DRUETT, Joan 1939- (Jo Friday)

PERSONAL:

Born April 11, 1939, in Nelson, New Zealand; daughter of Ralph Totten Griffin and Colleen de la Hunt Butcher; married Ronald John Druett (a maritime artist), February 11, 1966; children: Lindsay John, Alastair Ronald. Education: Victoria University of Wellington, B.A., 1960.

ADDRESSES:

Home—70 Calcutta Street, Khandallah, Wellington, New Zealand. Agent—Laura J. Langlie, 275 President St., No. 3, Brooklyn, NY 11231.

CAREER:

Teacher of biology and English literature until 1983; writer, 1983—.

MEMBER:

Authors Guild, Martha's Vineyard Historical Society (Edgartown, MA), Mystic Seaport Museum, New Bedford Whaling Museum, Wellington Museum of City & Sea, Friends of the Turnbull Library (New Zealand), Friends of Te Papa (National Museum of New Zealand), Friends of the International Arts Festival (New Zealand), Friends of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Best first prose book, International PEN, 1984, for Exotic Intruders: The Introduction of Plants and Animals to New Zealand; Fulbright Writer's Cultural Award, 1986; John Lyman Award for best book of American maritime history, 1992, for "She Was a Sister Sailor": The Whaling Journals of Mary Brewster, 1845-1851; Oysterponds Historical Society Scholar-in-residence Award, 1993; New York Public Library Award, 1998, for Hen Frigates: Wives of Merchant Captains under Sail; L. Byrne Waterman Award for outstanding contributions to history and women's history, 1999; John David Stout Research Fellowship Award, University of Wellington, 2001.

WRITINGS:

Exotic Intruders: The Introduction of Plants and Animals to New Zealand, Heinemann (Auckland, New Zealand), 1983.

Fulbright in New Zealand, New Zealand-U.S. Educational Foundation (Wellington, New Zealand), 1988.

Abigail (novel), Random House (New York, NY), 1988.

A Promise of Gold (novel), Bantam (New York, NY), 1990.

Petticoat Whalers: Whaling Wives at Sea, 1820-1920, illustrated by husband, Ron Druett, HarperCollins (Auckland, New Zealand), 1991, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1992.

(Editor) "She Was a Sister Sailor": The Whaling Journals of Mary Brewster, 1845-1851, Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT), 1991.

Murder at the Brian Boru (novel), HarperCollins (Auckland, New Zealand), 1992.

(With Mary Anne Wallace) The Sailing Circle: Nineteenth-Century Seafaring Women from New York, introduction by Lisa Norling, Three Village Historical Society (East Setauket, NY)/Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum (Cold Spring Harbor, NY), 1995.

Hen Frigates: Wives of Merchant Captains under Sail, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1998.

Rough Medicine: Surgeons at Sea in the Age of Sail, Routledge (New York, NY), 2000.

She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2000.

In The Wake of Madness: The Murderous Voyage of the Whaleship Sharon, Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 2003.

Also author of Captain's Daughter, Coasterman's Wife: Carrie Hubbard Davis of Orient, 1994. Contributor to periodicals, including Log of Mystic Seaport, Newport History, Sea History, Dukes County Intelligencer, Mains'l Haul, and No Quarter Given. Author of science-fiction stories published under pseudonym Jo Friday in magazine Worlds If.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Perseverance Harbour, an account of the American sealing schooner in Lyttelton, New Zealand, in December of 1883.

SIDELIGHTS:

Joan Druett is a former teacher whose interest in maritime history prompted her to conduct extensive research that has taken her across several continents and resulted in a collection of books about seafaring women. Among Druett's titles are The Sailing Circle: Nineteenth-Century Seafaring Women from New York, Hen Frigates: Wives of Merchant Captains under Sail, and In the Wake of Madness: The Murderous Voyage of the Whaleship Sharon.

Druett was born in 1939 in Nelson, New Zealand. She studied at Victoria University of Wellington and went on to become a teacher of both biology and English literature. In 1983, however, she decided to concentrate on a writing career. That year she published her first book, Exotic Intruders: The Introduction of Plants and Animals to New Zealand, which won an award from International PEN. Five years later, Druett completed two more projects, Fulbright in New Zealand and the novel Abigail, and in 1990 she issued A Promise of Gold.

Petticoat Whalers: Whaling Wives at Sea, 1820-1920, Druett's first nonfiction book about maritime history, was inspired by her discovery of a buried headstone. "My engrossing interest in the history of women in whaling began in May, 1984, when I came across a young Maori scraping at a patch of waste ground on the tiny South Pacific island of Rarotonga," she once explained to CA. "I was told that he had a dream in which an ancestor came to him and told him to clear the land because it was a lost graveyard. Three days later the young man had gone, so I investigated the heaps of weeds and broken stones and ended up falling into a hole where a great tree had been uprooted during a recent storm. At the bottom of that hole, I found a coral rock grave with a headstone set into it like a door. The inscription was a memorial to a twenty-four-year-old American girl, Mary Ann Sherman, the wife of the captain of the American whaling ship Harrison, who had died January 5, 1850. A girl on a whaling ship? It seemed impossible! How had she lived …and died? This was the beginning of my quest." The book is illustrated with paintings by Druett's husband, maritime artist Ron Druett.

After producing Petticoat Whalers, Druett served as editor of "She Was a Sister Sailor": The Whaling Journals of Mary Brewster, 1845-1851, which provides what a Publishers Weekly reviewer described as "detail concerning shipboard life and the whaling industry, as well as a portrait of missionary life on the island of Maui." She then published Murder at the Brian Boru and—three years later—Captain's Daughter, Coasterman's Wife: Carrie Hubbard Davis of Orient, released in 1994. In addition, she collaborated with Mary Anne Wallace in writing The Sailing Circle: Nineteenth-Century Seafaring Women from New York.

In 1998, Druett published Hen Frigates: Wives of Merchant Captains under Sail, which relates the experiences of women on shipping expeditions. Among the notable women in this volume is a teenager who replaced her dead father as commander and subsequently repelled a sexually aggressive sailor, quashed a mutiny, and even convinced her crew to dump the ship's alcohol overboard. Other women in Druett's study bear children, combat illnesses such as malaria and plague, and endure dangerous storms.

Hen Frigates won praise for its exploration of a little-known topic. An Atlantic critic said the book "casts light on an odd corner of nineteenth-century life," and Library Journal reviewer Roseanne Castellino called it "informative and entertaining reading." Another reviewer, Margaret Flanagan, declared in Booklist that Druett's volume constituted "an intimate glimpse" back in time and concluded that Hen Frigates "provides the reader with an intriguing entrée into an exotic lifestyle." Holly Morris, meanwhile, wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Druett's work serves as "a valuable collective portrait of intrepid seafaring women."

Druett's other books include Rough Medicine: Surgeons at Sea in the Age of Sail and She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea. In Rough Medicine Druett describes the adventures of English physicians who put to sea in the early nineteenth century in the wake of John Woodall, considered "the father of sea surgery." Based on primary documents, Druett notes that the doctors were driven to dangerous positions on shipboard mainly for the sake of adventure. The latter volume relates the exploits of seafaring women from the time of Ancient Egypt to the twentieth century. Among the various figures in the book are Tomyris, a Massegetae queen who triumphed in battle against Persian forces, and Lucy Brewer, who posed as a man and obtained assignment as a sailor aboard the U.S.S. Constitution.

