"Love, Marriage, and Family in the Nineteenth-Century Whaling Communities" Historic Nantucket article from the Nantucket Historical Association

Originally published in the Historic Nantucket, Vol 49, no. 4 (Fall 2000), p. 5-10

Love, Marriage, and Family in the Nineteenth-Century Whaling Communities
by Lisa Norling

Chapter 5: EXCERPT (pages 175-182) from Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720-1870. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Used by permission of the publisher.

COURTSHIP WAS THE PROCESS BY WHICH individuals paired up — formed that all-important, exclusive, intimate relationship — and separated themselves off from others in constructing a new family unit. As it had in the previous century, the performance of courtship rituals and activities continued to occur within a communal context of peers and community-based activities. But in the nineteenth century parents and other community elders exercised considerably less direct influence over courtship and marriage choice, and young women and men exercised considerably more individual freedom. When Jane Russell of Nantucket wrote her twin brother Roland in 1838 about her indecision over a prospect of marriage, she reported that she had "Friends to Advise me some one thing and some other but after all tell me too suit myself."

Jane was anticipating the return of her whaleman-suitor from the Pacific: "they have been absent 39 months and probably will not stay many more," she thought. She told Roland that she had been "very much tried and perplexed in my own mind," and felt deeply the lack of "a Father's Counsel and a Mother's advice" (both their parents had died several years earlier). Roland agreed with Jane on the "importance of weighing well every argument for or against the single & the Married life" because "upon this depends in a great measure your Happiness or Misery during life." Jane declared, "I am half Inclined to live an Old Maid [but] from the acquaintance I formed with Mr. Thomas S. Andrews I seemed to think that If I were to make a Choice of a Companion it might possibly be him." One of her reservations seemed to be his family, which, she wrote, "is not just what I should like." (It is not clear what about Andrews's family bothered Jane; perhaps it was his oldest sister's bearing of a child out of wedlock some fourteen years before.) Roland advised Jane that "it would be gratifying to be connected with a person of respectable parentage & who are in good standing in society" but added that, given Mr. Andrews's own evident virtues, "friends or fortune" were "of minor consequence." Jane had only asked for her twin brother's "good advice," but Roland concluded somewhat pompously, "if ... you have well considered the dutys and responsibilities of the married life & the disadvantages and perplexities of a life of celibacy I should cheerfully give my consent to your union with the man of your choice." Jane did so choose; she married Thomas shortly after his return in 1839. Their son, whom they named Roland, was born the following year.

The historian Ellen Rothman, in her history of courtship in America, describes how in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, "girls and boys met on the lanes and commons of the village and in the houses of their neighbors and kinfolk; they encountered each other in church, schoolroom, and shop. . . . They went berrying, riding, picnicking; they sang and danced together at parties and balls." Well into the antebellum period, as in the previous century, "male-female socializing did not depend on special occasions but was integrated into the routine of everyday life." Furthermore, "young people had the autonomy and privacy to develop relationships that were sexually and emotionally intimate, and they did."

In an 1850 letter to James Sowle, Ruth Grinnell described in some detail the activities by which she and James courted, which, judging by the research of Rothman and other historians, seem quite typical of their period, region, and socioeconomic setting: "James do you remember our visit to N.B. [New Bedford], and our walk to look up the horse and carraige, . . . our strolls about the meadows after wildflowers, and the time we went to meeting to the schoolhouse, and the numerous walks to the Point rock, and one time I hid your knife in the sand, and you said 'Oh blast you' have you forgotten all these. And oh James the last Sabbath you were here when you came down. . . . And the morning you sailed."

A remarkable set of sources allows us to compare the expectations and attitudes of Ruth and James with those of other maritime courting couples and to assess their typicality: a mailbag of dead letters dating from the 1840s and 1850s, preserved among the papers of a mid-century postmaster in the New Bedford area. It appears that Ruth and James were not unusual in their courtship, either in their activities or in their reliance on prescription. Constant reference to ideals of romantic love and companionship was the most important means by which many whalemen and their sweethearts pledged themselves to each other, distinguished themselves from their communities as separate couples, and sustained their ties over such extremes of time and distance.

