‘The Sea Captain’s Wife’ Brings a 19th-Century San Francisco Legend to Life

A couple of years ago, I stumbled across a most unusual story from the annals of old San Francisco. It concerned a 19-year-old woman named Mary Ann Patten who spent two months captaining a 216-foot-long clipper ship after her husband fell deathly ill during an around-the-world journey. In that time, Patten squashed an on-board mutiny, won the loyalty of the crew and kept her husband alive. The kicker? She did all of this while pregnant with her first child.

Patten guided that ship, Neptune’s Car, into the port of San Francisco on Nov. 13, 1856, becoming the first American woman in history to captain a merchant vessel. Though she quickly became an overnight celebrity, Patten remained humble. “I … endeavored to perform that which seemed to me, under the circumstances, only the plain duty of a wife towards a good husband,” she said at the time.

After I stumbled across Patten’s fascinating story, I did some research in the newspaper archives and wrote an essay in remembrance of her. But there was clearly so much more to her story to tell. This month, New York Times bestselling author Tilar J. Mazzeo is honoring Patten with an entire book. The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World brings Patten’s story to vivid life and makes clear just how much terror and tribulation were involved in her remarkable journey.

Mazzeo provides ample details of Patten’s family history, giving the reader extra reasons to root for her, as well as an understanding of where Patten got her fortitude. “Mary Ann grew up in [a tenement in] the North End of Boston,” Mazzeo notes, “then a neighborhood on the downswing and quickly becoming a bawdy maritime red-light district.”

That background also explains why Patten supported her husband’s grueling around-the-word trips. “Most clipper captains were able to earn [a] $100,000 fortune under a decade at sea and… that meant a lucky sea captain might be able to afford to retire by 30,” the book notes. “Then, if a captain were sailing against competitors, there was the money he could earn from what was, essentially, betting.”

Mazzeo paints vivid vistas of the lives of mariners during the mid-19th century — and it’s decidedly not a pretty picture. Honorable though the captains often were, Mazzeo suggests that many seamen of the era were an international coterie of incompetent, untrustworthy “vagrants with an attitude.”

It was for this reason that Patten was not supposed to associate with anyone on board except for her husband, their steward and the first mate. She was forbidden from wandering the decks. She was restrained by the women’s clothes of the day: stiff skirts, corsets and bonnets. Which makes it all the more remarkable when we finally see Patten take control of Neptune’s Car and swiftly win the dedicated support of the crew on board.

In its final third, The Sea Captain’s Wife plays out like a movie — one that would seem entirely unrealistic if it wasn’t, in fact, all true. There are two key villains in this portion: the first is the mutinous first mate William Keeler, presented as an almost Dickensian miscreant. The second is the shipping company that refuses to pay up because it was Patten and not her husband who completed the journey.

At times, The Sea Captain’s Wife plays out like a good, old-fashioned, around-the-world adventure. The “forest of masts” at San Francisco’s Gold Rush-clogged shoreline. The floating, lamplit brothel boats that greeted Neptune’s Car in Hong Kong. The teeming warehouses of London’s docklands. The gardens and church steeples of New York City. Mazzeo describes each new city in ways that transport the reader back to the place, era and, frankly, the smells.

There are more mundane elements padding out The Sea Captain’s Wife too — the tools of navigation, ship hierarchies and shipping industry politics in the 1800s. There are also many details about the hardships associated with specific patches of open waters. (If there is a moral to this story, it’s probably to avoid Drake’s Passage — the waters between South America and Antarctica — at all costs.) But these peripheral details are essential to understanding the full circumstances of Mary Ann Patten’s story.

Mazzeo wants the reader to take all of these facts as a whole and contemplate what they mean in a larger sense — a beautiful impulse in this book. About the Pattens, she writes: “Their story is the story of all those other nameless people whom history has not remembered but who once, out of love and loyalty and hope, did something amazing.”

‘The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World’ by Tilar J. Mazzeo is out now, via St. Martin’s Press.