Who Was Eleanor Creesy? The Real Navigator of the Flying Cloud

In 1849, San Francisco’s economy was a fever dream. Gold had turned a village of eight hundred souls into a boomtown of a hundred thousand in under a year, and the stores were beyond bare. A single egg sold for three dollars, a shovel for fifteen.

Every merchant in New York recognized the opportunity: whoever could get goods around Cape Horn fastest could make once-in-a-generation profits. The trouble was, decades before the Panama Canal the voyage took six grueling months. So they built a new kind of ship—not a plodding cargo ship but a race boat that took cargo—the clipper. And with its birth, the greatest sea race of the century was on.

Six months fell to five. Then four. Every American shipping company who could afford it sent out a fleet of clippers. Every American captain who could land such a prestigious command competed ruthlessly for the grandest prize of all. When Captain Robert Waterman made the run in 97 days, he was celebrated across the country.

His fame lasted barely a year.

On August 31, 1851, the clipper Flying Cloud dropped anchor in San Francisco Bay just 89 days and 21 hours out of New York. Despite the furious Cape Horn storms, sabotage attempts, and two dismastings that marked her maiden voyage, she demolished the record.

Stunned miners lined the hills to cheer as she sailed into the anchorage. Newspapers around the world proclaimed the feat on their front pages. Her captain, Josiah Perkins Creesy of Marblehead, Massachusetts, became his era’s equivalent of the rockstar overnight.

But the most incredible thing about that 1851 voyage is that the person who charted the Flying Cloud’s course, tracked her position, and threaded the ship through the most dangerous waters in the world—was a woman.

Her name was Eleanor “Ellen” Prentiss Creesy.

She was the captain’s wife, but she was also his partner. The Smithsonian calls her simply “the woman navigator of the Flying Cloud.” The National Sailing Hall of Fame calls her “a master at keeping track of the ship’s position and guiding the vessel around storms and light wind areas.”

I call her remarkable.

In an era when a woman not only couldn’t vote, but great concerns were raised about too much thinking damaging their reproductive organs, she was a brilliant mathematician who used spherical trigonometry in her daily life.

And in a time where a woman at sea was so rare, and that superstitions against them reigned so deeply, that Admiral Collingwood could write that he “never knew a woman brought to sea in a ship that some mischief did not befall the vessel,” Ellen didn’t merely sail. She took charge of the one thing a ship could least afford to get wrong.

Was the record she set a fluke? After 1851, every ambitious captain in America—driven by the highest possible stakes of fame and fortune—sought to beat the Flying Cloud.

Three years later, in 1854, a ship arrived in San Francisco in 89 days and 8 hours, breaking the record by 13 hours.

That ship was, again, the Flying Cloud, and she was sailed once again by the husband and wife team of Creesy and Creesy.

After that, the Creesys’ record remained unbroken for an incredible 135 years.

It wasn’t until 1989 that a high-tech trimaran with GPS officially sailed the distance faster. One could argue, of course, that their journey was not comparable at all.

And yet, while Perk became one of his era’s great celebrities, like so many high-achieving women of history, Ellen received scant recognition during her lifetime, and what little she did get was quickly erased.

An 1854 newspaper acknowledged that “Eleanor Creesy’s skills are considered to be a major factor in the ship’s safe and swift passages.” An 1855 story credited her with saving a man overboard, and an 1883 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine article added that “Captain Creesy’s wife could command a vessel as well as he did.”

Yet her obituary listed her merely as the “widow of Capt. Josiah P. Creesy.”

It wasn’t until nearly three decades after her death that an old shipping family’s letter surfaced, crediting “the captain’s wife” with bringing the Flying Cloud home in record time and set off two months of national headlines—“WOMAN SAILS FAMED CLIPPER!”

And still it wasn’t until 2026—a hundred and seventy-five years after that first record run—that the National Sailing Hall of Fame finally gave her the recognition she deserved, inducting Eleanor Creesy among the all-time greats of American sailing.

This is what we know about Ellen. And, just as remarkable, what we don’t.

Eleanor Creesy at a glance

The facts

Eleanor Horton Prentiss was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts, in 1814, into a town that lived and died by the sea. She learned the navigator’s art young—in the Smithsonian’s words, “the mathematics of navigation her seafaring father taught her”: Bowditch’s tables, the sextant, the chronometer, the daily discipline of reducing sights to a position on a chart. She was good enough that by 1841 she wasn’t just practicing navigation—a surviving receipt shows she was paid to teach it.

The sea ran deep in her line. Her father and grandfather were captains, and her great-grandfather, Capt. Nicholson Broughton, was the first commander of Washington’s fleet in the Revolution. But “her seafaring father” hides a tenderer truth: Captain Joshua Prentiss died near Havana when Ellen was three. It was his brother John who married her widowed mother, raised her, made certain a girl got a real education—and, when her interest turned to navigation, did the nearly unthinkable thing for his era. He taught her.

