Support for the Radio West podcast comes from Harmon's Grocery, offering a variety of steak,

salmon, and chicken breasts for grilling, roasting, and meal prepping.

Harman's, your food, our passion.

The writer Tilar Maceo says, the captains of clipper ships in the mid-1800s were the rock stars of their time.

They were young and they were truly gutsy because these ships weren't built for safety.

They were built for speed.

The idea was to race, like quite literally race from the East Coast down around the continent

and back up to the gold rush in California.

They would take supplies and then bring back the booty.

And these captains were always men, of course, but Tilar Miceo tells the story in her book

about the first woman to do this.

Her name was Marianne Patton.

In 1856, she found herself in charge of one of the fastest of these clippers, Neptune's car.

She was 19 years old and a few months pregnant.

Now, her husband Joshua was the captain.

She had gone with him on the voyage. The idea was to earn enough money for them to leave the relentless clipper trade and to buy a farm. And at this point in the story, Tilar Metsail says they were close, but not there yet. And the stakes couldn't have been higher.

They're carrying millions of dollars of somebody else's cargo.

And if they can survive three, maybe four circumnavigations,

they will have enough money to retire from the sea,

which is an incredibly dangerous profession,

and to build a life and build this farm and have a family.

Their whole future is on the line.

...