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- [00:01]
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- [00:57]
Tila J. Mazzeo
You have questions? They've got answers. Hey Meta, what's the capital of Peru?
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Meta Glasses AI
Lima.
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Advertiser
How do you say where's the restroom in Spanish?
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Tila J. Mazzeo
Dondes Talvano.
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Advertiser
Hey Mera, is a hot dog a sandwich?
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Narrator/Advertiser
Technically, no.
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Advertiser
Spiritually, yes.
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Tila J. Mazzeo
Hey Meta, what should I do with my life?
- [01:17]
Narrator/Advertiser
That's one of life's biggest questions.
- [01:19]
Advertiser
What do you think?
- [01:21]
Tila J. Mazzeo
Ask anything with the new Meta glasses.
- [01:24]
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- [02:00]
Narrator/Podcast Intro
In the mid 19th century, clipper ships raced around the globe, carrying valuable cargo through some of the world's most dangerous waters in an age of speed, risk and extraordinary ambition. But when illness struck during one such voyage, a young woman found herself in command of a vessel, battling storms, mutiny and impossible odds. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, author and historian Tila J. Mazzeo tells Eleanor Evans about the astonish true story behind her book, to the Edge of the World.
- [02:35]
Eleanor Evans
Thank you so much, Tila, for joining us on today's History Extra podcast.
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Tila J. Mazzeo
How are you doing? Great. Thanks for the invite.
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Eleanor Evans
It's wonderful to be talking with you about your book, which I loved so much, and I can't wait to get started. And I hoped before we go into the story Proper. Whether you can situate us in the era of the clipper ship. What is it about this vessel that is so important for our listeners to understand, and how is it changing the world at this time?
- [02:59]
Tila J. Mazzeo
Yeah, so we're talking about the 1850s, right? Just to situate us in time and then to situate us in space. We're talking about basically, cargo routes that go from New York to San Francisco to Hong Kong to London is the primary sort of transit. And clipper ships are these immensely powerful, fast, overpowered, dangerous, beautiful sailing vessels that are essentially the FedEx of the mid 19th century. So if you have commodities that you need to get at great speed from among those different locations, Clipper ships are how you do it. And really, it was a trade in which, in order to make vast amounts of money, ships owners incentivized young men to take terrible risks in order to make their fortunes.
- [03:47]
Eleanor Evans
And it's into this risky global story that your wonderful story takes place. Can we bring in here Joshua and Mary Paton? Can you introduce your figures for us?
- [03:57]
Tila J. Mazzeo
So Joshua Patton comes from a family in an area around Rockland, Maine, which is Penobscot Bay, which in this day and age is not something your listeners are likely to ever heard of. But in that moment in time, everybody would have known where Rockland, Maine was, because it was one of the great shipmaking capitals of the world. So you would have been as likely to have known Rockland, Maine, as you were Liverpool or London in that era. And so Joshua comes from a family of sea captains, and he is sent out to sea quite young, probably at 13 or 14, and by the time he's in his early 20s, he's become a sea captain. And there's a kind of fork in the road, as it were, for sea captains. You can either be a sea captain on the smaller vessels that run up and down the coast, coastal cruisers. And you can make an okay living. And you can sometimes be home and see your wife and watch your children grow up, or you can decide that you want to be a captain of an extreme clipper on these round the world dangerous voyages. And you can become something like what we would consider today an athlete or a rock star. They were very, very well known. So this is what Joshua decides that he wants to do. He wants to go really, really fast and to sail these huge, beautiful ships and to make a fortune. But he falls in love with a young woman, and she's very young when they get married. She's 15 when they get married. He falls in love with a Young woman named Mary Ann Brown, whose father is a really low ranking seaman and they, they have just this incredible love story and they get married and they can't bear to be parted. So he ends up having to decide whether he's going to give up his dream of being an extreme clipper sea captain or whether the sea captain's wife is going to sail around the world with him, which is not unheard of, but is still pretty unusual and extraordinary.
- [05:52]
Eleanor Evans
Their relationship is central to the story we're about to get into. I want to just stay on this analogy, this wonderful analogy you provide us with in the book of clipper captains as the rock stars of this day. And can you give us a sense just of how they would command and manoeuvre these vessels? I think there's one moment where you talk about a captain backing a ship into a port.
