Silk Sails (2 page)

The problems encountered and conquered in the early maritime region produced hardy, durable, tenacious and feisty women, who have received far less attention in the historical records than they rightly deserve. Most history has been written by men, and, until the recent advent of scholarly research in women's history, men have uniformly neglected to give women their rightful due. Perhaps this neglect was largely unintentional since women were usually little involved in the “big events,” and their essential roles in the background seldom played through into the foreground in obvious ways. The irony is that the public man so prominently depicted in history is often largely the result of being protected and sheltered from inner concerns while being championed and fitted for public affairs
by women
(mothers). Mothers tend to protect their sons from the inner struggles; daughters are expected and conditioned by mothers to endure the same stress that the
mother has endured and to carry the same weight and the same burdens. Daughters are trained for the harder, tougher mental and emotional tasks. John Langdon-Davies suggested in 1927 in the book
A Short History of Women
that women possess “a greater singleness of purpose and a greater fund of imagination” than men, and in this dual possession is their unique strength. While women shamelessly mother their sons into privileged softies, they mother their daughters into enduring, strong women, modeled after themselves.

Because of the lack, even non-existence, of a large body of documentation supplementary to the ship registers for Newfoundland and the Maritime provinces, it is difficult to substantiate women's roles in early fishing economies. Court records, plantation books, occasional references in the literature, and oral sources all help towards this end. I used all these sources extensively in my research, which set out to show that: i) women were involved in a substantial way in the early economy and society of Newfoundland and that they were owners of boats, ships and waterfront properties associated with the fishery; ii) it was real ownership involving real money; iii) although it was real ownership, society has collectively forgotten that there was a time in maritime history when women's substantial roles were being played out; iv) ownership was a natural activity and evolved out of necessity and opportunity; v) women possessed the requisite skills to be real partners in business ventures; and vi) older women modeled shipowning and property ownership for younger women.

The women growing up along the Atlantic coast were durable women fitted to carry the world on their shoulders – forget about Atlas! They accomplished extraordinary things such as running businesses and owning their own ships in a period when, according to the accepted storyline, women were thought to have been “barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.” The documentation presented in
Silk Sails
demonstrates conclusively that discarding the near-myth of the passive woman in early society is long overdue.

It is a serious error to think of the sea as the exclusive domain of men. Indeed, men and women have shared work on the sea for many generations and in some most unusual partnerships.

From earliest times, women have functioned on the sea as pirates, warriors, traders, whalers, workers, travelers, navigators, captains, and as working and supportive wives. They have even functioned at the edge of the sea as “fish-makers” and shipbuilders.

Why are we surprised by this? Both because there has been a concerted effort to write history from a man's point of view and a tendency to ignore women's involvement, as if women were invisible or unworthy of mention, and because the writing of women's history in a structured form is a relatively recent phenomenon. Attempts to depict the sea as belonging to men and the shore as belonging to women, and to depict the sailor and seaman as hard, tough and anti-domestic, appear to be myths perpetrated by shipowners and investors. It may well have served an exploitative purpose such as bolstering the mystique that helped attract the very best men to a kind of exclusive club and a select inner circle.

The averred connection between women, ships and bad luck seems also to have been a fiction promoted by shipowners who wanted more consistent hard work from their male crews,
without the added distraction of having women on board. The presence of women might have obliged men to act more decently and with less cruelty and would have required a curb on their infamous shipboard profanity. How the fiction of bad luck arose is uncertain. It seems not to have originated with sailors of European or American descent. Mary Chipman Lawrence, who sailed with her husband Samuel on board the whaler
Addison
from 1856 to 1860, wrote in her journal about the natives of the Marquesas Islands: “The women are not allowed to go in a canoe; it is ‘taboo' to them. If they wish to go to another bay, they are compelled to go over rocks and ridges while their husbands go in a canoe. They may go in a whaleboat, however, when opportunity offers.” This may have been an interpretation on Mary Lawrence's part, or the taboo may have been only occasional and associated perhaps with a woman's menstrual period. Apart from such rare instances we may assume that women were associated with the sea in the same natural relationship as men. Only their physical differences would have affected some of the roles they played.