“Beautiful, intelligent, from a good family, she did not lack in suitors,” writes David W. Shaw in Flying Cloud, “But none captured her fancy, nor offered her the freedom she desired, until she met Perkins.”

In 1841 she married Perk, as she called him—a hard-driving Marblehead shipmaster then rising fast in the China trade. She went to sea with him aboard the ship Oneida, sailing from New York to Canton, in an era when the tea trade’s brutal timetables were the proving ground of the world’s best sailors.

She also became one of the earliest and most faithful correspondents of Lt. Matthew Fontaine Maury, the naval officer whose revolutionary wind-and-current charts were redrawing the ocean’s invisible roads using a novel concept that would later come to be called data science.

Eleanor reviewed the chart packages he sent before each departure, and prepared the ship’s abstract logs for him after, voyage after voyage, for years—exactly the kind of unglamorous, sustained professional practice that separates a working navigator from a legend’s ornament.

Then came the Flying Cloud—Donald McKay’s masterpiece, bought by Grinnell, Minturn & Co., with Perk given command and Eleanor the charts. On her maiden voyage in 1851 she didn’t just break Waterman’s record—she demolished it, on a route Eleanor plotted from Maury’s new Cape Horn charts—among the first navigators to trust them. A single day’s run covered more ocean than any ship in human history had ever sailed in twenty-four hours.

Then again, in 1854, on the same ship with the same husband-and-wife team, they broke their own record. Ships chased that number—89 days, 8 hours—for the rest of the age of sail, and then for a century after it ended. When it finally fell in 1989, the Associated Press marked the moment by noting what the record books had long omitted: Eleanor Creesy remains “the only navigator to have guided her husband around the Horn to a record—twice.”

The Creesys swallowed the anchor in 1857 and retired to a farm in Wenham, Massachusetts. Perk answered the call once more—a Civil War command—then suffered a stroke in 1868 and died in 1871. To the end, the two of them took their daily walks together, Eleanor at his side, as they had once walked the Flying Cloud’s deck. She outlived him by twenty-nine years as “a woman of independent means,” the matriarch who supported her mother and sisters—and died in 1900.

What we don’t know

Almost everything else.

No portrait of Eleanor Creesy exists. Not a painting, not a daguerreotype, not a sketch. The captains and merchants of her world all got their portraits. What survives of Eleanor is a marriage record, a house, and a gravestone.

A letter written by a passenger aboard the Flying Cloud gives us her only description: “Such glorious eyes I never saw, large liquid and hazel, soft as a gazelle’s and always beaming with kindness on someone.” A passenger on a later voyage found her to be “sociable and intelligent.”

That—and one wisp of family lore: the tradition that Eleanor once sat for an engraver in New York, and that her likeness became the trumpet-blowing angel on the Flying Cloud’s advertising card, robes flying, banner reading “89 days.” If the story is true, the nearest thing we have to her face is an angel on a shipping line’s sales card.

The record is nearly as silent on everything I most wanted to know.

Who was she? What did she want out of life? What excited her? Disappointed her? Challenged her?

How did she deal with the responsibility of holding a hundred lives in her hands through a Cape Horn gale? What did it cost to be the only woman aboard, in charge of the one thing the ship could least afford to get wrong? What made her believe in data before most any other navigator, and use the new science to her benefit—even as her husband was initially wary?

On that thread, what passed between her and Perk—a famously exacting master who trusted no one, except, evidently, her? In the crucible of a small ship under the most intense stakes, did they fight? Adore each other? Respect each other?

How did that marriage work?

This is why I had to write her story as fiction. Not only could I fit the known facts of her life on a post-it note, none of them would answer the why questions I was most curious about.

This is why I wrote The Navigator Series as historical biographical fiction. To find those answers. To spend time with a fully rounded, flawed, brilliant human being instead of a set of impressive bullet points.

People have asked me how I created the character of Ellen—the Eleanor of my novels—and the honest answer is that I don’t think of it that way. I didn’t feel like I was drafting her. I felt like I was listening for her—quietly, patiently—for her voice across the centuries.

My novels are based on her true story, filling in the gaps when so much of her was never written down. They are fiction, but the heart of them is true, even where the details are imagined.

(Image source: Nesbitt & Co., Printers, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

What navigation meant—her ocean and mine

I write about Eleanor from an unusual vantage point: my desk is aboard a sailboat, and I navigate not just pages but passages—though with so many electronic helpers that what I do scarcely deserves the same name.

But once, in the Bay of Biscay between France and Spain, I lost engine power and found myself becalmed for seven days, going absolutely nowhere as I waited impatiently for even a breath of wind. It was but the smallest taste of what it meant to be a sailor in Ellen’s day when there was no diesel plan B.