- [06:12]
Tila J. Mazzeo
That's one of my favourite moments as well. I mean, it's a little bit tangential to the rest of the narrative of that story, but I couldn't not include that in the book because it's such an amazing feat. So this is a story about a quite well known, a famous sea captain of a clipper ship. And there would be these informal or formal, that could be both ways, races, because part of what happened is that these ships owners wanted to incentivize these men because time was money, right? Everything was about speed, because the faster the speed, the more you could command for that cargo. So there were a whole series of informal and formal races among these sea captains. And this was a race that was going from New York, I think it was, maybe it was Boston. It was either Boston or New York, somewhere on the Eastern seaboard to Liverpool. And coming into Liverpool in particular is quite difficult because the tidal swings are very, very extreme and you can get fog and weather that makes it quite treacherous to come in. So there was this one sea captain who was determined to win the race and also to set the speed record for getting into Liverpool. And he arrives, and when he arrives, none of the pilots will take him in. And he decides that he's not going to give up his record. He is going to take himself into the harbor, which is already incredibly risky as a gamble. And then, and there are huge numbers of crowds of people who are watching this feat on the docks in Liverpool. He not only docks under sail, but he backs a huge clipper ship. We're talking boats that are routinely more than 200ft long with, you know, more than a dozen sails. He backs it into the berth and I don't know if you're a sailor, but if you're a sailor, you know that backing, even docking under sail takes a huge amount of this takes nerves of steel and incredible skill. And to back it in was really sort of an unheard of feat of seamanship and, you know, absolute bravura. And the crowds, of course, are going crazy on the docks in Liverpool, applauding. What they understand is this just absolute showmanship. And it's soon reported in newspapers around the world.
- [08:24]
Eleanor Evans
I'm not a sailor myself, so I loved reading about this, didn't have that appreciation. But we should say that you are a sailor and you followed in the footsteps of these figures as well, which I'd love to get into in a little while. But if we return to Joshua and Marianne in this story, Joshua's in this world, isn't he? He's part of the racing. He is taking command. What are his ambitions in this world? What does success look like for him?
- [08:47]
Venmo Advertiser
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- [08:47]
Tila J. Mazzeo
So there was something that was known at that time as a competence. Basically. A competence was the amount of money that you needed to earn to retire to your country estate and be a gentleman and never have to work again. Right. And he had grown up in a middle class family. Marianne is from a very impoverished working class family. Her family are quite recent immigrants to the United States from Yorkshire. But he's from a middle class, but not a particularly wealthy background. And what he wants is to earn a competence. And a competence at that time was $100,000 U.S. so, you know, a couple million bucks maybe would be the equivalent, enough that you could put it in kind of an investment and live off your 5% return and be a gentleman. And what they wanted was to get their competence. And they had bought a piece of. When they were right before he marries Marianne, he goes and buys a piece of land on a river called the West Gig river in Maine, which is a piece of land that was very emotionally important to him because it had been part of his mother's lost inheritance. And what they want is to build a farm on the river and have a big family and retire from the sea. But in order to do that, most sea captains needed to do three circumnavigations. That was kind of a typical number of times that you had to do that tour from the Eastern seaboard around Cape Horn at the bottom of South America, to San Francisco, onto Hong Kong and then past the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, back to London or Liverpool, and then back again to New York, you had to do that three times in order to get your competence. And the problem was that the mortality rates were incredibly high. So every time you did a circumnavigation, the chance of not making it home was a real one.
- [10:36]
Eleanor Evans
So these are the factors that he's weighing up. And his new young wife are in love. What do they decide to do?
- [10:43]
Tila J. Mazzeo
So he is given the opportunity to become the captain of an extreme clipper. And he's young and he hasn't done a circumnavigation before. And so the deal that he strikes with the ship's owners and the brokers is that he will take less than the usual amount of money if they will give him the chance to go around the world in an extreme clipper and if they will let him take Marianne. And again, it's not unheard of for sea captains wives to do this.
- [11:14]
Eleanor Evans
It's just.
