Annette Brock Davis, Sailor

I came across a picture of the sailing barque L'Avenir:

The comments with the picture mentioned a Canadian woman called Annette Brock Davis who, in 1933, became an apprentice on the ship and learned to sail.
There were several hurdles she had to overcome that male apprentices did not, though. To start with, she had to pay double the amount that a male apprentice paid and her contract did not guarantee her a job at the end of the apprenticeship, as it did for the male apprentices. Also, she had to get her father's permission, even though she was 23.
By the end of the training voyage, though, she was offered the position of ordinary seaman with the Erikson Line, which owned the ship. This offer was withdrawn when they discovered that she had got married
She wrote about her experiences in My Year Before the Mast.

The Maria Assumpta

Today, a customer came into the shop wearing a sweatshirt with a picture of a square rigged sailing ship on it.
I recognised it instantly, because I used to have one just like it.
In 1990, I was working in Norwich on the Castle Mall excavation as an archaeologist, with my partner, and one weekend we decided to have a day out in Great Yarmouth. Just by chance, there was a tall ship in harbour, and it was possible to go aboard and look round. The ship was the Maria Assumpta, then the oldest square rigged sailing ship still sailing, and it was there I bought the sweatshirt.
The chap in the shop told me that he had been in the crew, and that they were sailing round to the Netherlands. He even remembered that the weather had been bad - it was a very grey day when we visited. When I was picking out my sweatshirt from the table with all the merchandise on it, the crew were sitting round a table nearby having lunch - he must have been one of them!
He told me that he stayed in the crew until the ship was wrecked, about five years later. I remember hearing about it on the news - they were coming into Padstow harbour when the engines failed and the ship struck rocks. Three of the crew were drowned.
He said that he was also an artist, and that he had carved the memorial to the ship and his lost crew mates that is now in a Cornish church. I looked it up, and it's St. Enodoc's Church in Trebetherick, which also has a memorial to Sir John Betjeman.