‘The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World’ by Tilar J. Mazzeo. (St. Martin's Press)

A couple of years ago, I stumbled across a most unusual story from the annals of old San Francisco. It concerned a 19-year-old woman named Mary Ann Patten who spent two months captaining a 216-foot-long clipper ship after her husband fell deathly ill during an around-the-world journey. In that time, Patten squashed an on-board mutiny, won the loyalty of the crew and kept her husband alive. The kicker? She did all of this while pregnant with her first child.

Patten guided that ship, Neptune’s Car, into the port of San Francisco on Nov. 13, 1856, becoming the first American woman in history to captain a merchant vessel. Though she quickly became an

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