Captain's Wife

By Abby Jane Morrell

“Gives the reader a woman’s perspective on life at sea aboard a schooner when conditions under sail were uncomfortable and, at times, dangerous.” —The Northern Mariner
 
During the nineteenth century it became increasingly common for merchant service masters to take their wives to sea, particularly in the whaling industry, where voyages of 2–3 years were not uncommon. Reflecting the sailors traditional dislike of women on board—seen as unlucky by the superstitious and disruptive by the more rational—these ships were derisively dubbed Hen Frigates and although they have been the fashionable subject of academic interest in recent years, there is not much literature by the women themselves. Among the first, and most accomplished, is Abby Jane Morrell’s account of a voyage between 1829 and 1831 that took her from New England to the South Pacific. Her husband Benjamin was in the sealing trade but was a keen explorer, and his adventurous spirit led him and his wife into situations normally well outside the world of the Hen Frigate.
 
Curiously, Benjamin also wrote an account of this voyage, but since he was described by a contemporary as the greatest liar in the Pacific, his wife’s is a better record of what actually happened, even when dealing with dramatic incidents like the murderous attack by cannibal islanders. Apart from the descriptions of exotic places, much of the interest in this book is the traditional, centuries-old world of the sailor as seen through the eyes of a thoughtful and well-educated woman. As such it heads a long line of improving books aimed at ameliorating the seaman’s lot.
 
“A book that absorbs and rewards the reader. Highly recommended.” —Firetrench

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9781783468768

Book preview

Introduction

‘I have a horror of death; the dead are soon forgotten. But when I die they’ll have to remember me.’¹

DURING THE NINETEENTH century it became increasingly common for merchant service masters to take their wives to sea, particularly in the whaling industry, where voyages of two or three years were not uncommon. Reflecting the sailor’s traditional dislike of women on board – seen as unlucky by the superstitious and disruptive by the more rational – these ships were derisively dubbed ‘Hen Frigates’; although they have been the fashionable subject of academic interest in recent years, there is not much published literature by the women themselves, and the wealth of journals are little known and not easily accessible. Among the first, and most accomplished, is Abby Morrell’s account of a voyage between 1829 and 1831 that took her from New England to the South Pacific. Her husband Benjamin was in the sealing trade but was a keen explorer, and his adventurous spirit led him – and his wife – into situations normally well outside the world of the Hen Frigate.

Curiously, Benjamin also wrote an account of this voyage, but since he was described by a contemporary as ‘the greatest liar in the Pacific’, his wife’s may be a better record of what actually happened, even when dealing with such dramatic incidents as a murderous attack by cannibal islanders. Her account certainly enjoyed larger sales. Apart from the descriptions of exotic places, much of the interest in this book is the traditional, centuries-old world of the sailor as seen through the eyes of a thoughtful and well-educated woman. As such it heads a long line of ‘improving’ books aimed at ameliorating the seaman’s lot.

Born in New York in 1809, the newly wed Abby Morrell insisted on accompanying her husband on a sealing voyage that was to last three years; her brother also went along on this voyage. However, after giving birth to a second son following their return in 1831, Abby remained at home. As a further example of wifely sacrifice, she withheld the publication of her own book until after her husband’s was released.

This volume of Seafarers’ Voices seems to be unique in three ways. It is the first American account (perhaps the first ever) of a deep-sea voyage left to us by the wife of a merchant captain, who accompanied her husband on the voyage in question. Further, it is possibly the only account where both the husband and the wife have left complementary versions of the same trip, providing a unique insight into a husband and wife team working together – and what each considered important, or came to consider important, on the voyage. Finally, many years before Samuel Plimsoll (1834-1898), the ‘seaman’s friend’, made his pleas for the amelioration of the lot of the common sailor in books such as Our Seamen (1873), Abby Morrell makes impassioned but reasoned arguments for better conditions and educational opportunities to be made available to the men before the mast, a call that has still not even today been addressed by many of the world’s biggest shipping lines, concerns, and consortiums.

