NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: on finding Pitcairn Island
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2004 Sep 25, 08:47 EDT
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2004 Sep 25, 08:47 EDT
Arthur Pearson asked:
"Can anyone at least confirm that Mayhew Folger commanded the sealing
vessel? I would be most interested to hear any other information about
Folger, his ship and voyage (out of Nantucket according to family lore),
and where I might be able to find source material about him. I don't
dare hope that his log might be part of Frank's wonderful on-line
archive, and I can't help but wonder if he practiced lunars."
He may well have! As for his logbook, yes, it exists. The logbook of the whaling/sealing vessel "Topaz" is in the Whaling Museum on Nantucket.
If you're related to Mayhew Folger, then you're also related to the Coffins and the Starbucks and the other families of old Nantucket whaling. For a lunarian and navigation connection, one later Coffin was the author of a US Civil War era navigation and nautical astronomy textbook at the US Naval Academy. It was from that Coffin that most late 19th century cadets learned about Chauvenet's method for clearing lunars. It's a distant connection, but you and he probably share a few lunarian bits of DNA...
Oh, and I should say, it's not my "wonderful on-line archive". I really have no idea who has done such a good job creating the online archive at Mystic Seaport's G.W. Blunt White Library (I'm strictly a patron there), but I think it is fair to say that it is a work of generations building on a long "pre-digital" success. Indeed the "G.W. Blunt" part of the library's name may be familiar to some as one of the family that originally published Bowditch's Navigator. The online collection at Mystic Seaport's library is one of their best contributions to maritime history.
Three museums in New England have large collections of logbooks from Yankee whalers: Mystic Seaport, the New Bedford Whaling Museum (Kendall Whaling Museum), and the Nantucket Whaling Museum. Only a percent or two of the thousands of logbooks have so far been digitized.
Here's a Mayhew Folger/Pitcairn link for you: http://library.puc.edu/pitcairn/pitcairn/encyclopedia2.shtml
Frank R
[ ] Mystic, Connecticut
[X] Chicago, Illinois
"Can anyone at least confirm that Mayhew Folger commanded the sealing
vessel? I would be most interested to hear any other information about
Folger, his ship and voyage (out of Nantucket according to family lore),
and where I might be able to find source material about him. I don't
dare hope that his log might be part of Frank's wonderful on-line
archive, and I can't help but wonder if he practiced lunars."
He may well have! As for his logbook, yes, it exists. The logbook of the whaling/sealing vessel "Topaz" is in the Whaling Museum on Nantucket.
If you're related to Mayhew Folger, then you're also related to the Coffins and the Starbucks and the other families of old Nantucket whaling. For a lunarian and navigation connection, one later Coffin was the author of a US Civil War era navigation and nautical astronomy textbook at the US Naval Academy. It was from that Coffin that most late 19th century cadets learned about Chauvenet's method for clearing lunars. It's a distant connection, but you and he probably share a few lunarian bits of DNA...
Oh, and I should say, it's not my "wonderful on-line archive". I really have no idea who has done such a good job creating the online archive at Mystic Seaport's G.W. Blunt White Library (I'm strictly a patron there), but I think it is fair to say that it is a work of generations building on a long "pre-digital" success. Indeed the "G.W. Blunt" part of the library's name may be familiar to some as one of the family that originally published Bowditch's Navigator. The online collection at Mystic Seaport's library is one of their best contributions to maritime history.
Three museums in New England have large collections of logbooks from Yankee whalers: Mystic Seaport, the New Bedford Whaling Museum (Kendall Whaling Museum), and the Nantucket Whaling Museum. Only a percent or two of the thousands of logbooks have so far been digitized.
Here's a Mayhew Folger/Pitcairn link for you: http://library.puc.edu/pitcairn/pitcairn/encyclopedia2.shtml
Frank R
[ ] Mystic, Connecticut
[X] Chicago, Illinois
