Fiction Review

Rosel Kim

The Sea Captain’s Wife
by Beth Powning
Toronto, ON: Knopf Canada, 2010
384 pp. $32.00

What was it like to be on Christopher Columbus’s boat when land was nowhere near sight? What was Magellan’s family like? What remained invisible in male-dominated and adventure-driven travel narratives were the long, lost days floating aimlessly, and the days of stalled disgruntled morale caused by the oft-famished crew. But most importantly, the wondrous travel narratives often omit the aching and uncertain loneliness of the family waiting back home. Beth Powning brings the neglected, heartbreaking and rich details to the fore with her new novel.

As the title promises, Powning gives us a forgotten narrative of the woman left behind – the forgotten woman behind a great captain. And this time, she has an unforgettable name: Azuba Bradstock, wife and daughter of prominent sea captains in the small town of Whelan’s Cove, New Brunswick.

At the beginning, Azuba is diminutive, silent, and unsure – letting others and her body speak for her. The novel begins with a harrowing scene of miscarriage – a common tragedy that befalls many women but is seldom depicted. We feel and see her pain of losing a potential child, as blood, “flecked with black strands” (7) that refuses to halt, dominates the opening scene of the novel. But we don’t hear her express her pain – she silently suffers, clutching her chest and running to the midwife, and silently thinks about what the town will say on her behalf without a hint of agency. Such is a woman’s fate.

Only when she meets another being as timid and unsure as herself is she able to open up and develop her own voice: Reverend Walton, whose youth and thoughtful introversion puts her at ease, but whose public and celibate occupation puts his interactions with her under public scrutiny. Predictably, their budding friendship becomes quickly tainted by town gossip, which ironically leads to the actualization of her biggest wish: voyage on her sea captain husband Nathaniel’s ship Traveller as a “seafaring family” (14), which she lovingly envisioned since meeting him.

The action picks up, and Azuba’s uncertainty transforms into strong will and savvy with the voyage. Powning’s investigative prose also digs deep into the structural inequalities of the ship that makes it a male-dominated space, where women are seen as bad luck and treated as ration-reducing burdens with no skills to spare. However, Azuba deftly defies the stereotypes with her tenacity and curiosity that demands information and respect. In one of the crucial scenes of the novel – and my favourite scene – she singlehandedly quells a potential riot when she snatches a gun from her husband’s hand and emphatically commands: “there will be no killing on this ship,”(222) as the stunned crew and captain look on.

Powning’s rigorous research shines in the intricate details describing women’s restrictive clothing (the hoops of skirts to children’s petticoats made of grass) to panoramic descriptions of the voyager’s nightmare of The Horn. But the novel is not just a story of a single voyage – it is much more than that. Powning manages to weave in the personal story of Azuba’s romance with Nathaniel through its painful details and the slow but solid reconciliation. By letting their true relationship take place away from the fixed customs of the land, Powning adds life and realism to what begins as a clichéd courtship of a passionate dance and intense eye contact.

The novel is told in third person with intense focalization on Azuba’s character, which at times feels a bit limiting in describing the complex life on the ship. We get to know Azuba very well by the end, but other characters often feel flat—such as the two men in her life, Reverend Walton and Nathaniel, who often seem to occupy the simplistic binary of masculinity and emasculation. In terms of structure, the novel loses its tightness as it progresses from not one seminal voyage, but two. I won’t give too much of the ending away, but suffice to say that the reader will stay on The Traveller for awhile. But perhaps feeling the weariness of the journeys on paper is Powning’s way of immersing the reader into the slower and exhaustive pace of sea travel in the 19th century.

The Sea Captain’s Wife will satisfy many readers—lovers of travel, historical, and romance literature can all find enjoyment in Powning’s detailed account of a young marriage, and an adventurous and harrowing voyage that takes the family around the world, with stops at stunning sites such as Antwerp and the American West Coast.