work-in-progress

I’m deep off into transcribing parts of a ship master’s log. There’s the early, painful period of learning the writer’s handwriting (which in this case is particularly bad), and with any eighteenth-century script, learning the orthography, frequently by comparing one weird character to a similar one somewhere else in the text, thinking about context, until finally it clicks and you say “oh, it’s a Q!” I’m past that; it’s uncommon now that he stumps me. And, since I’m accustomed to the pattern of the content, and of his phrasing, I can transcribe pretty fast, despite the complete lack of punctuation and proper capitalization.

So, with the actual work now just being a matter of getting through it, and being careful, my brain has time to think about what to do with it. I’ve found myself thinking about how to use it, how to relate it to the secondary reading, what other primary-source material I may need, and how the book is going to take shape. Is it going to prove worth doing, or is the original purpose going to elude me, ultimately? Who’s going to publish it? How do I write it so that they will?

After I knocked off work yesterday, and had a little Brain Adjustment Juice (rum), I told myself to back off of all that. I reminded myself that we work like scientists; we have to let the evidence lead us where it will. Let the sources speak whatever they have to tell. We can’t do that if our own noise is getting in the way in our heads. It takes courage; we’re turning over control of the process to people who died over two hundred years ago, the only remains of whom are the scratchings on these pages, and what those scratchings represent and convey to us from across all that time and disparity of experience. If we’re going to hear all that, we have to be quiet and listen carefully. We can’t analyze the data until we have the data. We don’t impose our preconceived agendas on the evidence. The evidence may well demand a revision of any such agendas. That’s OK; that’s how we write good history.

I’m taking a short break from “real” work to write this little blog post, mostly because composing prose makes me happy and compiling spreadsheets is just work—work like weeding a flower bed, or rolling coins—monotonous, tedious, dry, dull. But also meticulous—every little detail—which makes it worse, compared to, say, pounding nails into a fence or scrubbing a deck. Mustering the discipline to keep at it, hour after hour and day after day, is also work. But this is the work that makes the payoff of doing history (or archaeology) possible. When you read the book or watch the documentary or tour the exhibit, you don’t see the mountain of tedious work that lies beneath that final product.

This is not a moan-and-groan. What I’m doing right now is going through the master’s log of HM Schooner Sultana—or, rather, my notes on it, as I went through the log itself over ten tedious work days last September in Maryland—and compiling a spreadsheet of every recorded encounter she had with another vessel in her four years on station in British America, from fall of 1768 to fall of 1772. I’m in the summer of ’71 right now and I’m up to Line 243. Date, location, vessel name, vessel type, from, to, cargo, action, outcome. Again. Again. And again.

But such tedious compilations are the gold mines of history. From this spreadsheet, I can think of so many interesting extrapolations already. What percentage of vessels stopped were schooners like her? What percentage of those were on coastal routes? Island routes? There’s a whole list in my head—and soon, there will be a list on paper. The fun is in manipulating the data to answer questions—but first, you have to compile the data. And that may be tedious, but it also requires understanding the source material. I could hire someone off the street to enter words in a spreadsheet, but I can’t hire someone off the street to understand what they’re reading so they will know what words to put in the spreadsheet. I’m trained to do that, and I’m the one who read the original source document. So it’s up to me, and knowing what I’m going to be able to get out of this keeps me going with it.

There will be more spreadsheets to do. And more source documents to spend more tedious days reading. But, in the end, it will all result in a great book that will bring this all back to life. My parents grew up knowing that if you wanted a good cotton crop, you’d be spending day after hot exhausting day chopping weeds with a hoe in the fields. This is a far cry from chopping cotton, but the analogy holds, at least so far as it can, given that we’re talking about work you do sitting on your butt in an air-conditioned room. Speaking of which, it’s good to get up frequently, blink your eyes, walk around, do something else for a few minutes. And then get back to it. The only way to the end starts with Line 244.

