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Chapter Two The Quaker As the Stantons set sail on the Montreal, a second boat of abolitionists was already headed for London. The voyage of the packet ship Roscoe had begun smoothly as a steamer towed the ship from the congested New York Harbor five miles out to sea, where the crew unfurled its sails. Pas- sengers settled into the routine of gathering for meals during the day and enjoying each other’s company in the evening. But south of Nantucket, the Roscoe ran into heavy storms. A week later in the mid-Atlantic, another storm was so violent that it snapped one of the yards on the mizzenmast. Waves pummeled the ship as it launched “towards the heavens, and plunged down again to the depths to meet the cold embrace of the foam- ing waters,” one passenger wrote, as billows of frothy sea cascaded onto the deck and splayed into rainbows of spray.1 Even Captain Henry Huttleston said it was worse than the January crossings known for their turbulence.2 But the ocean storms were temporary and dissipated well before the Roscoe docked in Liverpool. The turmoil inside the ship, which had been brewing for years, did not. Onboard were several delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention who were deeply divided over the role of women at the Convention. Some, like Henry Grew, a Baptist minister from Phila- delphia, believed that only men should participate. Others, including his daughter Mary, and George Bradburn, a Unitarian minister and member of the Massachusetts legislature, were determined to have women accepted as delegates. At the center of this conflict was another passenger, Lucretia Mott, a forty-seven-year-old Quaker and mother of six who was a leader among women abolitionists. Lucretia was a diminutive woman who often made a large impression on those she met. A scant five feet tall, with neatly parted brown hair tucked under a cap and modest clothes, she was spirited and principled. When Philadelphia prisons confined inmates in isolation, she pressed for