Play cribbage like a sailor

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five, due to its lack of rss feed & commenting functions:

If you search our Museum Web Catalog, you'll find several examples of cribbage boards such as the one below. Popular for centuries, today in the U.S. alone it is played by over 10 million people!



Want to learn how to play the way they did in the 19th century? The Cribbage Player's Text-book, Being a New and Complete Treatise on the Game in all its Varieties (1837) is available online for free from the Internet Archive. If you're interested in a contemporary outline of how to play the game, the Wikipedia article is a good place to start; the links at the bottom of the article lead to cribbage associations, forums, and much more. If you're looking for a handy book to refer to while playing, either Scarne's Encyclopedia of Card Games or According to Hoyle : official rules of more than 200 popular games of skill and chance, with expert advice on winning play, will soon have you playing like a sailor.

Citation: "Cribbage." Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Library Edition. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2011. Web. 7 Mar. 2011. .

Digging for Gold at the Library: Sea Monsters!

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five:

by Gina Bardi, Reference Librarian)

If you're getting ready to take an ocean voyage, there are some staples you would pack: sunglasses, a set of quoits, a bathing suit with matching cape and most importantly, Monsters of the sea, legendary and authentic:

Because you would hate to be lounging in a deck chair sipping a scorpion and suddenly see a strange shape in the ocean and not be able to identify it as an American Sea Serpent or a Mediterranean one. Think how people would laugh at you! For reference purposes:

No, you must be prepared on your voyage. As the book points out in a beautiful detail on its cover, do you really want to be surprised by an octopus?

I think not. Surprises should involve parties, cakes and jewelry--not knife fighting cephalopods.

If you'd like to see John Gibson's Monsters of the sea, legendary and authentic, stop by the Library. There are sixteen other wonderful illustrations along with all the information you need to astound and amaze your fellow travelers while playing quoits.

Who let the Kraken out?

New in the SF Maritime NHP Library

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five, due to its lack of rss feed:

Here are the Library's lists of new accessions for the last half of April and the first half of May; for more information on any title, contact us, or search our catalogs:

• Library New Accessions, Apr. 17-30, 2011
  (.pdf file, 92 Kb)
  
• Library New Accessions, May 1-15, 2011
  (.pdf file, 118 Kb)
  

What d'ya mean?

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five:

What d'ya mean?

...by "Craft?"

"It is a very general word. In the nautical sense, it refers to virtually all ships and boats, large or small.

It comes from the Old English, craeft, which is believed to refer not only to boats and ships but to the skills required to build them."

Source: Rogers, John G. Origins of sea terms. Mystic, Conn. : Mystic Seaport Museum, 1984.

--Contributor: Palma J. You, Archives Technician.

"Viking" across the Atlantic

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five:

The Library recently acquired a lovely little book, "Viking" across the Atlantic : and a short summary of the Norwegian Vikings and Vikingships by Alfred A. Holm (Chicago : John Anderson Pub. Co., 1893), which is also available online. Assistant Curator Ted Miles sends in this report about the replica vessel, "Viking:"

I was recently asked what is the oldest replica in the world? This is not the time to debate the terms. Is it better to call it a replica, a reproduction or whatever? We can do that another day. You might want to read my article on "Historic Reproductions: An Account of Past Efforts," in Sea History #17 for Summer 1980 pages 26-27. The illustrations are from my post card collection. In the same issue is a list of existing vessels on pages 29-31.

But most people use the word replica to talk about long gone historic craft of one sort or another. The World's Fairs of the late 19th century certainly produced a number of them. The Columbian Expostion of 1893 had replicas of the three vessels used by Christopher Columbus voyage of 1492. And just so he did not get all the glory; a group of people in Norway built a replica of the famous Gokstad burial ship which had been excavated in 1880 and sailed it across the Atlantic Ocean and through the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes to Chicago.

Many years ago, I was visiting Lincoln Park in Chicago, Illinois and saw the ship on display. It has been given a shelter to protect it from the harsh winter weather. The other day, I looked it up on the Internet and find that the Friends of the Viking Ship can be found at www.vikingship.us. Now I see that the ship has been moved to Geneva, Illinois and placed under a different shelter. Tours of the display site are available in the summer.

The King Philip

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five:

(by Judy Hitzeman, Museum Curator (Registrar))

The bow of the King Philip at Ocean Beach (Photo copyright Judy Hitzeman, all rights reserved, used with permission)


The three-masted clipper ship King Philip recently reappeared on Ocean Beach in San Francisco. Built in Massachusetts in 1855, King Philip was a Cape Horner, making regular trips between New York and San Francisco. On January 25, 1878, while leaving San Francisco, the tug towing her out to sea had to leave to aid another vessel. The King Philip dropped an anchor, but it did not hold, and she drifted onto the beach. There was no loss of life, but the vessel broke apart.