I suspect the hardest thing for modern people to imagine about her world, though, is what it was like to lose complete track of where you are. Not which corner am I on, but which ocean? To spin 360 degrees and see nothing but horizon. No street sign, no tree, no distant hill to take a bearing from. No gas station to stop and ask directions.

The only fixed things she had were in deep space: the sun and the stars. And that tenuous connection to her own position—the thing that kept a ship from running dead onto a reef in the middle of the night—vanished under every overcast sky.

In that case, all she had to work with was a process called dead reckoning—sailors like to say it began as “deduced reckoning”—which amounted to sophisticated guesswork. She would plot the boat’s speed and heading every hour, and then use her best professional judgment to determine her likely leeway—the shifting winds and the invisible currents quietly carrying her ship off course.

Guesses stacked on guesses, with a hundred lives riding on each one—until the sky cleared and the sextant could give her a better approximation of how close she’d been. And all this on top of charts of significantly varying quality.

True story: even as late as 2018, I anchored in 25 feet of water off an island in Mexico not 200 miles from San Diego and the exacting digital chart plotter told me confidently that I’d parked my boat a mile inland. When I looked closer at the datum beneath, the last survey of the area had been undertaken in 1715.

One night on that Biscay passage I wrote in my journal: out here we could be anywhere—at least anywhere in the northern hemisphere; the bright, shining Big Dipper gives that one geographical clue. The difference is that my GPS was waiting below whenever I wanted it. Eleanor was the GPS.

And still, every offshore boat must be ready to lose her electronics—a single lightning strike could make us effectively no different than an 1851 sailboat. So somewhere below, wrapped and waiting, I carry what Eleanor carried: a sextant, a reliable timepiece, printed charts and tables, and a book of celestial navigation. If the sky is clear, the sun and stars still work.

She proved that better than anyone who ever lived.

If you’d like to meet the Eleanor I listened for, start the series free—or watch the trailer. The historical sources I leaned on are below.

Eleanor Creesy—quick answers

Who was Eleanor Creesy?

Eleanor Prentiss Creesy (1814–1900) of Marblehead, Massachusetts, was the navigator of the clipper ship Flying Cloud, which set the New York–to–San Francisco sailing record in 1851 and broke its own mark in 1854. The Smithsonian calls her “the woman navigator of the Flying Cloud,” and the National Sailing Hall of Fame honored her legacy in 2026.

Did a woman really navigate the Flying Cloud?

Yes. The Smithsonian, the San Francisco Maritime Museum, and the National Sailing Hall of Fame—along with David W. Shaw’s Flying Cloud and news articles from her own lifetime—credit Eleanor Creesy as the ship’s navigator on her record passages, working alongside her husband, Captain Josiah Perkins Creesy.

What record did the Flying Cloud set?

New York to San Francisco around Cape Horn in 89 days, 21 hours in 1851—then 89 days, 8 hours in 1854. The 1854 record for sailing vessels stood for 135 years, until 1989.

How did Eleanor Creesy learn navigation?

She learned as a girl in Marblehead—in the Smithsonian’s words, “the mathematics of navigation her seafaring father taught her”—mastering Bowditch’s tables, the sextant, and the chronometer. By 1841 she was skilled enough to be paid to teach navigation.

Is there a portrait of Eleanor Creesy?

No image of her is known to survive—only a marriage record, a house, and a gravestone. Family tradition holds that her likeness became the trumpet-blowing “89 days” angel on the Flying Cloud’s advertising card, which would make a sales card’s angel the closest thing we have to her face.

Did Eleanor Creesy have children?

No. She and Josiah had no children. After his death in 1871 she lived nearly three more decades as a woman of independent means, supporting her mother and sisters until her death in 1900.

What is The Navigator Series?

The Navigator Series is historical biographical fiction based on the true story of Eleanor “Ellen” Prentiss Creesy—her marriage to Captain Josiah Perkins Creesy and the voyages that made them the fastest sailors on earth. The series begins with The Navigator, with new books following Ellen’s story as the series continues.

Is The Navigator a true story?

The Navigator and its sequels are based on the true story of Eleanor and Josiah Creesy. They don’t purport to be the true story—much of Eleanor’s inner life was never recorded—but the historical spine is real, and the heart of it is true even where details are imagined.

Further reading

- David W. Shaw, Flying Cloud: The True Story of America’s Most Famous Clipper Ship and the Woman Who Guided Her

- Smithsonian, Time and Navigation—“Meet the Navigator”

- National Sailing Hall of Fame—Eleanor Prentiss Creesy, Class of 2026

- Margaret Elizabeth Lyon & Flora Elizabeth Reynolds, The Flying Cloud and Her First Passengers

- Anna E. Jacke, Josiah Perkins Creesy and Eleanor Prentiss Creesy, “Marblehead Legends” 1814–1900

If you're interested in more experiential learning aboard a tall ship, I highly recommend a voyage on the Bark Europa. My research trip to the Southern Ocean was one of the highlights of my life.