Upon its publication in 2000, She Captains received recognition as a provocative chronicle. Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman wrote, "Maritime lore has always been rich in romance and suffering; Druett's revelations increase its fascination tenfold." A Publishers Weekly reviewer was likewise impressed, describing She Captains as an "entertaining work …filled with fascinating characters." Library Journal's Roseanne Castellino remarked, "The stories are lively, the characters vivid and eccentric," while Louise Jarvis noted in the New York Times Book Review that She Captains presents "wild tales of women's bravery and bloodlust from antiquity to the twentieth century.… Druett descends on the gory tidbits and operatic tableaus with a cheeky tone that seems to acknowledge our own perverse fascination—delight even—with atrocities and hardships that would make Melville's or Hemingway's sea dogs buckle."

Having exhausted research documentation on seafaring women in her previous books, Druett's next work, In the Wake of Madness: The Murderous Voyage of the Whaleship Sharon, concentrated on a specific incident in maritime lore. In 1841 the whaler Sharon, led by Captain Howes Norris, "a seagoing psychopath of the classic mold," according to Peter Nichols of the New York Times Book Review, left Fairhaven, Massachusetts, for the South Pacific. When the ship returned three years later, only four of the original twenty-nine crew members were aboard, and Captain Norris was not among them. He had been murdered in the South Pacific by Kanaka tribesmen taken aboard as crew members. Based on the journals of Benjamin Clough, the third mate who recaptured the ship from the Pacific islanders who killed Norris, and Andrew White, the ship's cooper, Druett's book is the account to analyze Norris's behavior and show it to have been instrumental in his demise.

According to the records Druett uncovered, Norris was a racist and a drunkard who repeatedly beat and tortured his crew members and eventually killed his steward. In return, many men deserted the ship, which forced Norris to hire locals to flesh out the crew during the long voyage. The Kanaka tribesmen had no reason to remain loyal to the captain, so when the rest of the crew was offboard searching for whales, three of them hacked Norris in half with a sharp spade used for cutting whale blubber. For the remainder of their days, the surviving crew members largely skirted the truth about what happened during the voyage. Druett asserts they were ashamed by their lack of courage in standing up to a captain who did not have a firm grip on reality.

Many critics liked the book. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly called In the Wake of Madness "a terrific account of an unusually eventful voyage.…[that] manages a perfect balance between telling the story in an unfussy yet dramatic manner and honoring its complexity." Library Journal reviewer Robert C. Jones characterized the book as "a murder investigation mixed with equal parts whaling lore, mystery, retribution, and history" that is "informative and vividly recreated." Nichols wrote that Druett "draws a fine picture of the floating community of whalers and deserters scattered across the Pacific." Other critics also appreciated Druett's ability to evoke a detailed portrait of a bygone era. In the Wake of Madness provides an "excellent insight into the whaling life and human nature," wrote Kliatt reviewer Sunnie Grant, and a writer for Kirkus Reviews called the book a "swift, absorbing sage of the sea [that] invokes malice, mayhem, murder, and, hovering over it all, Herman Melville."

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY:

Druett contributed the following autobiographical essay to CA:

On a calm winter morning not so very long ago, I was driving along a country road to my home in Wellington, New Zealand. Then I drew over for safety's sake—not because of the traffic, but because of the stunning view. Ahead of me the snowcapped peaks of the Tararua mountain range stood out clearly against the pale sky, and the steeply descending slopes were an amazing blend of blues, purples, and indigo. The effect was so breathtaking I was not safe to drive until I had looked my fill—and yet this was not one of the so-called "scenic" parts of New Zealand. Now, because of the films that have been made here—The Lord of the Rings series being a very good example—people all around the globe are aware that New Zealand scenery is gorgeous. But did it make a difference for me to grow up in the biggest film-set in the world? What effect did being a citizen of "Middle Earth" have to do with my development as a writer? The short answer has to be, a great deal—and yet I write about American history, and my audience is American. So, why do I feel this empathy with America? What draws me to the American past?

Being very young at the time, I have no memories at all of "the War," which is the way New Zealanders still refer to the conflict between Germany, Italy, and Japan, on one side, and Great Britain, the Commonwealth, and the United States, on the other. When Japan entered the war, Kiwi troops were fighting on the other side of the world, and so American forces arrived here in the nick of time to save New Zealand from occupation—well, that was what I was told, and no doubt it was true. However, I don't remember the Americans who marched our roads or strolled along our sidewalks; what I do recollect is a huge carton arriving at our house, packed with good things from America like Cannon sheets and candy. Apparently my father, when working alongside U.S. servicemen in the Solomon Islands—he built airfields, latrines, useful things like that—had told interested listeners about rationing and shortages back home in New Zealand. No doubt he embroidered his yarns; my father was notorious as a gifted and imaginative raconteur. One of his listeners had written home, and his wife had collected up a box of goodies for this little family in New Zealand. As it happened, we were never short of the necessities of life, but because of the kindness of this unknown woman, I learned very early about the unquestioning generosity of ordinary American folk.

Another effect of this war was embodied in a couple of photographs in a big Victorian kitchen at the back of an ancient (by New Zealand standards) village apothecary shop. On wet or wintry Sunday afternoons, it was a custom for my father to drive us through the Manawatu Gorge to pay a call on his aunt and uncle. It was a winding, precipitous road—spectacular, of course!—and my brother and I used to amuse ourselves watching for the train dashing in and out of tunnels across the other side of the ravine. Then we would arrive in the village, and draw to a stop outside this little old pharmacy store which had had a "Closed Down" sign in its window for ever, as far as we could tell. My great-aunt and great-uncle lived in the back part of the house, and kept an eye on the shop in the front. They were very kind, if quiet, people, who had very little in the way of money or possessions, but their table positively groaned with cake and other good things ready for us to eat. The photographs were the reason they were quiet. They were of their two handsome sons, one in the uniform of the Royal Air Force, and the other in that of a captain in the British army. The first had been killed in the Battle of Britain, and the other had lost his life in Crete, on the first anniversary of his older brother's death. Their two good-looking sons had given their lives to the cause of the "mother" country, on the far side of the world. It was part of the reason, I vaguely understood, that the Americans had come to our rescue in the Pacific.

After we had drunk our cups of milky sweet tea and eaten all we could manage, my brother and I were sent to play in the apothecary store. In there, it was rather like the mysteriously abandoned ship Marie Celeste, because the shop was still furnished with counters, shelves of curvaceous bottles with beautifully scripted, meaningless labels, and cupboards of dusty books called "pharmocopaeia" and pamphlets with strong warnings about something mysterious called "self-abuse," all seemingly set to go if someone took down the "Closed Down" sign and opened the door. I was an avid reader, even if I hardly understood a word and was running the risk of going blind, and I am sure that this is where my fascination with pharmacology started, and where the book Rough Medicine, written many years later, was born. But there was something even more amazing stored in this place—a stack of huge oil paintings of old Maori chiefs! I studied them so closely that their proud, disdainful, tattooed faces were as familiar as those of my family. Where they had come from, I do not have a notion, but I can bring them vividly back to mind right now. The reason I saw them so clearly was that my brother and I played with the portraits, tipping them against each other to make teepees. I shudder to think of the cultural blunder we were so innocently committing.

