The Sea Captain's Wife

In the mid-19th century, coastal Maine was a center of international maritime culture. The village of Searsport alone produced 300 sea captains from a population of 2,500. Historian Tilar J. Mazzeo reconstructs the true story of Mary Ann Patten, a teenage captain's wife who took command of the clipper ship Neptune's Car during a violent storm near Cape Horn in 1856, becoming the first woman ever acclaimed captain of a merchant clipper.

Joshua Adams Patten was born in 1827 into a family rooted along Maine's Penobscot Bay. His mother, Mary Sarah Peabody, came from a wealthy family that for generations had tried to reclaim the Muscle Ridge Islands, an archipelago at the mouth of the Weskeag River. When Joshua's father, Abel Patten, went broke in the Panic of 1837, he tried to sell Mary Sarah's inherited lands despite never having visited them. She died in 1844, and Joshua, 16 and already at sea, later bought land on the Weskeag as a living connection to her legacy.

Mary Ann Brown, born in 1837, grew up in a poor immigrant family in Boston's North End, then a rough maritime district. Her mother enrolled the children in the Sunday School at the Old North Church, the nation's first such school, where working-class children learned reading, writing, and arithmetic. Mary Ann's literacy and mathematical skill would later prove essential.

Joshua and Mary Ann married on April 1, 1853, when he was nearly 26 and she was not yet 16. In 1854, Joshua commanded the clipper Flying Scud across the Atlantic, outsailing the legendary Captain Samuel Samuels in an impromptu race. He also sent his logbook to Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury, a naval officer whose revolutionary ocean-current charts allowed ships to shorten their voyages, and received pilot charts for Cape Horn in return.

The couple then accepted a contract from the firm Foster & Nickerson to sail Neptune's Car on a circumnavigation to San Francisco, China, and London. They calculated that a few successful voyages could earn them roughly $100,000 (about $3.5 million in modern values), enough to retire and build a home in Maine. Their one condition was that Mary Ann would sail with Joshua.

Neptune's Car departed New York in January 1855. Mary Ann endured isolation as the only woman aboard but taught herself celestial navigation using the sextant, the nautical almanac, and Maury's charts. They completed the circumnavigation in 15 months, returning to New York by April 1856. Mary Ann was now nearly as skilled a navigator as Joshua.

Foster & Nickerson offered a second contract: a five-way clipper race to San Francisco with $350,000 worth of cargo, departing in late June 1856, which meant transiting Cape Horn in the dangerous Southern Hemisphere winter. On June 29, the trusted first mate broke his leg. Shipowner Abel Foster refused Joshua's request to delay and hastily hired William Keeler, a 20-year-old hothead from Philadelphia who was unemployed for good reason.

Within a week, the second mate, William Hare, reported finding Keeler asleep on watch. Keeler grew increasingly defiant, deliberately slowing the ship and falsifying the logbook. Mary Ann watched with alarm while also observing Joshua's worsening headaches, fevers, and persistent cough, which she suspected was tuberculosis. She also realized she was pregnant.

When Joshua caught Keeler sleeping on watch a second time, he sacked him, ordered him to the brig in leg irons, and promoted the loyal but illiterate Hare to first mate. Joshua now had to stand double watches, with Mary Ann filling in with sextant readings and logbook entries. On August 24, they hit a ferocious polar storm south of Buenos Aires. After eight days fighting the tempest, Joshua collapsed unconscious.

Mary Ann took command. She consulted Maury's sailing directions and plotted a heading across Drake's Passage, the notoriously dangerous strait between South America and Antarctica. She asked Hare to direct the crew while she navigated. Belowdecks, the shackled Keeler stirred up the crew, insisting command belonged to him.

On September 5, Mary Ann ordered all hands on deck. With Joshua's loaded pistol hidden beneath her oilskin jacket, she recounted Keeler's failings, refused to reinstate him, and appealed to the men to accept her command. The crew responded with spontaneous applause and cries of "Captain Patten." She was 19 and pregnant.

The storm intensified into one of the worst off Cape Horn in years, with winds reaching 60 knots and rigging turning to ice. When the gale overwhelmed them, Mary Ann let the storm expel the ship southeast toward Antarctica. The tactic worked but carried them into ice fields near the South Shetland Islands. For three harrowing days they crept through fog and towering icebergs until they reached open water. By September 18, they had rounded Cape Horn.

Joshua's fever broke, and he resumed nominal command. He reluctantly reinstated the contrite Keeler, but within a week Mary Ann caught Keeler steering off course toward Valparaíso, Chile, to escape maritime justice. Keeler was returned to leg irons permanently. On October 20, Joshua collapsed again, losing his sight. The crew turned to Mary Ann. She brought Neptune's Car through the Golden Gate on November 15, 1856. Four seamen carried an unconscious Joshua down the gangway while Mary Ann, visibly pregnant, followed.

Dr. Harris, a fellow Mason, examined Joshua and diagnosed meningitis caused by advanced tuberculosis; his blindness was permanent. Mary Ann needed to get Joshua to Boston, but their finances were tied up with Foster & Nickerson. They traveled by steamer and rail across Panama, during which Mary Ann contracted malaria. They arrived in New York on February 14, 1857. Mary Ann's brother, George Brown Jr., met them with the news that their father had died of tuberculosis.

The New York Times called Mary Ann "a mighty pretty woman and a heroine" (203). The public was outraged that Foster & Nickerson had withheld the couple's wages and capital. The New York Board of Underwriters awarded her $1,000, and donations arrived from across America and Europe. On March 10, she gave birth to a son, Joshua Adams Patten Jr. The orator Edward Everett compared her to Florence Nightingale and George Washington, and women's suffrage advocates seized on her story as evidence of what women could accomplish.

Joshua's condition worsened through the spring. On July 20, 1857, he died at age 30. Ships' bells across Boston Harbor rang out Eight Bells, the ceremony marking the end of a mariner's watch. He died without a will. On September 12, the steamer Central America sank in a hurricane with $2 million in California gold, triggering the Panic of 1857. Foster & Nickerson collapsed, destroying all of the Pattens' invested capital.

Mary Ann, who had contracted tuberculosis while nursing Joshua, died on March 18, 1861, at age 23. Their son, Joshua Jr., was raised by his grandmother Elizabeth Brown. He had seizures, likely related to Mary Ann's malaria during pregnancy, that left him unable to find steady work. After his grandmother's death, he sold his parents' Maine properties for almost nothing and was eventually placed at the Rockland Poor Farm. On September 10, 1900, he had a seizure near a millpond, fell into the water, and drowned.

In an epilogue, Mazzeo reveals her own family's roots along Penobscot Bay and argues that the fragmentary record of ordinary lives should not prevent us from recovering their stories. The book closes with the epitaph on Mary Ann and Joshua's grave: "Are there seas in heaven, Joshua? / And is there such a vessel as our Neptune's Car? / If there is, wait for me, and we shall explore / the vast and boundless reaches of Eternity" (244).