How a pregnant teen bride in 1856 took command of her ailing husband’s ship

Joshua Patten was a clipper captain in the 1850s, racing bravely – and perhaps recklessly – through the most dangerous waters in the hemisphere to transport goods in hopes of earning a huge payday.

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But he was also deeply in love, so his diminutive teenage bride Mary Ann accompanied him on his trips from New York around Cape Horn to San Francisco. And it’s a good thing she did, because in 1856, in the midst of battling the elements, Patten fell gravely ill and was utterly incapacitated. With waves and wind smashing the ship and a mutiny brewing, only one person had any shot of saving the ship and the crew: Mary Ann Patten. 

In “The Sea Captain’s Wife,” Tilar J. Mazzeo recounts the wild tale of Mary Ann Patten’s heroics at sea, but Mazzeo, an experienced sailor herself, also grounds the story in the details of the Pattens’ families and their lives on land – their hopes and dreams and the unrelenting challenges facing them as they struggled to gain a financial foothold in American society.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q.  ​It’s a great adventure story​; do you also see it as something relevant now?I happen to believe as well that the lives – and the stories – of “average” people matter. Florence Nightingale has a quote that I mention at one point in the book where she says, “I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs.” There are families all around us who struggle and find ways to face personal tragedy and transform it. Any one of us might have it inside us, faced with only bad choices, to do something beautiful and impossible because we have to. I refuse the idea that presidents and princes are the real nation builders. As I say at the end of the book, I think of the story of Mary Ann and Joshua Patten as the story of all those nameless and forgotten people who once did something amazing.

Q. Your previous books were about subjects like the Nazi resistance – people doing remarkable things under extreme pressure – and about overlooked women in history. Is this book of a piece with those? 

I write what I think of as “hidden histories” – stories that escape our mainstream archival records and, therefore, our mainstream stories about nations and nation-building. The histories of women’s lives tend to not be as robustly recorded; so too, are the lives of working- and even middle-class people. 

There were moments in their story where the historical record is very thin, and in those moments I tried to signal for the reader not just what was missing but how those silences also matter.

I have written about spies and about resistance networks that had to be secret and I have written about political scandals, where the line between “official” history and “spin” is in question. The histories that come down to us are not neutral. What fascinates me as a writer is what is sometimes left out of the historical record, what gets tucked away in odd places.

Q. Were there details that surprised you along the way?

One of the details that I thought a lot about was how hampered Mary Ann was in her clothing. We know from the newspaper reports that she didn’t change her clothing for several weeks during the worst of the storm. Part of it, of course, was that she was pregnant, and she needed to wear whatever garment was loosest, but there was also the fact that women’s dresses in the 1850s included corsets that women were laced into and hoops under skirts. Mary Ann didn’t have anyone at sea to lace her into a different garment, and, as the only woman onboard ship, Victorian modesty and common sense, in regard to what I think was always a real threat of sexual violence, would have precluded her asking for help from the crew with anything involving her undergarments.

Q. Mary Ann didn’t even leave a ship’s log. How difficult was it to write about these people with such incomplete records?If you’re going to write about people whose lives were not considered “important,” you definitely have to get creative with your research skills. My work is narrative nonfiction. That means that I am not making up parts of the history, but at the same time, I am trying to write a great story. I use storytelling devices like characterization and cliffhangers, for example. In terms of building up Mary Ann as a character, I use something I call the “fish eye”: if I don’t have Mary Ann’s journal recording her thoughts, I can’t say what she was thinking. But I can have the reader look with me around a clipper in a storm off Cape Horn and see what she could have seen from where we know she was standing. There are archival records about what a clipper looked like. About what Cape Horn looks like. About what the weather was on the day that she was on the water. Weather records are particularly fascinating and accessible. So the reader does a kind of 360 with me – and with Mary Ann.

One of my favorite parts of writing a book is the detective work of research. There is a kind of thrill of the hunt in ferreting out old weather records, manuscript journals from the same place and time that you can use to triangulate.

Q. There’s a lot of background on the family and the period. How much of that was for historical context and how much was to bring Joshua and Mary Ann more fully to life as people?I think of this book as having a couple of narrative layers. One layer is the sea story. One layer is this incredibly moving love story. But another layer is about how much of the past we lose and what stories we choose to forget and what stories we choose to remember. Some of the background is a way of choosing to remember together. When we say “once upon a time,” it’s a collective invitation to both story and the act of remembering. But there is also an aspect in which, of course, it’s also about bringing Mary Ann and Joshua to life as people, in a specific place and time. It’s important to understand how genuinely rare a thing it was for a young girl from a working-class, immigrant background like Mary Ann to be taught to do reasonably advanced math in the 1840s and 1850s. If she had not been taught the basics of trigonometry, if she had also not been literate, they might all have perished.

Q. What did you learn by going on the water down by Cape Horn?I’d have loved to have followed in their footsteps on a clipper or even in a sailboat, but Drake’s Passage is still a fearsome stretch of water, and you’d have to be very sure you trusted any captain of a small craft, because you’d be placing your life in their hands. I went in December – so at the height of the Antarctic summer – on a small expedition-class cruise ship. I was secretly hoping for some foul weather, but we had a pretty tame passage. Heading back north, we had some moderately heavy seas, maybe 30 knots, which was enough to make a lot of people seasick, but nothing like what Mary Ann navigated.