Women at Sea in the Age of Sail

Margaret Conrad is Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Studies at
the University of New Brunswick. She is the author of Atlantic Canada: A
Region in the Making, and co-author of Intimate Relations: Family and
Community in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–

In recent years, academic historians have questioned romantic notions
about the “iron men who were believed to have dominated the age of
sail in Atlantic Canada. In their research, scholars have discovered
that life for the average sailor was anything but romantic and that
women and female children also went to sea, sometimes as hired hands but
most often as family members of the captain, who had the privilege of
maintaining domestic life on board ship. This book focuses on the
“rolling, pitching homemaking” that characterized the lives of many
seafaring women from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, an area that
accounted for a significant portion of the world’s sailing ships and
female passengers in the period from 1850 to 1940.

Aimed at the general reader, the book is based on the diaries, letters,
and reminiscences of seafaring women, and chapters are organized around
their individual experiences. An introduction and two chapters
describing “whalers” and “clippers” provide relevant information
on the context of the age of sail. The context of women’s history is
occasionally less sure-footed. For example, the author suggests that
Canadian women legally became persons in the 1880s. While it is true
that the law was changed in the late 19th century to grant married women
certain rights with respect to property and children, their equal
position as “persons” was not decided until 1929. Nevertheless, this
is generally a well-researched book, and the stories of the various
women who experienced seasickness, homesickness, honeymoons, childbirth,
spring housecleaning, spiritual growth, cultural awareness, mutiny,
disaster, and death on board sailing ships make stimulating and often
riveting reading. The author is a good stylist, but so too are the women
whose documentary legacy tells much of the story and testifies to
women’s literacy, their sense of narrative, and no doubt also the
boredom that sometimes characterized their lives at sea.