- [11:15]
Tila J. Mazzeo
It's unusual, really quite unusual because it's such a miserable situation. For any sea captain's wife. One of the unwritten rules of the sea is that she's not allowed to talk to anybody except the captain and the first mate and the steward, which is basically their, you know, their private waiter, you know, their servant. And unless there are other private paying passengers on board, she's not allowed to talk to anybody. And it's not as if she's allowed to wander the ship. She's allowed to walk up and down one particular area on the quarter deck and that's it. So Marianne was very limited in terms of what she could do on the ship, both in terms of who she could talk to, but also where she could go. She was not allowed to go what was known as before the mast, which is where the crew lived. She was restricted really to walking up and down on one side of a kind of platform at the back of the ship. So most captains wives would not be mad enough or in love enough to think that spending a year or two in very, very dangerous situations with nobody to talk to was a fun idea. Most of them chose to stay home.
- [12:22]
Eleanor Evans
It gives us a really strong sense, doesn't it, of their bond and how they were feeling about each other and their marriage.
- [12:27]
Tila J. Mazzeo
I think they were just madly in love with each other. I mean, all of the later testimonies about what happens is what an absolutely devoted wife. She in a kind of, you know, that's really not the devotion. It was the devotion of a young couple who were really, truly in love with each other and wanted nothing more than to have a life together.
- [12:45]
Eleanor Evans
Right. And Marianne wanted a stake in the life that they were forging for the pair of them as well. Yeah. So into this, we should probably bring a little bit about how navigation was carried out at sea at this time and how it was changing, because this becomes important later.
- [12:59]
Tila J. Mazzeo
Yeah. So this is a moment in time where they don't have GPS and satellite, they don't even have radar. Right. So none of those modern navigational technologies are available, and instead they rely on a system known as celestial navigation. And celestial navigation is really kind of magical. It was one of the. One of the things I like to do when I'm working on a book is to do sort of the follow your footsteps kind of research. So, you know, I did go to the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego and I got to see Cape Horn and I even went as far as Antarctica in the research for this. But the other thing that I did is I joined a series of courses to learn celestial navigation, which as a sailor I had not known.
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Eleanor Evans
That's impressive.
- [13:43]
Tila J. Mazzeo
It was really neat as well, because it is kind of this magical thing where if you know the position of the stars and the planets in the sky. Right. And the sun, you know, obviously being one of the stars in the, you know, in our solar system. So if you know where those are, the constellations are at what time of the year, which is all listed for you in an almanac. And if you have just a watch, or what they would have called a chronometer, and if you have a sextant, which is just basically, it's like, you know, remember in middle school they all had those protractors, it's basically a kind of protractor, for the sky is really all it is. And if you have those three things, you can take a sighting at midday anywhere in the world, and you can find exactly where you are, what your latitude and longitude is. And it's kind of amazing the idea that you could figure out where in the world you were by having very, very basic instrumentation and reading the stars. And of course, if you also happen to have a chart, then you could find your way home from anywhere. And these were people who very much wanted to find their way home again. Right. So that was the technique for how it is. You fig out where you were going to go in a world without modern navigational equipment. And what was really unusual about Marianne is that even though she was from a very impoverished working class background, she happened to learn to read. And that's because she grew up in the north end of Boston, near the Old North Church, you know, the one that Paul Revere does his midnight ride from.
- [15:22]
Meta Glasses AI
Right.
- [15:23]
Tila J. Mazzeo
So she's a parishioner at that church. And they have one of the first Sunday schools in America. And the Sunday schools were invented to teach working class kids how to read and write, not as some progressive mission, but because the ladies of Boston wanted more cultivated servants. I mean, it was ultimately, you know, ultimately the reason for this social program. And so she happens to learn how to read. And because she can read on that first circumnavigation that she and Joshua do, she's bored. She can't talk to anybody. There's no other passengers. So what she does is she learns celestial navigation and how to manage the sails on a clipper.
- [16:05]
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- [19:01]
Tila J. Mazzeo
Hey, I just Venmo'd you for rent.
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- [19:09]
Tila J. Mazzeo
Say more.
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- [19:18]
Tila J. Mazzeo
So order more pizza.
- [19:19]
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- [19:21]
Tila J. Mazzeo
Get the Venmo debit card.
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- [19:31]
Eleanor Evans
So they are at sea. Marianne has taken this upon herself. Take us onto the deck of a clipper ship. At this stage, what are the risks? What sort of challenges are they facing as they navigate the seas?
