A number of years ago the volunteer transcribers at the New Bedford Whaling Museum were involved in a project transcribing 19th century whaling crew lists to be added to an international database, www.whalinghistory.org , where typing a person’s or ship’s name into the search link brings up crew lists, information about the ship, the person sought, links to log books, and any information related to the person or ship. Old ancestors of local families have been discovered this way.
Previous to this project I had transcribed the logbook of the whale ship Newport while it and the Northern Pacific whale fleet wintered on Herschel Island on the northern edge of Canada about 60 miles East of Barrow Alaska in the mid 1890s. The ships would be packed in with snow and sand to protect the hulls from the crush of forming winter ice and would remain there as a little town until the spring thaw and the return of migrating whales. Why chase them when you can wait for them to come to you?
There is no whaling going on, just the activities of those living their lives as normally as possible waiting for the thaw, living on the ships converted into housing with shelters, recreation rooms, dining halls, and a baseball diamond on the tundra. The log keeper of the Newport, in contrast to others that made cursory entries as there was really nothing to write home about, kept detailed daily log entries, many ending with his mentioning, without explanation, that he worked the lathe.
This caught my interest and, as a volunteer without the fear of getting fired because I might not be fast enough and, as the museum loves it if in checking on some minor detail out of curiosity a transcriber might find some new historic fact, as has happened often, I went searching to solve this mystery.
Quite by accident, I cannot remember how, just that I came across the journal of Sophie Porter, a captain’s wife, who, like other wives, had joined her husband for the voyage and the wintering at Herschel. Not being an official log book with its requirements of form, style, and substance, this was a personal diary filled with non-ship related, more social details such as those about Christmas, birthday parties, daily routines, and deaths, all while referring to crew members not in words that implied a power and status hierarchy like the captains’ attitude toward crew which the wives did not share, as she spoke of the various crew members, both good and bad, the way one would talk about a neighbor. While her husband may have seen the crew as the great unwashed, Sophie’s was a softer attitude. In one of her many entries about the social life of the “colony” she mentioned a baseball game, the one depicted in a painting done that year and which hung in the museum until a recent exhibit change, and subsequently how the captain of the Newport had brought some bats to replace the broken ones, and the mystery of the lathe was solved.
It took an accidental cross reference to a journal, come upon by kismet, to solve a mystery mentioned multiple times without explanation in the original source material, the log book.
Left only to the Newport Log, we would know neither that the game in the painting was a real scene captured by the artist nor what the captain’s obsession was with the lathe whose product he never mentioned in the log.
It gets better.
During the transcribing of many rather mundane entries by a captain fulfilling his duties and in doing so was meticulous with events and details, listing the poundage of meat brought by the local people whose names he listed, the many men who ran away, those who were frozen, the number of times and details about limbs amputated from frost bite, the details of what the men were doing beyond the simple words “employed with ship business” and telling exactly what the work was, and there among his many entries. included as a factual recount without comment, was a single sentence stating,
“Monday Feb 11th
A light breeze from the W.N.W. Cloudy and misty Bar. 30.10. Ther. -4 Got a load of meat put the Steward (Scott) forward for Sodomy and Onanism of Bark Wanderer one of the men deserted but was overtaken and brought back.”
Confusion comes in as runaways had also been mentioned in passing among a number of other details in earlier and later entries and, because of the lack of punctuation in the original, sentences are blended and separation comes through context which is lacking when events are listed in order of occurrence and not by category .
I was curious about this because it was the first mention I had come across of Homosexual activity, and it was written in such a way as to imply two possibilities. Either Mr. Scott was alone, which brings up the question as to this being a one time interruption, or, because it concerns an activity that would involve another person, perhaps the man later to be noted as having been the man who ran away, or the reference to the run away was not related to this at all or just, as usual, an unrelated detail included because it was part of the day’s activities, like working the lathe when in an entry he had been talking about sanding the deck. The runaway was noted as being from a different ship than the Newport, meaning either there was an inter-ship hook up, or there is no connection between Mr. Scott and the runaway.
The other alternative is that in not mentioning he had caught anyone in the act, it is possible that the steward could have been “busy” since they left the port of San Francisco, continuing during the wintering and, growing tired of it especially if it continued while all male crews of many ships were gathered in close proximity, the captain may have acted in such a way as to slow things down if not totally prevent Mr. Scott’s activities. To this end, the Captain isolated him from the crew. In another log book a captain had done that to a crew member because he was simply a jerk and might have messed up the whole Catalpa mission at the last minute.
Questions engender research, so I went digging a little.
With the name of the ship and Mr. Scott’s name and position on it, as well as that of the captain, researching Steward Scott would be simple to investigate and learn a lot about if there was information, and so I went to www.whalinghistory.org, entered the name of the ship from which the runaway had, well, run, and what came up included the names of the three captains who had mastered the ship, Thrasher, which I was not researching but which the website included with all search link information, and after the name of Captain Weeks, in the column with the heading “Death”, while nothing was there for the other two, the notation “At Sea?” came after his.
