The Sea Captain's Wife
A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The true story of the first female captain of a merchant ship and her treacherous navigation of Antarctica's deadly waters, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Widow Clicquot
Summer, 1856
Nineteen-year-old Mary Ann Patten and her husband, Joshua, were young and ambitious. Both from New England seafaring families, they had already completed their first clipper-ship voyage around the world with Joshua as captain. If they could win the race to San Francisco that year, their dream of building a farm and a family might be within reach. It would mean freedom. And the price of that freedom was one last dangerous transit—into the most treacherous waters in the world.
As their ship, Neptune’s Car, left New York Harbor and sailed down the jagged coast of South America, Joshua fell deathly ill and was confined to his bunk, delirious. The treacherous first mate, confined to the brig for insubordination, was agitating for mutiny. With no obvious option for a new captain and heartbroken about her husband, Mary Ann stepped into the breach and convinced the crew to support her, just as they slammed into a gale that would last 18 days. Determined to save the ship, the crew, and their future, she faces down the deadly waters of Drake’s Passage.
Set against the backdrop of the California Gold Rush and taking us to the brink of Antarctica, The Sea Captain's Wife finally gives Mary Ann Patten—the first woman to command a merchant vessel as captain — her due. Mazzeo draws on new archival research from nineteenth-century women’s maritime journals and on her own expedition to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica in search of Mary Ann’s route. Thrilling, harrowing, and heroic, The Sea Captain's Wife is the story of one woman who, for love, would do what was necessary to survive.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this immersive account, literature scholar Mazzeo (Sisters in Resistance) spotlights a woman who was once "no less celebrated... than Florence Nightingale." In the 1850s, amid the California Gold Rush, huge, fast clippers routinely circumnavigated the treacherous tip of South America. The captains were international celebrities, and young Joshua Patten longed to achieve such superstardom. However, bad luck struck in 1856, when he and other captains decided to race to California, leaving too early in the season: at such short notice, Patten hired a "hot-headed, violent, and duplicitous" first mate; then, during the voyage, Patten was laid up with tuberculosis. But his wife, pregnant 19-year-old Mary Ann, a petite woman self-taught at "celestial navigation," was able to convince the crew to accept her as captain, and proceeded to sail them safely through incredible storms and fields of icebergs, foiling the nefarious first mate not once but twice along the way. Mazzeo offers plenty of juicy details about sea life; her tracking of events on land is less captivating, though readers will learn much about the grisly horrors of mid-19th-century travel. She also follows the Pattens' story, a somewhat unrelentingly tragic one, beyond the famed voyage itself (when they disembarked, Mary Ann, disallowed as a woman from conducting business transactions, couldn't even raise funds for her husband's medical care). The result is a bracing high-seas adventure and a forgotten slice of women's history.
