Joan Druett: 27 books

Romance and the islands have gone hand-in-hand since the bare-breasted young women of Tahiti gave a rousing welcome to the 18th-century European adventurers who discovered the island.  It was not just a tropical port of call that Captain Wallis and his men found, but their tales of golden girls and...

With her pistols loaded she went aboard And by her side hung a glittering sword In her belt two daggers, well armed for war Was this female smuggler Was this female smuggler who never feared a scar. If a "hen frigate" was any ship carrying a captain's wife, then a "she captain" is a bold woman distinguished...

Auckland Island is a godforsaken place in the middle of the Southern Ocean, 285 miles south of New Zealand. With year-round freezing rain and howling winds, it is one of the most forbidding places in the world. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death. In 1864 Captain Thomas Musgrave...

The true story of one of history’s most notorious mutinies is revealed in this riveting “nautical murder mystery” (USA Today). In May 1841, the Massachusetts whaleship Sharon set out for the whaling ground of the northwestern Pacific. A year later, while most of the crew was out hunting,...

A "hen frigate," traditionally, was any ship with the captain's wife on board. Hen frigates were miniature worlds -- wildly colorful, romantic, and dangerous. Here are the dramatic, true stories of what the remarkable women on board these vessels encountered on their often amazing voyages: romantic...

It was 1799, and French privateers lurked in the Atlantic and the Bay of Bengal. Yet Eleanor Reid, newly married and just twenty-one years old, made up her mind to sail with her husband, Captain Hugh Reid, to the Pacific, the Spice Islands and India. Danger threatened not just from the barely charted...

The year is 1838, and after more than ten years in the planning, the famous United States Exploring Expedition is set to launch into uncharted waters from the coast of Virginia. A convoy of seven ships filled with astronomers, mapmakers, naturalists, and the sailors charged with getting them around...

As she stood on the deck of the brig Gosling, Harriet Gray was forced to face an unhappy truth. She had been duped, yet again. At eighteen, the lovely English actress had already known more than her share of betrayal. And now, a dishonest shipmaster had stranded her on board a ship that was manned by...

That the Gosling Company should become a theatrical company was a preposterous idea—as crazy as the actual fact that Captain Jake Dexter, once a respectable Yankee mariner, was now an infamous pirate. Yet, he had already travelled such a long, strange path as a fortune-hunting adventurer that metamorphosing...

Like a phantom dogging Harriet Gray’s trail, Frank Sefton is polished, charming—and utterly ruthless. Once, he abandoned the actress to a miserable fate on the far-flung shores of New Zealand. Now, he is back in her life—full of devious schemes to rob and mortify her, far from the protection of Captain Jake Dexter, and his gold-seeking crew.

Born at sea and raised on shipboard, adventurous young Abigail Sherman wants nothing more than to be wedded to the ocean for life. But fate conspires against her. Abigail is packed off to Puritanical relatives in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to learn proper womanly decorum. She does her best...

It was not just the men who lived on the brink of peril when under sail at sea. Lucretia Jansz, who was enslaved as a concubine in 1629, was just one woman who endured a castaway experience. Award-winning historian Joan Druett (Island of the Lost, The Elephant Voyage), relates the stories of women...

This cross-continental journey had proved very pleasant, particularly considering that he was dead.  Or so Timothy ironically mused… The year is 1905, and the heyday of Thames, in the goldfields of New Zealand.  Back in 1867, Captain Jake Dexter, a flamboyant adventurer and pirate, and...

Using diaries, journals, and correspondences, Druett recounts the daily grind surgeons on nineteenth-century whaling ships faced: the rudimentary tools they used, the treatments they had at their disposal, the sorts of people they encountered in their travels, and the dangers they faced under the harsh conditions of life at sea.