"During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the whaling industry in New England sent hundreds of ships and thousands of men to distant seas on voyages lasting up to five years.

In Captain Ahab Had a Wife, Lisa Norling taps a rich vein of sources - including women's and men's letters and diaries, shipowners' records, Quaker meeting minutes and other church records, newspapers and magazines, censuses, and city directories - to reconstruct the lives of the "Cape Horn widows" left behind onshore."--BOOK JACKET.