Captain's Wife Research Articles

The Captain's Wife, and: Old Oliynyk

The Captain's Wife, and: Old Oliynyk

Mrs Dance strikes the first cut: visual storytelling and girlhood

This paper takes its title from the oil painting by George Pitt Morison held in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, called ‘12 August 1829. The Foundation of Perth. Mrs Dance strikes the first cut to mark the founding of Perth’. As a young girl in rural Western Australia I transformed Mrs Dance, the boat captain's wife, into the first West Australian feminist. My unsophisticated mind inexplicably linked the image of Mrs Dance with the feminist sticker my father had put on our refrigerator in the mid–1970s. This painting provides an example of how visual representations of historic moments work to both open out and close down thinking about history in a process that Martine Joly describes as ‘the force of the image’. In discussing my girlhood response to this image, this article will explore how visual representations impact upon the storytelling of history and on both individual and national identities.

The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century. By Martha Hodes. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Pp. 384. $24.95.)

<i>The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century</i>. By Martha Hodes. (New York: W. W. Norton &amp; Company, 2006. Pp. 384. $24.95.)

Book Review: The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century

Book Review: The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century

The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century. By Martha Hodes. (New York: Norton, 2006. 384 pp. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-393-05266-4.)

In The Sea Captain's Wife, Martha Hodes, an especially accomplished storyteller, has given us a carefully researched, cleverly conceived, and beautifully written book. Focusing her attention on Eunice Connolly, a New Englander who anyone would describe as an ordinary woman, Hodes offers a remarkably complex biography of a woman who should have fallen through the cracks of history. According to Hodes, Eunice was born of white and free parents in New England in 1831. Since her parents were among the working class that failed to find upward mobility, Eunice found herself in the ranks of women entering the region's textile mills. In 1849, she married a man of her own class, a carpenter, and quit the mills to assume her role as wife and homemaker. Yet, within the next decade, Eunice and family suffered from the separation and dislocation fostered by factory life. Her husband deserted her for life in the South, and she became so impoverished she was forced to board her children and re-enter the mills. Yet even then she had not reached the bottom.

The sea captain's wife: a true story of love, race, and war in the nineteenth century

Award-winning historian Martha Hodes brings us into the extraordinary world of Eunice Connolly. Born white and poor in New England, Eunice moved from countryside to factory city, worked in the mills, then followed her husband to the Deep South. When the Civil War came, Eunice's brothers joined the Union army while her husband fought and died for the Confederacy. Back in New England, a widow and the mother of two, Eunice barely got by as a washerwoman, struggling with crushing depression. Four years later, she fell in love with a black sea captain, married him, and moved to his home in the West Indies. Following every lead in a collection of 500 family letters, Hodes traced Eunice's footsteps and met descendants along the way. This story of misfortune and defiance takes up grand themes of American history-opportunity and racism, war and freedom-and illuminates the lives of ordinary people in the past.

The Story of a Life

The Sea Captain's Wife begins, appropriately enough, with Emily Dickinson's famous lines: I'm Nobody! Who are you?/ Are you-Nobody-Too? Eunice Richardson Stone Connolly was, in many respects, an ordinary woman in nineteenth-century America. Born on a farm in Northfield, Massachusetts, in 1831, she was one of eight children. Eunice worked hard for most of her life in the cotton mills of New England, as a seamstress, washerwoman, and domestic. Her life was also conventional, Martha Hodes suggests, because she yearned to climb out of poverty, make a stable marriage, and find comfort in hearth, home, and motherhood. What makes her unique is her decision to cross the color line, marry Captain William Smiley Connolly in 1869, and move to Grand Cayman Island. Almost as unusual was the decision-of her brother, Henry Richardson, and his heirs-to preserve some five hundred letters to and from Eunice's family. The correspondence, housed in the Duke University Library, is the answer to the prayers of anyone interested in what used to be called history from the bottom up. Martha Hodes stumbled on the collection some years ago and has made the most of it. In a remarkable feat of archival research, detective work, oral history, and imagination, she has excavated and recreated Eunice Connolly's world. The Sea Captain's Wife offers no major reinterpretations of industrialization, the Civil War, religious ferment, or race prejudice. But in the tradition of distinguished micro-histories and biographies-Laurel Ulrich's Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (1990), and Nick Salvatore's We All Got History: The Memory Books of Amos Webber (1996)-Hodes illuminates Eunice's lived experience. A page-turning tour de force, The Sea Captain's Wife captures the fragility, volatility, and vitality of everyday life in the United States. Hodes begins with a dissertation on letter writing. As the revolutions in transportation and industrialization dispersed families, she notes, letters became the only way to maintain intimate connections to loved ones. Letter

Arms and the Man: What Did the Right to “Keep” Arms Mean in the Early Republic?

