The Sea Captain's Wife by Beth Powning
The Sea Captain’s Wife by Beth Powning
Vintage Canada
384 pages
New Brunswick's Beth Powning lets her imagination run away from her in The Sea Captain's Wife and lucky readers get to go along for the voyage. It's highbrow Harlequin meets high-seas adventure. Powning gussies up both forms: Rather than typical "boy-meets-girl" romance, her love story anatomizes a struggling young marriage; rather than charting the exploits of a salty sailor, this ocean epic recounts the escapades of a sea-faring wife.
The novel opens in the early 1860s in a New Brunswick town called Whelan's Cove, where Azuba Galloway marries Nathaniel Bradstock. Both are the offspring of wealthy shipyard owners. Nathaniel is the man of Azuba's dreams and captain of the merchant ship Traveller. Nathaniel promises to take her with him when he sails. When the time arrives for their departure, however, he changes his mind. He is afraid of exposing his young wife to the dangers of life on a merchant sailing ship.
While away, Nathaniel misses the birth of their first child, Carrie. After he departs a second time, Azuba suffers a miscarriage. Lonely, angry, and frustrated, Azuba determines Nathaniel will never leave her again. She gets her way, eventually, when her friendship with a minister ends in scandal. Humiliated before the town, Nathaniel is forced to take Azuba and Carrie with him on a perilous journey around Cape Horn and across the Pacific. Azuba is happy enough at first, despite the resentment of the crew. Of course, she gets more than she bargains for: deadly storms, shipwreck, desperate hunger, and mutiny.
View of Saint John Harbour in 1890s
Powning's craft elevates this novel above pure genre. She vividly conjures the unceasing industry of the merchant ship, complete with shanty tunes, charmingly incorporated into the narrative. Her characters and elements of the natural world, especially the plant life, are thoroughly imagined. This accumulation of detail never overwhelms; it simply convinces. Dated letters and log entries enhance the sense of a world unfolding in real time. Hovering ominously in the background is the blight of slavery and civil war. When Traveller takes up a load of guano on Peru's Chincha Islands, Azuba learns of 50 slaves who joined hands and leapt to their death.
Cape Horn, Chile
Ultimately, this is a novel about relationships, the changes wrought by time, and the long, rocky voyage that constitutes marriage. After the scandal, Azuba strives to earn back Nathaniel's trust, while seething at his tendency to treat her as a lesser crew member. Nathaniel struggles to accept his wife as autonomous, capable, and strong. While the Traveller takes on cargo, the family lodges in port cities. They stay in luxurious accommodations appropriate to their status, a far cry from the privations of the ship. In London, San Francisco and Antwerp, seamstresses make dresses for Azuba and Carrie in rich, colourful fabrics. They take in all the local sights from the seats of hansom cabs. The Sea Captain's Wife is a work that reconciles and satisfies two aspects of the female soul – the quest for adventure and the desire for beauty and love.
A previous version of this piece appeared in the Toronto Star.