In New Zealand schools at the time, very little New Zealand history was taught, and no American history at all. Instead, we learned about English kings and queens, and English social life before and after the Industrial Revolution. All we knew about Maori—the Polynesians who discovered New Zealand about the same time that Europeans discovered America—was the story of the great voyager Kupe, who was the Maori Christopher Columbus. We had Maori playmates, of course, but we knew almost nothing about their heritage. By contrast, a little bit of American history was quite familiar—because we played Indians and cowboys, which was the reason we liked building teepees. We were Indians always, because one had to be rich to be a cowboy—a cowboy had to have a pistol, and, ideally, chaps, boots, and a leather vest as well. Bows and arrows were free, being easily made out of twigs and string—we turned into such good shots that it was a miracle that no one lost an eye—and there was this neat sound one could make by clapping a palm over one's hooting mouth.

However, I suspect that we would have been Indians even if we could afford the cowboy accoutrements, because we were thoroughgoing Kiwis, and Kiwis tend to side with the underdog. We never thought of playing Maori warriors versus English settlers, because no one had taught us about the Maori rebel wars of the eighteen-sixties, but if we had, we would have been Maori, despite the fact that we sprang from sturdy colonial stock. Not only were the tattooed and stalwart warriors so much more magnificent than musket-wielding Englishmen, but we were used to hero-worshipping great Maori players on the rugby field, rugby football being New Zealand's national obsession. I guess that is why I portray life under sail from the point of view of the harassed wives and underdog seamen, and from the perspective of the Pacific people, too—the islanders the American whalemen called "Kanakas," who sailed on American ships for the adventure.

And then there were American films. Westerns were tremendously popular, even if the cowboys always won. When I was at high school I used to make my pocket money by ushering people to their seats at a local movie theater which specialized in Westerns, and that is where I got early practice in creating dialogue. The other usherettes and I would sit in the back during the first showing, playing a game where we second-guessed what the characters were going to say next. It was surprising how often we could anticipate deathless lines like "This town ain't big enough for the two of us," before the film stars got them out. Occasionally, the game became hilarious—such as the time the film commenced with the hero (the "goodie") rushing down a hotel corridor. This is how it went:

Halfway down the corridor he opened a door at random. Inside was a bedroom, complete with a lovely young woman who sprang up in bed. "Squeak!" she went, gripping the sheet to her chin. "Save me! The Nasties are after me," he entreated. "Get into bed," she instructed—displaying an admirable grasp of the situation, we thought, especially considering she was mysteriously in bed in the afternoon. (That was a line we did not anticipate!) "But I've got my spurs on," he cried, but this collected young lass merely hissed at him to hurry. Into bed beside her he popped, and she pulled the blankets over his head. Slam!—and the door opened to reveal the Nasties. Up she sat, and again went, "Squeak!" Gentlemen despite their reputation, the gang retreated with bumbling apologies, the door shut, and the goodie sat up. "What do I do now?" he wondered. And with one voice we usherettes advised, "Take your ruddy spurs off!"

Needless to say, that was another line of dialogue we did not get right. However, we enjoyed the laugh. As well as having a boisterous sense of fun, my fellow usherettes were very interesting people, many of them being wives of sideshow men. They had an arrangement with the theater that they would work as usherettes every time the circus was in town, and so it seemed to us townies that they were always heralded with bands and elephants. We called them "carnies," or carnival folk, and their stories were as colorful as they were. About the same time, I discovered John Steinbeck, and recognized them instantly in his pages. I have been a tremendous fan of Steinbeck ever since. It is probably because of Steinbeck (though the apothecary shop must have been a factor) that I decided to be a biologist as well as a writer. Because of him, I knew that the two were not incompatible.

I was always going to be a writer. I wrote my first book at age four, after finding out that children were supposed to give their mothers presents at Christmas; a homemade book was the only present that came to mind. During the War a grade-school teacher lived next door, and she and my mother taught me how to read and write. I still have that book, and am mostly impressed by the perfect spelling; it has been downhill ever since. I won my first writing prize at the age of sixteen, in a satisfying combination of biology and literature. The competition was organized by a local farmers' club, and, while all the other entrants wrote poetic descriptions of sunlit meadows, I submitted a discussion of spontaneous abortion in cows, because I was pretty sure it was the kind of thing that farmers liked to read. The winning essay looked rather odd when published in the local paper, and my mother and her friends were rendered speechless, but I got a ten-pound book voucher, which was a lot of money in those days. The voucher went toward university text books—biology books, which seemed appropriate. Best of all was that I had proved to myself that it is always advisable to keep your market in mind—an excellent start for professional writing.

However, my career as a professional writer was fated to be stalled. In order to get a grant to go to university, I signed an agreement to teach school for three years after graduation. Was it because of those old Maori portraits that I opted to spend those three years in Maori schools? I'd like to think so. Whatever the motivation, it was tremendously rewarding. I learned the formal protocol of the marae, and, more importantly, the special qualities of the best of those people—their pride, their warmth and humanity, their unstinting hospitality, their capacity for sharing, and the infectious Polynesian sense of humor, which is creatively mocking but seldom malicious, and often self-deprecating. And their stories! I wrote a lot of them down, and sold them, under a pen name, to a Maori journal called Te Ao Hou. Then I blended some to make a novel, and sent it to the biggest editor of the biggest publishing house in New Zealand. And it was rejected! Even more crushing was the long, carefully considered letter from the editor, who advised me to stop writing, and experience life instead. I would know when I was ready to start writing again, he said. Everyone who hears this exclaims that it was a terrible piece of advice—which is probably true. At the time, however, it was strangely liberating. I finished my teaching obligation, packed my bags, and left New Zealand.

Over the last two or three generations it has become customary for young New Zealanders to travel overseas for several years. We call it "the big OE," which is short for "overseas experience," and is a reaction to our national consciousness that we are a long, long way from the rest of the world. Some people call this "the tyranny of distance." When the first settlers undertook the four-to six-month voyage to New Zealand, they knew that they were saying goodbye to the homeland forever. The shipping lines and the jumbo jet changed all that, but still there is a craving to go and see what the old world is like. Usually, this involves a return to Britain. By contrast, I was focused on North America, for several reasons. First, I am a fifth generation New Zealander on all sides of the family—I like to point out that if I were American, I would qualify for the Daughters of the Revolution. This means that for me there was no nostalgic link to Britain, because I had never known a family member who had memories of the country many Kiwis still insisted on calling "home." The games of Cowboys and Indians, along with all the Westerns I had seen, must have played a part in my decision, too, along with childhood memories that carton of goodies from America. I applied for a work permit in the United States—and was rejected. So I migrated to Canada.

