Hen Frigates: Wives of Merchant Captains Under Sail

This book does a great job of focusing on a specific topic in each chapter, providing details from various womens' lives, some with very differing perspectives on the subject. After watching one of my favorite movies showing the heroine living aboard ship with her husband, I'd always wanted to know more about a woman's life aboard.

I did alot of questioning the author's interpretation of a woman or man's words. You can't get someone's tone or inflections accurately from their writings, of course it's her prerogative to voice her interpretation, and I to take it or leave it.

OK I will cut straight to the chase with this - the format killed this book for me. I found it incredibly piecemeal and hard to read, I found no flow of narrative and couldn't connect to the featured persons because they all blended into one.

The topic should have been fascinating. The sheer volume of research and organisation of the book is impressive and admirable - most information came from diaries and letters of the wives. There were a lot of good photographs and the authors husband contributed excellent sketches, mostly of ships.

Essentially, the book is about the wives and children of captains of (mostly merchant) ships throughout (mostly) the 19th century. The book is arranged into chapters of themes, eg - The Honeymooners, At Sea, Children at sea, Ship /kitchens, Hazards of the Sea, etc. But the problem was that each wife had only a few paragraphs (or often just one) on each topic, so in 20 or 30 pages we her from 40 or 50 women. Each woman referenced requires a ship's name, a year and her husbands name to be able to even attempt to keep track, but for me I was not able to manage the sheer number of people, and they all blurred. Being so structured in this format it also became quite dry reading, with loads of repetition with only minor changes to the narrative.

Hard work to complete, with too few gems to be found amongst it.

2 stars