In 1852 Hannah Rebecca Crowell married sea captain William
Burgess and set sail. Within three years, Rebecca Burgess had
crossed the equator eleven times and learned to navigate a vessel.
In 1856, 22-year-old Rebecca saved the ship "Challenger" as her
husband lay dying from dysentery. The widow returned to her
family's home in Sandwich, Massachusetts, where she refused all
marriage proposals and died wealthy in 1917.
This is the way Burgess recorded her story in her prodigious
journals and registers, which she donated to the local historical
society upon her death, but there is no other evidence that this
dramatic event occurred exactly this way. In The Captain's Widow of
Sandwich, Megan Taylor Shockley examines how Burgess constructed
her own legend and how the town of Sandwich embraced that history
as its own. Through careful analysis of myriad primary sources,
Shockley also addresses how Burgess dealt with the conflicting
gender roles of her life, reconciling her traditionally masculine
adventures at sea and her independent lifestyle with the accepted
ideals of the period's "Victorian woman."
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