15 June 1771, near Sandy Hook, Diana, brig, Liverpool, New York, deal goods, F[ired 3 guns]

So quick in fact that I’m going to bullet-list it:

• It so happens that two books are coming out on the same day–30 April–the edited collection to which I have contributed, and my first monograph. The Publications page has all the details; I just updated that. (Link will open in a new window.)
• I am getting toward the end of the stack of secondary-source reading for Book 2. I probably have another six weeks. Speaking of Book 2…
• As I wrote on the Publications page, and sent out over social media, I was unable to secure funding for the second necessary archival work trip to Maryland this summer, despite applying for all the grants and fellowships I knew about. So, to keep the project on schedule, as I’ve already applied for a big 2021 grant for Book 3, I started a GoFundMe campaign to raise the necessary $2,100, or as much of it as I could. If you would like to know more about that, it’s on the Publications page, and there’s a link at the bottom of each page of the website. We’re about 2/3 of the way there. Contributions in any amount are appreciated and will be properly acknowledged. (Links will open in new windows.)
• I hope everyone reading this is well and getting along all right. We’re fine here.

We got home two days ago from a ten-day research trip to Chestertown, Maryland, funded by a Carter Fellowship from the Early American Industries Association. My second book project is a “biography” of sorts of HM Schooner Sultana, built at Boston in 1767 and used by the Royal Navy as a customs-enforcement interceptor on the Eastern Seaboard between 1768 and 1772. Because the Navy prepared accurate draughts of her hull and rig, made a detailed inventory of her equipment and specifications, and preserved her logs and muster books, we have a record of this vessel unheard-of for a similar vessel in normal merchant service. Based on that information, a dedicated group of people designed, built, and launched a replica of Sultana between 1999 and 2001, and she has operated as an educational vessel on the Chesapeake ever since, supported by the Sultana Education Foundation. During the design process, the Sultana group ordered copies of all the official documents pertaining to the original schooner from the Public Record Office in London. It is those documents that, thanks to the generous hospitality of Drew McMullen, Executive Director of the Foundation, and his staff,who were all friendly and supportive, I have been allowed to read.

Sultana had  both a sailing master, David Bruce, and a commander–Lt. John Inglis, an American who would remain loyal and eventually retire from the Navy as an Admiral. On this visit, I got through Bruce’s log, which covers every day of the schooner’s constant service from July of 1768 until early December 1772. Through the sometimes-almost-inscrutable handwriting and “creative” orthography, I got a terse summary of day-to-day events far too demanding for our modern sensibilities of risk tolerance and comfort, from the harrowing gale-lashed passage from Deptford to Halifax, to the boarding and searching of merchant ships up and down the East Coast of North America in all conditions, keeping a crew of 25 on a vessel too small for that many men, with rampant desertions, occasional impressment, a few floggings, and at least two deaths, before a second transatlantic in the other direction which, like the first, almost proved disastrous.

Sultana was part of an effort to enforce the Townshend Acts, themselves intended as instruments of a reformed British Empire able to meet the substantial challenges of its sudden post-1763 expansion and its depleted Treasury. She and her sister vessels were effective–perhaps too effective–in this role, subjecting British American maritime commerce to a constant scrutiny to which it was not accustomed. The resentment created by the use of naval vessels for commercial policing ratcheted up tensions between London and America–and between Americans of differing stations and opinions–to a dangerous degree.

I am applying for funding to return to Chestertown for two more weeks of reading, and I will post updates on this project here from time to time. Thanks for reading, and if you are interested in knowing more about Sultana and the Foundation that operates her replica, visit http://www.sultanaeducation.org.

 

Right after dissertation defense, 8 February 2017; Skip Fischer is on the far right in the picture. Neil Kennedy is on the far left. In the back are Barry Gaulton and Danine Farquharson. You can figure out which is which.

It’s been a while; here’s a brief run-down of what’s in the pipeline right now.

