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George H, you wrote:
"In [7333], Frank has avoided the point, in my questioning of his evidence
about the standard of navigation of American whalers in the 19th century."

Well, it's not that I'm avoiding your insistence for an account of the 
selection process. It's simply that this strikes me as yet another instance 
where it's probable that no answer would satisfy you. 

And you wrote:
"In museums, there's a well-known tendency, a curatorial bias, to keep and
display only the best examples, of anything."

Display? Yes. Preserve? No. That's not the case with logbooks. They don't take 
up much space, and research libraries have made a serious effort to acquire 
as many of them as possible, regardless of condition, for the plain and 
simple reason that they are the best evidence we have of maritime history. 
Every one of them is a historical goldmine, and that's how they're treated. 
The only thing that will keep an old logbook out of a museum is mold --since 
mold can spread to other artifacts and documents.

And you wrote:
"Of the immense numbers of American whaling voyages that took place, some will 
not have even kept an account worthy of the name of log-book. Of those that 
did, many logs will have gone into the bin after the voyage ended."

This would be a rare circumstance. Logbooks were legal documents. They were 
also important commercial records. In some periods, a whaling ship could not 
legally sail without a logbook. That doesn't mean they had to keep it 
rigorously. It also doesn't mean that they had to record positional 
information rigorously, even when known. But during the period of "Peak 
Whaling" when American whaling ships numbered over 300 at sea at any one time 
(mostly in the Pacific), there is evidence of a standard that included 
positional information on a daily basis.

And:
"The more that have been collected in institutions, the more the point about
selectivity is reinforced. Somehow, all those logs have got further whittled
down to the 30 that Frank has read. Whittled down by whom, and on what
basis? Was that whole corpus available to Frank, for him to choose his 30 on
some sort of lucky-dip basis? Or were they selected, perhaps for digitising,
on some other basis, such as legibility, completeness, good organisation,
fame of vessel or captain?"

Since this seems very important to you, here's the way I selected them:
1) Four because they had been digitized and therefore I could read them at my leisure.
2) Four more because they were from the Charles W. Morgan. I emphasize that 
the Morgan was in every way typical and unexceptional as a whaling vessel.
3) One because a librarian mentioned that it had references to lunars.
4) The rest (about twenty), at random from the reference catalogs. The 
advantage of picking from a catalog is that you have little information 
except vessel name, master of the vessel, home port, and dates of the voyage.
[please note that I am ONLY counting whaling logbooks in this summary. there 
are many other old logbooks in the collections]

I wrote previously:
"How many whaling vessels were "casually navigated"? What evidence do you
have for that? "

You wrote:
Aiming for the Horn, in the South Atlantic, in 1822, she fell in with
whalers Herald and Amazon, of Fair Haven, Mass. Here's what Sea-Serpents
captain said-

"The captain of the Herald came on board to ascertain his longitude; he
said that they had seen no land for the last two months, and had been too
busy to pay much attention to the course of the ship; that he knew nothing
of lunar observations, and had no chronometer; he was therefore desirous to
ascertain the present position of his ship. I had an excellent chronometer
on board, and as the lunar observation taken that day agreed with it, I
told him there was no doubt I could give him the exact latitude and
longitude"

So there we have an unpretentious American vessel carrying the tools for
modern navigation, and putting them to good use, and two other American
vessels wandering the seas in sublime ignorance of their longitude. Truly
it was a period of transition."

Sorry I missed that earlier post. Yes, the story you relate is a famous one, 
and it's frequently offered up as evidence of the early years of American 
whaling. Yes, it was indeed a time of transition. It was 1822, over a decade 
before the great boom in American whaling, before "Peak Whaling". 

Now bear in mind, this is a second-hand story. Did they really not know their 
longitude at all or only know it to the nearest degree? You'll notice that 
when masters tell their stories of "speaking other ships," they're usually 
quite proud of what they have to offer and frequently dismissive of what they 
get from the other party. It's a bit of a game.

And you wrote:
"The author was George Coggeshall, "Journeys to various parts of the world",
reprint of 3rd ed., 1858. His book is a good clear account of 36 voyages,
selected from his 80 made over 58 years."

It's available on Google Books incidentally. Say, you note the Coggeshall 
"selected" his stories decades later. Do you suppose there was any bias in 
HIS selection process?? A story about two whaling vessels seemingly lost at 
sea is a good "sea tale" so it gets re-told.

And you wrote:
"As for 19th century American backwardness in navigation generally, I can 
adduce once again, from [7201] the account by Samuel Eliot Morrison, in "The 
Maritime History of Massachusetts 1783-1860" (1921), who noted that even in 
the early nineteenth century, the position of a ship was generally still 
determined by dead reckoning with the use of only a compass, log line, and 
deep-sea lead. Among examples of Atlantic voyages made by American vessels 
using these traditional methods, he reported that an American vessel was 
seized at Christiansand, Norway, because she had arrived in port without 
chart or sextant. The ship was freed only after other American shipmasters in 
the port protested that they frequently sailed the width of the Atlantic 
without those aids, claiming that any comptent seaman could do so."

This was during the Napoleonic period, maybe 1810? It was not at all uncommon 
for Americans to get longitude by dead reckoning in that period. Chronometers 
were rare on American vessels before the mid-1830s (very roughly). And lunars 
are not much use in the North Atlantic since the passage is relatively short 
and the weather frequently cloudy for most of the voyage, as you yourself 
have noted.

By the way, can anyone find a more detailed account of this story? The only 
account I've found is from "The Quarterly Review" in 1817 as follows:
"and though Dr. Clarke, who found a sextant in the cabin, was able to inform 
them of that which they before knew nothing of -the latitude of the vessel 
and her distance from Rhodes and Cyprus- he had no other thanks for his 
discovery than contemptuous pity for the slow means by which the infidels 
acquired that knowledge which Mohammedans possess by instinct. After all, 
absurd as this appears, the Turkish are not the only mariners by whom the use 
of the sextant is little known or practised, nor is the Mediterranean the 
only sea in which it may be neglected with impunity. When some years ago an 
American vessel was condemned as English at Copenhagen, because no sextant 
was on board, and because the Danish courts would not believe that a voyage 
across the Atlantic was practicable without such an aid, all the other 
American captains in the harbour came forward to state, that the instrument 
was with them neither necessary nor usual, and that they had frequently made 
the passage with no other guide than the compass and their' reckoning of the 
vessel's course, till they made the north of Ireland. Whether British 
merchant vessels are better provided, is more than we can answer."

It's worth noting that in the early 19th century, "sextant" meant sextant, an 
expensive instrument reserved for lunars. The story does not necessarily 
imply that they carried no octant (quadrant) or that they made no celestial 
observations at all --only that they were not equipped to take lunars, which 
is unsurprising in that period in the North Atlantic.

-FER




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