Like many captain's wives, my mother helped to navigate the ship when they were underway. Mother gets excited when she explains this to me. It had to do with measuring how high the sun was above the horizon at the same time every day, then using an almanac, a kind of table with numbers that tells you how far west or east you have traveled. Sometimes she would measure the height of a star at night to double check. Papa says this was a very important part of running a ship and he was glad to have her help.
Captains are lucky in that they get to bring their families on trips if they want to.
No one else on the ship gets to do this. From the time my parents were married, my mother, and later my sister and me, would accompany my father on many of his voyages. I was always glad to be with my family, even at sea, but this could be difficult as well. We would spend many weeks underway often without seeing any land. Aside from my older sister there were no other children on board.