Nantucket Woman

Women of the Sea

This book devoted to the stories of heroines of the sea, by the master of New England maritime lore, Edward Rowe Snow, was originally published in 1962. Included in this collection are Hannah Burgess, who navigated her husband's clipper ship safely to port after his death; His Kai Ching, a widow who took command of her husband's pirate fleet; Mrs. Jones, a Methodist missionary who was the sole survivor of the Maria, wrecked off the coast of Antigua in 1826; Madame Desnoyer, who was cast adrift with her two children and a servant off Santo Domingo in 1767, after her husband had been murdered; and Alice Rowe Snow, the author's own mother, who spent most of her first twenty years at sea aboard ships commanded by her father.

Nantucket Woman

Captain Ahab Had a Wife

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the whaling industry in New England sent hundreds of ships and thousands of men to distant seas on voyages lasting up to five years. In Captain Ahab Had a Wife, Lisa Norling taps a rich vein of sources — including women’s and men’s letters and diaries, shipowners' records, Quaker meeting minutes and other church records, newspapers and magazines, censuses, and city directories — to reconstruct the lives of the “Cape Horn widows” left behind onshore. Norling begins with the emergence of colonial whalefishery on the island of Nantucket and then follows the industry to mainland New Bedford in the nineteenth century, tracking the parallel shift from a patriarchal world to a more ambiguous Victorian culture of domesticity. Through the sea-wives' compelling and often poignant stories, Norling exposes the painful discrepancies between gender ideals and the reality of maritime life and documents the power of gender to shape both economic development and individual experience.