Saturday Book Discussion

Summer, 1856. Nineteen-year-old Mary Ann Patten and her husband, Joshua, were young and ambitious. Both from New England seafaring families, they had already completed their first clipper ship voyage around the world with Joshua as captain.

If they could win the race to San Francisco that year and complete one more circumnavigation, their dream of building a farm and a family might be within reach. It would mean freedom. And the price of that freedom was one last dangerous transit -- into the most perilous waters in the world. As their ship, Neptune's Car, left New York Harbor and sailed down the jagged coast of South America, Joshua fell deathly ill and was confined to his bunk, delirious.

The treacherous first mate, confined to the brig for insubordination, was agitating for mutiny. The second mate could not read -- and so, could not navigate.

With no obvious option for a new captain and heartbroken about her husband, Mary Ann stepped into the breach and convinced the crew to support her, just as they slammed into a gale that would last eighteen days. Determined to save the ship, the crew, and their future, she faced down the deadly waters of Drake's Passage and earned the admiration of a grizzled band of seamen with her indomitable spirit and raw courage.

Set against the backdrop of the California Gold Rush and taking us to the brink of Antarctica, The Sea Captain's Wife finally gives Mary Ann Patten - the first woman to command a merchant vessel as captain - her due. Mazzeo draws on new archival research from nineteenth-century women's maritime journals and on her own expedition to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica in search of Mary Ann's route.

Thrilling, harrowing, and heroic, The Sea Captain's Wife is the story of one woman who, for love, would do what was necessary to survive. Copies of The Sea Captain's Wife - A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World, by Tilar J. Mazzeo, will be available at the Richmond Heights Branch Reference Desk.