During the course of my research into the mid-19th century bowhead whaling fishery in Russia’s Sea of Okhotsk I’ve depended on the archives of the Nantucket Historical Society, the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and the Providence, Rhode Island public library for access to their collection of ship’s logs.
When I started the project ten years ago, access to those collections was much the same as it was when I was a college student 50 years ago in the late 1970s — I showed up, talked your way past a librarian into the stacks, and if I was lucky and the librarian was in a good mood, I was allowed to touch some primary source material — aka original documents — if I promised not to write on them with ball point pens or eat my lunch while poring over the spidery Spencerian script penmanship.
When I narrowed my research down to two ships — the Massachusetts and the Phoenix of Nantucket — I made several research trips across Nantucket Sound on the Hy-Line ferries to spend the day at the Nantucket Historical Association’s archives in the former Quaker meeting house on 7 Fair Street reading whatever I could about the two ships and their voyages of 1856.
The first few visits were very unproductive. Because I was making a day trip, I had about six hours of reading time in the library, and initially thought I could read and transcribe from the old log books enough information to enlighten me about the events that transpired over the summer whaling season of 1858 around the wild Shantar Islands.
Alas, being unfamiliar with the format of the typical ship’s log, and totally bewildered by the handwriting of the “keeper” (the log was “kept” by the first or chief mate, who thus was referred to as the “keeper) and the abbreviations, conventions, and actual situation of the ship as described in entries such as the one below from the 1856-58 voyage of the whaling ship Massachusetts:
Thankfully, the kind librarians at the NHA were very helpful and helped me decipher some of the more inscrutable words. They began by telling me that, no, my great great grandfather Thomas Chatfield, captain of the Massachusetts was not the “keeper” of the logbook, but that it had been “kept” by chief mate William Folger of Nantucket.
The example above is the entry for Wednesday March 3, 1858. The header of the page reads “Bound to the Sandwich Islands March /58” — situating the ship in the Pacific on its way to the Hawaiian Islands after cruising off the coast of Baja California and Cabo San Lucas the previous three months.
In the left margin is the day and date “Wednesday 3d.” The entry then begins (as nearly all entries begin) with “Comd” — an abbreviation for “Commenced”. Reading on, Folger writes:
Learning to decipher such a entry takes practice and building some familiarity with the keeper’s handwriting.
“Comd with a moderate trade from ENE Steering W by S at 5 AM made the Isl of Owhyhee bearing W 10 miles dist Middle part light air from the SEd at daylight got the anchors ready at 9 AM took a pilot latter part standing in for the Bay at meredian the harbor bearing WSW 5 miles dist”
For the last few years I have been helping the Nantucket Historical Association transcribe logbooks of various whaling voyages. Because I need the transcript of the Massachusetts for my book on the wreck and rescue of the Phoenix, I was happy to learn the NHA had posted the full scans of the Massachusetts’ 1856 log book on a service called From the Page: “a crowdsourcing platform for archives and libraries where volunteers transcribe, index, and describe historic documents.”
Every morning I wake up and transcribe four pages of log book entries on the From the Page website. The web interface shows the scan of the original log in one window, and a transcription window to the right. When I log on go the project page for the Log of the Massachusetts and look for pages that need transcription.
Seeing that page 118 of the 182 page project needs to be transcribed, I select it and begin deciphering the script. The first line is the page header where the keeper always writes the name of the vessel of the left page and the general situation and year — “Bound for the Sandwich Islands /58” on the right.
The header on page 118 the reads, “Remarks while at Hilo S I / 58” Typing in the transcription box, I write “Remarks while at Hilo” then pause, and zoom in on the scan of the original log to try to decipher this puzzling abbreviation:
Because I’ve already spent about 40 hours puzzling over Mr. Folger’s penmanship I know the first cursive letter is an “S” and the second is an “I” and the underlined superscript beside the S is his way of noting things are plural. Deducing from previous pages that the ship has arrived at the Sandwich Islands, I put in square brackets and all-capitalized letters my interpretation of the “S” to mean “[SANDWICH]” and beside the “I” I guess “[ISLANDS]”. The diagonal slash and number “58” is how Folger notes the year. In this case 1858.
If I’m unsure of my guess, I would have added a question mark after the capitalized word and checked off the box “Needs Review” — a flag for the NHA’s librarians to please check my work and double check my interpretation. If I am completely stumped by Folger’s scrawl, I would insert three question marks in brackets after the mysterious word in question: [???]
