This collection, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will be a digital depository of over 120,000 pages of material available on-line. The project centers on merchant vessels of the nineteenth century, the people who owned and sailed them, and the records pertaining to them. merchant ships were the spine of the american economy and culture through the nineteenth hundred. They carried supplies, build materials, craft goods, and luxury items to and from ports throughout the country and the globe, and they brought millions of immigrants to this state. America ’ s reach with the rest of the world, prior to transoceanic cable, was primarily maintained via the merchant marine. merchant traders established cities, opened frontiers, negociate alliances, and distributed ideas, culture, and technology .
Ship Registers
Given the merchant marine ’ sulfur significant character, it is not surprising that the majority of the Museum ’ s research requests relate to merchant vessels in some manner, and involve the manipulation of such specialize materials as ship registers, ships ’ plans, and archival collections. Of these, the ship registers are the most heavily utilized by our staff and the public. Produced for shipping companies and policy firms, merchant transport registers document vessels ’ names, size, captains ’ and owners ’ names, home ports, type, date and place of construction, materials used in build up, and other vital information needed in studying their history. In many cases, these registers represent the alone criminal record of a particular vessel ’ sulfur being. Of the literally tens of thousands of American vessels which once plied our waterways, only a bantam count have survived, most having been broken up or differently lost to history when they reached the end of their useful life. Their builders, many of them anonymous, have died or gone out of business, and their models and plans, if any existed, have disappeared as well .
much of the research done at the G.W. Blunt White Library and early nautical inquiry libraries involves ship genealogy : verification of a ship ’ sulfur identity and some outstanding facts about it. As a consequence, most books and articles written on maritime subjects ( nautical archeology, shipbuilding, marine department of commerce, etc. ) quote embark registers, such as Lloyd ’ s Register of Ships or the record of the American Bureau of Shipping, to verify the facts about the ships involved. While no book or article is based entirely on the registers of ships, the registers hold critical data that simply can not be found elsewhere, and which in turn unlocks other sources, such as logbooks, manuscripts, ships ’ plans, maps and charts, and photograph and paintings .
apart from their utility in scholarly and aesthetic endeavors, ship registers are presently in big demand because of the growing interest that the general public is showing in the research of personal family history. Prior to the mid-twentieth century, the entirely way that emigrants from most countries could make their way to America was by ship. As people delve into their by, they not only want to know from where their ancestors came, but how they finally reached their finish. once a person determines the identity of the vessel that brought their ancestors to this nation, we can tell him something about it. Published embark registers are always a critical piece in establishing the identity of the vessel being researched. once this information is known, the research worker can begin exploring primary and secondary sources associated with the vessel in interrogate. The information in the registers, in fact, helps to “ link ” a vessel to other primary sources such as marine insurance records, logbooks, and clientele papers. Knowing how to use the registers to get to the information contained in the manuscript collections is an necessity separate of maritime research.
unfortunately, many of the registers are rare due to the original function for which they were created. They were not meant to be historical documents but, preferably, annual records of the vessels that were in universe at that orient in time. once the registers were out of date, they were normally discarded. Luckily, some individuals retained copies class after year, but most did not. One of the great drawbacks in maritime research today is the fact that no mental hospital holds a arrant set of american english transport registers for the nineteenth century. With the help of such institutions as The Mariners ’ Museum, the Maine Maritime Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Library of Congress, we have gathered up volumes missing from our collection. Through digital technology and cooperation with our sister institutions, we hope to prevent the loss of vital information, and simultaneously create a complete “ virtual ” run of nineteenth-century ships registers, beginning with the initial published cross-file in 1857 and continuing through 1900, and make the approximately 50,000 pages of registers available to all. The great advantage of creating the accomplished run of registers digitally and delivering them via the World Wide Web is that they will be simultaneously available to all of these institutions, ampere well as to the general public, something not possible in paper or microfilm formats .
Primary Sources
Researchers and scholars using these collections and registers do employment secondary sources to help put the material in the context of the time. however, the primary documents form the basis of new scholarship. mystic Seaport ’ s collections relating to the nineteenth-century american merchant marine have fantastic significance and depth in terms of subject matter, text file types, and stories. They span the maritime worlds of shipbuilding, China trade, slave deal, whaling, european trade, port embargoes, and so forth, and contain all types of transportation documents, legal documents, ships ’ logbooks, letters to agents and captains, and personal papers of all sorts. These collections tell thousands of stories and provide abundant sensitive information for anyone volition to examine them and work with them. These materials have been thoroughly cataloged and in digital form could be put to use immediately. many secondary sources that are required to fill out the necessary background might be found elsewhere in early libraries. The raw material-the primary documents, registers, and rare books from our collection- can not be found elsewhere and will make up more than 50,000 pages of images in this digital library.
Collections such as the David Gelston Papers are available for the first prison term to the scholarly community in general. Utilized chiefly by maritime historians in the past, these invaluable papers tell a much broader American narrative than the maritime one alone. Consider that Robert Albion, in his book, The Rise of New York Port, states that the New York Customs House was the principle generator of tax income in the Federal Government, and that by 1828 the duties collected there were enough to pay the government ’ mho running expenses, excluding the interest on our national debt. Gelston was the collector between 1801 and 1820 and was primitively appointed by Thomas Jefferson .
Broad political issues besides lie buried within the documents of this collection. The Connecticut vessel L.A. Macomber was lying at anchor off Nantucket shoals on June 17, 1863 when she was captured and destroyed by the Confederate Bark TACONY. At the fourth dimension of her destruction the MACOMBER had been out fishing for over a week and had on board approximately 2/3 of a cargo of pisces. Frederick A. Holmes, an lawyer from Mystic River, Connecticut, represented the complainants, i, the owners and crew of the vessel, before the ALABAMA Claims Court ( circa 1874-1876 ). This is not the alone Civil War-related case in the collection. The merchant marine is represented in other wartime documents as well. Fulwar Skipwith was the U.S. consul-general and commercial agent in Paris, France. He late served as governor of the state of West Florida and in the Louisiana Senate. The papers assembled here pertain to claims against the french Government he made on behalf of shipowners whose vessels were confiscated or destroyed by the french Government during the Quasi-War with France between the years 1798 and 1801. Visit the stick to link to the National Archives web site for further information on french spoil claims.
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Buried in our collection of primary materials are thousands of research papers waiting to be written. Making the collections more accessible will hopefully result in across-the-board use and greater publication .
Rare Books and Reference Works
Maritime jargon and practices require the research worker to understand nuances and terminology that can be gained merely from feel or reference materials. What we are able to offer in this context on-line are the latter. From Douglas Stein ’ mho american Maritime Documents, 1776-1860 that describes and illustrates documents crucial to the maritime trades, to James Folsom ’ s Mariners ’ Medical Guide that was written “ having in view the wants of the mariner at sea, ” the works presented here will help to define materials and concepts that are alien to the uninitiate. besides included in this class are 19th-century marine dictionaries, books on seafaring, arsenic well as an 1844 edition of Richard Henry Dana ’ s Seamen ’ s Friend a handbook of seamanship and the rights of sailors. The collection of books will continue to grow and will address such aspects of nautical history as department of commerce, immigration, shipbuilding, whaling and fishing in such a manner that will add to the body of works not promptly available from non-specialized collections. It remains a goal to offer books that will continue to illuminate the subject of our chief collections .
PJO 03/03/03