I fell in love with cosmopolitan cities, falling snow, and the North American way of life. A wonderful job as a "printer's devil" in the old printery of Victoria University, Toronto—which involved trooping about in mini-skirts and heels lugging great trays of lead type—inspired a life-long addiction to the smell of printer's ink. In the university library, I discovered a special collection devoted to Pacific studies, and spent absorbed hours learning even more about the ocean peoples I had left behind. Reading about those magnificent Polynesian navigators must have made me restless, because for no real reason I left Toronto, and headed across the Atlantic. A year in London followed, still devoted to various branches of publishing—I wrote copy for Popular Mechanics, among other publications, and learned how to use a computer, which was room-sized in those days. Then I ran out of money and returned to New Zealand, lugging along my souvenir, Ron, the Englishman I married.

Ron is a maritime artist. He introduced me to sailing ships. Like all New Zealanders, I had spent countless childhood hours in boats and the water, but now I learned to appreciate the beauty of pyramids of canvas—not only because they were so splendid to look at, but because they were such amazing machines, driven by just the wind and the muscle power of men. But still, I did not write. Instead, I raised my own children, and taught the children of others, and enjoyed both jobs immensely. A letter came out of the blue, requesting permission to republish one of my Maori stories in an anthology (an amazing feat of detection on the part of the editor, considering it had been written under a pen name), but still I left my pen alone. Then, our children grew old enough for us to satisfy our urge to travel, and I found that writing stories for travel magazines was an excellent method of paying my way to exotic destinations. We went to America, Europe, Indonesia, and the Pacific Islands, and the trickle of articles became quite a stream. I was fast turning into a journalist-cum-teacher when one of the biggest editors of one of the biggest publishing houses in New Zealand came knocking at my door.

She was carrying a bottle of wine, and she had a proposition—that I should write a book about how exotic plants and animals came to be established in New Zealand. The combination of biologist and writer was perfect, she argued. Only reluctantly persuaded, I set to and wrote an outline and sample chapter, and sent it off. And it was rejected! Till then, I had not been all that entranced with the task, but now I had my dander up, and was determined to get that book published. I sent the proposal to another publisher, and it was accepted the same day. The book, Exotic Intruders, won the PEN and Hubert Church Awards, and I left teaching to write full time, flushed with confidence. Misplaced confidence, I soon found, as book proposals I churned out were rejected. However, I was still selling travel articles, and in May 1984 Ron and I went to Rarotonga, a favorite South Pacific island, in search of more material.

We had been to "Raro" many times, because we love it there. It is exactly as beautiful as any tropical island poster, and the people are terrific. However, if the truth be known, tropical islands are boring. The locals work a great deal harder than most folk believe, and there is not much time left over for frivolity. So, tourists are left very much to their own devices—which, for us, meant cycling round the island. At noon on the first day we arrived at a place on the coast called Ngatangiia. I remember how beautiful it was, the sun glittering on the turquoise lagoon and the sapphire sea beyond the gray bulwark of the reef. The light was hot and bright on the stretch of coral rubble between the road and the beach, and the trunk of a great fallen tree lying over the white sand was shadow-black, its roots standing out starkly against the pale sky. Despite the heat, a young Maori man was working away in the rubble, clearing away the weeds—a thankless task, as little of use would ever grow there. When we got into town we asked why he was doing it and were told he had had a dream in which an ancestor ghost had instructed him to clear the ground—because it was a graveyard.

This was rather hard to credit, because burying grounds are very well looked after in Rarotonga. The locals believe that the ancestors never leave, Rarotonga being heaven, and so they make sure to tend their graves. There was more to the explanation, however. A long time ago, at about the beginning of the nineteenth century, an American ship had called at the island with a dead sailor on board, and the captain had asked the current queen—pa ariki—for permission to bury the lad. She had refused, as only Rarotongans were allowed to be interred there, but he had pleaded and her heart had been touched, and she had set aside this piece of ground as a graveyard for foreigners. Then, the sailing ships had stopped calling, and because there were no descendants around the graveyard had been neglected, until the young man had his dream.

Of course, Ron and I were fascinated. The day the young man was gone, his ghost-imposed task finished, we laid down our bicycles and fossicked for the headstones we thought we would find. But we found nothing. Over the decades, any headstones that had been there had been worn away to indecipherable bits of rubble. It was very hot, so I trudged over to where the dead tree's roots cast a patch of shade—and stumbled into the ivy-wreathed hole where those roots had grown. And there I found a grave that had been exposed to the light for the first time in more than one hundred fifty years, with a big, upright headstone where the words were as clear as the day they had been carved. And they read:

"To the Memory of Mary-Ann, the beloved Wife of Captn. A.D. Sherman of the American Whale Ship Harrison, Who departed this life January 5: 1850, Aged 24 Years."

This strange discovery had a thunderbolt-like impact. As I said, life on a tropical island is mostly uneventful, and I suppose that the find had all the greater effect because there was nothing going on to distract me. When I returned to my busy life in New Zealand, though, the questions raised still constantly raged. Had Mary-Ann Sherman been a rebel—some kind of adventuress? Or had she simply been dragged along by her husband to make his life more comfortable? What had she thought of the Pacific and its peoples? How had she died, and what had her life on board ship been like? I scavenged library catalogues, trying to find a book that would reveal the answers, but with total lack of success. I was forced to the conclusion that if the mystery of Mary Ann Sherman was ever to be solved, I had to research it myself.

I started by writing lots of letters. One was to Harry Morton, the author of In the Whale's Wake and The Wind Commands. The only address I had for Professor Morton was the History Department at Otago University in the far south of New Zealand. I had given up hope of getting a reply when the phone rang, and a gruff voice informed me in a Canadian accent that he had retired, and now lived in Blenheim. Then he instructed me to pack a bag, come to town, stay in the family sleep-out, and "go through what I have." Blenheim, now world-famous for the award-winning sauvignon blanc produced in vineyards of the area, is in the Marlborough Sounds at the northern tip of the South Island, and so I had to take a ferry across Cook Strait to get there, which seemed very apt at the time. I remember watching dolphins glide and leap, and talking with enthusiastic young Americans who had come to New Zealand to do their own "OE." Most of all, however, I remember the wealth of information and expertise that Harry bequeathed me. Not only did he let me free with boxes of notes taken from years of studying whaling logs and journals, but he showed me how to collate information, create databases, and write index cards, to create a foundation for history.

After I got home, two important letters arrived. One was from a whaling researcher who is famous for his databases of shipping material, Rhys Richards. He had received my query while on tour in Australia, and his long reply had been handwritten in a series of hotels and motels, jotted down whenever he had a spare moment. Like Harry, he told me about the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau microfilming project, which resulted in an eleven-mile-long collection of American whaling logs and journals, a copy of which is in the Alexander Turnbull Library of the National Library of New Zealand—" You can do no better than exhaust these sources from within New Zealand first," he wrote. Then he advised me to get to New England: "Go first to Mystic Seaport Museum, a recreated working port that includes the Charles W. Morgan that visited NZ in 1842 and 1884. Then visit New Bedford, the real home of US whaling for volume, and then visit its origins on Nantucket." He added, "I really loved the entrée whaling gave me to a side of USA I could never have penetrated otherwise."

