I offer this as proof that while everyone might see, few, if any, notice the history that is right there, clearly visible but actively ignored because of personal, religious, and/or personal beliefs has a person gloss over certain information, or, being unversed in the proper historic euphemism, saw merely words and missed the concept.
I also offer it as proof that erasure still happens and is not always obvious.
I offer it as proof that people are too comfortable in doing the erasing.
I assumed it was happening and was comfortable in that assumption as I had seen it happen in other places on other issues, but I felt further validated in that assumption as I saw evidence of it in a very confusing turn of events.
While transcribing the logbook for the Newport as it wintered on Herschel Island the winter of 1894-1895, I came across what had been listed as the “Diary of Sophie Porter” which was actually the logbook of the Jesse H Freeman for which Sophie kept the log for her husband whom she accompanied on that voyage. The person whose transcription I found explained it was a “poetic” version of the log as it did not contain everything from each log entry but had been modified to emphasize entries and their details dealing with Indigenous people, especially their medical needs, as he was a doctor who worked with the First Nations People of Canada.
In his version, Sophie is very maternalistic towards the Indigenous people with whom she lived and she took a number of photographs of them and her daughter, Dorothy, playing with the children.
However, this “poetic” transcription only included the time on the Island while the actual log included entries on the voyage from home port to the winter base. It is in these opening entries that we read of Sophie Porter’s first contact with the ”Natives” which revealed the attitude of the time when it came to people of other cultures.
“For their wretched condition for it is impossible to imagine any beings who show less degrees of comfort than these [people] these living on Siberian coast are considered more intelloigent than those on the American side, a great many can speak a few words pf English and some can converse quite well”
In this part of the log, upon first encountering Indigenous, people she found them dirty, disgusting, frightening, and not the type of people she or her daughter should associate with.
“ They were all very much interested in and friendly disposed toward Dorothy, who does not at all appreciate their advances, nor do I for they are so dreadfully filthy in their persons & clothes. I don’t want too close a contact with them.
She also noted that when approaching Alaska the “Natives” on the American side of the border in contrast to those on the Canadian side were less educated, haphazard in what they traded goods for, were worse off appearance-wise than those on the Canadian ports, thereby expressing the idea that it could be a question of nature vs nurture which gave hope that her attitude was changeable upon education as it would later prove to have been the case.
Aa can be seen in the above image, there is one early entry that had been edited with a thicker pen in which she crossed out the word “Indians” and replaced it with the word “people”. It is not done as a correction as she wrote, as the pen is thicker as is the writing which implies the change was made much later as the pen does not match the thickness of the rest of the log book except in another instance I found where she had obviously come back to make corrections as her description of the other women she met early in the voyage was similarly crossed out and changed, with what would appear the same second pen, from a complimentary description of the other captains’ wives as a nice group she would like to get to know better to “I met the other wives”.
Considering the similarity to thickness of pen and darkness of ink, these changes may have been made after the voyage as Sophie Porter reread her log entries as any decent writer would before handing in their work, and could indicate a wider opening of mind and change of attitude in many aspects of her life as she does at one time respond to the question of a friend back home about her ability to live in such an isolated place with a rhapsodic description of the Community.
Obviously, somewhere along the voyage her attitude changed and she might include what brought about her more open attitude toward the Indigenous People in her detailed and sometimes self-reflective ship’s log.
When I began transcribing, it was to avoid the docent duty of leading school field trips the museum thought I would be good at, having spent my professional career as a teacher, but it was that very detail that had me insist on not doing that as I had seen how docents got treated on field trips in spite of the chaperone’s best efforts, and did not want to become that target in retirement when I could be enjoying what I was doing. I, instead, emphasized that my close to 40 years in the classroom had given me the ability to read all manner of penmanship, and was handed the log for the Catalpa of Fremantle Fenian escape fame. Until then, transcription was strictly on an as-needed basis done by whoever in the research library had the time. Now there was an anchor person, and, to keep me busy and available, I and another volunteer, also not interested in noisy, easily distracted children, worked on two follow up ship logs and would be joined later by new people interested in transcription until the museum had a team of volunteer transcribers working on various documents depending on the need and requests of researchers.
A transcriber followed one log keeper from beginning to end and got used to their personalities as revealed in the log entries and this often made transcribing a log progressively easier by becoming familiar with the writer’s style, expressions, and writing idiosyncrasies. Progressing through history recorded by a participant, some events were like episodic television as some events on the voyage came to neat conclusions throughout it while others continued on as an ongoing storyline through the whole voyage that might have to be continued on the next ship as those entries on the stewards and cooks who behaved badly but were transferred along with their problems to another ship show some mobility of the characters in the tale.
In this process transcribers had been allowed to follow leads and in so doing have found historical details that were new or might modify existing historical assumptions and “urban “legends. I have written blogs about some of the connections discovered between things that were not seemingly connected even if those connections were as tenuous as the thread on a spider’s web.
A transcriber could watch Sophie’s growth and would be able to compare past and new attitudes and the moments that led to the change. They would see it because the whole process was in front of them.
However, under the new system of crowdsourcing, which was introduced so more pages of transcription could be produced regularly, transcribers now do whatever page comes up on the screen. What is transcribed one day has no connection to what had been done at the previous session’s transcriptions, so important entries are rendered routine and mundane whereas they could contain something that should have been noticed or might connect two things presently seen as unrelated. As multiple people are transcribing random pages on a central and publicly accessible web site, to one person Sophie Porter is a bigot, to another, an open minded example of what all our attitudes should be toward “the other”, while a third who may have transcribed the moment the change began to take root, not having the book-ending sides, has no idea of the importance of what seems a routine entry. A minor act of kindness might be overlooked as it has no context to the transcriber. Instead of having the knowledge of that moment now, it might, or might not be noted by someone further in the future but denied us in the meantime.