Signing herself his "affectionant girl," Susan Hathaway wrote to George Anderson, then at sea on the bark Governor Carver, a letter much shorter and not so neatly written as Ruth's, but which hit many of the same romantic notes. Susan told George, "I received your letter...and was very much pleased to here from you and here you were well and injoying your self so well try and injoy your self has well as you can untill you get home and then we will bouth injoy our self together in Ma's front room." "Dear George," she confided, "I dream of you every night . . . but when I awake in the morning I find it is but a dream. . . . you wrote that there was never was a homesicker man then you all for me but if you fell worse then I do I pity you for I felt very bad[.] I could not go in the frount room for a long time I miss you so." She promised, "George it is you I love no toung tell and Dear George I will not decive you I will be true to you while you are fare fare away from me[.] do not be afraid of it for I will keep my word there is no one that can take your place for you was the first that I can say that ever I love." She closed with just one ending (but with a bit of doggerel that Ruth might have appreciated): "you must escuse all mistakes and bad writting for my pen is porr[,] my ink is pale[,] my love shall never fale."

New Bedford spinster Lydia Davenport, whose two sisters both married whalemen, noted the exclusivity implied by romantic love and its paradoxical quality in the maritime setting. She recorded (rather pettily or maybe drearily) in her diary, "I rode [in the carriage] under rather peculiar circumstances, I felt that I was the 'third person' of the party; it was my dear Sister, and the One she loves best on earth, and who seems to love her with all the fervor of devotion; but" she pointed out, "he is soon to leave her for a long voyage." Lydia ended on a pious and perhaps conciliatory note: "May the rich blessings of Heaven, be shed around their different paths while separated, and may they be reunited and spend many years of happiness, in this world and be prepared, to spend a never ending Eternity in praising God for his goodness toward them."

Shared moments of intimacy might be snatched at the Point rocks, in Ma's front room, during a carriage ride despite a sister's presence—or even on a ship in port, as Jared Gardner reminisced to his wife Harriet, in "that burth where once we wer lock in each others armes." Jared remembered "the libertis that I took be fore we wer married," apparently with guilt-free pleasure, since he added, "I have no doubt but that you will forgive me for that. Men are too much alike in that respect but we will not dwell too long on that. I can truely say that the three months that we wer togather was the hapyest time that ever I spent. . . with the one who is dearer than all."

Jared Gardner, who had married Harriet just three weeks before he left Nantucket in the whaleship Washington on 14 May 1840, would be gone for three years. Measuring time at home in the weeks and the time at sea in years was typical, especially for the men who rounded Cape Horn and whaled the lucrative grounds of the Pacific Ocean. Elijah Chase asked his mother to give his sweetheart, "Lucritia," "my love in full. . .. Tell her that she must cheer up, for it is only 40 months more before we shall put away for home." Jane Russell sent news about one of her brothers to another in 1837: "Reuben is going out Master of the Ship Susan ... he has been at home 3 months now— quite a visit for a Cape horner." With the intermittent and prolonged absences of nineteenth-century whaling voyages, intimate relationships had to develop in short, intense periods of only weeks, interspersed with difficult multiyear separations.

The staccato rhythms of maritime courtship created insecurities on shore and at sea that only repeated reiteration of prescription could allay. Sarah Pierce wrote her sweetheart, Captain Elijah Chisole, "I saw by your first [letter] that you thought I had either forgotten you or forgotten my promise I felt very sorry to think that you thought so for I have taken great paines to write you every chance their has been ... I have written you 13 letters since you sailed." (He had left New Bedford on 29 June 1852; her letter was dated December 24.) Sarah insisted, "it is almost impossible for me to forget one that I thinks loves me as you do ... I think of you both day and night." In fact, she felt so strongly that she declared, "I want you dearest before you come home to make your mind up that you will never leave me again to go to sea for I never could be happy with you at sea and I at home far from you that I love."

Separation, especially during courtship, raised all sorts of fears as well as unhappiness. Women like Ruth Grinnell and Sylvia Tucker expressed concern about deception before their marriages. Ruth worried, "have I centered my all in a false deceiving man?" Sylvia Tucker, writing in 1852 to accept John Leonard's proposal of marriage, explained, "I think I should have answered sooner if I had not heard so much and been warned so many times to beware of deceitfulness (but now I trust in you)" and she signed her letter, "One not deceitful, Sylvia."

