Shenandoah (1872): links, questions, comments, coordination, ...

[ggordon]

March 28

More on Isaac Sapp's medal.

4:05 PM

called all hands to muster and read a letter from the Secretary of the Navy to Isaac Sapp (Sea. Ex.)
accompanying a medal prize for meritorious conduct while serving on board this ship.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorag ... 21-223.JPG

[Michael]

[ggordon]

March is complete.

Three months into the log the ship has been at sea a few times, but so far not a single course entry. In one case it just said following the flagship motions.

The ship ended the month at Hyeres, France, but it's anyone's guess as to what course it took to get there.

[Randi]

[Michael]

[ggordon]

April is complete. Continued westward to Marseilles and then back to Ville Franche.

The second part of April started a new log book. The digitizing person apparently had difficulty with the binding on the log. It was not fully opened when taking the images, resulting in the left part of the event pages being obscured by the weather page. I assume they were being careful not to damage the log. Which is more important, protecting the log or extracting the information stored in the log?

There were daily entries concerning men being confined for drunkenness, fighting, disobeying orders, or returning late from liberty.

[Michael]

That page issue is a problem with old logs. I'm glad the crew continues to express their freedom from pesky rules.

[ggordon]

May 13 at Genoa, Italy

8AM to Meridian

Sent boarding officer to board ~merican barque Francis B. Fay, Captain Durham, 44 days ~rom
New Orleans. cargo, cotton and tobacco; no sickness on board. ~he American barque came in
at 8.40: boarded her at 10.50. She ~as put in quarantine and quarantine flag hoisted at 11.15.
At 11.20 ~he ship was put in quarantine by authorities from shore, in consequence ~~~ having
boarded American barque, hoisted quarantine flag at once. ~ent Bill of Health on shore to have it
corrected.

The missing characters are due to the page overlap problem described in my post above.
It's a bit unclear, but if I'm reading it right, The Fay was put in quarantine and then the Shenandoah put in quarantine because of having boarded the Fay.

3:15PM

sent whale boat to health ~~fice with Asst Surgeon Heyl, for bill of health.

The Shenandoah set sail the next day with no further mention of the quarantine.

[Michael]

[Randi]

Timely!

[ggordon]

May is complete. Back and forth along the coast of France and Italy, and then back to Ville Franche.

It looks like the brig must be full nearly all the time. Every time one or more seamen are confined, an equal number are released. I'm guessing because there's not enough room. They seem to average confining four or five a day.

[Randi]

Shades of the Concord

[Michael]

[ggordon]

June 9 at Gibraltar

One deserter and long list of men who have overstayed liberty by 24 hours and still haven't returned.

[ggordon]

June 10 leaving Gibraltar

Four men were still absent without leave when the ship set sail from Gibraltar.

[Michael]

[ggordon]

June is complete. Sailed to Gibraltar and then on to Lisbon, Portugal, where most of the month was spent.

[Michael]

[ggordon]

An odd weather entry on July 19 at Queenstown, Ireland. A new log keeper has taken over who has beautiful handwriting, but...

The PM weather section has an extra line of data above the 1 PM row so that there are 13 rows. They have been in port for a few days. So it doesn't appear to be a time change, especially since there have been no previous time changes this year despite going as far east as Italy, and now over to Ireland. I thought maybe the log keeper might be repeating the Noon entry, but that is not the case. The data is different from both Noon and 1PM. No idea why they would have 25 hours of data for the day. Nothing on the event page to give a clue.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorag ... 23-118.JPG

I'm going to treat it like a time zone change and combine the pre-1PM and 1PM lines using a vertical bar to separate the entries, and make a transcriber comment.

I hope this doesn't continue on subsequent pages.

[Michael]

That's a good way to treat that problem. I suspect, having seen things like that before, is that the 1800 weather is really the weather at 1900. I.e., the PM line is really 1300, etc. You can see that the 1900 weather is an exact copy of 1800. Just leave it as you've done, and I'll worry about it when I work on the voyage.