Print from the 'Illustrated London News', 9 May 1863 (p.512), titled 'Ann Perriam, of Exmouth, Aged 93'. The text explains that the sitter's first husband was a seaman called Edward Hopping, whom she had married by 1795 (the marriage was in fact in 1788). In 1795 she went to Plymouth to meet him when his ship, the 'Crescent', commanded by James Saumarez, put in there for repairs after a long cruise on the coast of France. 'At that time a certain number of women of good character were allowed to sail with their husbands' and she was allowed to join him on board and when he subsequently followed Saumarez into the 'Orion', on which she remained five years, including in the action off L'Orient on 23 June 1795, at the Battle of St Vincent in 1797 and at the Battle of the Nile in 1798. In these sea fights she is stated to have helped the gunners and magazine men preparing 'flannel cartridges for the great guns'. Her brother and twelve other men from Exmouth (her native town, and at the time of the print) also fought in the 'Orion', 'one of whom died an Admiral', and of whom she was last survivor.

After the death of Perriam, her second husband, she sold fish on the streets of Exmouth until she was 80 and unable to continue, surviving all her children as well and reported by ILN as now 'not surrounded by those comforts which her busy life and strange services should have secured her.' Almost entirely the same text was reprinted in other papers in 1863 and again in the 'Penny Illustrated Paper' of 11 February 1865, with a portrait of her, in reporting her death at Exmouth on 24 January, aged 95. It adds only that 'A paltry pension of £10 a year was all she received from Government at the time of her death' but she did leave a will for effects worth under £100.

She was born Ann Letton at Exmouth in April 1769, was apparently known as 'Nancy', and as a widow married John Perriam in 1805.