DUCKING THROUGH the crypts beneath the Old North Church, Commander Billie J. Farrell kept a tight grip on her hat. Her dark, gold-trimmed bicorne under her arm, the 77th commander of the USS Constitution and first woman to helm the historic ship considered the legacy of her original predecessor, Samuel Nicholson, in his final resting place.
“He did not necessarily have what people would consider a successful first voyage for Constitution,” Farrell said, delicately, of an unfortunate series of events in the Caribbean including improperly claiming a ship under orders of Great Britain as a prize, letting another prize ship go, and weathering several instances of serious nautical damage. Nicholson was relieved of command after just two years, Farrell noted on The Codcast, “but, you know, he has his place in history as the first.”
Farrell is also a first, two years into her own command of the USS Constitution. Famously nicknamed Old Ironsides, the ship is the oldest commissioned warship in the US Navy.
“I fight and drive ships and lead sailors,” she said. “And so that’s what I’ve done for the past 20 years. I’m very fortunate that I’ve worked with a bunch of great commanding officers. I’ve almost always been the senior woman at my command, but I knew there were women that commanded ships elsewhere. I just never worked for any of them. And so I knew it was possible and knew that I could one day command my ship if I wanted to.”
Her job is a twofer – maintain and operate the historic Old Ironsides while training mostly young sailors who will later need to serve on combatant ships.
“The sailors, when they get to the ship, they’re starting as a blank slate, because they don’t know how sailors in 1812 lived, they know what the Navy looks like today,” Farrell said. So they have to learn how to hoist a 2,000-pound mainsail the size of a basketball court and climb a web of lines and ladders in period uniforms.
They may be training on one of the original six frigates of the US Navy – indicated on all modern commanding uniforms by six stars – “but then there is the aspect that they’re sailors in 2024, and so part of our training program is to talk about what the Navy does today,” said Farrell.
But she tries to tie in the USS Constitution’s 226-year history. Tucked into a small study in the Old North Church parish house, Farrell unwound her favorite story about the ship: its nicknaming.
“We were still a brand new Navy,” she said, when the USS Constitution came upon the British ship H.M.S. Guerriere during the War of 1812.
“She starts to fire on Constitution, originally far enough away that the cannonballs are not hitting the side of the ship,” Farrell recounts. “But as she continues to close the distance and the cannonballs do indeed start to hit the side of Constitution, a sailor looking over the side sees a cannonball hit and bounce off the side, and he turns to the captain and says, ‘Huzzah! Her sides are made of iron!’ And the captain says, ‘Ironsides!’ The whole crew knows the ship is wooden, but what it does is it gives them hope that they have a fighting chance now, as an underdog, to maybe actually win this fight.”
Farrell, who will be honored with the Third Lantern Award next month from Old North Illuminated, the nonprofit which maintains the historic church site and educates visitors, expressed some ambivalence about her position as the first woman to command the historic showpiece ship. Her gender wasn’t top of mind when she decided at 10 years old that she would join the Navy, but women were only about 15 percent of the Naval Academy when she entered in 2004. The first time she saw the USS Constitution, as a high schooler in 1998, was the first year a woman – Maureen Farren – took command of a combat ship.
“I think I actually didn’t really reflect on it at all,” Farrell said. “I had great captains that were all men, but they all were phenomenal leaders that I aspired to be like. They set a tone of dignity and respect across the command at every level. That was the expectation. I was very blessed to grow up in a Navy where that’s the experience I had and that’s how I modeled my leadership behavior, is that we are all to be treated with dignity and respect.”
Gender integration in the Navy, as with other military branches, has not been uniformly smooth. The Navy has weathered scandals and still grapples with a long history of slow response and reluctant prosecution to assaults.
Farrell oversees an 80-person crew, about a third of whom are women and most of whom are on their first assignment in the Navy straight out of bootcamp.
At some level, being a woman and mother of two young children is also an important signal to the crew. She and her husband, newly retired from the Navy, met as midshipmen at the Naval Academy, sometimes apart for months on end. Marriage and motherhood are complicated at sea, Farrell said, something that needs to be disclosed as much as the combat training.
“Open communication is really what I focus on a lot,” she said. “Trying to foster an environment where people are comfortable coming up to say they need something, so that I as a leader can take care of that. Because, especially in the military, if those basic needs aren’t taken care of and you go over the horizon, your mind isn’t where it should be – it’s back home.”