Stories

There were thousands and thousands of voyages, each with its own story. Adventures and disasters were reported in newspapers, sent home in letters, described in diaries, kept as family lore.

As I researched The Sea Captain’s Wife, I stood on the steps of our 1870’s farmhouse and looked southwards towards the Bay of Fundy. The wind carried a hint of salt, and I thought of the nineteenth-century women whose sons and daughters, husbands and fathers went to sea. They may have stood on these very same steps, their minds carried by the salt wind to the grey, empty waters, and the inconceivable size of the world.

And they waited. Fearing, hoping.

A sampler of typical tales:

- A woman clings to the slippery poop of a half-submerged ship in the icy waters of the North Atlantic, and sings to keep up the courage of the crew.

- Another woman gives birth as a ship is driven upon a reef.

- Pregnant Mrs. MacArthur, of Maitland, Nova Scotia, drifts in a life boat 2619 miles with the captain and two sons, giving birth just as their rescue vessel enters harbour at Guaymas, Mexico.

- A coal-carrying ship catches fire off Cape Horn, and the cook’s wife leaps from the bow into the inky blackness. She lands in a lifeboat, the only woman, and as man after man succombs to starvation, drifts along the barren coast of Patagonia.

- A captain drives his wife to madness by refusing to leave the Arctic until he has caught the requisite number of whales. In later years, he sleeps with a dresser pushed against his door for fear she will kill him with her finely-honed kitchen knives.

- A young wife dies at sea of a tropical disease picked up in the port of Calcutta.

- In the Indian Ocean, a ship piles onto a shoal, and the wreck is evacuated. The captain’s wife takes to a small boat in the teeth of a raging gale, and is picked up days later by a Hong Kong bound barque…

"A wall of grey-black water towered ahead, crested with a white fringe. Traveller, even lying on her lee as she was, rose to meet it. Azuba was pressed against the deck house wall as the bow lifted."

Chapter 6, "Cape Horn Snorter"