Twelve Ursuline nuns boarded the armed merchant ship Gironde on Feb. 22, 1727. Actually, they were hauled on board by a swing or cloth bag. A contrary wind prevented the ship from sailing until the next day. The sisters took advantage of the delay to settle into their extremely close quarters, six bunks in two rows, apparently without space between the parallel bunks, in a hot, partitioned little room.

Yet the nuns had a room of their own. Everyone else aboard the boat slept in the gun room. The Jesuits resorted to sleeping on the open deck, covering their heads with laundry baskets to protect them from the rain.

Eight of the sisters were fully professed choir nuns, and two were converse nuns. In 18th-century France, choir nuns usually came from well-off families and entered the convent with a dowry. Converse nuns came from more modest backgrounds and took on heavier burdens of manual labor within the convent. They had greater freedom to move between the cloister and the world and could act as go-betweens for the choir nuns.

The other Ursuline sisters aboard the Gironde were a postulant, Claude Massy, and a novice, Marie Madeleine Hachard. I'm drawing this account of the sisters' voyage almost entirely from letters written by Hachard, who as a novice was permitted to........

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