Next message: Arthur Pearson: "Re: Mutineers on Pitcairn"
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
