Joan Druett, Captain's Daughter, Coasterman's Wife

About: An account of the experiences of Carrie Hubbard Davis of Orient, Long Island, pieced together from her journals and private correspondence in the 1870s and early 1880s.

Verdict: Druett focuses on Carrie Davis’s participation in her husband's voyages across Long Island Sound to sell and procure freight. But that’s really just a small part of the story. The journals reveal a life filled with laborious domestic work—baking and canning and cooking and sewing—community and familial responsibilities, church attendance, and seemingly constant correspondence with her woe-is-me mother. Also, early deaths, rowdy neighborhood boys, and serious health problems, such as scarlet fever and toothache. It’s a fascinating account in that it conjures a long-vanished world in which little boats were routinely crossing the Sound filled with potatoes and peas and the like. It’s profoundly boring in that Carrie Davis's day-to-day life would make me want to claw my eyes out. Also of note is that Carrie Davis's son, William Steeple Davis, would grow up to be an author and artist of some repute.

Publication: 1995 · 63 pages