Stars to Steer By: Celebrating the 20th Century Women Who Went to Sea, by Julia Jones; Bloomsbury, Adlard Coles, 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, U.K.; 336 pp., $27.00
Available from The WoodenBoat Store
Julia Jones, who is the literary editor of Yachting Monthly and a longtime contributor to other yachting publications in the U.K., has researched a solid book on some of the accomplished British women sailors, from Lady Anna Brassey in the 1870s to Tracey Edwards in 2018. Although the subtitle specifies women who went to sea in the 20th century, the book encompasses a lot more: half of the 19th century and the early decades of the 21st century. The subjects are all British adventurers, as you might expect from Adlard Coles, a venerable British publisher.
The most interesting thing about this new book is, as often happens, the author herself. Julia Jones grew up aboard a stout wooden motorsailer named PETER DUCK, a Laurent Giles ketch built in 1946, and one of the first boats to be built after the end of the World War II. PETER DUCK was commissioned by the beloved Arthur Ransome, the author of a series of children’s adventure books, most notably Swallows and Amazons. One of his later books was titled PETER DUCK. Julia’s parents purchased the cruising ketch in 1957 and kept the boat on the River Deben in Woodbridge, on the East Coast of England across the North Sea from the Netherlands.
Julia was not quite three years old when the family began cruising aboard the 28′ PETER DUCK, and she writes that the boat was the key element in her childhood. The photographs from that happy time show the author, probably age six, boldly steering while standing on one foot, and in another photo she is somersaulting around the pinrail, sea and sky beyond. She reports that much of her time aboard was spent reading in her bunk while mishaps occurred aboard ship, occupying her parents’ attention. To this she credits her love of reading, and a literary career in boating publications. But it gets better.
Julia’s parents sold PETER DUCK, and in 1987 a couple cruised her around Britain, then took her to mainland Europe; they lived aboard in St. Petersburg while the new owner, Greg Palmer, worked on the project to build the replica of Peter the Great’s flagship, SHTANDART. When Palmer died, PETER DUCK came up for sale again, and Julia and her husband purchased her in 2000 and brought her back home to the River Deben. Since that time, four generations of Julia’s family have been welcomed aboard, from her 91-year-old mother, June Jones, who owned the boat from 1957 to 1984, to an enthusiastic young great-grandson learning the ropes.
Much of Jones’s book is a scholarly dive into the lives of women who found themselves aboard ships, boats, or skiffs, often in the company of a captain-husband, or racing in small family boats. The book includes discussion of women’s meager opportunities for command at the time—in the law and in society—being part of why their place in the sport of sailing, historically, may seem thin. Some captains’ wives were not listed in the ship’s roster, even though they were aboard for long and arduous voyages. Jones gives those women names.
The women covered include:
• Susie Irvine of the Shetland Islands, who went to sea as a merchant seaman’s wife, with her piano and sewing machine aboard. She rounded Cape Horn several times and bore nine children, seven of them surviving. Ports of call ranged from New South Wales to Zanzibar, San Francisco to Liverpool; cargos loaded, storms, and groundings are all carefully recorded in her letters home.
• Dorothy Levitt, who was the first winner, male or female, of the famous Harmsworth Trophy for motorboats in 1903, setting a world speed record of 19.3 mph. Rudyard Kipling and his wife were in the crowd for the event in Cork, Ireland. Dorothy’s life and adventures are recounted in great detail in the book, including her instruction to high-profile women to be fearless enough to drive the new automobiles.
• Lady Anne Brassey, who is well known for her book A Voyage in the Sunbeam, an illustrated travelog of her round-the-world voyage in 1876–77 with her husband and a complement of 43 friends and crew. SUNBEAM was a 159′ steam-driven barkentine planked with teak over steel framing. When sailing, her funnel could be lowered to allow the booms freedom to swing; she was as handsome a vessel as I’ve ever seen. Brassey presented a model of SUNBEAM to the New York Yacht Club that is still on display in the library of the club’s 44th Street headquarters. Jones describes Lady Anne’s iconic travel book well, giving the tragic background for the Brasseys to make this magnificent trip and conveying how well Anna Brassey’s account of the voyage was received at the time and today.
• A young woman named Winnie Sutton, who was a practiced racing sailor in The Solent. In 1892, Nathanael Herreshoff was commissioned to build WEE WIN for her. This was the first Herreshoff design to race in England, and for years WEE WIN proved unbeatable.
• Jeanne Day, who was a 23-year-old stowaway in one of Alan Villiers’ ships, the four-masted steel bark HERZOGIN CECILIE. She departed Adelaide, Australia, then rounded Cape Horn and sailed on to Cardiff, Wales. The young stowaway was treated kindly, mostly, but ridiculed and made to work. Upon arrival in Cardiff, she was examined by two doctors, the book tells us, who confirmed that she was still a virgin.
Oddly, neither the table of contents nor the subheadings in each chapter gives a hint at the names of the women being described therein. Each chapter is identified by items of women’s clothing described in the course of sailing: bonnet, winter shoes, blue gauze veils, and so on, not by the names of the women described. Even the names of the few well-known women, such as Lady Anna Brassey, Ann Davison, and Tracy Edwards, do not appear with their own chapter heads.
One of my favorite historic sailors and storytellers is Ann Davison, who in 1952 became the first woman to sail solo across the Atlantic. She had no motive and no sponsorship, just a huge grief to overcome. She had lost her husband in the horrible wreck of their 70′ powerboat, having held him in her arms, adrift in a cork raft, until he died. Her subsequent voyage to Barbados took a death-defying six months in her 23′ wooden sloop FELICITY ANN, which was purchased with the proceeds of her first book. She started out with very little sailing experience, but she knew navigation from her early days of flying airplanes. Jones’s book, taking the horrific details from Davison’s own book, My Ship is so Small, summarizes her formative experiences well, but not the actual long ocean crossing; instead she refers the reader to Davison’s book. I cannot forgive Jones for breaking Ann Davison’s story into random parts of three different chapters, each with headings of ladies’ clothing.
On a better note, FELICITY ANN has recently undergone a major restoration at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding in conjunction with the Community Boat Project in Port Hadlock, Washington (see WB No. 264). With help from volunteers, she was rebuilt with a purpleheart centerline and planking of larch and western red cedar; she was relaunched in May 2018.
The real story of women in the sailing world need not be limited by nationality. My favorite hero-sailor of any gender is Kirsten Neuschäfer, a South African who won the 2022 Golden Globe; she used her skills in celestial navigation and her superb physical and mental stamina for a heart-stopping rescue of another competitor who was adrift after he lost his boat in the southern Indian Ocean.
And let us include the pirate queen Grace O’Malley, lord of the Irish navy; the celebrated French ocean-racing champions Florence Arthaud and Isabelle Autissier; and the New Zealander Naomi James, now Dame Naomi James, who rounded Cape Horn solo in 1978 following the clipper-ship route.
Julia Jones has done fine research for Stars to Steer By, and I hope she will undertake the next volume, covering in narrative glory the great woman sailors of the world, most of them unknown and unsung. They should have their inspiring and varied sea stories told. 
Queene Hooper Foster is a regular contributor to WoodenBoat and a longtime instructor at WoodenBoat School.