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I""m Steve Ember. And I""m Shirley Griffith with EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English. Today, we tell about Eleanor Creesy. She helped to guide one of the fastest sailing ships ever built.The name Eleanor Creesy is almost unknown today. But in the middle eighteen hundreds she was a famous woman. Those were the days of wooden sailing ships. It was a time before ships had engines. Cloth sails were used to catch the wind to move a ship through the water.A ship that sailed from New York to San Francisco had to travel around the bottom of South America. Such a trip could take two hundred days to complete. Not all ships completed the trip. The high winds and angry seas in this area of the world created deadly storms. Ships often sank. No one could survive the freezing waters in this dangerous area if the ship went down.One hundred fifty years ago, women did not receive much education. Most women were expected to learn to read and write. But they almost never held positions of great responsibility.Eleanor Creesy was different. She was the navigator for a ship. A navigator is responsible for guiding a ship safely from one port to another.Eleanor""s father taught her to navigate. She wanted to learn this difficult skill because she liked the mathematics involved. A navigator also had to know how to use a complex instrument called a sextant. It was used to gather information about the sun, moon, and some stars to find a ship""s position at sea.Eleanor married a captain of a ship, Josiah Perkins Creesy, in eighteen forty-one. It was not unusual for a ship captain to take his wife with him on long trips. A captain""s wife often acted as a nurse, which Eleanor did. But she did a lot more. Josiah Creesy quickly learned that his wife was an extremely good navigator.Eleanor was the navigator on each ship that Josiah commanded during all their years at sea. They were husband and wife, but they also enjoyed working together.Eleanor and Josiah Creesy are fore
ever linked to one of the most famous ships in American history. That ship is the Flying Cloud. It was designed and built at the shipyard of Donald McKay in the eastern city of Boston. Grinell, Minturn and Company bought it. Captain Creesy worked for Grinell, Minturn. Company officials chose him to be the captain of the new ship.The Flying Cloud was a new kind of ship. The front was very narrow and sharp. This helped it cut through the water. The ship itself was narrow and long. This also added to its speed. A New York newspaper wrote a story about the ship when it was new. The paper said it was extremely beautiful. The world soon learned it was one of the fastest sailing ships ever built.The large number of sails the Flying Cloud could carry increased the speed of the ship. It usually carried at least twenty-one large sails. The crew often added many more to increase the speed.It was the second day of June, eighteen fifty-one. Goods and passengers had been loaded on the Flying Cloud. The ship quietly sailed out of New York City on its way to San Francisco.Very quickly it became evident the ship was special. Part of Eleanor Creesy""s work was to find out how far the ship had traveled each day. This involved doing complex mathematics and usually took Eleanor several hours. The first time she completed her work, she could not believe the results. She did the mathematics again, carefully looking for mistakes. There were none.The ship had traveled almost four hundred eighty kilometers in twenty-four hours. This was an extremely fast speed. Few ships had ever sailed this fast.The captain of a ship keeps a written record of each day""s events when a ship is at sea. This record is called a ship""s log. On May fifteenth, just seventeen days after leaving New York, Captain Creesy wrote this in the Flying Cloud""s log:"We have passed the Equator in two days less time than ever before. We have traveled five thousand nine hundred and nine kilometers in seventeen days!"As the Flying
Cloud sailed south, each day was extremely exciting. As it neared the South Atlantic, however, storms began to cause great concern.
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