well men to one such atoll, Polly Gardiner fell overboard and nearl y drowned, before being rescued by Carpenter Latimer himself. Even more exotic threats to life and health lay in wait on the crui sing grounds, lurking in a litany of uncharted reefs, vicious typhoons, and savage islanders. On rounding the Cape of Good Hope in January 1850, Captain Gray of the Hannibal promptly gave the order to get up the guns, scour and clean them, and mount a cannon on wheels. Whaling itself was brutally dangerous. When Gray " lowered once alone, and was soon lost to sight in a dense fog," it is linle wonder that the steerage boy also recorded that " his wife was alarmed and cried ti 11 he came aboard again." Far from home and the support of friends and relatives, the lot of a seafaring woman whose husband had died of disease or accident was unenviable. Naturally, therefore, Mrs. Gray cried even more on June 8, 1850, when she came on deck and announced to the crew that her husband had taken sick and was dying. The men, by contrast, were delighted , and the instant she had returned below a kind of party broke out. " Mahe the Kanaka danced , threw up hi s hat and kept saying in broken English-goodgood-good," wrote young Nat, "and many others expressed a similar feeling. " The celebration , however, had beg un too soon. The dy ing captain had taken leave of the first mate along with many solemn instructions, and the vessel was running "colors half mast, union down," when Captain Clark of th e H enry Kneeland came on board. Gray immedi ately felt the better for the company, and "at noon when I went aft to dinner he was sitting up in a chair, and called Franklin Brown (one of the owners) all the damn sons of bitches that he could think of, and that was by no means a few ," wrote Nat. " I thought then that the prospect of hi s dying was not so great as some of the crew wished it was," he concluded. And so Captain Solomon Gray survived, and Mrs. Gray trave led a-whaling yet again, on the Montreal in 1853 . Then, in 1864, Captain Gray carried her off on yet another voyage, on th ela mes Maury. This time, he did die. The ship 's log records that on Friday, March 24, 1865, " Light winds and pleasent wether at two PM our Captain expired." Next day, the crew made a cask, filled it with sp irits, and put the captain 's body inside. Two months later the ship was taken by the Confederate raider Shenandoah, SEA HISTORY 74, SUMMER 1995
"Th e Cam ," by Ron Druel/ . At any given moment the tedium of looking f or whales could be enlivened by raising the sail of another whaler.After hailing, the ships hauled aback, and boats were lowered to take visitors from one ship to the other. Women, if possible, were even more enthusiastic about this mid-sea visiting than their menfolk. "We have just finis hed arrangeing the rooms as nearly as possible," wrote Mal vina Marshall to herfamily from the Sea Queen in October 1852 , "taken up our carpet coverings, dusting, wiping the glasses &c &c as we should at home if we were preparing/ or company ."
but Captain Waddell of the cruiser was so touched by Mrs. Gray 's predicament that he did not burn the ship, but bonded the James Maury instead. And it seems only natura l that he should be sympathetic. Not only had Mrs. Gray lost a husband , but she had endured nearly twenty years of a sea-going existence, a most unnatural kind of life for a " true" woman of her era. In the context of the times, this last was probably the most valid reason of all for not going to sea on a whaling voyage. Beginning in the 1820s, while Polly Hubbard Gardiner was cruising the Pacific and Indian Oceans, influential American women like Sarah Josepha Hale (who became the editor of the wi ldly popular Codey' s Lady's Book) were describing a precise set of di stinctions between the two genders. According to Mrs. Hale's stem philosophy, the task of" true" women was to save the morals of the world, for an abyss divided the two sexes. "The want of the world is moral power," she robustly pronounced, and went on to propound such didactic sentiments as, "woman 's divine ly appointed sphere" was to be"God ' sappo intedagent of morality. " This was beca use the male-as typified by the swashbuck ling whaleman of popular legend- was supposed to be proud , swaggeri ng, agg ressive and lusty , tamable onl y by the pure example of the patient, demure, and pious "true" woman , whose right and
proper place was the home. Strange as the philosophy mi ght seem today , the " true woman" became an extremely popul ar concept, because it gave wives, daughters and mothers a holy role, and made them feel important. It also meant, however, that any woman- like Mrs. Gray, for in stance- who abandoned her " true sphere" to go sailing about the wild oceans on a whaleship, became the subject of public disapproval. It would seem logical , then , if only a very small cadre of brave (or foolhardy) women left home, hearth and divinely appointed responsibilities to go and live in the intensely masculine environment of a whaleship. This was not so, however, for despite the dangers, the discomfort, the length of the voyages, and the extremely doubtful quality of the company on board, an increasing tide of American women went a-whaling from the year 1850 on. In December 1850 , the Honolulu newspaper The Friend remarked in tones of wonder that "the wives of some half a dozen of the Capts. accompanied their husbands " to the new ly opened Western Arctic , " with the same willingness that they would have gone to Saratoga or Newport. " Then, in February 1853, the same paper ca lcul ated that "one in six of all whaling captains is accompanied by hi s wife. " Obviously, something--0r someone- had made voyaging a fashionable avocation for the wives of whaling captains, and there is eloquent evidence that the person largely responsible for the growing fad was a remarkable young woman from Stonington, Connecticut. Her name was Mary Louisa Burtch Brewster. Mary sailed on the whaleship Tiger of Stonington in November 1845 , for the very good reason that she was obsessively in love with her husband William and had bitterly resented the fact that in fo ur years of marriage they had been together for just five months. It was not easy for her to go: the first entry in her journal records defiantl y, " In coming my own conscience tells me I was doing right, and what do I care for the opinion of the world .... With much opposition I left my native land ... . Well thank Heaven it is all past, and I am on board of the good ship Tiger and with my dear Husband ." And so she was , for the greater part of the nex t six years, and despite terrible seasick ness whenever the ship rolled and pitched, Mary never regretted her decision to accompany her beloved William. Eventually , more than 400 whaling sisters ado pted the same strange ex21