Excellent advice, which I could not wait to follow—but, while researching at the Turnbull Library was easy, getting to New England was a hurdle. However, it was solved by the second important letter. The smartly headed page informed me that I had been awarded a Fulbright fellowship to research in the great maritime museums and libraries of New England and Hawaii. It was a miracle. Three years later, when the US-NZ Educational Foundation contracted me to write a history of the first forty years of the Fulbright program in New Zealand, I was delighted. Not only did the job involve interviews with many fascinating and formidable scholars, but it was a chance to record the debt Kiwis like myself owe to the inspiration and support that this wonderful program provides.

I took up the fellowship in May, 1986, two years to the day after the discovery of the grave. The intervening months had been crammed with endless hours of reading microfilms at the library, and reading inter-loaned books about whaling at home. Librarians are magical people. The trick is to tell them about your mission, and they will perform amazing feats to help, something that the staffs of the Alexander Turnbull Library and the library of Victoria University at Wellington do to this very day. Through their auspices, I worked through hundreds of logbooks and journals on microfilm, and many dozens of books about sailing and whaling. Certain logbooks stand out in my memory, though, especially the first microfilmed log I ever read. It was kept by Captain Nelson Waldron on the ship Bowditch from 1849 to 1854, and was stuffed full of strange terminology. Puzzling out the topsails, buntlines, and parrel straps was immensely rewarding, however. Not only did I have a whole new vocabulary, but I learned to understand the ways of a whaleship at sea.

Captain Nelson Waldron made no mention of women at all, which I did not find surprising, because every book I read testified that a whaleship was an acutely macho environment, rough, tough, and intensely male. Then, to my surprise, I found a logbook that mentioned a whaling wife—not Mary Ann Sherman, but someone by the name of Mrs. George Raynor. The ship was the Reindeer, and my reason for reading the log was that the Reindeer had called at Rarotonga, and I thought it might mention Mary Ann's grave. Instead, it was a carping complaint about the captain and his "famaly." The logkeeper, the first mate, was annoyed that the captain and his wife and child were on shore "haveing a good time," while the ship and crew were hanging about waiting for them, instead of being off about their proper business of hunting whales.

The realization that Mary Ann Sherman was not just one lone adventuress—or victim of her husband—came as quite a surprise. It was also a hint that the sailors might not have been thrilled about the presence of the captain's wife on a voyage. Had other women sailed on the Reindeer ? I hunted down the journals written on other Reindeer voyages, and lo, I found that not only had another woman, Adra Ashley, sailed on that ship, in 1856, but she had kept a diary! And what a gossipy account it was—full of chatter about other wives and what they got up to in the Hawaiian Islands. These whaling wives, it seemed, were not adventuresses or victims, but sturdy New England women. How had they coped with the strange seaborne existence—and what did people think of these redoubtable ladies? Intrigued, I turned to the papers.

"LADY WHALERS," blazoned a headline in the New Bedford Whalemen's Shipping List for February 1, 1853, going on to remark, "The Honolulu Friend says that there have been at one time enumerated in Honolulu the wives of twenty-five sea captains, and supposed that one in six of all whaling captains is accompanied by his wife." One in six! The American whaling fleet in the Pacific numbered over five hundred at the time, which meant that there were about ninety of these women sailing at that time—ninety! "Whether this estimate is correct or not, the number is very large," the editor assured me. "The enterprising ladies not only preserve unbroken the ties of domestic life that otherwise would be sundered," he rhapsodized; "not only cheer by their presence the monotony and discomforts of long and perilous voyages, not only exercise a good influence in the discipline of the ship, but they make capital correspondents, and through the female love of letter-writing, keep us well posted up in the catch and prospects of the season."

The editor's motives for writing this were pretty blatant, I thought; obviously, he was tired of captains who blithely sailed over the horizon and forgot to send back reports for the paper to print. And he was right, Victorian women were great writers—of journals as well as letters, which I thought extremely promising. Was there a great fund of female letters and journals hidden somewhere in New England? I was more anxious than ever to get there—and in May 1986 Ron and I, accompanied by our younger son, Alastair, flew to Boston and took the bus to New Bedford. I will never forget the moment of arrival. It was late afternoon, and the town lay spread out in the low light, all its silhouettes familiar because of the reading I had done. The spires of Fairhaven were sketched in the mild spring sky across the Acushnet River, and the cupolas and "widows' walks" of the mansions of County and Orchard Streets glinted near at hand. Because we were making a lengthy stay, we boarded with a family in the historic district; that, added to the fact that the librarians at the Old Dartmouth Historical Society Library at the New Bedford Whaling Museum knew all about my project already, having been deluged with correspondence, made us feel at home right away. I was so much at home, in fact, that when some tourists asked me for directions, I was able to direct them unerringly, because I had studied maps of old New Bedford until I knew them by heart.

Other moments stand out. I remember arriving at the Nicholson Whaling Room at the Providence (Rhode Island) Public Library, and holding the original log-book of the Bowditch, the first log I ever read on microfilm—and my astonishment when Paul Cyr, the genealogist in the Melville Room at the New Bedford Public Library, produced yet another microfilm, of a journal written on the very same voyage by the captain's wife. Her husband had recorded the ship's activities every day for more than five years, without a single mention of Elizabeth, or his two little daughters, not even when one of them was born! And then there was the moment that Paul Cyr informed me that Mary Ann Sherman had probably been illegitimate—and the shock when I found her grave in Padanarum cemetery, because it recorded her death year as 1845, the year she sailed, and not 1850, the date on the stone in Rarotonga. Had she committed such a sin by going off to sea that her adoptive family declared her dead and put up a gravestone to prove it? Probably so, I concluded—because of the first entry in the journal kept at sea by another seafaring Mary, Mary Brewster, which I read at Mystic Seaport Museum.

"With much opposition I left my native land," this other Mary had written; "few had to say one encouraging word—She who has extended a mother's love and watchfulness over me said her consent would never be given in no way would she assist me and if I left her she thought me very ungrateful and lastly though not least Her house would never be a home for me again." It was lucky Mary Brewster's adoptive mother did not go as far as announcing her death, because Mary survived that voyage and at least one more after that—which would have proved quite an embarrassment if a false gravestone had been erected. However, she stuck to her threat, and never again was Mary welcome in her childhood home. Young Mrs. Brewster was a resilient character, however, going on sturdily, "Well thank heaven it is all past and I am on board of the good ship Tiger and with my dear Husband." And from then on she recorded her experiences day by day, describing what it was like trying to create a home in that most undomestic place, a whaling ship at sea.

