From Joan Druett’s World of the Written World http://joan-druett.blogspot.com
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
A female surgeon in the days of sail
Book Two of the Patricia MacPherson Nautical Adventure Series
Patrick (aka Patricia) MacPherson has survived the horrific siege of Havana, and narrowly escaped death from yellow fever.
Now it is October, 1762, and Dr. MacPherson, surgeon’s mate and female in disguise, is back on the frigate Richmond.
Those who have read Star-Crossed will know Patricia’s history. The bastard daughter of a high-born plantation owner in Barbados, she stowed away to get to the island and claim her inheritance, and was saved from starvation and seasickness by a handsome young seaman, Brian Dalton. Somehow, she managed to get to the plantation, but only to find her father dead, and nothing to inherit. Desperate and penniless, she married a ship’s surgeon, and was too quickly widowed, leaving her at her wits’ end, again. Dressing as a man, and passing off as a surgeon’s mate on the frigate Richmond (where Brian is a gunner) seemed the logical way out of her dilemma. Then came the siege of Havana. And thus the first book came to a nail-biting conclusion.
Now, Patricia is back on the Richmond, and all goes well until the horrible moment when her true sex is uncovered. What is she to do? Marry Brian, and become a gunner’s wife, one of the unrecorded females who lived on His Majesty’s ships at the time? The choice is taken away from her. Called onto a smuggling craft to try to save the captain’s wife, she is spirited away, and forced to live on her wits again, while she carries on with her deception of being male.
Linda Collison knows her ships and her sails. She knows what it is like to haul on a line, and lean on the spokes of the helm. She has also done her homework, and has deduced an astounding amount about the life of a woman in the lower decks of an eighteenth century man-of-war. Anyone reading this book will learn more than he or she could possibly imagine.
I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of Patricia’s adventures on board the little smuggling craft. Not only was there a very good contrast between life on a small vessel and existence on the multi-layered decks of a frigate, but the feeling of “family” that Collison described is very evocative indeed.
With Fireship Press, Linda Collison has found a publisher with the enthusiasm she deserves. I look forward immensely to the next in the Patricia MacPherson series.
Written by Richard Spilman
Saturday, 21 May 2011 00:00
Originally published on the The Old Salt Blog
Patrick McPherson is a 19 year surgeon’s mate in the Royal Navy. By all appearances, he is an upstanding young man with a promising future. The dark secret that the young mate carries is that he is indeed, a she. Patrick was born as Patricia. When Patricia’s husband, a ship’s surgeon dies while tending a fever outbreak in the Indies, she decides to “shed Patricia like an inconvenient skin, becoming Patrick McPherson, a surgeon’s mate, of His Majesty’s frigate Richmond, on its undercover mission to Havana…” Linda Collison’s new book Surgeon’s Mate is the second in her series following the nautical adventures of Patricia McPherson. See our review of Collision’s first book of the series, Star Crossed.
There have long been stories of women running away to join the army or navy. These have often been dismissed as the fantasies of lonely young men. Nevertheless, there have been more than a few well documented examples of women who succeeded in disguising themselves and passing as men in the military. Christian Davies, Hannah Snell, Mary Lacy, Mary Anne Talbot, Deborah Sampson, and Chevalier d’Eon, are but a few examples.
In Surgeon’s Mate, Collision deftly recreates the claustrophobic world of a Royal Navy frigate and gives the reader a glimpse of how a woman could, with considerable care and no little risk, maintain her disguise, even in the crowded and close-knit community within the wooden walls of a small navy ship.
Collison writes with an easy authority, both on shipboard life and the medical care of the period. She is an experienced sailor, including of square rigged ships, specifically, the replica of the HMS Endeavour. She is also a registered nurse. The combination, no doubt augmented by considerable research, allows her writing to feel completely authentic, whether describing the inconveniences of shipboard life, the lancing of boils or the cutting off of a sailor’s gangrenous leg.
What makes the book especially intriguing is that while Patrick must cope with performing his first amputation, inoculating a crew of a Yankee schooner against smallpox, or dealing with French privateers, she also faces the larger and even more difficult conflict of figuring out who she is, and who she wants to be. Will she follow her head or her heart? Will she reveal herself and marry the handsome gunner’s mate she loves, only to disappear into the invisible cadre of wives aboard the frigate or will she continue her chosen profession, which she can only do as a man?
This conflict remains unresolved, fortunately, as there will be more books in the series. I am indeed looking forward to the next installment. Highly recommended.
From Historical Novel Reviews (November, 2011)
Surgeon’s Mate is a sea adventure from a unique perspective. MacPherson struggles to gain competency in 18th-century medicine and deals with the pressure of discovery when “Every good thing I had done, was undone by the fact I hid a woman’s body underneath these masculine clothes.” Patricia’s struggle with the age-old dilemma of wishing to have it all is interestingly played out in the microcosm of a mid-18th century ship of war, and in an America approaching revolution against Europe. She finds herself torn between a desire for freedom, respect, and the professional challenges of the life of a man and a surgeon, and the love of a good man.
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