This meant someone somewhere wanted information that was necessary for that person and most likely useful to others, and, as I was familiar with the other two captain’s, Bodfish and Tilton, Tilton having been the captain of the Newport, the worker of the lathe, who had taken over the Thrasher, Weeks’s ship, when he died, and was familiar with all three through the Sophie Porter journal, I knew how Weeks died because Sophie, whose journal I had not looked at for six years until I went looking for Mr. Scott, explained,
“Fine clear weather fresh wind the mate of the Wanderer reports seeing the runaways east of the southwest sand spit At 5:15 p.m. Captain Charles Weeks fell from between decks striking we suppose the keels and then the skin of the ship He was insensible when picked up and died at 1 oclock He was quite conscious when he died His collar bones were crushed in and there was apparently some injury to the back.’ “
He may have been on a whaling voyage, but in light of the wintering, he did nor die at sea as his ship, like the others, was surrounded by arctic ice and was not sailing.
Sophie Porter goes on in an entry a few days later,
“Captain Weeks’ remains were laid up in the ice house to await the arrival of the Jeanie when they will be taken to San Francisco the casket was placed on a sled and draped with the Ensign A large body of men and all the Captains and ladies followed to the vault our attention was given then to poor Mrs. Weeks who needs the most tender care I stayed up with her last night and will take turns with Mrs. Cook in doing so til she is a little stronger”
I might point out that even in her personal journal, in a serious entry, Mrs. Porter threw in a reference to runaways in the same by-the-way manner as the runaway from the Wanderer was mentioned in the Newport log.
Or not.
There is a research topic here.
While my intention was to look up Mr. Scott and, perhaps, begin a whole new area of study at the New Bedford Whaling Museum with all its resources and connections dealing with those whose sexual orientation was Gays or who, because of long voyages on ships filled with men, performed circumstantial Homosexual acts for release because of physical need, to pursue research in a more formal manner than just taking it for granted that there would have to have been Gay crew members and homosexual activity on ships by sheer number and circumstances when in one case, which implies many more, there is an actual recorded bit of homosexual activity, instead, I ended up answering a question on an international website because I had found, by accident, the answer to the present question many years ago before it was even asked or the website existed upon which it could be asked. A total stranger, and the project itself, now has the answer because I was following one sentence in an old ship’s log that caught my attention but was totally unrelated until the threads got pulled.
A “lowly” transcriber who, like the others, routinely comes across information no one is looking for but will be happy it was found, had his work validated and his worth shown and that of his fellow transcribers, all unpaid volunteers, at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. He also used the website to which he and they had contributed through a variety of transcription projects and was able to use the website and his contribution as research to answer some unknown question.
I had the privilege to see this happen in my case as I had to go back and review past work that, had Mr. Scott not been so obvious, I would never have looked back at as I had moved on to a new project now, and having no pressing need to, just wanted to answer one question but answered another.
The transcribers come together at times and while transcribing, ask each other questions about things we come across which often leads to an answer being found and we go home satisfied with our work and our discovery unaware that while we assuaged our own curiosity, we also did so for others from many places now and in the future.
This thing with Captain Weeks shows that even as the transcribers may seem isolated from the big picture, obscure as we may seem to be, we are feeding information to those who need it and are benefiting from it in whatever way the benefit comes without us knowing that we are more than individuals on keyboards, part of a web from which, like all of us on earth looking at our galaxy from here, see little there while in reality it is huge.
Mr. Scott will have to wait until my next shift at the museum.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if this man who could have gone the rest of time as an obscure reference in one sentence out of thousands in a logbook from a multi-year voyage over 130 years ago (by the way this entry about Steward Scott was written 100 years before I arrived in Oklahoma in 1993) became the seed for studies related to Gays in the whaling industry going beyond the wealthy and famous owners whose same sex activities were of interest because every era has its Kadashians.
The New Bedford Whaling Museum restarted the New Bedford Lyceum by having the author of a recently banned book, “All Boys Aren’t Blue” speaking on the present frenzy of conservatives to ban books, and just as Frederick Douglass spoke and educated the locals about the true conditions of slavery and who Black people really were if their potential is respected not subjugated, George Johnson, a Black, non-binary individual did the same for every stripe on the Rainbow Flag.
Between that speech and the Newport entry, this would be a good time to have the New Bedford Whaling Museum institute a committee on Gay studies, or whatever acceptable name is assigned by the youth to the new area of study that will be as on-going and unending as all the other areas of study at the institution.
Hoping that any research on Steward Smith shows either good things, or obscurity as opposed to his having gone too deeply in the shadows as far as identity and activity and was not a good person, perhaps, to avoid all the discussion of what Gay people call ourselves these days and all the infighting about the dominant identity, we just name it after him, the first discovered actively Gay crew member identified by name.
There may be plenty of references in earlier log books even if described in Victorian era, Quaker vocabulary, but to my knowledge, this is the first one found.
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