https://www.sailingscuttlebutt.com/2020/03/06/riding-the-wake-of-mary-lacy/)
Please read on for an interesting and informative blog from Sharon Gosling about the inspiration for her latest book. It is published by Little Tiger and available from your favourite bookseller.
The inspiration for Sharon Gosling’s new book
‘The Extraordinary Voyage of Katy Willacott.’
‘There are more of us than folk realize.’
It’s Fran Brocklehurst who says this, a young journalist who encourages Katy Willacott that she can have all the amazing adventures that fill her dreams. Although Fran herself isn’t real, she’s based on the American journalist Nellie Bly. Born in 1864, Ellie Cochran became one of the earliest pioneers of investigative journalism. For her first big story she went undercover as an inmate at a mental institution to expose the bad treatment of its patients. What really made her famous, however, was her decision to find out whether it was possible for her to beat the time that it took Jules Verne’s fictional character Phileas Fogg to circumnavigate the globe in Around the World in 80 Days. She was writing about her exploits for the New York World newspaper. Half way through her journey she learned that she was racing another journalist – Elisabeth Bisland of the Cosmopolitan. Both women beat the 80-day deadline, Bisland completing it in 76 days. Bly romped back to New York in just 72.
Fran tells Katy about some other extraordinary women, who most definitely were real. One is Mary Lacy. Lacy was born in 1740 and was likely to have been the first woman to have passed through the British Admiralty exams. We say ‘likely’, because it’s entirely possible that other women did as she did and pretended to be male. Aged 19, domestic servant Mary ran away from home dressed as a boy, changing her name to William Chandler. In 1763 she began studying as a shipwright, a gruelling apprenticeship that she completed in 1770. She had worked in the shipyards all the way through this period and in 1771 was forced to stop because of rheumatism. She applied for and was granted a pension under her birth name, Mary Lacy. There was no way the Admiralty could deny Mary’s mettle and hard work.
Mary Lacy’s autobiography in 1773, The History of the Female Shipwright.
https://www.sailingscuttlebutt.com/2020/03/06/riding-the-wake-of-mary-lacy/)
Then there’s Eleanor Creesy. In 1851, Creesy was the navigator aboard the clipper the Flying Cloud. Her husband Josiah was Captain – even as a girl, Eleanor’s dream had been to marry a Captain and sail with him aboard his ship. (At this time, this likely would have been the only way for her, as a woman, to achieve her dream of working on the waves). She kept turning down offers of marriage until she met Josiah. On its maiden voyage, the Cloud made the fastest-ever journey by water between New York City and San Francisco. The newspapers of the time named Creesy’s skills as navigator as a major factor in their success. The husband-and-wife team broke their own record three years later and it wasn’t broken again until 1989, over a century later.
Jeanne Baret became the first woman (that we know of) to circumnavigate the world after disguising herself as a man so that she could join her botanist lover Philibert Commerçon on his expedition for Louis XV in 1765. This was particularly risky because at the time it was illegal for a woman to be aboard ship. We know that Baret was responsible for collecting a large number of the specimens that Commerçonthen preserved and for which he took the entire credit. He named many of these plants after friends and acquaintances, but only ever tried to name one for Baret. This was rejected when it was found to have already been named. It’s only in recent years that Baret’s contribution to botany has been recognised, and it wasn’t until 2010 that Jeanne Baret finally had a species named after her: Solanum baretiae.
Women often disappear from historical record, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t always been there. Extraordinary women, doing extraordinary things. There are more of us than folk realize. There always have been.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federation.