Customer Reviews

HEN FRIGATES: Passion and Peril, Nineteenth-Century Women at Sea

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This book is a compendium of the experiences of 19th century women who spent much of their lives on board sailing ships. Largely invisible in naval chronicles, a not inconsiderable number of wives and daughters accompanied merchant captains of that time. These globe-hopping women and girls led highly unconventional lives. They faced everything from abject boredom to dire peril from pirates, mutineers and the loss of loved ones from illness and injury - yet managed to overcome almost every challenge.

The book is organized into broad categories of experience, and uses the womens' own words from letters and diaries to tell their stories. There are lots of thumbnail illustrations of shipboard life, too. All in all this is a fascinating peek at Victorian conventionality and how far women could go in stretching it while remaining firmly trussed within its bounds.

"Hen Frigates" is such a specific book, one can hardly imagine the time and research it must have taken to pull it all together. Ms. Druett has compiled list after list, diary excerpt after diary excerpt etc. to transport us into days past. Even though the time periods vary with the womens accounts, the stories all seem to ring the same. Each wife suffered through the same torments of life on the sea, but also in time relished with her husband. This is an interesting fact as husbands could sometimes be away for three years at a time with ittle or no contact home. By allowing the wives to share in the shipping/whaling experience, their marriage became all the stronger, or all the weaker in some cases. It is so easy for we in the 21st century to take advantage of all the amenities we use in everyday life, but the brave women portrayed lived as the sailors lived...sparsely. Raising children is difficult enough on land, but to do it on a ship sailing the seven seas, must have proved to be near impossible at times. All in all, a very interesting book on a forgotten subject.

This is an outstanding non-fiction book so alive with detailed stories about women aboard ships that it reads like a novel. It discloses not only women's stories about long journeys, shipwrecks, and daily experiences on board, but how women served as navigators across seas around the world. A splendid source on 19th century sailing.

"Hen Frigates" is such a specific book, one can hardly imagine the time and research it must have taken to pull it all together. Ms. Druett has compiled list after list, diary excerpt after diary excerpt etc. to transport us into days past. Even though the time periods vary with the womens accounts, the stories all seem to ring the same. Each wife suffered through the same torments of life on the sea, but also in time relished with her husband. This is an interesting fact as husbands could sometimes be away for three years at a time with ittle or no contact home. By allowing the wives to share in the shipping/whaling experience, their marriage became all the stronger, or all the weaker in some cases. It is so easy for we in the 21st century to take advantage of all the amenities we use in everyday life, but the brave women portrayed lived as the sailors lived...sparsely. Raising children is difficult enough on land, but to do it on a ship sailing the seven seas, must have proved to be near impossible at times. All in all, a very interesting book on a forgotten subject.

I began writing my novel, "The Sea Captain's Wife", The Sea Captain's Wife: A Novel www.seacaptainswife.ca, before I discovered Joan Druett. I am in awe of her meticulous research. What a treasure it was for me as an author! I learned more details than I could possibly use in my novel: how to hide "grandy rags" when hanging up the laundry, how the captain's wife stood in relation to the ship's cook, how to give a large captain husband an enema, what games children played. Joan Druett is amazing. I am so grateful to her for the dedication and passion she has given to this little-known subject.

Ever since making the acquaintance of Mrs Croft in "Persuasion", I've been intrigued by the idea of a woman living in such a thoroughly male environment as a naval ship, at a time when the spheres of men and women were far more strictly defined than today. So I was drawn to this account of captains' wives on sailing ships in the 19th century. It covers a period a little later than Mrs Croft's, and these were commercial vessels rather than naval, but conditions must have been similar in many ways.

"Hen Frigates" gives us glimpses from the lives of many such women, gleaned from journal entries and letters, and occasionally from newspaper accounts. There's excitement, boredom, irritation, sorrow, laughter and joy. Storms at sea; tedious becalmings; even getting caught up in battle. It could be a lonely life as the only woman on board, but there's little sense of self-pity in these accounts.

One example to give a small taste of these tales: Emma Browne took herself off to England in 1876, hoping that James Cawse, with whom she'd corresponded for the previous two years, would marry her when she arrived. Fortunately for her he did! A few weeks later they sailed off together, and by the time she returned to England she had a baby daughter - delivered at sea by her husband. Having the husband deliver the baby, unless the ship happened to be in port at the right time, was quite a typical experience, it seems. Many children were then raised on board, although parents tended to prefer to send their girls back to relatives when they reached their teen years.

The accounts are fascinating, though I did feel there might have been almost an overabundance of women represented (and even these are a subset of the comprehensive list the author provides in her references). After a time I started to feel I knew some of them specially well, and enjoyed their stories all the more for that. I wondered if the tales might have been even more effective if just a few women had been concentrated on, giving us more of a narrative structure of those particular lives.

Although I certainly wouldn't want to miss out on such exciting tales as that of sixteen-year-old "Miss Arnold", the daughter of the ship "Rainbow"'s captain. Her father died, the first mate was a drunkard, and the second mate was "a cad". She "repelled... his dastardly attempts" [from the newspaper account], and threw herself on the protection of the crew, who acted like true British gentleman. It's a wonderfully melodramatic tale, with the virtue of being true, it seems.

I'm left with huge admiration for these women who went against the norm, for their own various and varied reasons. The opening quote is from one of the book's main "characters", Mary Rowland:

"As Henry [her husband] says, we have only one life to live, and he cannot be at home, and it is very hard for us to be separated so much".

She wrote that in 1873, 21 years after marrying Henry, and three years before he died. They had spent all those years together at sea, enduring difficulties but with the comfort of each other's company. I think Sophy Croft might have said something similar.