By the time I arrived back home in New Zealand, I had read and made abstracts of seventy-seven whaling accounts written by women like Mary Brewster. Some were letter collections, some were detailed journals, some were brief diaries, and others were reminiscent accounts. It was a goldmine of material, sufficient for dozens of articles and several books. The first book to be written was a novel, Abigail, which paid homage to the link between New Zealand and the New England I now knew and loved. The story was inspired by Captain William Mayhew of Edgartown, who, with his wife Caroline, came to New Zealand to settle in the eighteen-thirties, before the British had annexed the country. He helped found the first bank, acted as the Vice Consul for the United States, and owned a lot of property, including a half-share in an island. Ruined by the British takeover in February 1840, he returned to Martha's Vineyard. There are lots of stories, too, about his redoubtable wife, Caroline, a doctor's daughter, who was famous for leading a wallaby (a small kangaroo species) about on a string. The one I used in the novel was the story about her saving most of the crew of his ship when it was ravaged by an outbreak of typhoid. In reality she lived to sail another day, but in my story she passed away, leaving a small daughter for William to raise on his own. I called the little girl Abigail, and gave her the surname "Sherman" in honor of Mary Ann Sherman's grave. Her father acted differently from the real William Mayhew, too, fighting for his property instead of giving up and going back to New England. Because of the danger to both her life and her education, Abigail was sent to New Bedford to live with unwelcoming relatives. Rebellious and broken-hearted, she surprised herself by falling in love with the city—just as I did—but after learning that her father had been murdered she determined to get back to New Zealand to claim her inheritance, and after many adventures she managed it.

In many ways, Abigail was the adventuress I once imagined Mary Ann Sherman to be. By now, I had learned that there were no real whaling wives like that; their bravado was different, being the grit and stamina necessary to survive the dangers and discomfort of years-long voyages in far off, badly charted oceans. However, editors in New York, London, and Auckland loved my flamboyant heroine. Abigail was followed by another novel, A Promise of Gold, which had its own sequel, Murder at the Brian Boru. This last book was a very rare bird—a commissioned whodunit. HarperCollins wanted me to write a mystery set in a real mystery weekend hotel, which triggered the strangest research project I have ever carried out, because Ron and I experienced every facet of the business. Over many weekends he and I tended bar, washed dishes, accompanied busloads of tourists, waited at tables, looked after the hotel office, and took part in melodramatic murder mysteries.

There was a set routine. On the Friday evening we arrived at the hotel, in the historic gold-mining district of Thames, and the paying guests were assembled in a firelit Victorian parlor. There, over a lavish supper, they were informed that they would get up early and be taken on an adventure tour of the Coromandel—a spectacular trip that wound through forest-covered ravines to a picture-postcard beach, and involved white-water rafting as well as a freshly caught seafood lunch. Then, after a visit to a goldmine and a stamping mill, their instructions were to disguise themselves in fancy dress, ready for a banquet—and at some time in the midst of the festivities, one of the party would be murdered. The murderer would be one of the staff, or one of the guests—an actor who would have been dropping clues to his or her identity throughout the long day. Ron and I lost count of the times we were either murdered or the murderer—and it is quite a feat to kill off someone at the same time as tending bar! However, everyone enjoyed it immensely, especially the dressing-up part. The proprietress of the hotel provided the costumes, which ranged from priests' habits to pirate gear, and a great deal of eating and drinking and tomfoolery was involved. And hereby hangs another tale.

Drinks being expensive in the hotel, it was quite common for the guests to call into a local wine store for their own supplies. One Friday night I dropped into the store myself, to find that there was a new proprietress, a talkative middle-aged Englishwoman with an upper-crust accent. She asked me if I was staying in town or traveling through, and I told her that I was staying at the Brian Boru—at which she reared back, clapped a hand to her bosom, and exclaimed, "You mustn't! Strange things happen at the Brian Boru," she went on in hushed tones. "They do?" said I, my tone rather strangled. "Indeed!" she cried. "Last Saturday night a priest came in to buy wine, and, without a word of a lie, he was drunk! When he lifted his habit to reach his wallet, he was forced to cling to me to retain his balance. When he had gone, positively reeling down the street, I said to my husband that never would I have believed that I would ever see a man of the cloth under the influence of liquor, and he said to me, 'It's something to do with that Brian Boru, because strange things happen at the Brian Boru.'"

Despite all the books that were mounting up, and these weekends of frivolity, I still clung to my ambition to write a nonfiction account of the experiences of the whaling wives, Petticoat Whalers. Meanwhile, though, a letter arrived from Mystic Seaport Museum, proposing that I transcribe and edit the journals of Mary Brewster, an opportunity I could not possibly resist. I had been fascinated by her ever since the tall book with its marbled covers and blue, lined pages had been put in front of me. Kept on the whaleship Tiger of Stonington, Connecticut, her whaling journals were probably the most candid and self-revealing of all the manuscripts I had read. Previous researchers had been put off by the fact that she was pious and constantly questioned the state of her conscience in a way that is foreign to us now, but I had the experience to know that she was merely typical of her setting and era, and so I had persisted to the end, and enjoyed her dry humor immensely. Devastatingly candid in her opinions, Mary was at her best when describing the posturing of missionaries, and the strange foibles of her husband's brother whaling skippers.

And she could tell a joke against herself, too. A good instance is the time that the Tiger was anchored in a bay off lower California, in company with a number of ships, including a couple where the captains had "season wives"—mistresses—on board. These men were neighbors at home, and their lawful wives were her friends, so Mary was predictably disgusted. When one of the dissolute skippers came on board to pay a call, she decided to take a strong stand (as they used to say in those days), despite the fact she was just starting on a favorite treat, a dish of oysters that were freshly shucked. She stood up—"so prim"—and marched out of the cabin, with a toss of her head. But did the erring captain feel ashamed, did he blush and stammer? Not on your tintype! He grinned; he rubbed his hands together—and sat down and ate her oysters.

Naturally, I accepted the offer of editing her journals like a shot. For the next four years Mary Brewster ruled our household while I looked up books and checked microfilms and wrote footnotes. Another trip to New England was necessary, and this time we lived in the shipyard of the museum. The many thousands who have visited Mystic Seaport will understand at once that this was an out-of-this-world experience, because the museum is a recreated Connecticut village port, complete with tall ships, including the whaler Charles W. Morgan, the full-rigged ship Joseph Conrad, the schooner Brilliant, and the fishing schooner L. A. Dunton. At night when the wind blew and the snow drifted down and the old ships creaked at their moorings while hanging signs in the little streets squeaked back and forth, the nineteenth century engulfed us. In the very early mornings, as the mist rose up from the river, we would be woken by the cheerful singing out of the shipyard workers as they arrived with their tool-boxes and their dinner pails. It was then that I would go to the whaler Charles W. Morgan, walk up the gangplank, duck under the "no admittance" rope, and sit where the captains' wives who had sailed on that ship—Lydia Landers, Charlotte Church, and New Zealander Honor Earle—had sat, and feel what it had been like to be Mary Brewster. At nine o'clock, I would unclip the rope to allow the first tourists of the day on board, and it was like time travel in reverse, back to the present century.

While this book was in production, Petticoat Whalers was published in New Zealand by HarperCollins. It was even better than I dreamed it would be, beautifully designed, enhanced with Ron's sketches and paintings as well as many images of the whaling wives themselves. Then, just as Petticoat Whalers was released in New York, an equally handsome volume, 'She Was a Sister Sailor': The Whaling Journals of Mary Brewster came out—and won the John Lyman Best Book of American Maritime History award. A book tour followed, with the unexpected result that I was approached by two Long Island institutions, the Three Village Historical Society of East Setauket, and the Whaling Museum at Cold Spring Harbor, with the proposition that I be the writer-historian for a big museum exhibit on seafaring wives under sail. Normally, I would have been forced to decline, there being no way we could afford to rent a house on Long Island for the time involved, but again fate intervened. Ron, whose beautiful maritime paintings were beginning to be recognized internationally, and who by this time was a gallery artist with the Mystic Seaport Gallery, was invited by the William Steeple Davis Trust to apply for an artist-in-residence award.

