With her five-year old daughter, Mary Chipman Lawrence accompanied her husband Captain Samuel Lawrence on seven whaling cruises to the Pacific and Arctic Oceans, including one voyage (the second) to the Gulf of Alaska. Her memoir was later published as The Captain's Best Mate: The Journal of Mary Chipman Lawrence on the Whaler Addison, 1856-1860 (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University Press, 1966. Edited by Stanton Garner. Reprinted by University Press of New England, 1986). Although there is little information on British Columbia, her accounts provide an accurate description of how whalers functioned in the Pacific during the 1850s.

[BCBW 2004] "Whales"