- [19:42]
Tila J. Mazzeo
So clippers are particularly dangerous, Right? All seafaring was dangerous. I mean, there's. Especially in an age without modern navigation or really good charts, especially in parts of the world that are relatively unknown in many regards. And, you know, even today they think that what, maybe a million people have ever gone as far as Antarctica, Almost all of them in the last 20 years.
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Eleanor Evans
Wow.
- [20:05]
Tila J. Mazzeo
So we're talking about travel to remote parts of the world that were lightly inhabited or not inhabited. So there was always a risk of any seafaring. I mean, we're familiar because cars are the primary mode of transportation with people dying in car crashes. In the mid-19th century, people were familiar with people dying in shipwrecks it was a common occurrence where the newspapers would list the arrival of ships so that if you were waiting to find out if your loved ones had made it somewhere or not, you could know whether the ships had arrived or not. So that was the first risk that they inherently faced. In other parts of the world, there were real risks of piracy, especially off the coast of Hong Kong. A lot of people who were being pressurized by imperialism and colonialism didn't take kindly to that and, you know, fought back. So there were those kinds of risks. But to both be also on the deck of a clipper ship, that's an extreme clipper, which is what Neptune's car, their vessel was, was a very particular kind of danger as well. Because these were ships, because they were built for speed, they were vastly overpowered, which means they had massive sails, you know, dozens of sails, and they had these very, very narrow bodies so that they could cut through the water quickly. And the problem was that they were just top heavy. So in heavy seas, extreme clippers were very, very likely to crash. And my father was a merchant mariner, and he says that as late as, you know, the 1960s and 1970s, it was still understood that as a sailor, as a mariner, often in far parts of the world, it was better to not know how to swim, because if your ship went over or you fell off, you were better off drowning quickly than suffering for a long time while you waited for help that wasn't going to be able to come. So we know that on every ship, on every voyage, statistically, somebody was lost on every voyage. So there might be a crew of 30 or 40. You would usually lose one person per trip, sometimes more than that, sometimes, you know, sometimes many more than that in very heavy weather. And it would be things like crews climbing way up in the rigging, climbing up to adjust the sails hundreds of feet above the sea and falling. And I mean, if you were lucky, you probably hit the deck and died quickly. If you were less lucky, you fell into the sea and nobody could turn around to get you. But also incredibly beautiful. I mean, you know, these were some of the most majestic ships in seafaring history.
- [22:39]
Eleanor Evans
So myriad risks, but also, as you say, the commercial reward is immense if you can succeed in these journeys. And also the beauty that you're sailing in when you can get it right, sounds incredible. So we're moving towards the event that's central in your book. There's a voyage in 1855, 56, that becomes a real turning point in Joshua and Marianne's life. Take us into the beginnings of this story.
- [23:02]
Tila J. Mazzeo
So it's their second circumnavigation, right? Their first circumnavigation. They go around the world, they do quite well. Joshua is learning the ins and outs of the tea trade. I mean, there were two very, very economically profitable parts of this journey. One of them was delivering things to California for the gold R. I mean, there's that old quip that the people who made money in the gold rush were not the 49ers, but were the people who were selling the pickaxes. And as a captain, he had a share in the sale of pickaxes. So you could make a lot of money in San Francisco at that period during the gold rush. And then the other place that you could make a huge amount of money was in the tea trade, buying tea in China or Hong Kong and delivering it to London for the first tea of the season. So they go and they do their first circumnavigation. He's learning about the tea trade. They've made a lot of money, they're well on their way to a competence and they get an offer to do a second circumnavigation with the same ship. And this time everything goes wrong from the beginning. They're about to leave. And their trusted first mate, which is the second in command and is a person of interest. Incredible power. On board a ship, the sea captain is the master. He has the decision of life and death in his