William Steeple Davis (1884-1961) was a self-taught artist who spent his entire life in the little hamlet of Orient, at the tip of the North Fork of Long Island. Having found his own artistic inspiration in the ethereal, ever-changing local scenery, he endowed his small cottage and large barn studio for the use of landscape and maritime artists. It was never going to be easy—there was no stipend, and living in a largely unimproved mid-nineteenth century cottage promised to be quite a challenge. However, we took the plunge, and lived and worked there for the next thirty months. We would not have survived without the unstinting encouragement and support of the local people, but it was one of the most satisfying experiences of our lives. The museum exhibit won funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and for many months, while Ron painted, I scoured Long Island for manuscripts and memories of Long Island wives who sailed under canvas in small coasters, great deep-sea merchant ships, and whalers.

The project was originally inspired by an oil painting that had been presented to the Three Village Historical Society, that in size and solemnity took me back to the great portraits of Maori chiefs of my childhood. This one, however, was of a woman—a woman who had gone with her husband to sea. It was no surprise to me to find that the subject was yet another Mary—Mary Swift Jones—because the painting is so evocative of the same stalwart Yankee femininity. Dressed plainly in black, her dress relieved only by white lace collar and cuffs and the small posy of flowers she holds in one hand, she is composed, formal, and elegant. In 1858, Mary Swift Jones had boarded the China-trade bark Mary & Louisa, and over the next three years had come to know the port of Yokohama as well as her village at home. Though she did not know it, her husband had stowed a coffin in the hold, because she was not expected to survive the voyage. As it happened, Mary Swift Jones did not die until a few days after they had arrived back in New York, and in the meantime she had written long, descriptive letters home. The Society also had access to the eloquent, down-to-earth journals kept by yet another Mary—Mary Rowland, who over a thirty-five-year seagoing existence sailed first on small merchantmen and then on larger ocean-going barks. She was a delight to read, being both forthright and poetic, her descriptions of childbirth, child-rearing, shiphandling, and getting along with the husband she adored unrivaled in their descriptive powers and their honesty. Years later, I had the privilege of submitting a selection of Mary's writing to the magnificent Library of America anthology, American Sea-Writing, and her pithy descriptions of life at sea sit very comfortably alongside extracts from such writers as Jack London and Emerson

Search as I would, though, it seemed impossible to find any record of the hundreds of women who had plied Long Island Sound on little sloops and schooners. In the nineteenth century there were thousands of these humble craft, carrying everything imaginable from horse manure to railroad tracks between New York and Connecticut; they were the trucks of the era. It was only logical that wives and daughters sailed along to cook and clean, sell and buy groceries, and keep accounts, but it seemed as if I would never prove it. Then, one afternoon I was sitting in the William Steeple Davis house idly leafing through the diary, dated 1878, that had been kept by his mother, Carrie Hubbard Davis. I was reading it only because I was living in her house, and felt a natural interest in her daily routine. Then, to my amazement, I read, "I started with Charlie and pa on a Trip in the vessel." Not only had Carrie sailed regularly, but the schooner, named Jacob S. Ellis, was owned by her mother, Jane Culver Hubbard. The revelation was like a magical gift. I had found the evidence I so badly needed of a woman's coasting—right in the house where I lived!

That the exhibit would now be such a well-rounded one was very satisfying, but of course I had a book about the general experiences of seafaring wives taking form in my head, already named Hen Frigates. It was now that living in New York yielded another treasure—literary agent Laura Langlie, who adopted my idea as enthusiastically as she took me on as a client. Just a couple of weeks after I sent her the proposal, Ron and I were carrying out some research at the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine, when I got the message that I was needed urgently on the phone. Laura had sold the proposal to Simon & Schuster, and she was even more excited about it than Ron and I were.

Hen Frigates, included by the New York Public Library in its list of Books to Remember for 1998, led to a kind of sequel, She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea. In reality it is a kind of anthology, being my mostly lighthearted tribute to the maritime adventuresses I had pictured back in May 1984, after the discovery of the grave in Rarotonga. The stories range over several thousand years, and cover all kinds of maritime women, from female captains and petticoat pirates to lady shipbuilders and cross-dressed marines. If I were asked to name a favorite in this line-up of resourceful females, I would probably choose Mistress Agnes Cowtie of sixteenth-century Dundee, who owned a fleet of little ships that carried wool to Europe and returned with timber, iron, and wine. In 1582, her ship Grace of God was seized and sacked by English pirates. Two rogues, Clynton and Purser, killed her two sons, and then horribly tortured her "especial mariners" to extract the information of where the ship's box of bullion was stored. After the survivors, barefooted, blind, and crippled, arrived back in Dundee, Mistress Cowtie took her passionate protest to the baillies—the town magistrates. However, though they were sympathetic, they could do nothing more than petition Lord Walsingham. So Agnes wrote to King James VI of Scotland—and he sent a letter to his cousin, Elizabeth of England. Forthwith, Queen Elizabeth instructed a Judge of the Admiralty, Sir Julius Caesar, to capture the men who had seized the Grace of God. Not only did he succeed in that, but he cleared the English seas of pirates—and all because of an obstinate and angry female shipowner in Scotland.

The publication of She Captains marked a kind of closure to my full-length studies of women and the sea. As a project, this little-known aspect of women's history had proved immensely rewarding. Still today, I get many written and e-mailed queries about the wives' experiences on board ship, and descendants, who are proud of the sea-letters and diaries they hold, write to tell me about them. Some even photocopy these materials, and send the copy as a much appreciated gift. Usually, I ask permission to lodge the manuscript in some appropriate library or museum, so that other researchers can have the reward and pleasure of reading it, and more often than not the owners are glad for me to do so.

My books have also been surprisingly controversial. Feminist historians tend to disapprove of the pictures I draw of women who were proud to have a swept cabin floor and a saloon table loaded with good things to eat. I suspect they would be happier with women who rebelled against the demands of their society—and their menfolk. Obviously, most modern women would behave very differently if time travel whisked them back in time, to a windjammer at work, but I firmly believe that historical characters should be considered in the context of their own time and setting. The question I always ask myself after I have described one of these women is, would she recognize herself in these pages? If I believe the answer would be yes, then I am happy—and, to do my readers and critics justice, most of them are happy, too.

Apart from annual visits to New York and New England on research trips and author tours, Ron and I are now firmly settled in New Zealand. Despite the fact that most of my focus has been on America, the New Zealand creative community has been very supportive—and in 2001 I had the particular honor of being designated the John David Stout Fellow at Victoria University, Wellington, a position I held for the full academic year. The Fellowship is within the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies, incorporating the Treaty of Waitangi Research Unit, which is devoted to the study of our culture and our past, both European and Maori. This is another harking-back to those great portraits of Maori chiefs that were such an unconventional prop in our childhood games, and those three years I spent in Maori schools; it reminds me, too, of the Pacific collection in the university library that I delved through during my spell as a printer's devil in Toronto. Now, because I am surrounded by New Zealand researchers and historians, and listen to their lively discussions, I link New Zealand and New England differently. Instead of looking at the Pacific from the point of view of the Americans who sailed here, I view those American mariners from the Pacific perspective, measuring the impact that they had on the communities of Oceania.

