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The Sea Captain's Wife
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About This Book
A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World The true story of the first female captain of a merchant ship and her treacherous navigation of Antarctica's deadly waters. 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.
Reviews
"Mazzeo's narrative slowly builds toward an action-packed climax."
"The difficulty a reader faces in The Sea Captain's Wife is that it takes half the book to get to the action."
"A thoroughly entertaining, delightful story."
"Mazzeo writes with a no-nonsense crispness that feels appropriately shipshape."
"But she also acknowledges there are gaps in what she can prove ..."
"Mazzeo turns exemplary research into nineteenth-century maritime history into a fascinating tale."
"The result is a bracing high-seas adventure and a forgotten slice of women's history."
"Mazzeo builds up to that fateful voyage with family histories of both Joshua and Mary Ann, as well as precise and fascinating details about the world of sailing in the mid-1800s ..."
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