Abstract
Memoirs by seagoing partners of seafarers can offer valuable insights to maritime historians. Newcomers to a floating institution can shed fresh light on under-articulated hegemonic relations aboard; intimate partners can explain seafarers’ emotional responses to dynamics in the floating goldfish bowl; and wives can offer gender-aware vignettes that men may overlook. So the growth in do-it-yourself publishing as well as in vanity publishing usefully enables memoirs to circulate. No commercial publishers could afford to bring out seafarer biographies because they are of such specialist interest; perhaps that applies even more so to memoirs by spouses of seafarers.
Carole Goldsmith is the latest UK person to bring out a book about being a sailor’s wife. Her husband Andy was a Third and Second Mate. For five years she sailed on Texaco Overseas Tankships in the 1980s. The booming fleet of 30 vessels in 1974 was declining, to four in 1984, which means this book about the 1979–84 period traverses choppy waters.
From the 1950s to early 1980s petroleum companies such as BP sought to retain skilled white officers by allowing senior men to take their wives with them. This book therefore is the subjective story of life affected by this policy and about the reality behind the long-gone job adverts that featured sketches of several fashionable wives in bikinis tanning happily by the ship’s pool, on their ‘almost-cruises’, with never a tedious oil terminal in sight.
Goldsmith herself ‘cruised’ on the Texaco Rome, Great Britain, Plymouth, Rotterdam, Gloucester, Melbourne, London and Ghent. This young wife’s life was based on that of a busy man whose employment pattern meant he spent five months at sea then two months at home, in theory. In practice he often had to respond to his global company’s immediate and changing needs; she knew upheavals.
The book is structured into eight chronological chapters, one per ship. Each chapter is topped by information about the ship and a photograph of it; the chapter is tailed by a map of the route and a dated schedule of ports of call. So the book is an immensely coherent account, although without contents list or index. Pages are interspersed by many personal photographs, in colour, of life on board and ashore.
Seagoing wives classically claim they had the time of their life, in a period when women were less motile. Goldsmith is prepared to show the underside too, including referring to the impoverished pregnant sex industry workers who climbed aboard in Haiti. But she does not moan about the matters that usually bug officers’ wives: bad food, boredom, storms, hold-ups in ports, malfunctioning irons, ‘shadow stripes’ competitiveness and wardrobes too cramped to accommodate cornucopias of dresses.
As the wife of someone on the deck, not engine side of the ship, she was often on the bridge and therefore knew what was happening. She certainly joined in officers’ social life and found ways to contribute by cutting hair, typing, ‘entertaining the troops’ and acting as cinema projectionist (which silenced complaints about poor films). Her vignettes show the part the personal played in shipboard life. For example, a kindly captain arranged for a helicopter to bring a blister pack of contraceptive pills when she feared her supply was running out.
Dynamics changed for her when another wife was on board. They were often even younger than her, so she was the ‘senior podgy’ (73). No pregnant women were allowed. When a Maltese wife turned out to be pregnant and had to be returned home, she writes: ‘I was really upset about losing her friendship. It meant I would once more be alone.’ (43)
Authors of seafaring autobiographies are necessarily constrained by a desire to avoid offending old shipmates with whom bonds have been so strong. Protective tact can sometimes create anodyne narratives and irritating omissions. It is well known that sexual tensions mount on ships where men in authority have privileged access to a sex partner, by contrast to other personnel who resent not being allowed to take spouses, as Norling writes of an earlier period. 1 Indeed, for over a century, pulp novels have thrived on sole women as lighted matches in the powder keg of a ship.
But, politely, the author does not refer to such gendered dynamics. However, she reveals the racial inflection in one incident of sexual harassment. Anonymous phone calls that she says were ‘not in the best of taste’ turned out to be from an Asian steward. She lets drop that another wife had previously had such calls too, but the case had not been investigated ‘because she started to accuse the officers [so] nobody looked into it officially’ (p59). That is, because Goldsmith recognised the obscene caller had an Asian accent he was hunted down and punished, whereas someone thought to be a white brother officer was not.
The memoir is based on upbeat letters home, as well as her diary. And the final product was created 30 years after the events, which means in effect there are two narrators, the young wife then and the mature woman today. This reviewer regrets that that the mature Goldsmith did not say more. It would augment the scant material by other seagoing wives. These include slight articles. The UK merchant marine has only one similar book, Jean Faulkner’s A Wife on the Ocean Waves (2011), which mainly focuses on tourism ashore in the late 1970s. And the US’s main two books on the subject are the annotated letters of Grace F. Ladd, a nineteenth- century wife under sail (2003) and Nancy Allen’s Fair Seafarer, a forthright account of being on a 1990s cargo ship (1997).
Goldsmith’s lite account would ideally be expanded and deepened in a second edition, enabling a more reflective narrative exploring meaning, not simply chronicling events. However, the many small insights she allows, and the rarity of books by seafaring wives, make this a welcome addition to gender-aware maritime history.
