"A Bold and Hardy Race of Men": The Lives and Literature of American Whalemen

5. Unconventional Gender Roles at Home and at Sea

137 5 Unconventional Gender Roles at Home and at Sea The unusual domestic arrangements whaling families adopted further complicated the notion that whalemen were national heroes. These sailors were away from home for three or four years at a time, and during that time the majority of whaling wives remained ashore, either alone or with extended-family members.By necessity,these women assumed all of their spouses’ familial duties in addition to their own: they parented the children, managed domestic affairs, and transacted the family’s business dealings. sarah orne Jewett captures the difficult and lonely lives these whaling wives led in her novel Deephaven. There, one character, a whaleman ’s wife named mrs. Kew, explains, “When i was first married ‘he’ had a schooner and went to the banks, and once he was off on a whaling voyage , and i hope i may never come to so long a three years as those were again,though i was up to mother’s.”not even the company of her mother could stave off the bouts of melancholy mrs. Kew experiences during the years of her husband’s absence. When mr. Kew returns, he discovers that his wife has “taken it so to heart” that he gives up whaling and becomes the deephaven lighthouse keeper.1 Though it was not typical for a whaleman to abandon his livelihood this way, the Kews’ story dramatizes the psychological toll such domestic arrangements could take on a marriage. other whaling narratives also highlight the plight of new england’s shoreside whaling wives. J. hector st. John de crèvcoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, for example, explains that nantucket women are 138 Chapter Five “necessarily obliged to transact business, to settle accounts, and, in short, to rule and provide for their families.” The narrator of nathaniel hawthorne’s short story “chippings with a chisel,” describes a whaling captain who spent so much of his life at sea that “out of twenty years of matrimony he had spent scarce three, and those at scattered intervals, beneath his own roof.” “The Whale fishery,” an article in the april 1875 issue of Ballou’s Monthly Magazine, presents the example of a lonely whaling wife who, “when asked how many letters she wrote to her husband during his last voyage,” replied, “one hundred, of which he only received six.” and a poem by Lydia howard huntley sigourney describes the effect of separation on the title character,Laura,a young newlywed. ’Twere hard to tell,how loneliness and woe, chill’d her young breast,and how thro’midnight storms she sleepless wept—or from some broken dream of shipwreck,and the swimmer spent with toil, sprang up,affrighted.2 staying at home in new england proves so torturous that Laura insists on traveling with her husband on his next whaling voyage. she dies of a mysterious malady in san francisco. By the mid to late nineteenth century, some women who were married to whaling captains had another alternative: they could sail with their husbands on their vessels. despite the widespread superstition that a woman aboard ship is bad luck, some owners and investors believed that they could boost a captain’s morale by permitting his wife and perhaps a few of his children to make the voyage with him. They believed that married whalers were “different being[s],” sober men who were capable of fulfilling their duties responsibly and reliably, and that a woman aboard ship might exert a “civilizing” influence over all of the sailors under a captain’s command.3 having their wives and families aboard might have eased the loneliness of ship captains, but there is little evidence that their crew members behaved any differently in the presence of a woman. mary chipman Lawrence, martha smith Brewer Brown, and eliza Williams all record in their journals that their husbands were forced to punish sailors for insubordination, desertion, and drunkenness while they were aboard. Lawrence remarks: “found a state of affairs on board which made my heart ache: four men were in irons. one was fighting with a sailor, and 139 Unconventional Gender Roles at Home and at Sea when reproved by the officer, attacked him; a second jumped overboard and attempted to swim ashore....The remaining two refused duty.”4 although the decision to leave new england was difficult, approximately 20 percent of whaling wives chose to sail with their husbands.5 Thus...