THE VOYAGER Hannah Masury Howe

In 1867, a ship bound for California with 400 Chinese passengers signalled distress as it drifted in the Pacific Ocean. The ship’s captain was a woman, and her mutinous crew had refused to sail the ship even though they were running out of water. How did Captain Hannah Masury Howe come to be in such a predicament, and how could she possibly save herself and the ship?

Our guest for this real-life high seas adventure is NYT bestselling novelist Katherine Howe, author of A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself.

Video map of Hannah Masury Howe’s adventures, created for us by artist Mera MacKendrick

The Ellen Southard punchbowl
photo courtesy of Katherine Howe

The Olive Southard, a “sister ship” to the Ellen Southard
painting by Édouard Adam

The ship’s manifest of the Ellen Southard

Newspaper coverage of Helen’s last voyage on the Ellen Southard

Newspaper coverage of the mutiny aboard the Ellen Southard, from the Petaluma Weekly 1867

San Francisco newspaper coverage of the mutiny aboard the Ellen Southard

Katherine Howe is a New York Times bestselling and award-winning historian and novelist. Her newest novel, A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself, is a mystery adventure set in the Golden Age of Piracy. Katherine has appeared on “Good Morning America,” “CBS This Morning,” NPR’s “Weekend Edition,” the BBC, the History Channel, Smithsonian TV, the Travel Channel, and she hosted Salem: Unmasking the Devil for National Geographic. Her fiction has been translated into over twenty languages. She holds a BA in art history and philosophy from Columbia and an MA in American and New England studies from Boston University. A native Houstonian and avid sailor, she lives in New England with her family, where she is at work on her next book.