April White at JSTOR Daily:
“The sea is a stranger to me,” Sheldon confessed in the first pages of her journal, yet the thirty-six-year-old had not hesitated a moment when she had been asked, two days earlier, to join the voyage as the stewardess—the only woman on the crew for the sixty-five-day trip to Hong Kong and back, with stops for additional passengers and cargo in Japan and Hawai‘i. For Sheldon, who had been born into a farming family in central Wisconsin before the Civil War, and for other women like her, the position of ship stewardess was a rare and, from the outside, glamorous chance to see the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her travels, Sheldon would see things most Americans had encountered only in books or on canvas. “The sunset was beautiful,” she wrote on her first evening aboard the Belgic, “one of those soft pink and yellow tinted skies which we see in pictures and think was created by the artist just to see what he could do. I know now they are real.”
For at least eight years, between 1892 and 1900, Sheldon worked shipboard for the Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, traveling from San Francisco to Asia and Central America tending to the every need of the women passengers in the first-class, or “saloon,” cabins and doing the ship’s mending. On at least six of those voyages, she kept a detailed record of her travels. Now, more than 125 years later, the Ella Sheldon Diaries have been shared via JSTOR by the University of the Pacific.
more here.
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