After transcribing the header text, I zoom the view of the scan out, hit a carriage return to insert a blank line, and start transcribing the first entry for Sunday the 7th of March, 1858.
Most log entries at sea end with the position of the ship noted as “Lat by Obs” or Latitude by Observation and “Long by Chr” or Longitude by Chronometer, with the cartesian coordinates expressed in degrees and minutes.
Because the narrative structure of my book depends on knowing where the two ships are, especially when they come together for a “gam” or conversation between the two captains who are the book’s protagonists, I take the coordinates from the log book and enter them into Google Earth.
By placing a new placemark, I can enter in the latitude and longitude and then copy the transcribed text from the logbook into the description space. I can also add images of the original log, photographs of any landmarks or relevant equipment, and insert links to web pages — especially Wikipedia entries describing specific landmarks.
Google Earth is an exceptionally useful tool for a maritime historian. Because my book is set in the Sea of Okhotsk, and because the New England whalers usually sailed that body of water without the benefit of accurate charts (maps), they tended to give landmarks nicknames of their own that bear no relation to their actual Russian names.
Here’s how I keep track of the two ships as they work along the ice pack in the Sea of Okhotsk in the months of May and June 1858.
Because Google Earth does a terrible job identifying geographic features, I took it upon myself to label the names of the islands with both the whaler’s English nicknames and the appropriate non-cyrillic Russian names in use today.
The yellow push pins show the location of the Phoenix. The light blue show the position of the Massachusetts.
Note at the bottom of the screen shot above is an yellow icon for May 25 when the two ships came together for the first time since leaving Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard in the fall of 1856. There the two captains — Bethuel G. Handy of the Phoenix and Thomas Chatfield of the Massachusetts — and “double” brothers-in-law (each married the other man’s sister) spent an afternoon together catching up on the news and having a little Cotuitport “reunion” 15,000 miles away from the Cape Cod village they called home.
The power of Google Earth in helping me track the position of the two ships and gain some understanding of what they saw and experienced can’t be understated. Take for example the log entry of the Phoenix for June 4, 1858. Taking the text from the official transcript (as transcribed by volunteers using “From the Page” and archived on the Nantucket Historical Association’s website, I created a placemark with an anchor icon to note the ship’s position in the anchorage of Fabius Island.
In the placemark’s description I copy over the relevant transcription of the log, and rolling over the icon a popup tells me “Friday 4th Begins calm ship laying at ancker [ANCHOR] off Fabius harbor. [T]hree boats off after whales. [S]aw a few but did not strike. [L]atter part one boat getting wood”
Good to know. As I write about that in the book, I’m able to say with confidence that the winds were calm and the crew was off hunting whales with one of the ship’s boats ashore gathering firewood. But curious about Fabius Island, I turn to Wikipedia where an amazing savant with the username “ST1849” has described a whaling camp established on Fabius over the summer of 1858 by two American whaling ships. To remind myself to include this information in the book, I add a link to the Wikipedia entry for Fabius Island. I also make a note to find the logbooks for the New Bedford whaling ship Cicero and the Fairhaven ship Sharon so I can read the logbook entries from those ships and learn more about the summer whaling camp they established there.
I also have learned the Russian name of the island (Ostrov Nedorazumeniya) and its translation to the wonderful “Island of Misunderstanding” because some Russian cartographers forgot to add it to an early map.
Wondering what the actual island looks like and despairing of ever getting an opportunity to actually travel to the Sea of Okhotsk to see and experience those waters and stark landscape, I went searching for pictures of the Island of Misunderstanding. Finding one, I added an image link to the Google Earth placemark as seen above.
More later about these new powerful tools that are transforming how I research and write my maritime history projects. The potential to integrate the power of Google Earth’s maps with historical imagery and primary source material has me now thinking the final output of my project, The Wreck and Rescue of Captain B.G. Handy is not a traditional book but some hybrid e-book integrated with a “follow-along” guide that replaces the classic model of footnotes and illustrations with something far more interactive and visual.
I’m open to suggestions. The publishing landscape at present is iffy and I have yet to find a literary agent willing to take this project on and pitch it to the usual suspects in publishing. But passion projects being what they are, I continued to persevere and write away to tell the improbable story of two young men who came together across three of the biggest events of their generation– the Gold Rush, the final years of whaling, and the Civil War.
