Eleanor Creesy

Burial Location: Lot 1358 Grave 2 Seaview Avenue

Eleanor Prentiss Creesy was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts, on September 21, 1814. Her parents were Joshua and Eleanor Prentiss. Eleanor was interested in seafaring from the time she was a very little girl. She learned the actual skills from her stepfather and Uncle John Prentiss, a master mariner who married her mother after her father died at sea in 1817.

To be interested in seafaring was most unusual for a girl at that time, when most girls and women stayed at home and took care of their families while the men were often gone for years at a time and often died at sea. Another unusual part of Eleanor’s personality was her stated goal to marry a sea captain and then sail on his ship.  

She succeeded in meeting that goal after rejecting many suitors, and in 1841, she married Josiah Creesy. Serving as his navigator, she traveled on the vessel Oneida on a voyage to Shanghai, China. In May of 1851, she sailed on the Flying Cloud on a trip from New York City to San Francisco, having read Matthew F. Maury’s Sailing Directions. This voyage set a record for the number of days at sea: 89 days and 21 hours, they broke their own record two years later; it was not broken again until 1989. Eleanor Creesy’s skills were considered to be the major factor in the ship’s safe and swift passage according to an article in the Daily Alta California, published on April 20, 1854.

Josiah Creesy was forced to retire from the sea due to poor health after serving in the Civil War. He and Eleanor lived on a farm in Salem. She outlived him by 29 years, dying on August 25, 1900, at the age of eighty-five.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Sources Consulted:

• Time and navigation, Smithsonian Institution.
• Wikipedia.