Stern of the King Philip (Photo copyright Judy Hitzeman, all rights reserved, used with permission)

Charles Hittell captured the scene in a painting done in March of that year. The painting is now in the San Francisco Maritime NHP museum collection, catalog number SAFR 5729. Born in San Francisco in 1861, Hittell was just 17 when he painted the wreck. He went on to study at the San Francisco School of Design, as well as in Munich and Paris where he made the most of his California origins by dressing as a cowboy and affecting the name “Carlos.” Hittell’s California work included seascapes but he was mainly noted for California adobe scenes and western landscapes.

The King Philip wreck site is located at the foot of Noriega Street. It is usually covered in sand but occasionally appears when conditions are right.

Digging for Gold at the Library : Buried Treasure Maps

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five:

by Gina Bardi, Reference Librarian

The other day I was answering a reference question about steamship routes and it gave me a chance to visit one of my favorites sections of a library, the ol’ Gs, better known as "Geography (General). Atlases. Maps." As a Maritime Library, the expectation is that we would be more interested in charts than maps, and while there are some charts that are interesting to look at for reasons other than navigation, nothing beats a map in my book for unintentional art. Today’s library treasure is Derek Hayes’s Historical Atlas of California with Original Maps, published by University of California in 2007.



Look at this beautiful image from a map published by Bosqui Eng. & Print Co., in 1884. The map shows San Francisco in 1847. It’s such an idyllic view of the city- so quiet and unassuming. I’d wager it was a fairly easy map to drawn what with only 5 streets. Oh, to have great great-great grandparents who would have bought up a block or two!

This next map is a broadsheet which has information about going to the gold mines. It was published in 1849 by James Wyld and contains valuable advice such as, if you go the Chagres and Panama route, "Do not touch the oysters, wear flannel next to the skin by day and by night, avoid spirituous liquors and it is needless to say, be off the first opportunity."



They also call the climate of our region "remarkably healthy" which I would agree with on most days.

If you’d like to take a look at this book or any other book in the library, stop on by. I’m always up for a dig!

New in the SF Maritime NHP Library

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five, due to its lack of an rss feed:

New in the Library:

The Library's new accessions lists from the latter half of March and the first half of April are now available.

We download these lists from OCLC, whose public interface is known as WorldCat.org. Although we catalog directly on OCLC, we do not have the type of subscription that would allow us to appear as a holding library on WorldCat.org, but you can see our holdings in the NPS Combined Library Catalog. (See our Catalogs & Finding Aids page for catalogs listing other Museum Collections.)

* Library New Accessions, Mar. 16-31, 2011 (.pdf file, 27 Kb)
* Library New Accessions, Apr. 1-16, 2011 (.pdf file, 31 Kb)

What is a fathom?

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five:

According to the library's 1988 edition of The Oxford companion to ships and the sea, a fathom:

...comes from the old English faedm, to embrace, and is a measurement across the outstretched arms of a man, approximately 6 feet in a man of average size; the length of a nautical fathom is therefore 6 feet.

So how far is "full fathom five?" About 30 feet, or a little over 9 meters.

Herman Melville's library

A catalog of Herman Melville's library has been created on LibraryThing. According to the library's profile page, the library "has been graciously catalogued by Merton M. Sealts, Jr. in his work Melville's Reading." The profile describing the library is delightful, with information "supplied by a sub-sub librarian," and Hart Crane's poem, "At Melville's Tomb."

When viewing the library, don't miss the gray text in on one of the top bars that informs you that, "HermanMelville has a suggested style for viewing this library (use it)." When you select the "use it" link, the library display will change to include a "Comments" column, pulling this field from the catalog records, which describes provenance, sources, existence of annotations, etc.

Log chips by John Lyman

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five:

(by Ted Miles, Assistant Curator)

Starting in July 1948 maritime historian John Lyman wrote and edited a mimeographed news letter called Log Chips: A Periodical Publication of Recent Maritime History. Each issue is twelve pages and each volume consisted of 12 issues. There were four volumes and later one of his friends Norman Brouwer edited a series of Log Chips Supplements.

The material covered within these pages is wide ranging and is a wonderful resource for those people who are interested in commercial sail in the Pacific after about 1860. For example there is a List of Launchings in the United Kingdom in most issues. The iron and steel sailing vessels that were built in the UK between about 1838 and 1907 were a major player in moving cargo around the world during this period. These vessels came to be called Cape Horners because so many of their voyages took them around Cape Horn into the Pacific Ocean.

Another area that Dr. Lyman was very interested in was west coast shipbuilding. In many issues he wrote biographical articles including launching lists on ship builders up and down the coast, for example Matthew Turner, Hans D. Bendixsen, the Hall Brothers and others. The men and the companies who built the East Coast schooners were covered especially in New England. There are lists of schooners from seven masts down to three mast and their histories.