Abby Morrell was born Abby Jane Wood in 1809, the daughter of Captain John Wood, who died at New Orleans in 1811 while master of the ship Indian Hunter, a man, we are told, who was judged by his contemporaries as being of ‘great integrity’. On his death, Abby Wood Morrell’s mother placed their property in the hands of a person who ‘by intention or mismanagement lost – or retained – the whole of it’. Matters were rescued when her mother was consoled both by religion and by remarriage, in 1814, to a Mr Burritt Keeler. This stepfather Abby Morrell came to love and feel for ‘as much as if he were naturally responsible for my existence and care’. She adds that she had a ‘plain and regular education’; and that one of her greatest enjoyments was attending St Paul’s Trinity Church, New York.

Early in the year 1824, when she was fifteen, her cousin, Captain Benjamin Morrell (1795-1831), whom she had not seen since she was five, returned from one of his Pacific voyages, travels that had rendered him both famous and infamous, the latter stemming from his remarks and writings concerning the topography of the Southern Ocean and its land masses, and how far south he had managed to penetrate, what he found there, and how long it took to make these discoveries. Although these observations gained him the title of ‘the liar of the Pacific’, and he has further been accused of plagiarising the accounts of others, some historians have been more supportive, asserting that his tendency to boastfulness should not diminish his genuine achievements.²

Abby Wood married Benjamin Morrell on 29 June 1824. Morrell had been married before; his first wife and their two children had died between 1822 and 1824 whilst he was at sea. A short time after this second marriage, according to Abby’s account, Benjamin Morrell informed his wife that he would be leaving on a voyage expected to last about two years, and three weeks later he did so.

Morrell returned on 9 May 1826, two months short of two years, before making a number of short European voyages, during which time a son had been born to the couple. Then in June 1828 Morrell sailed again for the South Seas, this time the separation being eleven months. On his return, his wife determined ‘that if he ever went to sea again, I would accompany him.’ On hearing new plans for another trading voyage to the Pacific, she now ventured ‘to mention my accompanying him.’ At first he apparently would not hear of it; but ‘when I insisted (as far as affectionate obedience could insist) he at last reluctantly yielded and put the best side outwards.’

Although ‘voyaging under these circumstances [might] seem a most remarkable challenge’, as Joan Druett points out in her history of those wives of merchant captains who went to sea, Abby Morrell was only one amongst ‘a great multitude of women who took up the same strange existence in the blue-water trade’, yet astonishingly most of them were, like Abby, ‘ordinary, conservative, middle-class women’, and ‘not rebels or adventurers’³, even if their husbands could be described as such.

On 2 September 1829, Captain and Mrs Morrell, with twenty-three sailors (one of whom was Mrs Morrell’s brother) embarked on the schooner Antarctic for the South Pacific, via the Cape of Good Hope. Once there, their aim was to try for a cargo of seal, bêche-de-mer (sea cucumbers), and whatever else might be available to render a profitable voyage.

Once out of sight of New York, it seemed at first that the voyage had been a mistake: Mrs Morrell became anxious for the welfare of her young son who had been left with her mother, and she immediately fell prey to seasickness, telling us that while the Stoics could sustain having their flesh torn by red-hot pincers, ‘even the most famed of that sect would look a little pale in a fit of seasickness.’⁴ However, Abby Morrell eventually gained her sea legs, and perhaps also became reconciled to her absence from her son, as the account only mentions him again briefly before they are reunited at the end of the voyage.

