Abby Jane Morrell | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Abby Jane Wood February 17, 1809 New York |
| Died | after 1850 (aged 40 or more) |
| Language | English |
| Period | 1833 |
| Notable works | Narrative of a voyage to the Ethiopic and South Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Chinese Sea, North and South Pacific Ocean, in the years 1829, 1830, 1831 |
| Spouse | |
Abby Jane Morrell (born February 17, 1809; date of death unknown) was an American writer who produced the first description of sub-Antarctic travel from a woman's perspective.
Morrell was born Abbey Jane Wood in New York on February 17, 1809. [1] Her father, Captain John Wood, died on November 14, 1811, in New Orleans and had been master of the ship Indian Hunter. [1] Her mother remarried in 1814 to a Mr. Burritt Keeler. [1]
On June 29, 1824, she married Captain Benjamin Morrell, who was a distant cousin, and became his second wife. [2] They had a first son (born between 1825 and 1828) whom Morrell looked after in New York. [1] However, in her own words, Morrell was determined to accompany her husband on his next voyage in 1829 and succeeded in persuading him after a week of crying. [3] When she and her husband set sail, the son was left in New York with her mother. [1]
On September 2, 1829, they set sail on her husband's fourth voyage of commerce and exploration on the schooner Antarctic. [4] They voyaged from 1829 to 1831 and both wrote accounts of what they saw on their return. [2] Morrell was accompanied by her brother, who is not named. [5]
The voyage saw them visit a remarkable number of places around the world, such as the Cape Verde Islands, Tristan da Cunha, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Liberia and South Africa. [6] Morrell kept journals whilst they travelled, which helped to put together her account on her return. [7] Morrell is influenced by the trader perspective in her writings - theirs is a voyage of financial investment. [8]
In January 1830, during their travels in the South Pacific, [9] the ship visited the east coast of New Zealand and Morrell went to visit the mission at Paihia, where she was hugely impressed by the work of the English missionaries. [10]
Morrell's account is important in Antarctic history, as it the first description by a woman of the subarctic region. On December 5, they put into a harbour visited by James Cook and saw "an enormous number of elephant seals". [11]
Many of the things they saw and wrote about are of interest to historians. One episode is the capture of a person called Dako, who appears to have been a leader from the small island of Uneapea (Bali Island), north of West New Britain, Papua New Guinea, who led an attack on their ship. [12] They captured Dako, named him 'Sunday', and he eventually returned to New York with them, and alongside another captive called 'Monday' put them both on display at Tammany Hal l and then at Peale's Museum on Broadway. [12]
The couple returned to New York in 1831, nine days before their second son was born. [5]
There is little documented history for Abby Morrell after 1838: two records, dated 1841 and 1850, place her in New York, but details of her life and eventual death are unknown. She wrote no further books. [13]
Morrell's account Narrative of a Voyage to the Ethiopic and South Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Chinese Sea, North and South Pacific Oceans, in the Years 1829, 1830, 1831 was published in New York in 1833 by J. & J. Harper. [2] It was ghost-written by Samuel Knapp, whilst her husband's was completed by poet Samuel Woodworth. [12] The Christian Magazine wrote a double review alongside Emma Willard's Letters from France and Britain, and wrote that "both are the productions of our self-taught countrywomen who [are] ... creditable to their sex". [14]
Described today as a "series of self-serving cliches", Morrell's account suffers from no straightforward structure, which could be due to its dual authorship. [15] However, Morrell is compassionate to most: she argues for the reform of sea laws; she sees the non-white people they encounter as human, but nevertheless thinks they should speak English. [15] Like many other writers writing in antebellum America, she approves of colonisation. [16]
Unlike many accounts by wives of ship's captains, Morrell's account was aimed at a wide, public audience. [17] Her calls for reform in terms of education, both abroad and on board ship, put her within the context of nineteenth-century social concerns. [17]
In more recent scholarship, Morrell's account has been over-shadowed by the longer career of her husband, and academics such as Fairhead [18] have blamed her memoir for opaque representations of her. [19]
She was featured on a 4 franc postage stamp issued by the French Southern and Antarctic Lands in 2000. [20]
USS Vincennes was a 703-ton Boston-class sloop of war in the United States Navy from 1826 to 1865. During her service, Vincennes patrolled the Pacific, explored the Antarctic, and blockaded the Confederate Gulf coast in the Civil War. Named for the Revolutionary War Battle of Vincennes, she was the first U.S. warship to circumnavigate the globe.
Faddey Faddeyevich Bellingshausen or Fabian Gottlieb Benjamin von Bellingshausen was a Russian cartographer, explorer, and naval officer of Baltic German descent, who attained the rank of admiral. He participated in the first Russian circumnavigation of the globe, and subsequently became a leader of another circumnavigation expedition that discovered the continent of Antarctica. Like Otto von Kotzebue and Adam Johann von Krusenstern, Bellingshausen belonged to the cohort of prominent Baltic German navigators who helped Russia launch its naval expeditions.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, written in 1838, is the only complete novel by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The work relates the tale of the young Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaler called the Grampus. Various adventures and misadventures befall Pym, including shipwreck, mutiny, and cannibalism, before he is saved by the crew of the Jane Guy. Aboard this vessel, Pym and a sailor named Dirk Peters continue their adventures farther south. Docking on land, they encounter hostile, black-skinned natives before escaping back to the ocean. The novel ends abruptly as Pym and Peters continue toward the South Pole.
