The volunteers at the New Bedford Whaling museum who are usually transcribing ship logs from the 19th Century so people can read them online without having to overcome some pretty awful penmanship to do so have had to put aside that task to perform another.
Before a ship left port, its crew members’ names, places of birth, places of residence at the time of sailing, their country of citizenship, age, height , skin color, and hair color were listed, and this list submitted and certified at the customs house. Upon the ship’s return, its Master would amend the list to note who had returned, who had deserted or died at sea, and who may have joined the crew at another port.
The names of those lost at sea were entered on a second list. if a ship’s Master upon returning to port amended his outgoing list to include the notation that his ship had come upon the body of someone who was lost at sea by another ship, he would list the height, apparent age, skin color, and hair color observed upon retrieving the body before giving that person an appropriate burial at sea so that, perhaps, that person could be matched by those characteristics to the name of a person another Master had noted as having been lost at sea.
All required formalities having been observed, the lists were then filed away where they were available to anyone who had reason to view them, or to remain in obscurity never to be looked at again.
When we take history classes or read books on history, we only get the stories of kings and queens, politicians, religious leaders, military commanders, captains of industry. We know their names and stories, and that determines how we view the past.
What we don’t hear about are the common people without whom leaders would not have been leading, wars could not have been fought, and industries would not have functioned.
These people lived their lives, had their passing mourned by those who knew them, and then, as time passed, slipped into the void of oblivion.
My city has many cemeteries that have huge ostentatious monuments to the famous people who are interned there surrounded by thousands of smaller headstones of those who made them famous. There is even a cemetery in which hundreds of people are buried from the time of the city’s founding in the 18th century but with few graves marked by headstones, with most of those rain worn to illegibility with the majority buried there with nothing to mark their presence at all. They lie there as empty in the minds and memories of people now as the field under which they lie.
Their names and identities have been lost to time as if they had never existed to begin with.
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The task is not impersonally clerical as some names appear on more than one list over a number of years, and some of those who shipped out when in their teens reappear as the Masters of future ships, became the leaders of the community with major streets now bearing their names, or are listed on one list as lost at sea after the transcriber had repeatedly encountered their names and had listed their ages to find that, after having been first encountered as a teenager on the first list and seeing them age, they died young.
Sometimes the transcribers will mention a name to each other and they will comment on a familiar name, or lament a passing.
In some cases there are certain clues that a Black man with “Black Wooly” hair was in fact a self-emancipated individual who arrived in town after escaping from the South, whose descendants finally get to see their ancestor’s name written on an official document for the first time.
After over a century, unknown and forgotten people whose names have been hidden, are being read, typed, and spoken about and entered into an international digital database of whaling ship crews and are hidden no more.
The ancient Egyptians believed that a person was immortal as long as someone said their name.
Based on that, these common men, the ones who made it possible for the famous people to become so, have been pulled out of obscurity and given immortality when a transcriber, who may be the first person to see a crew members name since the list was stored in a box in the bowels of the customs house, first reads the name with some odd penmanship requiring a certain degree of analysis, types it out on a computer spreadsheet along with the other information, and then submits the name to the centralized database making it available to the future.
Sitting at our keyboard, we have met people long dead and forgotten, but forgotten no more, as we say their names and make them available to the future, and, not to sound too braggadocious, give them their immortality.
