Whaling Wife (June 1964 | Volume: 15, Issue: 4)

Whaling Wife

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June 1964 | Volume 15, Issue 4

“She was a small woman, weighing less than a hundred pounds, and she could stand erect under her husband’s outstretched arm without touching it.” So the editor of this previously unpublished journal describes its author, his grandmother, Eliza Azelia Williams. Its lively pages contain her account of a thirty-eight-month voyage, from 1858 to 1861, on the whaler Florida with her husband, Captain Thomas William Williams. Eliza, was a reticent New Englander who did not feel that her personal problems were suitable subjects for her pen. (She does not, for instance, evsr mention in her diary that she was five months pregnant when the Florida sailed from New Bedford, Massachusetts. And only rarely does she refer to how much she missed the two small sons she had left at home with her parents in Wethersfield, Connecticut.) She was also a woman of sturdy courage, an endlessly curious—and tactful—American traveller to remote lands, and a reporter of broad sympathies and rare perceptiveness.

After she returned home, the journal which had helped her while away the long months afloat lay untouched in an old sea chest for a hundred years, until Harold Williams, the son of the boy born on the Florida, began to dig out old family records to write a history of his ancestors. Entitled One Whaling Family , the book will be published next month by Houghton Mifflin Company. The excerpts below, in which Eliza’s highly individual spelling has been retained except where it could not be deciphered, describe a dramatic part of American history and introduce, we believe, a remarkable American. —The Editors

In company with my Husband, I stept on board the Pilot Boat, about 9 o’clock the morning of the 7th of Sept. 1858, to proceed to the Ship Florida, that will take us out to Sea far from Friends and home, for a long time to come. I do not realize much yet that I am going away for any length of time; for this seems more like a pleasure trip just now. I fear it won’t seem so long.… The Ship looks very fine laying off in the distance; but we do not make much headway towards her. The wind is very light; my Husband is rather impatient to get to the Ship, but he has just hailed another Boat that is near, to take us on board; now they are rowing us along quite smart; the Ship looks large as we near it; we have reached her and the men have lifted me up the high side in an arm chair, quite a novel way it seemed to me. Now I am in the place that is to be my home, posibly for 3 or 4 years; but I can not make it appear to me so yet: it all seems so strange, so many Men and not one Woman beside myself; the