First, though, it’s only proper for a professional maritime historian to acknowledge the death on 11 February 2018 of one of our field’s guiding lights, Professor Lewis “Skip” Fischer, co-founding-editor of both the International Journal of Maritime History and of The Northern Mariner/Le Marin du Nord. When I got accepted to study maritime history at Memorial University, where Skip had taught since I was in about sixth grade, I was hopeful that I would get to work with him at some level. I must admit I was a bit intimidated when my advisor, Neil, first took me over to meet him, but I needn’t have been. He was simultaneously warm and frank, in a way that I try to be. He let me know that his approval, based on his old friend and my old professor Carl Swanson’s recommendation, was why I was there, and that he had every confidence I would do well based on that recommendation. I read the technical history of the ship for Skip, and our one-on-one discussions were of course a great privilege. I learned that he was generous, sometimes to a fault, with students, though he was quite clear about what he considered good work and what he did not. The man truly was a walking library. His office mirrored that externally; to find him, you had to navigate a warren of bookshelves with barely room to turn around between them. It’s Neil’s office now, and it looks quite different.

All of us who were trained at any level by him, mentored by him, lectured by him, are lucky. The maritime history world is only beginning to celebrate his life and work.

Meanwhile, we do what he would want us to do: keep working. Neil was kind enough to tell Skip, a few days before he died, that my book manuscript was coming along well, and indeed it is. I will do everything I can to get Sea Venture: The Merchant Ship and the British Atlantic, 1600—1800 in a publisher’s hands, and a contract in my own, by the end of this year. I’m happy to have received a small but important grant from the Anderson Bequest of the Society for Nautical Research for some research assistance in Bristol and London, and that is underway now. I also just found out that an edited collection, Cultural Economies of the Atlantic World: Objects and Capital in the Transatlantic Imagination for which I will be contributing a chapter, “Conveyance and Commodity: The Ordinary Merchant Ship in the British Atlantic, 1600—1800,” was accepted by Routledge and should be forthcoming next year. (These things take a long time.)

I’ve got a few conferences in mind for this year, including the Society for the History of Technology’s in St. Louis in October, for which I have proposed an open session and actually have an interested collaborator! We hope to get more in the next couple of weeks. I’m also applying for a major fellowship from them. As my intellectual direction continues toward histo-techno, I hope to make a contribution to that field at the same time as I hope this project makes toward early America and the British Atlantic.

Thanks for checking in and stay tuned. If you care for maritime history, please raise a glass of something good to Skip Fischer.

Photo courtesy Dr. Jennifer McKinnon, ECU Program in Maritime Studies

People always say this, but I really was honored to be invited to speak to the alumni, faculty, and especially current graduate students in the Program in Maritime Studies, from which I graduated myself, 19 years ago. The two professors who taught my maritime history surveys back in ’96 and ’97 were both in the audience. Neither of them fell asleep or chided me afterwards. I’ll take that.

We were there to celebrate 35 years of this unique program, of which I’m proud to be an alumnus. My remarks were intended as an endorsement of the founders’ vision, based on my own experience doing maritime history at the professional level. Dr. Still and Dr. Watts were absolutely right; we can’t advance maritime historical scholarship without an inter-disciplinary toolkit based on training in history, archaeology, anthropology, and material culture.

I met some cool new people and re-connected with some cool old people (and some that aren’t quite old, but working on it–like me).

If you’d like to know more about the Program in Maritime Studies at East Carolina, click here to explore.

Happy 35th to a bunch of hard-working, hard-playing pirates.

“It’ ain’t Club Med…” –Dr. Brad Rodgers, Director

We had a great turnout Sunday evening (10/22/17) at The Lyceum in Alexandria for “The Ship IS the Treasure: Why Alexandria’s Eighteenth-Century Ship is Important,” an invited talk I gave for the City of Alexandria and the Friends of Alexandria Archaeology to help raise funds for the conservation and preservation of the unusually-well-preserved hull remains found at the construction site of the new Hotel Indigo on the city’s waterfront in January of last year.

My role was to explain to folks why the study of these remains is important for our ongoing attempt to understand ordinary merchant ship technology in our world in this period–a subject swimming in murkier waters than even some maritime historians realize. Judging by the questions we discussed afterward, and the obvious interest of the audience, I’m confident that those who were there will spread the word and support for this project will grow.

If you’d like to follow the progress of the conservation, you can do that via the site created by the conservators at Texas A&M University here. If you’d like to consider supporting the project, please visit Save Our Ship to find out more and make your contribution.

If you’d like to contact me about an invited talk, please see the Contact page for my e-mail address. And thanks for visiting!