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| 1 Introduction in 2007 a visitor to the Sandwich Glass Museum and Historical Society on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, would have seen many exhibits related to the development of the glass industry and the impact it had on the town. As museum goers moved through rooms of beautiful glass bowls, tumblers, plates, and other precious objects, they would have come across an unusual cabinet. This cabinet bore the name “Hannah rebecca Burgess” in gilt letters and contained artifacts from the woman’s life, including her wedding gown, an ivory pagoda and other curios from her trip to China, and the story of how she navigated her husband’s ship Challenger, in 1856, when William lay ill from dysentery in his stateroom. in 2010 a visitor can see an expanded version of the cabinet in the form of a reconstruction of this woman’s dining room. The new exhibit incorporates her own china with glass made by the Boston and Sandwich glass company, and features a holographic display of the woman, played by the curator, Dorothy Schofield. Why is this exhibit on display in a museum dominated by the story of the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company? Who was this woman, and why is she the only other prominent individual featured in the museum besides Deming Jarvis, the incorporator of the glass company? This book examines the life of rebecca Burgess both as she presented it in her journals and in other personal documents, which she donated to the Sandwich Historical society, and in the journals she retained but did not explicitly donate to be kept in the public purview. rebecca may well have been a footnote in history had it not been for the prodigious journals that she kept from the 1840s to 1878 and the way in which she presented herself and her memories to the local public. i explore the ways in which rebecca defined herself as the captain’s wife, though she had sailed for only two years out of her eighty-three-year life. i also analyze the conditions in which rebecca lived in to understand how rebecca viewed the world and her role in it. As a victorian woman of the provincial middle class in nineteenth-century Massachusetts, she experienced dramatic change in her lifetime, which 2 | Introduction made her maritime legacy all the more compelling for the collective community ’s heritage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. i also define the ways in which rebecca actively reconstructed her memories of maritime life through her work in her Sandwich village, as well as the ways in which the community embraced and helped rebecca’s memories become a local legend. i attempt to present a picture of her village and her maritime world by piecing together contemporary sources, primarily from newspapers and census data,1 and from scholarly monographs that analyze the world in which rebecca lived. This book essentially has two main objectives: to understand how rebecca perceived her world and portrayed herself as an actor in it as she wrote in her journals, and to examine how rebecca’s reproduction of memories as she reflected back on her life at sea helped her shape a legacy that would become a legend in her community. Authenticity and the Fictive “Self” in Autobiography rebecca’s journals describe her experiences, her beliefs, and her relationships with others. Through the art of journal writing, rebecca defined her core values and her identity for an audience that extended beyond herself and her family. rebecca’s journal writing falls within the bounds of victorian practices. Many scholars of women’s autobiography suggest that women often form their self-definitions in relation to others—family and friends— and even portray themselves more passively than men.2 Although Burgess defined her actions as those of a perfect wife and then grieving widow, frequently she used those conventions to justify her extremely independent actions. in journal entries her sense of adventure belied her image as the dependent wife, and her focus on the approximately two years she spent at sea enabled her to cast herself as the heroine of a maritime drama, creating a legacy that would be embraced by her contemporaries and by generations of Cape Codders to come. Like many other women journal writers, rebecca assumed that she was writing for a public audience, certainly her husband and, as she mentions several times, her good friend and possibly her family.3 However, she made sure to extend that audience when...

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