Abby Jane Morrell

(1809 - c. 1855)

Abby Jane Morrell traveled the world on the ships of her American sea captain husband, Benjamin Morrell. Her diaries of these voyages—zigzagging from the Cape Verde Islands to New Zealand to South Africa to the Phillippines—show a life filled with adventure and misery, for both the inhabitants of these ocean-exploring vessels and the indigenous people they imposed upon. “There are but a few places, thank Heaven, where an American vessel cannot go,” she wrote, “and but few indeed that they have not visited. At home we females think but little of national glory, or rather not much of the means of supporting it; but when abroad we become interested in everything connected with commerce or naval power.”