A question: How does Beth Powning so authentically recreate not only the world of 150 years ago, not only the world of a sailor 150 years ago, but the world of a woman at sea 150 years ago, without having been there?
Having asked that, and reincarnation or guidance from those who lived in her 1870 New Brunswick farmhouse aside, the research (she lists her sources) is not enough—it has to be the power of her imagination. Powning is so convincing that you want to be part of the family, to share their lives when Azuba’s wish to travel with her sea captain husband is granted. You want to take sides—with Azuba, neglected and lonely and finding not the freedom she imagined but confinement of a different sort; with Nathaniel, the strong man in command of his ship, his crew and his wife. Your passions are as strong as Azuba’s and her emotions become yours. You wonder if you would have put your child at risk at sea as she did, teaching her and keeping her occupied and happy, happy in the knowledge she was giving her child a father, one who had ’till then been more absent at sea than at home. You wonder at the tenacity of a child who comes to terms with the death of a seaman in front of her, and happily gives up her carved bone-buttons so the single surviving egg-laying hen has enough calcium to create egg shells and you weep with them with that chicken is taken in a storm. You wonder if you would have had the courage (or stupidity) to risk a pregnancy at sea in the days that pregnancy ashore meant a high chance of death.
Powning draws you in all the time. You are with the family when they round Cape Horn, when the ship is knocked down, when the winds and waves threaten to kill. You are with them in the doldrums and having fashionable clothes made in London and San Franscisco after months of making do; you are hungry when they are down to quarter rations with dirty water; you want to scratch your own scalp when they have no means of keeping clean. You feel the heat of the tropics and the cool of the wintery north. Most important, you feel for and with Azuba when she questions her own judgement and you grow with her as she realises that life is never what you think it will be.
There’s adventure on every page—her own misjudgement that changed her life; the lives of other seafaring wives, ports in South America and the sophistication of Antwerp. Just when you think it is safe to turn the next page, that the ship is heading for a safe port, there is more danger in Hong Kong, danger that cost other people’s lives and nearly their own.
Yes, there’s a happy ending in Whelan’s Cove in New Brunswick but not an entirely unblemished one, for no one survives such a life unscathed. This is an enchanting and captivating novel, and one of the most enjoyable reads I have had in a long time. —Shirley Gueller