Just as Virgil linked “arms and the man” in his epic history of Rome's origins, Americans have linked the bearing of arms with their own national origins. Regardless of other uses to which his image has been put, the Minuteman who stands guard at Concord reminds us that he stood his ground in 1775 to stop British regulars from seizing assembled weapons at Concord and disarming the Middlesex County militia. Robert Churchill provides us with an entertaining anecdote of a young man to illustrate his claim that such men actually believed that they were protecting their personal right to keep and bear arms. Asserting that he had become ill, the militiaman was “skedaddling home” after his company's engagement with British regulars at Concord in 1775. Though his captain's wife told him that “you must not take your gun with you,” he retorted, “Yes, I shall.” His refusal to yield his gun, explains Churchill, “transcended its importance in allowing him to meet his communal obligation. The gun was his, and he believed he had a right to keep it.” But this anecdote, though charming, demands closer examination. Like much in Churchill's essay, it reveals that items or statements taken out of context can be misinterpreted and misleading.

The Journal of a Sea Captain's Wife, 1841-1845 by Lydia Rider Nye, Doyce B. Nunis, Jr.

Museum in 1935,and conserved and installed in the museum's sculpture court in 1998. Proctor isalso represented at the Metropoli tan Museum ofArt, BrooklynMuseum, Smith sonian American ArtMuseum, and numerous others, including theA. Phimister ProctorMu seum inPoulsbo,Washington, established in1997 by theartist'sgrandson.Monuments by Proctor are located inDenver,Washington, D.C., Pitts burgh, and other cities. Hassrick suggeststhathis supreme accomplishments are the equestrian, multi-figured Pioneer Mother inKansas City, Missouri, and the two-man, two-horse monu ment toRobert E. Lee inDallas, Texas. The monograph is spaciously designed and well organized and written.A seventyfive-page introductoryessay,divided into seven chapters, presents a chronological discussion of Proctor 's early life,development as an artist, happy marriage and family life, and successes and frustrations as he competed with his western art contemporaries Charles M. Russell and Frederick Remington as well as high style Beaux-Arts sculptors, especially followers of Daniel Chester French, rivalofProctor'smentor Saint-Gaudens. The essay is followed by a chronologi cal catalogue that illustrates and discusses each sculpture, providing information on patron-artist relations, significance of subject, date ofmodeling and casting, location, and other known versions. The catalogue is cited throughout the essay so that one can turn to detailed discussion of a particular work while reading the broader commentary in the essay. (In thediscussion ofOregon PioneerMother on page 89, citation is omitted for the catalogue entryon page 225 ? aminor but temporarily confusing discontinuity.) The book, situatingProctor in regional,na tional, and international contexts, is a valuable addition toAmerican art historical studies. It contributes to art scholarship about the Ameri canWest, on thebasis ofwhich Proctor staked his fame,and Northwest, which Proctorwooed and, inOregon to a surprisingdegree,won. The Journal ofa Sea Captains Wife, 1841-1845 By Lydia Rider Nye, edited byDoyce B. Nunis, Jr. Arthur H. Clark Company, Spokane, Wash., 2004. Photographs, maps, bibliography, appendices, index. 254 pages. $32.50 cloth. Reviewed byNancy Pagh Western Washington University,Bellingham Historian jo Stanley recently wrote about the need for books on women at sea. "How can gender issues be raised in a discipline (maritime history) that traditionally uses straightforward social and economic his tory approaches rather than drawing in tools available fromcultural studies, women's studies, and post-colonial studies?" she asked ina review essay inGender & History (April 2003, p. 136). The Journal of a Sea Captains Wife is a beautifully designed, traditional scholarly edi tion of Lydia Rider Nye's journal, including her account of traveling from Boston toHawai'i tomeet her husband and trade voyages to the PacificCoast. The book includes a prologue and epilogue, giving it some narrative shape, and numerous appendices ? including accounts of theBritish seizure ofHonolulu in 1842, King Ka mehameha Ill's restoration, and theCalifornia hide and tallow trade.Given the current inter est inwomen's accounts of sea travel,this text, promoted as "the only known journal kept by a wife of a ship captain during a voyage along the Pacific Coast prior to 1848" (although Frances Reviews 511 Barkley's 1787 account ofNootka predates it), will garner interest by feminists,social historians ofHawai'i, and economic historians interested in thehide trade. Nye herself points out, "I do not want for matter, but language,O that I had the pen of a readywriter" (p. 91). Unlike the fascinating journals of Caroline Leighton and Libby Bea man, Nye's writing lacks a sense of personality and reflection. Early entries wear a heavy mask ofpiety (theeditorfinds thisrhetoric"genuine"; I credit her fellow passengers, who were mis The Oregon Historical Society Press congratulates Lewis L. McArthur winner of a 2005 Merit Award for individual achievement from the American Association for State and Local History McArthurin2003 xvith the firstsixeditions ofOregon Geographic Names Lewis L. McArthur grew up learning about Oregon places. His father, Lewis A. McArthur, began research for the first edition of Oregon Geographic Names shortly after Lewis was born. After his father died in 1951, the younger McArthur con tinued the tradition, completing the fourth and preparing the fifth, sixth, and, in 2003, a seventh edition of what has become a classic reference work. He also serves on the Oregon Geographic Names Board and the Place Name Commis sion of theUnited States...

