In 1929, Joan Lowell wrote an autobiography, "Cradle of the Deep", published by Simon & Schuster, in which she claimed that her seafaring father took her aboard his ship, the "Minnie A. Caine", at the age of three months when she was suffering from malnutrition and nursed her back to health. She also claimed that she lived on the ship, with its all-male crew, until she was 17, during which time she became skilled in the art of seamanship and once harpooned a whale by herself. She claimed that the ship ultimately burned and sank off Australia, and that she swam three miles to safety, with a family of kittens clinging by their claws to her back. In fact, the autobiography was a fabrication; Lowell had been on the ship, which remained safely in California, for only 15 months. The book was a sensational best seller until it was exposed as pure invention.