Hen Frigates: Wives of Merchant Captains Under Sail - Hardcover

"I have crossed the Atlantic four times, and have been once to the East Indies and back again, and only once; besides being in different places about home: Cork, and Lisbon and Gibralter.... and I can safely say that the happiest part of my life has been spent on board a ship. While we were together, you know, there was nothing to be feared." --Mrs. Croft in Jane Austen's Persuasion

Much has been made of man's romance with the sea, and to read the literature--from Homer's Odyssey to Melville's Moby Dick--you'd never guess that women so much as got their feet wet in the surf, let alone went down to the sea in ships. But Jane Austen's fictional Mrs. Croft, the wife of an admiral, was by no means a rarity in her time as Joan Druett's fascinating exploration of women and the sea, Hen Frigates, makes clear. During the 19th century, women often accompanied their sea-captain husbands or fathers on oceangoing merchant ships, enduring the same hardships as the male sailors--sickness, poor weather, shipwreck, piracy--and a few of their own, as well, such as pregnancy and childbirth. Yet the history of women at sea has remained largely unwritten and unacknowledged. Then in 1984, Druett discovered the gravestone of a whaling captain's wife while bicycling on one of the Cook Islands in Polynesia. "A woman on a whaleship! It seemed incredible. Instantly fascinated, I thought I would look up a book to learn more about this young woman who had made such a strange and fatal decision to go to sea." What Druett discovered, however, was that there was no book. So she wrote one herself. In Hen Frigates, Druett has used the letters and journals of seafaring women to limn a portrait of 19th-century ship-going life, including matters such as sex, child-rearing and medical practices. From shipwreck and pirate attacks to the intricacies of navigation and the pleasures of visiting foreign lands, Druett's heroines shed new perspective on the 19th-century shipping news.

An engaging portrait of shipboard (and portside) life for women sailing with their husbands during the 19th century, from maritime historian and novelist Druett (Abigail, 1988). During the age of sail, American captains, and sometimes their first mates, were permitted to take their wives with them as they plied the coastal trade or struck out on trading voyages. The women were clearly a literate bunch, for they left behind a wealth of diaries and letters and journals, often dryly humorous and witty, that Druett gathered to fashion this evocation. Using extensive quotations from her sources, Druett describes what it was like to be the mistress on everything from schooners to downeasters to the tony packet ships; how the women contended with frights, privation, storms, monotony, and seasickness (or, as one woman termed it, ``paying homage to Neptune''); their experiences with pirates and cholera and mutiny. Many of the women made this their life, extending decades beyond the traditional honeymoon voyage (which was likely obligatory, as the family capital was the ship and there was no house to wait in), and they had to learn everything from medicine to navigation to raising a brood on a rocking boat to learning how to survive in a foreign port. Throughout, Druett keeps readers' attention by moving swiftly from episodes of intense excitementmenacing weather, dastardly crews, extreme heroicsto leisurely, droll observations, many of the best coming in the chapter on high-seas sex: One wife declared with spirit to her husband, ``I shall not be a fellatrix, Captain, oh my Captain, and if that be mutiny, make the most of it.'' Decidedly, these were women ``very aware of owning a certain aura of romance, of being widely traveled and worldly wise, something in which they took perceptible pride,'' and in Druett's hands their stories make for highly enjoyable reading. (photos and illustrations) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.