James Weddell was a British sailor, navigator and seal hunter who in February 1823 sailed to latitude of 74° 15′ S—a record 7.69 degrees or 532 statute miles south of the Antarctic Circle—and into a region of the Southern Ocean that later became known as the Weddell Sea.
Basil Hall was a British naval officer from Scotland, a traveller, and an author. He was the second son of Sir James Hall, 4th Baronet, an eminent man of science.
Owen Chase was first mate of the whaler Essex, which sank in the Pacific Ocean on November 20, 1820, after being rammed by a sperm whale. Soon after his return to Nantucket, Chase wrote an account of the shipwreck and the attempts of the crew to reach land in small boats. The book, Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, was published in 1821 and would inspire Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick.
Peter Dillon was a sea captain engaged in the merchant trade, explorer and writer. Dillon discovered in 1826–27 the fate of the La Pérouse expedition.
The Nantucket was a 350-ton whaler built in Nantucket, Massachusetts, in 1837. First master, David N. Edwards, 1837-40, then: George Washington Gardner, 1841–45; Benjamin C. Gardner, 1845–50; Richard C. Gibbs 1850-54 ; Richard C. Gibbs (1855–59).
New South Greenland, sometimes known as Morrell's Land, was an appearance of land recorded by the American captain Benjamin Morrell of the schooner Wasp in March 1823, during a sealing and exploration voyage in the Weddell Sea area of Antarctica. Morrell provided precise coordinates and a description of a coastline which he claimed to have sailed along for more than 300 miles (500 km). Because the Weddell Sea area was so little visited and hard to navigate due to ice conditions, the alleged land was never properly investigated before its existence was emphatically disproven during Antarctic expeditions in the early 20th century.
Benjamin Morrell was an American sea captain, explorer and trader who made a number of voyages, mainly to the Atlantic, the Southern Ocean and the Pacific Islands. In a ghost-written memoir, A Narrative of Four Voyages, which describes his sea-going life between 1823 and 1832, Morrell included numerous claims of discovery and achievement, many of which have been disputed by geographers and historians, and in some cases have been proven false. He ended his career as a fugitive, having wrecked his ship and misappropriated parts of the salvaged cargo.
The era of European and American voyages of scientific exploration followed the Age of Discovery and were inspired by a new confidence in science and reason that arose in the Age of Enlightenment. Maritime expeditions in the Age of Discovery were a means of expanding colonial empires, establishing new trade routes and extending diplomatic and trade relations to new territories, but with the Enlightenment scientific curiosity became a new motive for exploration to add to the commercial and political ambitions of the past. See also List of Arctic expeditions and List of Antarctic expeditions.
Samuel Lorenzo Knapp was an American author and lawyer.
Warren Hastings was built in 1789 at Calcutta, India. Her registry was transferred to Great Britain in 1796. In 1805 she was sold and her new owners renamed her Speke. She made three voyages transporting convicts from Britain to New South Wales. After her first convict voyage she engaged in whaling.
York was a sailing ship built in 1819 at Southwick. She made one voyage to Bombay for the British East India Company (EIC) in 1820. She made three voyages transporting convicts to Australia between 1829 and 1832. She was condemned and sold for breaking up in 1833 at Mauritius.
Thomas Abernethy was a Scottish seafarer, gunner in the Royal Navy, and polar explorer. Because he was neither an officer nor a gentleman, he was little mentioned in the books written by the leaders of the expeditions he went on, but was praised in what was written. In 1857, he was awarded the Arctic Medal for his service as an able seaman on the 1824–25 voyage of HMS Hecla, the first of his five expeditions for which participants were eligible for the award. He was in parties that, for their time, reached the furthest north, the furthest south (twice), and the nearest to the South Magnetic Pole. In 1831, along with James Clark Ross's team of six, Abernethy was in the first party ever to reach the North Magnetic Pole.
Amelia Wilson was built in France under another name and captured by the British in 1809. Her new owners renamed her and she became a West Indiaman. She later became a whaler and was wrecked in 1833 on her fifth whaling voyage.
Cadmus was launched in 1813 at Sunderland. She traded with the East Indies under license from the British East India Company (EIC) until 1827. Then between 1827 and 1834 she made two voyages as a whaler. She was lost in 1835.
Lady Harewood, was launched in 1791 at Rotherhithe. She was initially a West Indiaman and in 1800 a French privateer captured her, but a Royal Navy frigate recaptured her two days later. She made three voyages transporting convicts to Australia, one in 1829 to Van Diemen's Land, and two, in 1831 and 1832, to New South Wales. In 1833 she became leaky on her way to Singapore from Australia and was condemned and sold at Singapore.
Mellish was launched in 1819 at Kidderpore, Calcutta as Chicheley Plowden but renamed within the year and sold for a "free trader", i.e, a ship trading between England and India sailing under a license from the British East India Company (EIC). She then made two voyages transporting convicts, the first to New South Wales, and the second to Van Diemen's Land (VDL). She next made two voyages as a South Seas whaler between 1831 and 1838. She was wrecked on 5 October 1844.
Byers's Island is a phantom island reported by Captain Benjamin Morrell in his 1832 book A Narrative of Four Voyages.
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