Finding herself in charge of her sick husband’s clipper, a self-taught working-class teenager overcame storms, icebergs and a disloyal first mate to get her ship to safety
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o one knows exactly what Mary Ann Patten said in September 1856 when she convinced a crew on the verge of mutiny to accept her command as captain. What is known is that Patten, who was 19 and pregnant, was a force to be reckoned with.
After taking the helm from her sick husband in the middle of a ferocious storm off the coast of Cape Horn, the notoriously hazardous tip of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago off southern Chile, she successfully put down the mutiny and navigated her way to safety through a sea of icebergs.
Patten arrived in San Francisco Bay 10 weeks later with her crew and her cargo intact, the first woman ever to command a merchant clipper ship.