power. Really at sea, it's an absolutely military regime of control. And the first mate, who is the second in command is the person who has the only person who has anything approximating the equal status of the captain. And if something happens to the captain, the first mate should automatically become the captain. So they had traveled around the world with the first mate that they liked and trusted. And as they were doing the final preparations in New York, he falls through an open hatch and breaks his leg. Well, and you can't circumnavigate with a broken leg. So he's out of commission for this voyage. And Joshua goes to the ship's owner and he tries to convince him that they should delay the voyage until another first mate can be found. But time is money and this is a four way race. This one is a quite formal four way race among different ship's owners. And the ship's owner says, no, I will find you a first mate. And he does. He finds this thuggish, violent first mate, sort of the dregs of the docks. The only person who was available on 24 hours notice to become a first mate. And this first mate is imposed upon Joshua. And they set out. And by the time they are not yet even as far as the northern part of South America, the first mate and Captain Patton have already come very close to blows. Because the first mate is completely derelict in his duties. He's engaged in insubordination. He falls asleep deliberately on watch. He's not trying to make sail. He's losing them time. He's back talking the captain to the point where Joshua has already had to threaten to lock him up down in the brig. But at that point, he hasn't. As they come further down and Joshua's not feeling well. I mean, that's the other thing thing is that he's not feeling at all well. And this is the era of what was known then as the white plague. And what we would know today as tuberculosis was a terrible epidemic. And tuberculosis was a particularly cruel disease because it tended to strike down the young, Kind of like the Spanish flu epidemic. So Joshua's not feeling well, and they're coming down the coast. And by the time they get to the sort of first really treacherous passage, which is the strait of Le Maire, which is basically just before you make the turn toward Tierra del Fuego, at the very bottom of, like I said, would be Argentina. And Chile is the next country over. So just as you're coming around the coast of Argentina, there's this very, very narrow passage that has very heavy seas. And just as they're coming through this, Joshua has already now had to put the first mate, has demoted him and has put him in chains. They've basically come to blow almost, you know, at gunpoint. Cause Joshua does carry a pistol. And at that moment, Joshua collapses because he is so exhausted and is so feverish, he just falls to the deck in the middle of this incredibly dangerous transit through the strait of Le Maire.
- [27:29]
Eleanor Evans
So you've got this mistrusted first mate who's been committing insubordination. Joshua is unable to be at the helm. Take us through the remarkable events of what happens next.
- [27:39]
Tila J. Mazzeo
So normally, if the first mate had not been demoted, he would have automatically become captain. But because he's been demoted and is in the brig, then in that case, the chain of command is that the second mate should automatically become the captain. And the second mate is a good guy. But the problem is that the second mate is not literate. And that is a hard ceiling for moving up beyond the rank of second mate. Because the primary job of A captain and a first mate is navigation. And if you can't read the almanac and you can't read the. In order to take the recordings that you need to do the math, because there is some kind of basic trigonometry required to do celestial navigation, then you can't navigate and you can't ever become a captain. So for this guy, it's kind of a, you know, it's a kind of a tragic story, right? He's a great sailor. He's a really great guy. But because he has not had the benefit of that education, he can never progress in this world beyond the rank that he's at as second mate. So at that point, Marianne decides that the only thing to do is that she's gonna have to take command of the ship herself. So she says to the second mate, look, you manage the crew, I will do the navigation. And a lot of these men have already come around the world with her once, and they know that she is. I mean, she is genuinely one of the most talented sailors of her generation. I mean, later, when people tell this story, what they say is, you know, in an era of great clipper sea captains, there might have been one or two other sea captains who could have rivaled the skill of Mary Patton.
- [29:19]
Eleanor Evans
And she's 19.
