes/National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London 
 
 He has spent nine years working on it, reversing the damage caused by previous attempted repairs. The final effort in the 1970s, using a technique Cook says was then widely accepted, involved pasting a fine silk gauze to strengthen the pages – but it was in fact damaging Barlow’s illustrations, including battles at sea and a shark devouring a naked man, whales, an elephant and a rhinoceros. 
 
 Cook became the first person in more than 300 years to read Barlow’s original words, hidden under the rewritten version, which included the weeping woman on the shore but omitted the account of the rape. Instead, Barlow wrote: “I had in part promised her at London that I would marry her … having had a little more than ordinary familiarity with her”. 
 
 Roberth Blyth, a senior curator at Greenwich, who has included pages from the journal in the Tudor and Stuart navy gallery opening this week, thinks Barlow probably came back from sea, reread his journal and was horrified at how honest he had been. 
 
 “By then, he is a respectably married man, with a house and children, and he must have thought: ‘is this really the account I wish to leave of myself to history? With every voyage there’s a chance I may never return, and is this what I want my children to read about their mother?’” 
 
 Barlow’s spelling and punctuation are erratic, but the handwriting is beautiful, swirling across tightly ruled lines on high-quality paper, which Blyth thinks must have been pilfered from stores. 
 
 “The official account is that he learned to read and write while a prisoner, where he certainly would have had time to start a journal, but that is what is technically known as bollocks,” Blyth said. “Nobody ever taught themselves to write like that – he must already have been at least partly literate, which was rare enough for an ordinary seaman.” 
 
 Fate caught up on Barlow in 1706, when the ship he finally commanded, the Liampo, was wrecked off Mozambique. His bequests included a silver supper dish, two cups, four small teaspoons – and a secret that would be kept for centuries. 
 
 • Pages from Barlow’s journal and a digitised version of the manuscript will go on display for the first time at the National Maritime Museum in one of four galleries opening on 20 September. ||||| 
 
 Many people in Manchester will have heard the name of Edward Barlow, Ambrose Edward Barlow, born at Barlow Hall, now Chorlton Golf Club, martyred for his Catholic Beliefs in 1641 at Lancaster. 
 
 But there is another Edward Barlow, born just a year after the death of Ambrose, whose life path would take a very different path. This Edward Barlow born in Whitefield in 1642 and who sailed the seven seas between 1659-1703. 
 
 We know of his life because he kept a journal and it is unique in that it is as far we know the only narrative from an ordinary sailor in the restoration period who worked his way up to be captain of a merchant ship. 
 
 One of six children, his father was a farm labourer and the young Edward supplemented the family income fetching horse loads of coal for which he received 2d per load. He tried his hand as a farmer’s boy, a bleacher in a cotton mill According to his journal, he told his friends at the age of sixteen that they would see him no more during one holiday. 
 
 Thinking that he was bluffing, he proved them wrong, putting on his best clothes and running off to sea. His journal pictures the scene, in one of its early entries, entitled running away from my father’s house in the Whitefeld, his mother stands beckoning her hand calling him back. 
 
 He became an apprentice seaman on board HMS Naseby, the flagship of Admiral Montague 
 
 He appears to have travelled the world, fighting against Barbary pirates under the command of Lord Sandwich in 1661 and fighting the Dutch off the coast of Lowestoft in 1665, when the Dutch flagship famously blew up, a campaign brilliantly depicted by Barlow in his journal by a magnificent water colour of the scene. 
 
 He travelled to Brazil, Portugal and China, served as a merchant on an East India Company boat and carried herring from the Clyde to the Mediterranean 
 
 He was captured by the Dutch in Batavia, (modern day Indonesia) in 1673, which is where he wrote up the first installment of life story brought home in a leaky Dutch vessel . Three years later he is in Marseille over Christmas where he writes: 
 
 Having put all our goods on shore that we were to deliver [to Marseilles], we walked ashore being Christmas, to take our recreation and see all about the town, which is a place of very good buildings and a pretty large town or city, where all things are very plentiful, both for meat and drink. They have a very good wine of several sorts and very cheap, especially a red wine, which is a king of wine much like to claret, only a clearer red and better wine to drink.” 
 
