I recently received a gift of a book from fellow heritage blogger Kathleen Moore Walsh. She thought the story would interest me, a story of a fellow countrywoman, Mary Ann Paten nee Brown who became stand in captain of a clipper ship after her sea captain husband fell ill.  No bother says you…shur anyone could do it…until you realise that it was as the rounded Cape Horn, from the Atlantic approach…in a hurricane…Mary Ann was only nineteen and pregnant.

Embarresingly, I had to admit to Kathleen that I never heard of the story. Although she cautioned me that the start was somewhat slow, once I got into it, it would really set sail – and it was exactly as Kathleen described.

You can google all kind of fawning reviews and descriptions of the book. But here’s my own modest take.

The start is slow because it gives a lot of genelogical information about both the Patens and the Browns. Put simply they both came from seafaring homes, Joshua from Penobscot Bay, Maine and Mary Ann from Boston. While Joshua’s people had been raised as sea captains and with expectations, Mary Ann was from humble origins. Her mother kept the roof over them and insisted that she and her brothers get an education, while her dad sailed the seas as a able seaman.

They married in 1853 and her first circumnavigation of the earth began in January 1855. Although Mary Ann had many pursits planned to keep her occupied on the journey she excelled at navigation alongside her husband and as the trip proceeded she learned to take sightings, use a compass and plot a course. She also became useful at first aid and caring for the crew.  The kernal of the story was her second circumnavigation. They took the clipper ship Neptune’s Car south from New York around the Horn, and it was here that Joshua collapsed and Mary Ann took the helm. From that point forward the story sounds almost impossible to believe but the facts are widely known and verified. 

There was much that I had read about the sea that was covered and repeated in the story, but so much that I enjoyed and learned from this story too. The basics of navigation, the complexities of handling cargo, the ways in which a captain could make money from a trip and the pressures they faced from inscrupouls owners who cared little for their crews, only for speed and profits.

Tilar J Mazzeo brings her characters to life and you know you are hooked on a book, when the pages keep on turning and you find yourself wanting them to endure, to come through, to succeed. Written by a woman, celebrating another woman, the book is an absolute gem of a story of an era when women, like children were to be seen and not heard. Its a story I was delighted to read and I would stronly recommend it. Thank you Kathleen.

Kathleen Moore Walsh blogs at Glenmore History.