- [29:20]
Tila J. Mazzeo
She's 19 at the time. Yeah. So at this point, because this first circumnavigation was a couple of years, so by now she's 19. The other part of the story is she's also pregnant. And she may or may not know this by now. I suspect she probably has an inkling. The crew does not know this yet, but they will certainly know it by the time that the story ends, that she will be heavily pregnant by the time the story ends. So she makes this decision, and for the first couple of days, right? I mean, they're in the middle of this terrible storm. They're about ready to make the turn. So as you come through the Strait of Le Maire, what happens is at the very bottom of the world is Drake's Passage. And Drake's Passage is still considered probably the most dangerous stretch of water in the world, because what happens at the bottom of the world is there's no landmass to stop the wind and the waves. It just runs around and around and around. Terrible circle. So the currents run very quickly, and so do the wind and so do the waves. So you can have really gale force winds on an average day in Drake's Passage. So incredibly steep, heavy seas. And then the other problem is that if you're going from New York to San Francisco, you're fighting, you're going the wrong way, right? All of the wind and waves are coming back right against you. And I know you'd said, Eleanor, that you're not a sailor, but if you were a sailor, you would know that sailors killed cannot sail straight into the wind. Right? Sailing straight into the wind is known as coming into irons, which is to say your boat is going nowhere. So you have to zigzag your way across this passage. And what they say in Drake's Passage is that you need to do whatever you need to do to make westerly. In other words, to try to get yourself far enough west that you can make the turn around Cape Horn, which is this rocky archipelago, and finally make the turn onto the west side of the. Of the South American continent. But the chances of doing this, the deck is hugely stacked against you, especially in bad weather. So where Joshua collapses, they're just about to make the turn into the full force of Drake's Passage. So for the first couple of days, they're in heavy weather. The crew is like, okay, you know, maybe the captain's still gonna be okay, and he's gonna be better quickly. And she's got command of the ship with the second mate. They don't really think about it a whole lot for the first few days, but in those days, they're now in Drake's Passage and they are not making any headway. And at about the third or fourth day at sea, she can tell that the crew is starting to lose faith in her. And the first mate, who has been locked down below, is agitating a mutiny. He's trying to persuade people. The cook in particular, seems to have been a weak link in the chain, trying to persuade the crew that they should release him from the brig and from his irons, and they should restore him to command of the ship. And Marianne knows that if he does that, she and Joshua probably will not survive because mutiny is a capital offense if they get back to the United States or to the United Kingdom. And the other thing is that he will turn tail and run, and he will take them into a port. All of the seamen will find work on another ship, and she and Joshua will be completely financially ruined.
- [32:46]
Eleanor Evans
So the deck is really stacked against her. And this really came across for me in your book as well. She's obviously this hugely talented navigator, but there are moments of just really hold your breath waiting, and as well, as, you know, you describe waves that are stories high in a very Vivid way. And this storm they're in. But there are also moments where they go into these lulls. And it shows, I think, her strength of character, that she's able to maintain the control that she. I thought that was so striking.
- [33:14]
Advertiser
Yeah.
- [33:14]
Tila J. Mazzeo
I think. I mean, by the time she makes it there, right? A spoiler alert for your listeners. But by the time they make it to San Francisco, it's when the ship finally does come in to port. It comes in in the best shape, people say, of any ship that had arrived in recent memory in San Francisco. And for anybody who was a seafarer in that moment in time, that was the sign that she had been a great captain, right? Because crews only did that, right, if they had a great leader. So what happens? I mean. Cause there's this incredibly dramatic moment. Again, it's a little bit of a spoiler alert, but. So they're at the bottom of Cape Horn, right? And this is the moment that the crew decides really to trust her and to invest in her as a leader. So they're there. It's four days out. Keeler is about ready to have a mute, right? So he sends her a letter and he says, you know, I demand that you put me back in charge. You're a woman. You're not a sea captain. You know, this is my right. So she decides that she's gonna have to confront the situation head on. So she goes up onto the deck and she takes his pistol, right? And she's got this wrapped around her waistband. And, you know, by now her dress is tight. She knows she's pregnant, right? So she goes up and she says, look, the first mate has sent me this letter. And, you know, in another world, that would true, right? I mean, normally that's true. He should be the captain, but he's a thug. He was demoted. My husband is not dead. He is still the captain. And the captain's orders are these. And I'm going to follow the captain's orders. I am going to command this ship until my husband can do it again. And I am asking you not to mutiny. And she says this. And this is in the middle of it, as you say, incredibly heavy seas. I mean, they're in the middle of a terrible storm. One of the worst storms in several years. A number of the other people who are in this race with them