 Food often featured in his diary, whilst a prisoner of the Dutch he wrote that “instead of good pies and roast meat, we were content with a little boiled rice and a piece of stinking beef, which they gave us three days in the week, and a quart of stinking water to drink for a day, the weather being exceeding hot.” 
 
 While he also gives a lesson in the eating of turtle eggs 
 
 “[Turtle’s] eggs are not so good as the flesh of them, it being very good and wholesome and very sweet, making excellent good broth. Their eggs are not like hens” eggs, but are as round as a ball, and their shell is white, and a kind of tough thick skin over them, but when the shell is dry it will break like another egg shell 
 
 Man overboard was an oft heard cry about the ships and Barlow would often write of such occurrences 
 
 it [was] blowing pretty hard and some of our men going up into the foretop to reef our fore topsail [reduce its size to increase stability of the ship], a young youth fell from the fore topsail yard into the sea, and was drowned, yet he could swim pretty well, but the ship driving away, and hoisting out ye boat, and it blowing very hard, the boat looked for him but could not find him, for the waves running high had swallowed him up and he was lost.”5 
 
 He would often comment on the differing nationalities that he met, the men of Lisbon were according to him “fiercely jealous and would not allow any stranger to come close to their wives”. 
 
 Nor did the Spaniards allow their wives any freedom.The men “ were very proud, even if not worth a groat and with hardly victuals to put in his belly, yet he will have asword by his side and a cloak upon his back.” 
 
 The 225,000-word journal, preserved in a joint of bamboo sealed with wax from the rigours of shipborne life, in some ways paints a dark picture of life on board a seventeenth century ship, the suffering of hunger, violent punishments, and fundamental lack of liberty. “ The best literary study of Barlow’s journal classifies him as an outstanding example of the mobile consciousness of early modern England’s working poor”, wrote Steve Mentz. 
 
 Indeed Edward would in his journal, advise young men to follow any trade apart from going to sea where they would suffer, “ abuse, hardships and a life little better than a slave going with many a hungry belly and a wet back.” .He added that the injustices made England the worst kingdom in all of Christendom for seaman. 
 
 Yet we should not forget the magnificence of the journal, Barlow improved as an artist as the years went on, sketching and later using watercolors to depict harbours, ships and animals. He appeared to enjoy depicting wildlife in particular, drawing a shark which he describes as the most “ raucous fish that swims in the sea.” He would draw gulls catching flying fish as well as an elephant and a Rhinoceros. 
 
 How the journal came to be published is something of a mystery.It was written neatly on foolscap sheets and transcribed and edited by Basil Lubbock who boiught the mauscript from the Earl of Hardwicke. It had previous to that resided in the library of Sidney Lodge in Hampshire, once the home of vice admiral Sydney Yorke but the family had no idea how the manuscript had come to be there. 
 
 Some have claimed that it is fake, questioning how an untutored sailor could have taught himself to write, been supplied with all the ink and kept in such good condition while at sea.Experts have studied it and believe it to be genuine, its style of writing consonant with that of contemporary sea journals.
– The elegant script and color illustrations of Edward Barlow's 225,000-word diary documenting the 17th-century sailor's life at sea have been admired for some 300 years. Hidden beneath was his darkest secret: a note providing what the Guardian calls an "excruciatingly frank account" of his rape of Mary Symons, a female servant in a house in which he was staying. He would eventually marry her. "She was asleep but being gotten into the bed I could not easily be persuaded out again, and I confess that I did more than what was lawful or civil, but not in that manner that I ... think that she should prove with child," he wrote. "I take God to witness I did not enter her body, all though I did attempt something in that nature." The note was uncovered by Paul Cook, a senior paper conservator at London's National Maritime Museum. He has worked to repair the diary over the last nine years and discovered a rewritten account had been carefully pasted over the first. It made no mention of the earlier rape. Barlow—who would go on to describe his wife as "obliging and ready to do any thing that should give me content"—instead wrote that "I had in part promised her at London that I would marry her … having had a little more than ordinary familiarity with her." As Barlow became a husband, father, and captain, per About Manchester, NMM curator Roberth Blyth suspects he grew to regret how forthcoming he had been and appreciate the risk of leaving that account behind for his family to read. Thanks to his handiwork, Barlow's secret was kept long after his ship went down off Mozambique in 1706.