A Woman at the Helm: Mary Ann Brown Patten and the Voyage of Neptune’s Car

In the great age of the clipper ships, when vast square-riggers raced around Cape Horn carrying the commerce of the world, command at sea was an almost exclusively male domain. Yet in 1856, during one extraordinary voyage to San Francisco, a young woman stepped onto the quarterdeck and proved herself equal to any captain who ever faced the fury of the Southern Ocean.

Her name was Mary Ann Brown Patten, and her story remains one of the most remarkable in maritime history.

Mary Ann was sailing aboard the American clipper Neptune’s Car, a sleek 216-foot vessel, alongside her husband, Captain Joshua Patten, who commanded the ship. Like many clippers of the era, Neptune’s Car was bound on the long and demanding voyage to San Francisco, a journey that required navigating the most feared passage in sailing—Cape Horn, where the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans collide in towering seas and relentless winds.

But fate intervened mid-voyage.

Captain Patten fell gravely ill with tuberculosis, leaving him too weak to command the ship. Matters grew worse when the first mate was confined for neglect of duty, removing the only other qualified officer who could have taken the helm.

With the ship thousands of miles from port and rounding one of the most dangerous stretches of water on earth, the responsibility fell to an unlikely figure: the captain’s nineteen-year-old wife.

Mary Ann Brown Patten stepped forward and took command.

Though not formally recognized as captain, she had studied navigation and seamanship with her husband and possessed the knowledge necessary to guide the vessel. Standing on the quarterdeck of the clipper, she directed the crew, supervised the handling of sails, and worked out the ship’s position and course.

The greatest test lay ahead: rounding Cape Horn.

For days the ship battled the brutal conditions that had wrecked countless vessels before her. Mary Ann managed the crew, maintained discipline, kept the ship on course through heavy seas, and at the same time continued nursing her desperately ill husband below decks.

Against formidable odds, she succeeded.

Neptune’s Car completed the passage and arrived safely in San Francisco, the young woman who had guided her through the storm becoming a sensation in maritime circles. Newspapers celebrated her courage and seamanship, and she was widely hailed as one of the most remarkable women ever to command a sailing vessel.

Mary Ann Brown Patten’s story endures not merely as a curiosity of the clipper era, but as a powerful reminder that leadership at sea has never truly been limited by gender—only by opportunity.

On a storm-lashed ocean, at the edge of the world near Cape Horn, a nineteen-year-old woman proved that point beyond doubt.

Janis MacKenzie: Inspiring Woman

I first met Janis MacKenzie in 1993 when I was the newly minted communications director for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Janis and her firm guided us through the opening and all its many political mine fields and media sand traps. 

Since then, her wisdom and guidance have continued to influence and inspire me. The friendship with her and Dennis Conaghan is a real joy to me and Alfredo Casuso. Quite simply to quote a song by another “inspiring woman”, Tina Turner, Janis is simply the best. Read Ali Wunderman’s great profile below. — David Perry

https://www.sfexaminer.com/inspiring-women-janis-mackenzie/article_7ed400ae-f2cf-4f45-9a48-33203d716b20.html

St. David’s Day: Do the Little Things

My family originally hails from Scotland: both sides having emigrated to Virginia in the mid 1600s. Having said that, the feast of St. David and its connection to Wales at the other end of Albion, has always been a day I mark with smiles. I embrace March 1st as my feast day and resonate with Dafydd’s (the Welsh spelling) advice to his followers: “Gwnewch y pethau bychain” (Do the little things).

There is something beautifully Celtic about that counsel — spare, humble, enduring. It feels less like a proclamation and more like a quiet inheritance.

The man behind the feast is Saint David — Dewi Sant to the Welsh — a sixth-century monk and bishop who founded religious communities across Wales and western Britain. He was known for his asceticism: simple food, prayer, scholarship, and discipline. Legend tells us that during one sermon the ground beneath him rose into a hill so that all could hear him. Myth or metaphor, the message remains: clarity of voice matters.

David died on March 1, around the year 589. His shrine at St Davids Cathedral became one of medieval Britain’s great pilgrimage sites. It was once said that two pilgrimages there equaled one to Rome. For a small nation at the western edge of Europe, that mattered.

And Wales has long understood the meaning of small nations.

St. David’s Day — Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant — is not only a saint’s feast; it is the national day of Wales, a celebration of the country’s history, language, and enduring cultural identity. While not yet a formal public holiday across the United Kingdom, it functions in every meaningful way as Wales’s national day — a moment when the nation turns consciously toward itself.

It is an affirmation of Welsh language, song, poetry, and identity. Children wear traditional dress. The red dragon flies. Daffodils bloom across lapels and leeks appear as proud, improbable emblems of history. (According to legend, David advised Welsh soldiers to wear leeks in battle to distinguish themselves from their Saxon foes.)

For whatever reason, March 1 resonates with me. Scotland may be the ancestral homeland of my forebears, but the spirit of Wales — resilient, lyrical, quietly steadfast — speaks to something equally ancient in the bones.

“Do the little things.”

It suggests that faith is not thunder but practice. That culture survives not through spectacle but through repetition — hymn by hymn, poem by poem, story by story. It reminds us that communities are sustained by ordinary acts: tending stones, sweeping streets, teaching children, lighting candles.

There is also a maritime echo for me — that western edge of Britain looking out toward the Atlantic, toward the same ocean my ancestors crossed in the 1600s. Wales, Scotland, Ireland — these Celtic shores are bound not only by language and song, but by salt water and departure. Small nations sending their sons and daughters outward, carrying memory with them.

And so each March 1, wherever I am, I mark the day. Tonight there will be leeks to eat and daffodils on the table.

I wasn’t named for David of Wales, but I like to think that I was.