do not survive this journey. One of the other ships, captained by a man named Phineas Windsor. I mean, they see each other at one moment in this passage, and Captain Windsor tries to signal for help. And Marianne can't help him. And there's this terrible story where he keeps having men get washed oversea. And they then at one moment, one of the young seamen is his favorite nephew, and he watches his own nephew get washed out to sea and die. And he records in his ship logs about how he just falls to his knees in tears, and then he just takes down the sail and lets the storm spit them back out and abandons the journey, right? So they're in the middle of absolute extremis in terms of the weather at this moment. So she says, I am asking you to let me be captain. And not mute. She turns, and she's gonna go back down to the captain's quarters. She's gonna lock the door with her and Joshua. And if they mutiny, she's gonna try to hold them off at gunpoint and hope that she survives. And of course, there's always the inherent risk of sexual violence as well. She's the only woman on a ship in what is going to be a criminal act, right? Which she and Joshua are not going to survive because dead men tell no tales, right? So. So she turns, and at that moment, she suddenly hears this cracking. And it takes her this moment to realize that what's happening is the crew is applauding. And the crew later says that they had never had any intention of this, right? That it was completely spontaneous, but that in this moment, they start applauding and then they start calling out, captain Patton. Captain Patton. And then she realizes that they mean her and that they have just. And she becomes, in that moment, the first woman ever acclaim as a captain of a merchant vessel. And at that moment, they later tell the story about how the old salts had tears in their eyes. I mean, everybody understood what an extraordinary moment this was, because declaring her the captain was not declaring a woman their equal. It was declaring a woman their master, right? I mean, it was a completely profound moment in terms of the overturning of these kind of natural hierarchies. And so in that moment, they acclaim her captive. And then she proceeds to act with incredible courage as the storm gets worse and worse. Because finally, she, like Captain Windsor, is required to acknowledge that they cannot survive the storm. That if they continue to try to make westerly around Cape Horn, the waves will crush the ship. So at that moment, she makes the decision to turn and to try to let the storm spit them out. And that means getting spit basically back towards Antarctica and the iceberg. And so they do get blown off course almost as far as Antarctica. They don't land on the continent, but they do almost get trapped in icebergs. I mean, it's Shackleton in a way with a different outcome. A century before Shackleton. She's certainly one of the very first women in history. She's the first woman in history ever to have been a captain of a ship that close to Antarctica for sure. And then they finally do manage it, as you say, as they're coming home in. You know, there are these also terrible periods of lulls. I mean, ship's captain said that the most dangerous period was when your crew had nothing to do. That was when mutinies really happen. So they ultimately do finally make it to San Francisco and in the end she doesn't win the race, but they even come in second when they arrive.
- [38:47]
Eleanor Evans
But this arrival is, as you outlined for so many reasons, so remarkable in itself. And the moment when she's acclaimed is such a powerful one. I just, I had tears in my eyes reading it as well, for what it's worth. But what's her reception like when they arrive safely? How is she?
- [39:02]
Tila J. Mazzeo
So they arrive and by now, I mean, the problem is that Joshua's dying, right? I mean, Joshua briefly rallies kind of after they pass Cape Horn, and then the tuberculosis has gone to his brain so that it's become meningitis. So by the time they arrive in San Francisco, he's in and out of consciousness, he's blind and he's deaf and he's dying. I mean, there's not really any chance that he's going to survive this illness. So they arrive in San and the ship as a testament, you know, the crew said all we wanted to do was act with the courage of Mrs. Captain Patton. So like that was our only goal. And they say this later to the newspapers because it becomes a huge international story. So we know what the seamen said because they gave interviews, they drank out on this story for the rest of their lives in pubs, right? So, you know, they arrive and they've made sure that the ship is absolutely ship shape is a testament to her as a captain. And they arrive in San Francisco and there is this solemn procession where they have to take the captain off on a litter. He's unconscious and Marianne is following behind him and they take him to one of the nearby hotels. And of course this is itself a kind of spectacle, right, in a, you know, what is then frontier San Francisco. And the story very quickly gets around San Francisco of this amazing feat that the captain's girl of a wife has taken them around the greatest howler in recent memory at the Southern tip of Cape Horn as captain. So very quickly, the merchants and businessmen in San Francisco start writing these letters back to brokers in New York saying, you'll never believe this story about what had happened. And so the news reaches the east coast within sort of six weeks of this all happening and starts spreading. So this story is in the newspaper. Marianne has no idea of this. She's simply trying to figure out how she's going to get Joshua back home and try to get him to a doctor and try to save his life. And the only way that she can do that is that she's finally. Because once she lands, she can't even sell, right? She has no