The first book that resulted from this new perspective was In the Wake of Madness, which Algonquin published in May 2003. It is a retelling of a notorious mutiny on board the whaleship Sharon in 1842. In this once-famous but now forgotten incident, three Pacific Islanders assassinated Captain Howes Norris while the rest of the crew were off in the boats whaling. Then, they tried to flee with the ship. The attempt was foiled by the gallant third mate, Benjamin Clough, who swam on board in the dark of the night and single-handedly recaptured the vessel. The rousing story has been retold many times in books and papers, because Clough's undeniable heroism is such a sure seller. I looked at it differently, however—from my new Pacific perspective. Why had the natives slaughtered Norris? No one had asked that question properly before, because it had been assumed that savages, being "savage," did not need a reason. But I was certain not only that the three islanders had some motive for the crime, but that it was an overwhelmingly compelling one. They were seven hundred miles from the nearest inhabited land, and three men could not have sailed such a large ship so far on their own, so the murder must have been both unpremeditated and sudden. Something devastating had sparked the attack—but what?

Two of the three natives were killed during the recapture of the ship. The third was found cowering in the hold next day, but his only excuse was that "the captain was cross." What did that mean? At home in Martha's Vineyard, Norris was respected as a lucky and conscientious whaling master; he had the reputation of a good husband and kind parent. Did he behave differently at sea? Did he have a savage temper, for instance? I hunted down every record available, and found the last key to the secret when a descendant allowed me access to the journal kept by the heroic third mate himself, which is still in family hands. What I read gave me nightmares. For eight months, Captain Norris had tortured one of his black seamen, and then, in a frenzied rage, he had beaten him to death. In the weeks leading up to his murder, he was "beating and pounding the Kanakas"—the native seamen he had picked up when the ship called at various Pacific islands. So, when the three islanders attacked him, were they literally afraid for their lives?

This awful unfolding story was something I felt driven to write. It had special New Zealand significance, too. After Norris was murdered, the ship called at the Bay of Islands, and there the true account was whispered about the grogshops. As I have said before, Kiwis are traditionally on the side of the underdog, and these stories of sadism on the quarterdeck—and Norris was by no means the only brutal shipmaster—meant guaranteed public support for any beleaguered Yankee seaman with a complaint about his boss. In fact, ships taken over by disaffected seamen deliberately steered for New Zealand. In 1884 the U.S. consul, Gilderoy Wells Griffin, complained in a letter to the State Department that his job was much harder in New Zealand than elsewhere, because "there is a general opinion throughout the Colony that American ship-masters are proverbially cruel and brutal to their sailors."

This led to the very strange affair of the Connecticut sealing schooner Sarah W. Hunt—a different story from the dark tale of the Sharon, but equally intriguing. In December 1883 the schooner arrived in Port Lyttelton in the South Island of New Zealand flying a flag of distress, with only the captain and the steward on board. By themselves, they had sailed the 116-ton vessel five hundred miles through the most storm-wracked, tempestuous seas in the world. It was an amazing accomplishment—but what, the locals asked, had happened to the other men? They had been lost off Campbell Island in the sub-Antarctic, said Captain Miner; he had given up all hope for their survival.

Because of the poor record of Yankee captains, the members the Christchurch Chamber of Commerce chose not to believe him. They petitioned the government for a search party to be sent to Campbell Island, but time went by and they lost patience, handed round the hat, and raised money to hire the government steamer Stella for the search—and the steamer arrived back in Port Chalmers, Otago, with six crippled, frostbitten survivors on board, the castaways of Campbell Island. The other six men, they said, had been lost. All hell broke loose as the headlines hit papers around the nation. Consul Griffin, a very competent and honorable U.S. representative, was forced to travel to Christchurch to supervise what rapidly turned into an international incident.

There is a book in this, of course, already named Perseverance Harbour in my mind—Perseverance Harbour being the anchorage at Campbell Island where the schooner originally dropped her anchor, and where the six castaways landed with the expectation that the captain would be waiting there, and glad to see them. It is also apt because they endured a shocking eleven-day ordeal in a small open boat to get there. "Perseverance" also describes the diplomatic efforts of United States Consul Gilderoy Wells Griffin—a most able man, who was every bit as colorful as his predecessors in the surprisingly difficult job of representing the United States in New Zealand—to mediate between the public, the press, the survivors, the U.S. State Department, and the New Zealand Government.

Apart from this book, where will my new direction lead me? A mystery novel beckons—staged on the U.S. exploring expedition which sailed to the Pacific in 1838. A young Maori chief is with the fleet as the captain's translator. What would his shipmates look like, from his Polynesian point of view …and how would he set about solving a murder?

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American History Illustrated, July-August, 1993, review of "She Was a Sister Sailor": The Whaling Journals of Mary Brewster, p. 17.

Atlantic, August 1, 1998, review of Hen Frigates: Wives of Merchant Captains under Sail, p. 104.

Booklist, May 15, 1998, Margaret Flanagan, review of Hen Frigates: Wives of Merchant Captains under Sail, p. 1570; February 15, 2000, Donna Seaman, review of She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea; September 15, 2000, William Beatty, review of Rough Medicine: Surgeons at Sea in the Age of Sail, p. 197.

Choice, April, 2001, review of Rough Medicine: Surgeons at Sea in the Age of Sail.

Journal of the American Medical Association, April 11, 2000, Hans A. Brings, "Nautical Medicine," p. 1894.

Journal of the Early Republic, winter, 1993, Mary Zwiep, review of "She Was a Sister Sailor": The Whaling Journals of Mary Brewster, p. 582.

Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2003, review of In the Wake of Madness: The Murderous Voyage of the Whaleship Sharon, p. 359.

Kliatt, September, 2003, Sunnie Grant, review of In the Wake of Madness: The Murderous Voyage of the Whaleship Sharon, p. 60.

Library Journal, July, 1998, Roseanne Castellino, review of Hen Frigates: Wives of Merchant Captains under Sail, p. 108; March 15, 2000, Roseanne Castellino, review of She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea, p. 104; March 15, 2003, Robert C. Jones, review of In the Wake of Madness: The Murderous Voyage of the Whaleship Sharon, p. 96.

New York Times Book Review, July 26, 1998, "First Helpmates"; March 26, 2000, Louise Jarvis, "Dames at Sea," p. 15; May 4, 2003, Peter Nichols, "Psycho at Sea," p. 16.

Publishers Weekly, November 16, 1992, review of "She Was a Sister Sailor": The Whaling Journals of Mary Brewster, 1845-1851, p. 55; January 31, 2000, review of She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea; December 18, 2000, review of Rough Medicine: Surgeons at Sea in the Age of Sail, p. 70; April 28, 2003, review of In the Wake of Madness: The Murderous Voyage of the Whaleship Sharon, p. 61.

ONLINE

Joan Druett Web site,http://members.authorsguild.net/druettjo (November 17, 2003).