NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Navigation and whaling
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2009 Feb 5, 23:23 -0800
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2009 Feb 5, 23:23 -0800
George H, you wrote "From the vast number that once existed, a museum collects the documents that have survived and can be preserved, the well-bound official logbooks with well-organised information that can be read and studied. Where, now, are the dog-eared scraps of paper on which the hardly-literate skippers of parish-rigged whalers kept their scanty records?" You might be surprised by the "dog-eared" documents that have been preserved in New England. Hundreds and hundreds of battered old logbooks exist in museums. Don't forget that these were significant legal and commercial documents so they were stored even before they became historical artifacts. Few whaling captains were owners. Most were working for small corporations and partnerships of investors. Those backers expected a reasonably well-kept logbook. Of course, there is always bias in preservation. In particular, logbooks that have interesting illustrations and "whale stamps" are much more likely to be preserved today. Even so, the logbook from the Morgan's maiden voyage (which I have described elsewhere) was preserved despite the fact that it's really dull as dust. And there's a notebook of navigational calculations from a much later voyage that would qualify as a collection of scrap paper. And you wrote: "They've gone into the bin, over the years, not into a museum. So it's now impossible to judge, from what has been preserved in museums, what was the general standard of practice at sea. Frank doesn't know it, and neither do I. We just have to keep an open mind." Oh come on now! The fact that we have imperfect evidence does not mean that we should ignore huge amounts of evidence. There are so many whaling logbooks that it's likely that no single person has ever read them all, but they are loaded with solid evidence of the history of whaling. Yes, you do need to bear in mind the biases introduced by selective preservation. For example, logbooks from small coastal whaling voyages are rare, but that's obvious enough. Logbooks from long-distance whaling voyages exist in large numbers and they provide tremendous "primary source" evidence. That evidence beats speculation any day. You also wrote: "Yes, of course. Who could deny that? There are many such concentrations of commercially-valuable whales, such as the Right (Bowhead) whales to be found in Arctic , and Blue Whales in the Antarctic, and many others between. Which was exactly why I restricted my comments to Sperm whales, which can be found literally anywhere, their distribution being so diffuse that a vessel hunting Sperm whales can and will simply wander over hundreds of thousands of square miles of open ocean." In fact, in its career the Morgan mostly was engaged in hunting sperm whales. Although their concentrations are more diffuse than some other species and although they are found globally, sperm whales are still found more frequently in certain areas. If you look at the map of the maiden voyage of the Morgan which I posted recently, you can clearly see what grounds they hunted on that voyage. There's the huge equatorial belt to the west of the Galapagos, and there's also the whaling ground in the Gulf of Alaska. In other years, they would visit different areas. It's true that once the whalers were "on the grounds" they could wander about aimlessly over as much as "hundreds of thousands of square miles" but they made long, deliberate journeys involving some of the best navigational practices of the day to get there and get back. And even on the whaling grounds, the vessel's position was recorded regularly when weather permitted though clearly not as regularly as on the voyage to the grounds. Again, these logbooks were legal records of a commercial expedition. Navigating and recording the vessel's position was an important daily task. -FER --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Navigation List archive: www.fer3.com/arc To post, email NavList@fer3.com To , email NavList-@fer3.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---