The ship eventually made Boa Vista, Cape Verde Isles, where Mrs Morrell was relieved once more to see people, having had only the Antarctic’s sailors for company for ‘the last thirty-three days. Days, in retrospect, that appeared to me nearly as long as my life had been.’ The only woman on the ship, and with no specified role on board, time must have hung heavy on her hands on many occasions. But once on board – what was her purpose? She could not navigate; the work of the ship was complex and extremely professional, and needed a great deal of physical stamina – stamina built up over years of unceasing labour. As Druett points out, this difficulty was not particular to Abby Morrell; women at this time ‘were expected to be busy and productive’ but at sea ‘her only real job was to keep the captain company and look after his children, oversee the steward’s work in the pantry, entertain the passengers if there were any, and otherwise sit with folded hands.’⁵ She would be reduced to being an observer and now, at the Cape Verde Isles, probably realised this. Her account of the voyage is based on the journal she kept on board; this presumably is the thorough account that it is because of the hours she had to spend on writing it. As she tells us, ‘passengers surely have leisure when officers have no spare time, the inspiration coming, generally, from the pure air, which after all may be the best inspiring agent in nature’. Perhaps also the long days which needed to be filled, particularly when the ship was becalmed, also inspired her comments on the importance of a copious and well-stocked library on board, for ‘in such a situation the nights are restless, the days endless. All that memory can furnish, books can supply, or conversation can offer, is nothing.’

Mrs Morrell probably saw herself, even this early in the voyage, as being there as a commentator on what was to be found ashore in the various ports they would visit. Her account is wide-ranging, with descriptions of ocean and bird life, the geography and history of the places to which they voyaged, not to mention the strange and foreign peoples whom they encountered – her memoir takes the reader right back to the early nineteenth century world of the southern oceans, a world of explorers and missionaries, of ‘cannibals’ and ‘savages’. Although some of her views make uncomfortable reading nowadays, as in her dismissal of ‘Hottentots’ as ‘abject wretches’, and her prejudices are typical of her time, she also demonstrates a humanity and desire for amelioration in the condition of the sailors with whom she travelled, and for the education of the peoples with whom she came into contact.

We hear about maritime customs and superstitions: as the Antarctic reaches the equator she tells us about the ‘crossing the line’ ceremony, where ‘Neptune’ boards the ship, an event which she describes with amused tolerance; she also presents us with the moving spectacle of burial at sea. Other more irrational superstitions such as the legend of the Flying Dutchman she dissects with scientific precision, keen to detail rational explanations for such phenomena.

That this voyage was full of potential danger and one from which a number of sailors did not return alive is made clear, although Abby Morrell’s matter-of-fact narrative tone does not sensationalise or exaggerate the perils. She was taken ill with an ‘intermittent fever’, which then spread to many of the crew, until ‘in five or six days, one half were prostrate’, and her husband was left trying to run the ship short-handed, not sleeping ‘two hours out of twenty-four.’ After two crew members died, Mrs Morrell began to think this would be her own fate, feeling horror at the thought that she herself might suffer the fate of being consigned to the waters of the oceans for an eternity.

Benjamin Morrell has left a graphic account of the state of his wife’s mind at this time, perhaps worth quoting at length as it provides an insight into their relationship and the way they responded to each other, as well as illuminating the differences between her and her husband’s style as a journal writer:

Nov 9th – On Monday, 9 November, I was happy to perceive that the fever had left Mr Scott and two of the seamen, affording reasonable hopes of their ultimate recovery. The rest still remaining in a critical, if not hopeless, situation… . My wife sent for and told me that she would no longer conceal from me the fact that her hours were numbered … feeling she could not survive another day. She therefore … charged me with some messages for her mother, father, brothers, sisters, and our dear little boy – soon to be a motherless orphan. She wished me to cut off some of her hair, and give each of them a lock; with an injunction to preserve it for the sake of one who had loved them, and prayed for their happiness day and night.

‘Tell my dear mother not to weep for me,’ said she; ‘for I shall die happy, and expect to meet her in heaven. Tell my brothers and sisters to be kind to their mother, and to be kind to our dear little boy, and early initiate him in the path of virtue, which alone leads to happiness. I need not ask you, Benjamin, to be kind to your son, the pledge of our mutual loves; but I pray you to be so to my afflicted mother, and all the family. Do not fail to bring up our dear boy in the fear of the Lord. Have a locket made of my hair, and tell little William that he must always wear it about his neck; that when he looks at it, he may be reminded that he once had a fond and doting mother, who blessed him with her dying breath; and teach him to pray that he may meet her in heaven.’ After a little pause, she continued: ‘There is only one thing, Benjamin, that makes me feel unpleasant; and that