She was the Harvest Queen, out of Bermuda, and he was her very young Captain, only 22. He’d gone to sea since he was 14. I’m rereading some of the letters between him and his family. They date from 1839 (the last letter from his father, my great-great-grandfather, Captain of the Admiral Digby, who was lost at sea when that ship went down in a hurricane) to 1883. My Bermudian cousin, John Cox, published the compilation in 2024, after my Mother typed out the contents of the letters and donated the originals to the Bermuda Archives.
Even coming from a line of sea-captains, i used to think of their job as mainly getting the ship from one place to another, but these letters showed me it was so much more. He had to make the voyages pay. Planning a route or schedule ahead was often impossible. He took on a cargo, sailed to wherever he thought he could sell it, then bought a different cargo and found a destination to sell that. He and the ship’s owners lost money if he had to sail with ballast alone. Once in a while he sold the ship itself, if that was more profitable, and hitched a ride home with another Captain. He could never be sure how long the journeys would take because he was dependent on the wind. Other delays were caused by having to wait in port for weeks for various reasons. His sweetheart, later his wife, never knew how long it was going to be before he could get home again.
Ann Dickinson Sargent 