Women through Women's Eyes. Latin American Women in Nineteenth-Century Travel Accounts

Chapter 1 Life among the Elite in Chile and Brazil Chapter 2 Peregrinations of a Self-Proclaimed Pariah Chapter 3 Women's Lives in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Mexico Chapter 4 A Swedish Novelist in the New World Chapter 5 A Parisian in a Slavocrat Society Chapter 6 A Naturalist's Wife and Educator in Brazil Chapter 7 A German Schoolteacher in Brazil Chapter 8 Keeping House in Northern Mexico Chapter 9 A Wellesley Graduate's Travels in Guatemala Chapter 10 A Naval Captain's Wife on Tour

Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1920.

From the voyage of the Argonauts to the Tailhook scandal, seafaring has long been one of the most glaringly male-dominated occupations. In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Margaret Creighton, Lisa Norling, and their co-authors explore the relationship of gender and seafaring in the Anglo-American age of sail. Drawing on a wide range of American and British sources-from diaries, logbooks, and account ledgers to songs, poetry, fiction, and a range of public sources-the authors show how popular fascination with seafaring and the sailors' rigorous, male-only life led to models of gender behavior based on iron aboard ship and stoic ashore. Yet Iron Men, Wooden Women also offers new material that defies conventional views. The authors investigate such topics as women in the American whaling industry and the role of the captain's wife aboard ship. They explore the careers of the female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, as well as those of other women-transvestite heroines-who dressed as men to serve on the crews of sailing ships. And they explore the importance of gender and its connection to race for African American and other seamen in both the American and the British merchant marine. Contributors include both social historians and literary critics: Marcus Rediker, Dianne Dugaw, Ruth Wallis Herndon, Haskell Springer, W. Jeffrey Bolster, Laura Tabili, Lillian Nayder, and Melody Graulich, in addition to Margaret Creighton and Lisa Norling.

Ranald MacDonald in Nagasaki

While he was being confined in the prison“Daihi-an”in Nagasaki, Ranald MacDonald jotted down the names of the fourteen interpreters on a sheet of Japanese paper. He also wrote down on the other side of the same sheet of paper the names of“oyakunin”, or the soldiers who guarded the prison where he was confiend. The existence of such kind of paper on which the names of the guards are written has been well-known in Japan, but I am afraid each name of the guards has not been known in our country so far. The Japanese paper in question is now at the Provincial Archives of British Columbia, Victoria, Canada, and it is my aim to clarify here the names of those guards, though it is a little difficult to decipher in places what MacDonald wrote since he wrote in such a peculiar longhand of his own.MacDonald's listing of the soldiers at“Daihi-an”includes twenty-eight names, among which one, the name of the twenty-eighth soldier, is totally unrecognizable. Ehara Matagero, the first of the listing, is the very captain whose“head was chopped off”because he brought five women including his wife and daughter into the prison so that they could see MacDonald. He is also the guard for whom MacDonald feels very sorry when he hears that“his head was chopped off”. And one can also see from the paper that the name of the captain's wife is Yanagawa. MacDonald learned Japanese words and colloquial expressions more from these guards than from the interpreters. And the fact that MacDonald wrote the names of as many as twenty-eight guards testifies of course that he was on a very friendly terms with them.

Cause of Beriberi on American Whalers.

New York City, Oct. 25, 1899. <h3>To the Editor:</h3> —The whaling bark,<i>Greyhound</i>, came into port at New Bedford, Mass., Nov. 4, 1897, with a tale of distress and death. Two of her crew had succumbed to beriberi, and the body of a third, who had died a few days before, was brought into port. There were also five men sick with the disease, in the forecastle. Although the<i>Greyhound</i>had been five years on the cruise, when she touched at St. Helena six months before, all the members of the crew were in good health. The men were not stricken with the disease until about a month before she reached port, while the bark was homeward bound. The third man died two days before reaching port. The captain's wife was on board and nursed the men. She and the captain were not sick. Although the<i>Greyhound</i>was well provisioned,

The Remarkable Sunsets

UNDER date of January 14 I named the bark C. Southard Hurlburt as having observed the glow on September 3. She was dismasted in a cyclone August 8, and came to Honolulu for repairs. On the former date she was in about lat. 17° N., long. 125° W. The captain's wife, Mrs. Davis, described the phenomena to me as extremely brilliant.