Joan Druett, all at sea and proud of it

Meet a writer who documents the lives of women under sail, as MARGIE THOMSON discovers.

They say sailors are a superstitious lot, and this certainly extends to the woman who has become one of the most popular historians of the age of sail. Joan Druett finds that history has a habit of tapping her on the shoulder, odd coincidences and chances buffeting her along the path of success.

The first book written by this former biology teacher was about acclimatisation. Named Exotic Intruders, it won best first book at the New Zealand book awards in 1983. That was very encouraging, as Druett says, and also very nice in that it netted the tired teacher $1000 in prize money. She and her husband, Ron, a maritime artist whose work features in each of Druett's 10 books decided to blow it on a holiday to Rarotonga.

Cycling around, the couple came across a man clearing an old graveyard where foreigners had been buried during the days of sail. Druett went to sit in the shade of an enormous tree that had been uprooted in a recent hurricane and there saw something that was to change her life.

It was a gravestone, standing as tall as a man, dedicated to the memory of Mary-Ann Sherman, beloved wife of Captain Sherman of the American whale ship Harrison, who had died in 1850.

Thinking to write a travel article for a glossy magazine, she resolved to look up the daring Mary-Ann, but found nowhere to turn for information. Druett would have to write it herself.

On the strength of her recent book win, she put a proposal to the Fulbright Foundation and, to her surprise, was successful. Aware of her lack of research experience, she sought and got the help of maritime historian Harry Morton of Otago University. "I owe him a lot," she says.

By the time she took up her Fulbright scholarship in 1986, arriving at the Whaling Museum in New Bedford on America's eastern seaboard, ready to begin her research, Druett found she had already been elevated to world expert status.

Somehow, she had caught the wave of interest in women and the sea at just the right time, and people who knew less than she were writing, calling and knocking at her door, asking for information.

Husband Ron was offered a residency on Long Island and in that house she found the key to her second book.

She found the 1870 to 1884 diaries of a young woman with no obvious connection to the sea.

For general interest Druett was idly perusing them when she came across the fateful entry for a Friday in March 1878: "I started with Charlie and pa on a Trip in the vessel."

"The vessel!" Druett says with glee. "Here, for the first time in more than a decade of researching 19th-century seafaring women, first-hand documentation of a women's coasting lay before me. As an experience, it was perfectly magical ... like a marvellous and most unexpected gift."

Out of that luck came her book Hen Frigates, which brought her several awards and was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the best 25 books of the year for 1998.

Druett is little known in her home country although recognition has boarded her gangplank in the form of her present position as a research fellow at the Stout Centre at Victoria University of Wellington but she is loved in the United States, where her books are accorded full-page reviews in top newspapers and she has won awards such as the John Lyman Award for Best Book of American Maritime History for She Was A Sister Sailor.

In typically down-to-earth fashion, Druett reckons she has wrung this topic's rag dry. As well as various edited works of diaries and letters, she has published three highly anecdotal histories (whose user-friendly, journalistic tone belies the years of painstaking research) covering whaling wives, merchant wives, and piratical women who were leaders in their own right (She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea).

Most recently, her study of 19th-century ships' surgeons, Rough Medicine, developed her theme somewhat into the painful region of scurvy, amputation, tropical disease and their imaginative treatments.

She is now getting acquainted with New Zealand history which is short and complex with much that has never been properly covered.

In the process she has uncovered some rip-roaring yarns. For example there is the story of the guano carrier that visited Wellington in 1873, where the crew, tired of being beaten, had overthrown the captain and put the mate in charge.

The British consul threw the crew into jail and freed the captain, but Wellington was in an uproar over the case, with citizens taking the part of the underdog crew, forming a defence fund, getting lawyers and holding banquets.

"Staid old Wellington," Druett laughs.

She has always loved the sea although, despite the rather piratical photo of her on the jackets of her books, she doesn't pine for her own briny adventures.

"I like my comforts," she says.

Instead, she lives vicariously, her office adorned with seafaring posters, her nose stuck in the manuscripts left behind by romantic dreamers who could write.

Like one of her sailors of old, Druett has grabbed the good wind and set sail.

* Joan Druett is appearing at 2.15 pm tomorrow at the Going West Books and Writers Festival. The festival runs throughout this weekend from 9 am each morning, at the Titirangi War Memorial Hall.