Sex

At sea, the husbands they had known and loved became either benevolent dictators or tyrants. Wives, like the crew, were entirely under his authority.

Imagine, then, the marriage bed. Alone of any person on board, a woman was privy to the captain’s intimacy. It was the only place where she might exercise her own authority; or share tenderness.

A marriage pamphlet of the time advises:

“Give little, give seldom, and most of all, give grudgingly.”

But another, surprisingly, states:

“It is a false notion, and contrary to nature, that passion in a woman is a derogation to her sex.”

Husbands at sea and women alone on land may have longed for the marriage bed. Captains coming below after a long, cold watch enjoyed the prospect of a warm body in bed. Waiting for her husband, Martha Brown, of Long Island, confided to her diary:

“Night suceeds night, but I am not permitted to clasp the object of my fondest affection.”

Yet in 1912, we hear from Dorothea Balano, of Port Clyde, Maine, words that women of an earlier era may have thought but not dared express:

“Last night I was having a good sleep….when enters my goatish hubby, hell bent on what he calls ‘A connection that will make you happy.’ I told him I was quite content with things as they were and rolled over…If he’d be a bit tender and loving, less abrupt, he might get somewhere. The brute doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell with me so long as he barges in and thinks with his genitals instead of his head…”

Contraception was aided by seasickness, and the fact that many children and babies slept in their mother’s bed. And opportunities for sex were few and far between. Captains went without rest of any sort for up to 80 hours, and some had separate bedrooms due to their erratic schedules.

"Sticky skin. Taste of flesh. The bed shifted in its gimbals. The small square porthole was open, and they could hear voices on shore and the soft plashing of paddles."

Chapter 17, "Safe Anchorage"