It is not always clear what Ruth, Sylvia, and other women feared when they referred generally to "deception." Other than the threatening possibility that he had stopped caring for her, the only specific sin that Ruth warned James against was profanity: "I sincerely hope my own dear James does not take Gods name in vain . . . James I do not want you to deceive me by swearing when you are out of my presence." Her appeal echoed those of other maritime women, such as Joan Waterman, who had written a quarter of a century earlier, in mild suggestion to her husband, "I hope you will try to keep your temper and not use no profane language." Words were what comprised their relationships during separation and words, at least those words known to be common to the seafaring subculture, were in part what some women tried to control.

Certainly they had plenty to feel insecure about: they stayed home while the whalemen roamed the world. Susan Cromwell informed her husband that "John Enos got married at St. Catharines brought his wife home in the Ship & Cynthia feels verry bad to think he serv'd Eliza such a mean trick ... I realy pity her she is disappointd & mortified." Perhaps the fears of Ruth, Sylvia, and the others were justified. But the absent men felt insecurities, too. Charles B. Babcock told his brother Henry, who was serving as mate of the bark LeBaron out of Newport, Rhode Island, "I called on Sarah at Mr Hammond store where she is clerken and invited her to go a sailing with us but she was so engaged she could not go ... dear Harry I am affraid that she has proved herself unworth of you and in my opinion the best of girles would not remain true in the absence of 2 years of a lover, mark my word they are faithless things unless you are with them every day."

Apparently a certain Sallee Brown in Westport proved so, as William Davol informed his brother Edward, then somewhere in the Indian Ocean. "In your letter to George you requested him to acknowledge to Sallee Brown When he read it he said he should do no such thing ... I should consider you as insane indeed if you were to marry a girl that was not virtuous ... it can be proved to a demonstration that a certain chap in Westport did stay with Sallee the night before he sailed and she having the flowers [i.e., was menstruating] did paint the map of the world on his shirt tail, and when he went a board he gave it to davy Jones [i.e., threw it overboard]. She has turned off her beau and some think that you will marry her yet [but] I consider you as having stood on the verge of an awful precipice and crawled back just in time to save your neck &c."

It may have been Sallee's lack of discrimination rather than the act itself that was at issue. Rothman found that what young women and men actually did when courting in the antebellum period demonstrates that "sexual boundaries between unmarried women and men were still loosely drawn and crossed with relative ease. . . . Coquetry and seduction were condemned, but flirtation and sexual playfulness remained common features of male-female social life." Rothman suggests that in the nineteenth century, as it had been in the eighteenth, such behavior was tolerated (though not necessarily condoned) in the close-knit local communities where other family members could assure marriage if pregnancy resulted. Whaleman Jared Gardner certainly admitted with pleasurable memory but no self-consciousness that he "took liberties" before he and Harriet married, and "D." Alien wrote her seafaring brother matter-of-factly, "Little Edmand goes to see Beck Petty and stays till morning. I expect nothing else but they will be married in a few weeks."

The flexible attitudes about premarital intimacy demonstrate that the modern notion that all aspects of marriage from sex to cohabitation begin with the wedding ceremony itself was not yet firmly in place. Rather, the evidence from the whaling communities indicates the persistence of an older custom by which the multi-faceted transition from single to married status occurred over several weeks and culminated not with the wedding but with the new couple independently "setting up housekeeping." The achievement of married status could be even more complicated in the maritime setting because the transition frequently continued for the first several years after marriage. In a very common practice, new wives simply remained in their parents' homes when their husbands shipped out again. Their familiar identity as daughter, evolving over years, sometimes overwhelmed their newly acquired, still uncertain sense of themselves as wife when their husbands were gone.

Just twenty-five days after they were married, Susan Gifford's husband John shipped out on a Pacific whaling voyage. He would be gone for three and a half years, while Susan continued to live with her parents in the small village of Mattapoisett some miles east of New Bedford. Susan began her diary the day John left, 15 November 1859, with the simple entry: "The Ship Milo Sailed to day my Husband sailed Mate."

For the first few days, Susan's entries addressed John directly; she still felt his presence that immediately. "I felt very bad after you had gone. I did not know what to do with myself[.] I went up stairs and cried till my Head ached and I felt most sick. Mother came up said I must not give way to my feelings so if I did I should be sick so I went down stairs but every thing seemed so lonesome and dreary that I felt as though I did not care whether I did any thing or not. ... It is dark and cloudy out to night and I expect you feel rather lonesome[.] I judge by myself[.] I have such a sense of loneliness come over me once in a while that I dont know what to do[J You was all the World to me and now you are gone."

