Flashes of Panic

Hmmm, can I write a post while I wait for this CD to finish?

I recently finished Joan Druett’s Hen Frigates, a book about the wives of merchant sailors in the 19th century who sailed with their husbands. (A “hen frigate” was a jargon term for a ship with the captain’s wife aboard.) I remember this book being on my to-read shelf in Pennsylvania, so I’ve been carrying it around for a while; it’s about time I made it through.

The jacket promised “Passion and Peril,” but I don’t know that we ever really get it. Druett works extensively with primary sources; she read dozens of journals and hundreds of letters written by seafaring women. However, she organizes the book by topic, which means that at best we get snippets of each woman’s tale; I found it nearly impossible to keep track of which women went with which husbands and which ships, since fragments of their stories were distributed among the multiple chapters, and often the same paragraph would reference multiple women.

Of course, the journals probably didn’t provide much in the way of story lines by themselves. But I found that this “survey method” didn’t really get me involved with any of the characters. The look at the past was most interesting, though, and one surprise was the magnitude of Victorian morality’s role in women’s place on shipboard. I didn’t feel like I wasted my time, but I’m not sure I’d go back and re-read it.

Now Playing: Bone Of Song from Hello Starling by Josh Ritter