Quite a Curiosity: The Sea Letters of Grace F Ladd

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

For approximately 30 years, Grace Ladd (1864–1943) of Yarmouth, Nova
Scotia, lived aboard a “tall ship” (a wind-powered cargo vessel) and
wrote about it in letters home to her father. Fourteen years’ worth of
those letters (1886–1900) constitute the core of this book. The
letters are supplemented by passages from her husband’s logbook and
her daughter’s journal.

Grace lived onboard for trips that criss-crossed the oceans, sailing
“over the wash of water,” carrying cargo to and from points as
far-flung as Norway, New York, Uruguay, Shanghai, Nagasaki, Hong Kong,
and Singapore. While her husband, the captain, struggled to navigate
through weather that included storms, tropical calms, headwinds, and
icebergs, Grace coped with domestic life onboard, including raising and
educating two children at sea. Her letters touch on the nature of
Christmas celebrations at sea, encounters with Natives, chickens and
pigs kept onboard for food, laundry, rats, accidents (including sailors
swept overboard), and communications from home and with other ships.

A portrait of a remarkable Victorian woman and her family emerges from
the letters and journals. As a first-hand account of a way of life
unimaginable today, the work is outstanding.

A glossary, extensive endnotes, and a bibliography facilitate
comprehension and add to the value of the work as a research document.