Based on a true story of terror, resilience, and the unstoppable majesty of the world’s most tumultuous seas.
From the first word, we can tell we are in the hands of a master
storyteller. The sea is fully alive, the wind too. The inescapable
strain of keeping a wind-driven clipper afloat amid seas as tall as its
masthead is thundering through every line. And that’s
before we get to the dangers faced by the captain‘s pregnant young wife, nursing her deathly ill husband and, hour by desperate hour, coping alone with a ship-killing storm, a dangerously incompetent first mate, and a ship full of men who have never in their lives at sea taken an order from a woman.
This is, however, based on a true story, a real woman, and thus the
next few chapters turn to her antecedents on land, and her husband’s,
in a coastal region famed for its sailing families and its crucial place
in the world trading routes. The family history up to the 1830s is
detailed but the writing never lets it lag. Long dead townsfolk,
captains of industry, farmers, shipwrights flicker to life, and then
recede as quickly. Even the geography gets its due in elegant prose that
is a delight to read. All this before the main action gets underway,
and including an ominous historical note that sea captain’s wives were alarmingly
over-represented among the women confined to the Maine Insane Asylum and other institutions. For
saying no, for not bearing children, for not keeping the house up to
the husband or in-laws standards, for getting ill. For any reason, and for none.
Another historical foreshadowing is the mention of an
enduring vampire panic in rural New England, believed responsible for the
spreading paleness and wasting common to tuberculosis. Apparently
it began in 1782 and lasted for a century. [No word here whether anyone
was staked on account of the mistaken belief but possibly that topic has
been covered by other authors.] But the very real damage wrought by
tuberculosis overshadows any monster myth. At the start of the century nearly 15% of all the people who had ever
lived in the United States in Europe had been killed by tuberculosis. By
the end of the century, 80% of the US population would be infected with
a bacteria that had an 80% mortality rate.
Small wonder, then that
Marianne‘s mother wanted her children educated enough to escape the over-crowded seaport slums before they too were consumed by tuberculosis. Despite working six days a week to
sustain her brood in the frequent absence of their father, she took them
all to church each Sunday morning so they might learn to read, write, and do basic math at the
Sunday School. Sending pretty Marianne, then under 16, into marriage with a man a decade older, of seemingly prosperous family and excellent prospects, could be the whole family's salvation.
None knew that Marianne's brave young sea captain already held the spores of his own, and his family's, devastation.
Marianne had a quick intelligence that made good use of her Sunday School education. By the end of her first voyage, she was competent at both celestial navigation and, by poring over medical tomes during her many lonely hours, at nursing injured and ill sailors. Her second long voyage tested everything she knew. Her husband, already suffering from a cough and migraines, had to confine his first mate to the brig for sleeping on watch. The second mate could neither read nor write and thus is unable to navigate the ship safely through the turbulent waters around the tip of South America. The captain, ill as he was, must stand watch day and night to keep the ship on course through sleet and stormy seas that have already sent many a clipper ship to the bottom of Drake’s Passage.
When her husband collapses on deck, semi-conscious and feverish, it is up to Marianne to keep the ship together.
If you have seen the snowy, gale-tossed passage of those waters in the movie of Master and Commander, when everyone was freezing and the ship was groaning over every wave as if it would
disintegrate beneath their feet, you will have an idea what Marianne
endured. Not yet twenty, and pregnant for the first time, she alone was responsible for the ship, crew, and the cargo that is supposed to set her little family up in financial comfort for life. She'd spend the next 18 days standing watch, navigating, and nursing her husband while the wind dragged the ship one way and the heavy currents around the Cape pulled it in the other direction.
The suspense at this point in the book is intense. The wind and waves are merciless. The clipper passes another ship already lying 'hull-to' and hoping merely to survive, and are unable to close the distance to render aid. They're swept onward, possibly to their own doom.
I'd love to tell you how the voyage ends, whether there is an 'after' of prosperity for Marianne and her unborn babe, but you'll have to read the book for that.
I'll tell you this much, though: the brutal reality of women's lives in the mid-nineteenth century, when marriage meant putting yourself and your financial security completely into the power of a man who might gamble it away, squander it on mistresses, and throw you into an asylum if you protested, will make you first terrified and then furious. There is nothing in the aftermath of Marianne's famous voyage, nor in her enduring reputation for courage and seamanship, that can disguise how destructive her marriage to that particular captain was for her and her whole family.
Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys nautical history, economic history, American history, women's history, and true stories of danger and inspiration.
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A Watch of Nightingales
