Women Sailors and Sailors' Women: An Untold Maritime History - Hardcover

Cordingly, David

3.62

481 ratings by Goodreads

9780786235247: Women Sailors and Sailors' Women: An Untold Maritime History

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786235241 ISBN 13: 9780786235247

Publisher: Thorndike Pr, 2001

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The fall of 1856 was one of the worst seasons that sailors off the coast of Cape Horn had ever seen. The clipper ship Neptune's Car, a trading vessel from New York, had battled huge waves and gale-force winds for weeks. Desperate to save his men and cargo from the violent storm, Captain Joshua Patten spent eight sleepless days and nights on deck. On the ninth day at the helm, he collapsed with a raging fever, and his crew panicked. As freezing rain and wind howled through the rigging and death seemed imminent, just one person on board stepped forward to take control of the ship: Captain Patten's nineteen-year-old wife, Mary, then five months' pregnant with their first child. When the ship safely reached its destination of San Franciso that November, Mary Patten was hailed as a national heroine.

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From the Inside Flap:

s the sea has been regarded as a male domain. Fisherman, navy officers, pirates, and explorers roamed the high seas while their wives and daughters stayed on shore. Oceangoing adventurers and the crews of their ships were part of an all-male world — or were they?

In this illuminating historical narrative, maritime scholar David Cordingly shows that in fact an astonishing number of women went to sea in the great age of sail. Some traveled as the wives or mistresses of captains. A few were smuggled aboard by officers or seaman. A number of cases have come to light of young women dressing in men’s clothes and working alongside the sailors for months, and sometimes years. In the U.S. and Britsh navies, it was not uncommon for the wives of bosuns, carpenters, and cooks to go to sea on warships. Cordingly’s tremendous research shows that there was indeed a thriving female population — from female pirates to the sirens of legend — on and around the high seas.

From the Back Cover:

“This is a book to inform, stimulate, and amuse—an irresistible diversion.”
—Baltimore Sun

One of the best books of 2001*

“A valuable addition to nautical literature and a useful contribution to the study of women’s history....[Cordingly’s] book leaves no doubt that women have played a far larger role in the nautical life than is commonly understood.”
—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post*

“Cordingly transcends the ideological limits of gender history and brings a world to life.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Revisionism at its most delightful. With no particular gospel to preach, Cordingly works his way through layer after layer of overlooked and unconnected written records, finding evidence of women almost everywhere.”
—Houston Chronicle

“Cordingly brings a wide range of research together in one expansive volume.”
—Boston Herald

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