"I have crossed the Atlantic four times, and have been once to the East Indies and back again, and only once; besides being in different places about home: Cork, and Lisbon and Gibralter.... and I can safely say that the happiest part of my life has been spent on board a ship. While we were together, you know, there was nothing to be feared." --Mrs. Croft in Jane Austen"s Persuasion Much has been made of man"s romance with the sea, and to read the literature--from Homer"s Odyssey to Melville"s Moby Dick--you"d never guess that women so much as got their feet wet in the surf, let alone went down to the sea in ships. But Jane Austen"s fictional Mrs. Croft, the wife of an admiral, was by no means a rarity in her time as Joan Druett"s fascinating exploration of women and the sea, Hen Frigates, makes clear. During the 19th century, women often accompanied their sea-captain husbands or fathers on oceangoing merchant ships, enduring the same hardships as the male sailors--sickness, poor weather, shipwreck, piracy--and a few of their own, as well, such as pregnancy and childbirth. Yet the history of women at sea has remained largely unwritten and unacknowledged. Then in 1984, Druett discovered the gravestone of a whaling captain"s wife while bicycling on one of the Cook Islands in Polynesia. "A woman on a whaleship! It seemed incredible. Instantly fascinated, I thought I would look up a book to learn more about this young woman who had made such a strange and fatal decision to go to sea." What Druett discovered, however, was that there was no book. So she wrote one herself. In Hen Frigates, Druett has used the letters and journals of seafaring women to limn a portrait of 19th-century ship-going life, including matters such as sex, child-rearing and medical practices. From shipwreck and pirate attacks to the intricacies of navigation and the pleasures of visiting foreign lands, Druett"s heroines shed new perspective on the 19th-century shipping news.