In 2007 a visitor to the Sandwich Glass Museum and Historical Society on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, would have seen many exhibits related to the development of the glass industry and the impact it had on the town. As museum goers moved through rooms of beautiful glass bowls, tumblers, plates, and other precious objects, they would have come across an unusual cabinet. This cabinet bore the name “Hannah Rebecca Burgess” in gilt letters and contained artifacts from the woman’s life, including her wedding gown, an ivory pagoda and other curios from her trip to China, and the story of how she...

The book is a small, red leather autograph journal, with the titleFlowers in Frolicwritten in gold on the cover. Pages of dedications from friends and family members are interspersed with colored prints of anthropomorphized flowers, given female forms, costumes, and personalities based on each flower’s representation of a virtue or vice. At various points, Rebecca added real flowers to the pages, which remain pressed in them today. The book could have been held in Rebecca’s hand and taken to school, church, and on visits to neighbors. Rebecca’s uncle Calvin Crowell, ten years her senior, gave her the book...

Though Rebecca’s autograph album provides the only information about her youth, her first two donated journals speak volumes about her life and her relationship with William. Rebecca kept two separate journals in the year prior to her going to sea with William; one she began almost immediately after her wedding, and the other she started right before William’s departure as captain of the clipper shipWhirlwindjust months after Rebecca and William were married.

William returned home from Calcutta in July 1852, bringing with him fabric for Rebecca’s wedding dress. Rebecca and William married on August 5, 1852, in her...

When Hannah Rebecca Burgess embarked on theWhirlwindon February 4, 1854 to San Francisco, she joined hundreds of other wives who accompanied captains on whalers, merchants, and naval ships. By the mid-nineteenth century the maritime transport business employed more people than any other industry except agriculture, so the number of women going to sea with their husbands peaked at this time. Though we do not know exactly how many captains’ wives attended their husbands at sea, maritime scholars remark that by the 1840s ship owners expected many women to venture to sea with the captain.³

Rebecca became part of...

After spending five months ashore with family and friends, Rebecca made the fateful decision to accompany William again, this time on a voyage with no definable destination but San Francisco. The couple embarked on a new, much larger, extreme clipper ship named theChallenger. In this ship William and Rebecca traveled from Boston to San Francisco, then on to China, London, and Chile. Rebecca began the voyage with high hopes, but as the months wore on she seemed to face almost nothing but trouble, both on the sea, in her own spiritual life, and with her husband. The way Rebecca...

Left alone in Valparaiso, Chile, with only theChallenger’s steward, David Graves, to accompany her home, Rebecca faced still more trouble in her life. Having spent the past two years almost entirely in William’s company, Rebecca now looked toward to what she perceived to be a bleak and lonely future. Since she made a promise never to marry again, the young woman perhaps saw nothing before her but solitude. The twenty-two-year old woman’s writings suggest that she was overcome by despondent feelings immediately upon William’s passing, and she recorded these feelings for years after William’s death.

Rebecca continued to write...

From the time of William’s death through the 1870s, Rebecca kept five separate journals, four of which she donated to the historical society. The donated journals complete the picture of Rebecca’s activities during her widowhood and suggest that although she spent much of her time reminiscing about William in the cemetery, she did participate in community activities, most particularly in her church. Rebecca’s journals during this period blend religious introspection with narrative about visits, philanthropic efforts, and political events during the Civil War. Rebecca used her prose in this era to more fully fashion her persona as widow not just...

Rebecca had been telling her family and friends the story of William’s death for years, and had even begun to write her reminiscences for the wider public. But this remarkable event—the return of her Bible through the noted maritime author Richard Henry Dana—may have made Rebecca think that her story had potential to inspire a wide audience, even long after her own demise. It is at this point in her life—particularly in the 1870s and beyond—that we have evidence that Rebecca began shaping her own legend for the community. During this time Rebecca added to her...

Rebecca wanted to be remembered in her community as a proper Victorian wife, a grieving and devoted widow, and a maritime heroine who failed to save her husband but who saved the lives of more than thirty crewmen from certain peril as she navigated theChallengerto Valparaiso in 1856. She succeeded in making both Sandwich and Bourne embrace her story as part of their collective town histories. She also succeeded in getting the academic community to portray her as an important maritime figure, and as a heroine who fought to save her husband and the ship theChallenger. She...