power on land. She cannot sell their cargo. She has to wait in San Francisco until word comes months later back from the east coast about what she is meant to do with the cargo. So she's stuck in San Francisco for quite a while with Joshua very ill. Ultimately, they're able to get a steamer ship to Panama. They cross Panama over land with the railway that has just been opened that year. She contracts malaria and is very, very ill. And then they get a steamer ultimately from the Atlantic side of Panama back up to New York. And by now she's desperately ill. She's very heavily pregnant, like, at the last stage of her pregnancy. And Joshua is deaf and blind and is never going to recover his sight, which is to say he's never going to sail again. And they're just trying to get now home. And she arrives, and she doesn't realize that she's already a heroine, that everybody in New York and everybody in London and everybody in Boston has been waiting for the arrival of Mrs. Patton and this amazing story of this thing that she's done. So they arrive, and the New York Times, the New York Herald is all covering these stories of the arrival of Mrs. Patton. And they finally do make it to Boston, home with Joshua dying. And what happens is that the ship's owners walk themselves into a public relations disaster because she's broke, and they refuse to pay her Joshua's salary because she's a woman. And this outrages the international community, who says, you know, this is just completely ungrateful of them. So at this point, she's in Boston, and there becomes an international campaign where men and women, but particularly women from around the world, are now sending in their money to the newspapers to donate for a fund for Mrs. Patton because the ship's owners have been so ratty about it all. And, of course, what happens is the newspapers realize that they're onto this great story, right, where everybody sends in money and then they run another feature about all of the people who have sent in this money. So in the end, she becomes, for a brief period of a couple of years, this kind of international phenomenon. I mean, poems. We have Cambridge undergraduates writing, like, ridiculous poems about her that are published. One is called Neptune's Car, A Tale of New York. So she's very much in the public eye. But in the end, I mean, there's no way to manufacture a happy ending, right? In the end, Joshua does die. He goes insane, and then he dies. And that's a huge event when he dies in Boston. And then in the end, taking care of him, she also contracts tuberculosis. So she has her son, Joshua Jr. But he is born to a mother who has had malaria very late in her pregnancy, which is disastrous for him as a baby. And then when he's a toddler, she has contracted Joshua's tuberculosis, and she dies at 23. So it is, in some ways a story of this is the wealth that the sea gave but also took away.
- [44:34]
Eleanor Evans
It is a tragic end. And there are so many more details about their book, about their lives, that I will leave our listeners to discover in the book, which is fantastic. But, Tilar, if I can just finish with a question to you. You followed in the footsteps as a sailor yourself. What was that like, taking on this journey? And what else did you unearth about it that struck you as you were undertaking this research?
- [44:58]
Tila J. Mazzeo
Yeah, so I actually grew up in Penobscot Bay, so I learned to sail, as I say at the end of the book, skipping school, because I grew up in a small fishing village on Penobscot Bay, not far from from where Joshua Patton grew up, so understood that sort of landscape and that place that he was coming from. I grew up not far from the West Giggle river, in fact. So I understood that context. And I think that was, you know, for me, part of the footsteps that I was retracing were also those footsteps of my own learning how to sail as a young woman. But I did go as far as Antarctica, as I say, Marianne and Joshua didn't make it quite as far as Antarctica. I did. I acknowledge that I did not have the courage to try to do that in a sailing vessel. I thought about it. The problem is that that is still such dangerous water that to go with a captain in a sailing vessel who you don't know is to trust your life to somebody you don't know. And we have children at home. I decided that that was not going to be a winning strategy. So I went with one of those expeditions, expedition ships. And it is an amazing. I mean, I feel ambivalent about having gone to Antarctica because the environmental damage of even being there is ultimately, you know, a heavy weight. There's no denying the environmental damage of one's presence in Antarctica and in Drake's Passage. And at the same time, it is completely magical. I mean, the thing that I had not, had not anticipated was how otherworldly it is. Icebergs, because the ice is so ancient, are electric blue. You do not think of nature having those colors. And the albatross, you know, are really, really amazing creatures. I mean, you understand something like Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner in a different way when you really see an albatross. So it was an amazing experience. It did help understand, you know, the kind of both emotional and psychological and physical terrain that they were navigating. But I can't recommend either, in any good conscience that your listeners go there.
- [47:06]
Eleanor Evans
Well, luckily, they can get there through your wonderful book and understand some of those risks and that beauty as well, through Mary Ann and Joshua's story. So, Teela, thank you so much for taking us into a bit of it today. It's been such a pleasure.
- [47:19]
Tila J. Mazzeo
Thanks so much else, Eleanor.
- [47:23]
Narrator/Podcast Intro
That was historian and author Tila J. Matseo speaking to Eleanor Evans. Her latest book is to the Edge of the World.