I grew up in Long Beach, California and have always gravitated to port towns and saltwater. I had a summer job as a student working on the famous Hurtigruten cargo ship and traveled up and down the Norwegian coast as a dishwasher. Since then I’ve kayaked, sailed, and wandered the shores of many countries, including the Pacific Northwest, where I live now. Being Irish and Swedish myself, I wanted to make women’s history as seafarers in the cold waters of the North better known. I had a great time researching this travel book about little-known places and women skippers, fishers, and sea goddesses.
It’s not just that Ann Davison crossed the rough Atlantic alone in her twenty-three-foot yacht, the Felicity Ann, it’s that this solo crossing, in stages, took place in 1952-3. Ann Davison, middle-aged and widowed, took her heart in her hands and set off from Plymouth, England, to find “the key to living.” The boat was sturdy but the ocean was big, and it was winter. A lot of the logbook reads “Wretched night” or “Squalls” or “Incessant scream of the wind,” but you know she’s going to get through it. In its humorous, modest, courageous way, this book continues to be my favorite seafaring story. Even though I would never ever try the same thing.
Tania Aebi was eighteen when she set sail on an around-the-world voyage in her twenty-six-foot sloop, Varuna. It took her two and a half years to complete the 27,000 mile voyage, but she returned to New York in 1987, becoming the youngest person and the first American woman to make a solo circumnavigation. She hit a tanker at one point. She found herself in a lightning storm. One of the things that most stays with me, though, is that she brought her cat, Tarzoon, with her. Aebi was even less prepared than Ann Davison for the challenge of the sea. She was a high school dropout and knew relatively little about navigation. The sea calls to misfits and makes women out of aimless, surly teenagers. It’s a grand adventure story.
In 1985 Tania Aebi was an 18-year-old working as a bike messenger in New York City and frequenting bars until late at night. It was then that her father offered her a college education, or a boat. However, if she chose the boat, she would have to sail around the world alone. This volume tells of her 27,000 mile voyage. When she left New York harbour in 1985, she had never sailed alone before and knew little about navigation or anchorage. What began as a quest for adventure became a spiritual test, and fight for survival.
I picked up this book in a London bookshop long ago and read it on a stay near Land’s End in Cornwall, looking out to sea and dreaming. Just about everything in the book was new to me. It made sense that among the Viking warriors who attacked in their longboats, there were women like the pirate Alfhild, but I’d never heard of Grace O’Malley of Ireland who regularly raided English ships. I was ignorant of the pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, scourges of the Caribbean, or of the Chinese pirate Cheng I Sao. Stanley’s book, with contributions by three other historians, was eye-opening, fun, and decidedly feminist. After I’d read it, I definitely wanted to jump into a ship and wave my cutlass around.
As far back as 480 BC, when Artemisia commanded her Greek trireme, women have taken to the high seas in pursuit of life and liberty. Simultaneously revered and reviled by superstitious male mariners, the realities of these women pirates' lives have been lost in a murky fog of sexual and racial preconceptions. Bold in her Breeches takes a wholly fresh look at these mythical figures and places them in their true historical and cultural contexts. From Artemisia to the contemporary women pirates of today, via eighteenth-century Grace O'Malley and nineteenth-century Cheng I Sao, we learn why women took to piracy,…
If you want a thorough grounding (watering?) in women’s maritime history, this is the book for you. New Zealander Joan Druett tells amazing tales of women at sea from Ancient Greece to contemporary times. Her chapters are packed with all the information you could wish about warriors, pirates, crossdressing sailors, and wives who sailed with their captain husbands. Druett’s scope is wide, given that many people who traveled in the past traveled by sea—but that makes it possible to discuss more sorts of gender and racial issues, such as colonization and the British empire. Substantial and engaging, it’s the gold standard, and who can resist a book with “hellions” in the title?
In an innovative look at maritime history from the female perspective, Joan Druett introduces a remarkable array of characters and re-creates their adventures with a captivating immediacy and wit. There are 'pirate queens' armed with cutlasses and pistols who strike fear into the hearts of sailors. There are sea-loving women and women eager to be with the men they loved, who dress as men and join unsuspecting crews where they serve with honour and daring. The brave housekeepers and rescue workers are here too - including twenty year old Grace Darling, whose rescue of nine castaways in 1838 inspired a…
Pirates! Historical fiction for young adults and anyone who enjoys a sea story with twists and turns aplenty, this novel begins in Bristol, England in the eighteenth century. Nancy Kingston’s father is a shipowner whose money comes from sugar plantations and enslaved labor in Jamaica. A tragedy makes sixteen-year-old Nancy his heiress; her brothers send her to the West Indies to marry. But life takes a surprising turn; she and the enslaved maid Minerva, escape to become pirates in the Caribbean. If you’re looking for an absorbing, multicultural tale of girls who go in search of adventure and freedom amidst the horrors of plantation life, this is a must-read. According to the author the novel is based on a true story, which makes it even more fascinating.
From the author of the bestselling and award-winning WITCH CHILD, comes another outstanding historical novel.
When two young women meet under extraordinary circumstances in the eighteenth-century West Indies, they are unified in their desire to escape their oppressive lives. The first is a slave, forced to work in a plantation mansion and subjected to terrible cruelty at the hands of the plantation manager. The second is a spirited and rebellious English girl, sent to the West Indies to marry well.
But fate ensures that one night the two young women have to save each other and run away to a…
Barbara Sjoholm explores history and myths about women and the sea while traveling around the North Atlantic, often by ship. From the west coast of Ireland where the Irish chieftain and pirate Grace O’Malley taunted the British in the 16th century to the herring lassies of Orkney to the skippers of Iceland, from mermaids to storm witches to sea goddesses, Sjoholm collects a riveting array of historical personalities and maritime legends. A personal log of travel to Ireland, the Scottish islands, the Faroes, Iceland, and the Norwegian coast, The Pirate Queen is also a book of landscapes and seascapes, and of encounters with women who make their living from the sea now.
On the run from her abusive husband, Kyra Smith hits the road. Destination unknown. With a dog she rescued in tow, she lands in the peaceful California mountain town of Gold Creek and is immediately befriended by an openhearted group of women who call themselves the Tattooed Ladies. They’re there for Kyra—and for each other.
The maternal Frannie is a tattoo artist struggling with a troubled daughter. Suzy is a self-described fashionista grandma bearing a painful estrangement from her son. Then there’s Jo, whose storybook marriage is shadowed by a grim medical diagnosis. And bookstore owner Marisol. She longs for…
A woman escaping a violent past finds new friendships, romance, and tenuous sanctuary in an emotionally gripping novel by New York Times bestselling author Eileen Goudge.
On the run from her abusive husband, Kyra Smith hits the road. Destination unknown. With a neglected dog she rescued in tow, she lands in the peaceful California town of Gold Creek and is immediately befriended by an openhearted group of women called the Tattooed Ladies Club. They're there for Kyra-and for each other.
The maternal Frannie is a tattoo artist struggling with a troubled daughter. Suzy is a self-described fashionista grandma bearing a…