There was a recognition in ancient Greece of a woman's right to own a ship, but when she wished to sell or dispose of it she was required to request a man's help if not also his permission. This requirement would likely have applied to a family member only.

Even the titles of books have assumed a natural relationship between men and the sea:
Wooden Ships and Iron Men
;
Men, Ships and the Sea
;
Atlantic Conquest: The Men and Ships of the Glorious Age of Steam
; and
Men and Ships in the Canada Trade
. Actually, there were many women involved in the Canada Trade, and they will be included in a subsequent work about Quebec and the Maritime provinces.

Men have always attempted to carry the mystic female presence to sea with them in the guise of naming their ships after women, having their ship christened by a woman, wearing tatoos of women, or designing a ship figurehead in the female form.

Women, as well as men, have written about the sea from earliest times, and women's diaries, journals and articles are being recovered and published to demonstrate their unique insights and observations and to form an essential component of women's history. Unfortunately, there are not enough of these, and most of them deal with sea voyages rather than life at the edge of the sea.

One of the very best books dealing with women's historic relationship with the sea is Linda Grant DePauw's
Seafaring Women
. The author demonstrates the amazing breadth of women's involvement with the sea as she writes about women as pirates, warriors, whalers and traders. I am indebted to her book for much of the information in this chapter, especially for the stories of Hannah Burgess and Mary Patten. Many additional sources have been consulted as well.

Perhaps the earliest known female pirate was Alvida, who operated in the North Atlantic from a Scandinavian base and whose exploits were recorded by Saxo Grammaticus, a twelfth-century historian. Another was Lady Killigrew of Cornwall, wife of Sir John Killigrew, and a contemporary of Queen Elizabeth I. Grace O'Malley, an Irish pirate, operated during the same period. With her father's support, Grace supplanted her brother as heir and commanded her family's fleets and castles after her father's death. Mary Lindsey of Plymouth, England, married a pirate, Eric Cobham, and became a pirate captain herself. They operated pirate ships out of Poole and Plymouth.

Women also served on ships as warriors or as crew members on fighting ships. During the eighteenth century, Anne Bonny and Mary Read were crew members aboard a pirate ship. During the American Revolution, Fanny Campbell of Lynn, Massachusetts, captained a privately owned ship that fought against the British. About the same time, a woman was in charge of the French privateer
La Bougourt
in the West Indies where she attacked British ships. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women either worked voluntarily as crew members of fighting ships (often disguised as men) or were pressed into service during crises aboard ship; in the latter case they were usually paid for their service.

In 1730 Dame Suzanne, nee LeGros, widow of Nicholas le Pelley, purchased the Island of Sark from Sir Charles de Carteret. Dame Suzanne had been born on the Island of Sark and the le Pelley family were from Guernsey. About 1755 the widow of Daniel le Pelley, “Dame of Sark,” Dame Elizabeth Etienne, who had already served a term in an ecclesiastical position as “douzenier,” which would have been extremely rare for a woman in those days, dismissed a priest for misconduct and barred the door of the church. The controversy had to do with Dame Elizabeth's decision to award “livings” (clergy, clerical wages, or lands) to lapsed Catholics. The Anglican Church disagreed. Though the Dean of Guernsey challenged Dame Elizabeth's action initially, he relented in the end and the matter was resolved the following year. Sark remained a possession of the le Pelley family until 1852. Strong women such as these may have been rare, but there were women of such stature here and there, now and then. Dame Elizabeth had, in fact, taken over commercial operations in the Jersey Islands after her husband's death. Because of the connection between these islands and Newfoundland, it is possible that civil law governing property may have been at least temporarily established in Newfoundland.

In much more recent days, there is the story of Katherine Dorey taking over the Guernsey family firm of Dorey Shipping Co. Ltd. when her husband Peter drowned in 1979. The firm had been in business for about 100 years as a tramp shipping company carrying cargoes of coal, wheat, and stone, as well as other commodities. In their shipyard at St. Samson they built several small vessels and repaired others, and Peter set up the Condor hydrofoil service sometime in the 1970s. Katherine took over the management of this firm at a very difficult time when British shipping was in a depressed condition. Condor was sold in 1984 and the Doreys' other ships eventually came under the management of the Fishers of Barrow.