But, with her husband absent, Susan's life gradually began to reassume its pre-wedding rhythms in work and relationships. "It is a beautifull day, I think it must be pleasant where you are I wish I was there, I have been sewing for Mother this forenoon and shall sew a little more this afternoon[.] I did think some of going out... but have given it up[.] If you was here we would go and make some calls[.] Mother has got the work ready and I must stop for the present."

The entries filled with intense longing were continued for just about a month. Then, Susan's emotions began to calm and her sense of being someone's wife slip away: December 31 was the last time she addressed John directly in her diary. In the new year, her entries became considerably abbreviated and generally nonre-flective, becoming largely lists of weather conditions and local events. For the entire year of 1860, John was mentioned only twenty-two times, and always in the third person. On May 15, Susan simply recorded, "Went to Uncle George and helped them move and sewed on carpetf.] did not go to Meeting felt two [sic] tired[.] six Month since John went away." Their first wedding anniversary passed without remark; Susan was busy, anyway, assisting at the birth of her sister-in-law's baby.

As with Ruth Grinnell and her letter, all we have of Susan Gifford is her diary. We do not know the ending of Susan's story. In the back of the volume are a few lists and notations that indicate that John returned, they resumed married life, and she went with him to Brooklyn where he may have been stationed for a few years. (He appears to have been associated with the Brooklyn Navy Yard during the Civil War.) But we do not know how (or if) her identity as wife survived during their separation, what reunion felt like, or how she negotiated her second transition from daughter to wife when he returned in 1863. The slim volume records that she did write letters to John, nine of them by the time the diary ends in December 1860. Perhaps it was in her correspondence that she expressed the feelings toward and concerns about her husband appropriate to a young wife. They were not in her diary.

Lisa Norling is an associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota and is coeditor of Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1920.

Sources

Printed Works

John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.
Karen V. Hansen, A Very Social Time: Grafting Community in Antebellum New England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Jane C. Nylander, Our Own Snug fireside: Images of the New England Home, 1760-1860. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Ellen K. Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America. New York: Basic Books, 1984;
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.
The Penguin Dictionary of Historical Slang. New York: Penguin, 1972.

Manuscripts

Charles B. Babcock to Henry Babcock, 28 September 1845, Alexander Cory Dead Letter Collection, Mss. 80, Subgroup 3, Series K, Subseries 1, Old Dartmouth Historical Society-New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, Mass. (hereafter ODHS).
Elijah Chase to "mother," 10 Dec 1842, quoted in the Kendall Whaling Museum KWM Newsletter 8:1 (Spring 1990).
Susan Cromwell to Peter Cromwell, 26 July 1854, Peter Cromwell Papers, Box 96B, Martha's Vineyard Historical Society, Edgartown, Mass.
"D. A." to [brother] George G. A. Alien, 31 July 1844, Alexander Cory Dead Letter Collection, Mss. 80, Subgroup 3, Series K, Subseries 1, ODHS.
Lydia G. Davenport Diary, 17 October 1855, Mss. 64, Series D, Subseries 4, ODHS.
William Davol to Edward Davol, 14 May 1847, Alexander Cory Dead Letter Collection, Mss. 80, Subgroup 3, Series K, Subseries 1, ODHS.
Jared M. Gardner to Harriet M. Gardner, 3 June 1840, Gardner Family Papers, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.
Susan Snow Gifford diary, 15 Nov 1859, private collection, on deposit at ODHS.
Ruth Grinnell to James Sowle, 3 February 1850, Mss. 56, Series S, Subseries 24, ODHS.
Susan H. Hathaway to George A. Anderson, 15 November 1850, Alexander Cory Dead Letter Collection, Mss. 80, Subgroup 3, Series K, Subseries 1, ODHS.
Sarah A. C. Pierce to Elijah H. Chisole, 24 December 1852, Alexander Cory Dead Letter Collection, Mss. 80, Subgroup 3, Series K, Subseries 1, ODHS.
Jane Russell to Roland Russell, Nantucket, 21 October 1838, Mss. 172, Folder 5, Nantucket Historical Association, Edouard A. Stackpole Research Library.
Sylvia Tucker to John Leonard, 12 July 1852, Leonard Family Papers, private collection, New Bedford, Mass. Joan Waterman to Martin Waterman, 13 April 1828, Coll. 141, Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic, Conn.