Review: The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World

The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World by Tilar J. Mazzeo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

3.5 stars

I received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review 

She is the captain’s wife and just nineteen: Mary Ann. 

The Sea Captain's Wife was an account of how Mary Ann Patten became the first recorded woman captain of a merchant ship. Footnotes abounding, the author clearly did through research, which some readers will appreciate and others might find their eyes glazing over at times as I felt some tangents tied-in and others a little spun-off. While we start off at the moment Mary Ann's husband, Joshua, collapses from illness on their sea voyage and she's about to have to take over, the story quickly goes back to give historical context to how these two have ended up where they are. 

We are on a dangerous journey. A journey in which wealthy shipowners pit young men against each other with the promise of riches, urging them on to reckless dangers, in the name of another man’s lucre. The year is 1856. 

The beginning delves into Mary Ann and Joshua's family trees, you'll get a lot of geographical, economical, and genealogy background to help give a good idea who these two might be and why they made the decisions they did. As Mary Ann and Joshua had ties in Maine and lived in Boston, the Old North Church and other landmarks make numerous appearances, helping to set the reader in the time and place. There's also delving into the US's economical context at the time, highlighting how important shipping was, discussion on how Matthew Maury changed the game, and the way the business was set-up, with backers, companies, and so forth, and how important having good captains were. The describing captains as the “rock stars and professional athletes” of the time, along with salaries put into today's context, along with going through a ship crew's hierarchy and politics helped to lay-out the atmosphere for when the story gets to the moment readers are probably looking for, when Mary Ann becomes captain. 

Never before had any woman been acclaimed captain of a merchant clipper. 

Around the halfway mark is when all the lead up pays off and we get Joshua becoming too ill and Mary Ann having to navigate Drake's Passage and fend off a mutiny from a disgruntled crew member. I was a little disappointed with what I was, mostly, reading the book for was such a little part of the overall story. Her time in charge was, factually a short time in her overall life story, but I felt somewhat bereft as that was what I went into this for. The journey she faced after, getting back to Boston, caring for Joshua, having a baby, and trying to secure enough funds to live on, all while having her legend grow through newspapers, was engrossing in a sedate way and sad in how the lack of medical advances at the time had her story ending far too soon. 

For nonfiction, this had a fair amount of conjecture in it, which is explained/discussed in the author's notes in the end; how documents/records weren't kept for middle-class, everyday people. I agree that these people's stories should still be told but when emotions and thoughts are more readily inferred, I get a little uneasy. This was a good read for looking at a moment in time where sea faring could make or break individuals and the US, you'll get a good look at two American families who Mary Ann and Joshua tied together and how Mary Ann gained the knowledge to be able to captain the clipper Neptune's Car and become the first recorded woman merchant captain.

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