American women in an earlier period were involved in the whaling trade, and the names of Martha's Vineyard, New Bedford, Salem and Nantucket figure prominently in the whaling business.

Martha Smith owned a fleet of whaling ships by 1718. Kezia Coffin Fanning of Nantucket operated a large shipping business during the American Revolution while her husband, John Fanning, was away on whaling voyages. Kezia was loyal to the British and enjoyed their protection during the war as she consolidated her trade and took mortgages on wharves, warehouses and other assets of her customers. By the end of the war she held mortgages on much of the valuable property of Nantucket and owned a townhouse on Center Street and a sumptuous country place. When the war ended with a win by the revolutionaries, Kezia fled to Halifax where she was later imprisoned. She eventually lost all her property and her husband died on the island.

Something of the quality of the women of this period may be seen in Mary English, wife of Philip English, who was the major shipowner of Salem during the period 1680 to 1750. She had the best education available at that time and wrote very well. She was also a devout member of the Established Church. In the witchcraft frenzy, Mary English was “cried against,” arrested and imprisoned. The manner of her arrest is worth noting. Guards came to her bedroom to take her away, but she refused to move until morning. After morning devotions she tended to the needs of her family, outlined plans for her children's education, kissed them goodbye, and told the officer in charge that she was ready to die. After she had been in prison for six weeks, her husband, who visited her regularly, was also arrested. They were both transported to Boston where they later escaped from jail and were taken to a safe place in New York.

The breakaway from European culture and education in the early American colonies caused a diffusion of roles for both men and women. Daniel Boorstin writes: “Although our knowledge is only fragmentary, evidence suggests that women in colonial America were more versatile, more active, more prominent, and on the whole more successful in activities outside the kitchen than were their English counterparts.” Wives and daughters took advantage of learning opportunities provided through the husband's and father's system of household manufacturing, and
women became involved in printing and publishing; they became merchants and tradespersons and often acted as medical practitioners. A woman's cooperation and energy were essential for many a family business to succeed. In this environment mothers became responsible for education in the family, many of them having been educated by their own parents who saw the need for studies in various foreign languages and “the graver sciences.” Boorstin continues: “Even such fragmentary evidence suggests that women in the colonies were successful in more different activities and were more prominent in professional and public life than they would be again until the 20th century.” The law protected women in the colonies well beyond what the British common law provided, and married women enjoyed unprecedented rights in their ability to initiate new businesses and continue these. The stories of women's bravery and courage and fighting spirit even in colonial warfare illustrate their ability to rise to new challenges and to be undaunted in the face of the worst atrocities.

Hector St. John de Crevecoeur published his
Letters to an American Farmer
in 1782 after a visit to Nantucket, during which he was very impressed with the whaling wives of the island. Not only were they industrious in the home and in social affairs, they were astute business heads as well. He writes: “As the sea excursions are often very long, their wives in their absence are necessarily obliged to transact business, to settle accounts, and in short, to rule and provide for their families. These circumstances being often repeated, give women the abilities as well as the taste for that kind of superintendency, to which by their prudence and good management, they seem to be in general very equal. This employment ripens their judgement, and justly entitles them to a rank superior to that of other wives, and this is the principal reason why those of Nantucket as well as those of Montreal are so fond of society, so affable, and so conversant with the affairs of the world.” What made the wives of Montreal similar to the wives of Nantucket is that their husbands, as merchants and traders, were away for similarly long periods of time, trading with the native people. Crevecoeur refers to the ingenious Aunt Kesiah and identifies her
husband, the richest person now in the island, as Mr. C- - - -n. It is obviously the Kezia Coffin Fanning referred to earlier, so the error must be in the husband's name. It is a well known and recorded fact, says Crevecoeur, that Kesiah is the secret of her husband's success, for she started trading at first with pins and needles and kept a school. She then moved into trading with “more considerable articles” and “laid the foundation of a system of business, that she has ever since prosecuted with equal dexterity and success.” Her business connections extended even to London, England.