 "I can hardly walk about, I fetch up sometimes where I start for and sometimes somewhere else," she wrote in June 1857.Captain John Deblois, the man rescued by Richard Gibbs after his ship "Ann Alexander" was sunk by a whale, carried his wife, Henrietta, on the whaling ship "Merlin", and in May 1858 she and Almira Gibbs met in one of the mid-sea visits whalemen called "gams.