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| 27 2 Becoming the Captain’s Wife Crafting Personas and Defining Relationships noveMber 8, 1852 At half past eight we stepped on board of the Whirlwind and surveyed it to ourleisure.W.informedusthatinconsequenceoftheirgoingoffintothestream to take in powder, and our stay must necessarily be short. I felt very sober and was glad to leave the Ship where preparations seemed being made for departure. It brought to my mind in a clearer state the shortness of my husband’s time on shore and reminded me that I was not to go with him. We left the Ship. We cast one lingering look at the Ship as she lay at the extremity of India Wharf and thus queried, tomorrow morning let the gazer come and look in vain for her. Only an experienced eye will be able to detect the W. from among the other Ships in the distance. William bought Saturday Eve two plain gold rings to have marked a solemn promise on both sides, which was this, “I will never marry again.” At William’s request, I took the rings to get them marked, this morning.1 on board Ship WhirlWind at Sea april 1853 i’M thine alone rebecca I’m thine alone, though other hearts may claim My wandering thoughts, this heart will turn to thee At early morn or evening’s quiet time Its secret beatings thine alone shall be.2 Though rebecca’s autograph album provides the only information about her youth, her first two donated journals speak volumes about her life and her relationship with William. rebecca kept two separate journals in the year prior to her going to sea with William; one she began almost immediately after her wedding, and the other she started right before William’s 28 | Becoming the Captain’s Wife departure as captain of the clipper ship Whirlwind just months after rebecca and William were married. William returned home from Calcutta in July 1852, bringing with him fabric for rebecca’s wedding dress. rebecca and William married on August 5, 1852, in her home in West Sandwich. Most likely it would have been a formal wedding with at least her sister, Lizzie, and her two sisters-in-law, Lydia and Mary, in the bridal party. ellen rothman describes weddings of the 1850s as being more elaborate than their eighteenth-century and even early antebellum counterparts, with “costumed attendants dispensing slices of white wedding cake” and printed invitations.3 There would probably not have been time to print wedding invitations, but certainly kin and friends surrounded the couple that day. eighteen-year-old rebecca was a very young bride. in the antebellum period before 1850, the average age of brides in New england was twenty-two or twenty-three.4 in fact, as rebecca recalled in her diary, she was “decidedly too young” for the sensibilities of a single older woman she met just before the wedding.5 After the wedding rebecca and William took a short honeymoon and then moved into his parents’ home on Fountain Place in Boston. There they awaited the completion of the new clipper ship Whirlwind, which William would captain. rebecca grew up quickly in the space of several years. rebecca documented the months after her marriage in her first diary, which William had given to her on their wedding day. The first page reads: “Diary. The Property of Mrs. William H. Burgess, Commencing the fifth of August 1852. Written particularly for the amusement of her husband, who is out on the wide blue sea.”6 This diary signaled the beginning of rebecca’s adult life, one in which journal-keeping became increasingly important to her. Why did rebecca decide to write consistently in her diary, when the only written record of her early life comes from an autograph book? Scholars who study nineteenth-century women’s diaries discover that antebellum women wrote often and for many reasons. They wrote to analyze their experiences and define themselves as engaged intellectually with the world around them. Nineteenth-century advice literature suggested keeping a diary for intellectual development, and for growth through introspective self-reflection. in addition , keeping a diary was often a sign of gentility. A woman who kept a diary, particularly if it were filled with long, self-reflective entries, had the education , literacy, and time to write in a journal. Finally, diaries preserved continuity , allowing women to sort out the disparate details of their lives to create a meaningful narrative of their feelings and experiences, especially...

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