If We Are Spared to Each Other: Love and Faith Against the Sea

William G. Godfrey is a professor of history at Mount Allison University
in New Brunswick.

Raymond Simpson captures the love between his maternal grandparents,
Captain John Kendrick Butler and Annie Rogers Butler, as well as the
cruel realities of the seafaring world in the 1860s and 1870s, in a
readable and informative book that draws upon the diary Annie kept when
she sailed aboard the brig Daisy with her beloved John on a honeymoon
voyage, letters her husband wrote to her while on his solitary voyages,
account books, marine records, and various other sources, as well as the
author’s own knowledge of sailing vessels.

Butler’s naval career and his six years of marriage were cut short by
his death at sea in 1876 at the age of 39. Of the seven different ships
he captained between 1865 and 1876, three were lost to storms at sea.
With Methodist resignation, the widowed Annie never remarried. Initially
in Yarmouth and then in Halifax, she opened a nursery school and then
served as matron of the Protestant Orphans’ Home while raising her two
children.

The sometimes coldly statistical picture of the age of sail is given a
vibrant human face in this fascinating and well-documented account.