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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. | 