Objections to the new approach have been expressed but answered with a description on the assembly line approach where layers of people down the line double check the pages as they produce a true transcription for posting, but in the process all those people also see but do not understand the content as production, quantity over quality, takes over in creating a bureaucracy.
Another transcriber found two entries in the log of a ship whose captain seemed enamored of flogging his crew at the least provocation, and was surprised as a descendant of a whaling ship master himself who has spent much of his adult life dealing with the history of whaling on many topics including family history in the industry, that on two occasions the captain whipped “the dog”. This was a unique example of animal cruelty that he had never encountered before.
Under the new random-page system he might never have solved this mystery of animal cruelty, but as he was under the old system at the time he was able to complete the log as one continuous account and found that “the dog”, minus capitalization which was a common writing fault, was the nickname of a particularly rough crew member and not an animal at all. Again, had this transcription been done under the new method, he would have been left believing he had found a rare case of animal cruelty while another random transcriber would only know it was a crew member which would mean neither transcriber would notice the detail and would not point it out in the notes transcribers leave for researchers.
Because of his curiosity about the dog, the transcriber did what we had been able to do before; he went and investigated the captain, and established that he was a consistently cruel master with crews that over time became unruly in response to his brutality requiring more of it and that “the dog” was a thorn in his side.
A story within the log that brings humanity to it that could have been lost.
After my transcribing of the Catalpa log I, along with a new transcriber, was assigned the Anrnolda. When reviewing the digitized manuscript, it became obvious that in digitizing the log, that had the pages from the Arnolda and some from the Rebecca Sims kept in a folder because of loose pages, had been dropped and reassembled with some pages out of order, so we had to reorganize the pages and, as there were two logs in one, each picked a log.
I chose the Arnolda section which eventually showed up in the blog “Tangled Web” because of the connections, real or circumstantial, that brought it all back to the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth on Cape Cod. That was in 2016.
When we finished this transcription, we were assigned the Newport as it wintered on Herschel Island and, again, we divided the log into two parts, and because of that, I came across the entry about the steward, Smith, being sent forward for Onanism and Sodomy. I obviously had a reason to notice this but have wondered if it would have been noticed had the other Transcriber gotten that section.
So close, but no cigar.
This log entry was the impetus for the Quigley Institute for Non-Heterosexual Archival Archaeology which has had some success in gathering accounts of Homosexuality on whaling ships after having taken the time to investigate if this were the first such entry in a ship’s log discovered, although there were some mainland court cases related to sexual predation, and this involved correspondence with various archives and researchers in what is now a 7 year process and has included meetings with the administration of the New Bedford Whaling Museum that resulted in the Institute as the museum is curatorial and not research based.
The evidence is there and it has not been silently treated.
Sitting at the most recent museum volunteer meeting, a transcriber who works remotely from home, as many of us do as all that is needed for transcription is a computer and a place to sit and do the work, mentioned his work on the Rebecca Sims which, as I mentioned, had been done 6 years previous. It had shown up on the crowdsource page and when I consulted that site, I not only saw that he was a good amount through an already transcribed log book, but out of curiosity when I looked up the Arnolda, Newport, and Mercator, the first whaling ship to enter Japan and whose records were used to prepared Commodore Perry for his official visit there, I found all four logs were on the crowdsourcing site and all of them were in some degree of completion meaning time, energy, and attention had been given by a number of people to complete work that has already been done and has been being used for the last 7 years.
I have written about these ship blogs, established a website, have met with Museum leadership, and have written about them in a book all while people were duplicating work already done and being used.
My main concern was obviously to see how the entry about Mr. Smith, the steward, was treated by another transcriber and if, as I had had to explain Onanism to a surprising number of people, there might be some explanatory note from the them.
Instead I found the erasure.
The “official” transcription on the transcription site jumps from February 10, 1895 to February 12, 1895 totally omitting the existing entry for February 11, 1895 and as it is the longer entry compared to the others on the page and at the very bottom of it, this could not have been in error.
For whatever reason the transcriber, who can be traced down, chose to omit this passage and, if this were to remain the final version, would have erased history, a history we already have the record of.
This is not omission but erasure.
Had I not transcribed this blog in 2017, Mr. Scott would have been lost to history unless we can truly rely on someone somewhere down the line and hope that line is not peopled by those who find such erasure acceptable.
This is the actual page from the transcribing website. Note the number of entries on the original as opposed to the completed work on the website.
Took six years for someone to come along and erase us again.
According to the official Transcript of the whale ship Newport, there was no February 11 in the year of Our Lord 1894, no such person as Mr. Scott, the steward, and just the usual Heterosexuality at sea because with this erasure, the only sex we know for certain that took place on Herschel Island in 1894 was that between the heterosexual captains and their wives.
This now means that the discovering of ourselves is very complicated and proof that we have been either simply omitted or, as this case shows, deliberately erased because of someone’s political, religious, and/or personal beliefs and not the reason of the historical record.
We have had the full Newport log and we are in it.
It was preferred I should have been more patient and not go off on this especially when action was taken to restore the erased entry. I had been advised to be patient in the past and my patience was, in the eyes of the bigots, permission to stall.
Why should I be expected to exercise patience for the comfort of those who have no problem trying it. They want to be able to offend and guilt us into being patient to allow them time to do or not do what they should.
You can stop worrying about my lack of patience when you stop assuming you can do what you want and handling it is my burden.
This might be a “one off” or it could be one of many and just the first one caught.
I choose to no longer wait and see, but call out and demand redress without doing so patiently from the closet but the the same alacrity and abandon as the offense.
Don’t like the quickness of the response?
Don’t be so quick and free with the stimulus.