Regular reports in Log Chips covered Recent Bibliography, Sail News and Book Reviews. An especially interesting group of reviews by California State Senator James Mills was a group of classic titles that were not new even 50 years ago and deserved to be better known. This writer has continues to use this approach in Relative Bearings today; the Newsletter of the Friends of the San Francisco Maritime Museum Library.

As mentioned Lyman did a lot of the writing, but other contributors included Commander Alan Villiers, maritime historians Hans Joaquin Gersdorf and Andrew W. Nesdall, Curator Robert G. Burgess of the Mariners Museum and so many others. Charles W. Morgan of Boston wrote letters and later contributed a 12 page index to the publication.

Further needs to be said on the Launching Lists of the United Kingdom. They are laid out geographically around the coasts from Newcastle and Sunderland all the way around to Belfast, Ireland. Changes of name and owners are recorded and in many cases final fates of the vessels. John Lyman took the annual lists back to 1875 and Norman Brouwer took them the rest of the way back to 1838 when the Iron Age was launched. She was the first ocean going iron sailing vessel in the world. I do not know of any other publication where you can get so much sailing ship data in one place.

Sources:
Log Chips.

Kortum, Karl, and Routh, Donald. "John Lyman: the Hub of Our Wheel." Sea History No. 12 (fall 1978) (1978): p. 13-15. Print.

"Potato, potato, potato"

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five:

An illustration of a one cylinder, eight horsepower Hicks engine that is in the Park's artifact collection, circa 1940. SAFR 17336, HDC 1092

Are you renovating a Hicks engine, or making a scale model of one?
Or even if you want to look at the engineering plans, we are an excellent source of accessible information. The Park’s archive collection, HDC 1092 SAFR 17336, includes blueprints, assembly and price lists, a catalog and instruction manual, photographs, and illustrations of parts. Blueprint title blocks indicate the unique engine series number, part name and number, and issue date. Plans for series B, C, D, E, F, W, Sketch, AY, BY, CY, DY, EY, FY, GY, HY, KY and LY model engines, which have one to three cylinders and horsepower ranging from 6 to 45, are included. Bay Specialties Company donated the collection in 1994. We also have a number of catalog records for our collection of Hicks engines and parts, and for related materials in the Library collection.

To read more about the collection, and to learn what a Hicks engine has to do with saying, "Potato, potato, potato," see the new Collection Corner article about the Hicks Marine Engine Archival Collection, and for more details, or to access the collection, call 415-561-7030.

--Contributor: Palma J. You, Archives Technician

Digging for gold at the library: Coast Seaman's Journal

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five:

(by Gina Bardi, Reference Librarian)

Sometimes when you come to the library, you know exactly what material will be the most useful for your research. Other times, the library seems to be laid out before you as a vast and uncharted landscape of great unknowns. Like a prospector, you must dig a little here and there with hopes of striking it rich. In this regular feature we will mine the collection for veins of information and see if we can make our research fortune.

Today we are digging for treasure in the Coast Seaman's Journal, a periodical started in 1875 by the Coast Seamen's Union. Our library has a run from 1875 to 1918 as the Coast Seaman's Journal and then from 1918 to 1929 in its second incarnation as the Seaman's Journal. We also have a few convention issues from the 1930's. I pulled volume 22 which covers September 23rd, 1908 to September 13th, 1909.

What does the Coast Seaman's Journal have to offer? Shall we grab the pick axe of our curiosity and begin to dig?

Someone who was working on maritime labor history would absolutely want to include this publication in their research (and if they didn't know it existed, a helpful reference librarian would point it out). Each issue is devoted to labor causes on both coasts and the Great Lakes. World events are discussed through the lens of labor. This journal provides startling clear insight into the mind of unions during the turbulent early years of their formation. There are also general news sections, sometimes maritime: "Mexico's first attempt to fortify her harbors with modern rifles will be undertaken at Santa Cruz" ("News from Abroad" 12). Sometimes not: "The Grand Parlor of the Native Sons of the Golden West, a California organization, has decided hereafter that no malt or spirituous liquors shall be used at the entertainments given by the order." ("Home News" 13). The good news is each volume is indexed at its start. The bad, or perhaps more amusing than bad, is the style in which they are indexed, which is by title of article and not by subject. One has to wonder what this refers to:

"Story, Strange, Hinted at"

And I defy you to read the entry:

"Sea-Coffins Doomed"

and not linger for a moment on its promisingly macabre content.

A boon for genealogists would be the "Information Wanted" section of each issue. Here, worried friends, family and lovers leave ads hoping to find what has become of their missing loved ones. A typical one from reads:

"John Widell, who has been on the Pacific Coast and in Alaska for about 18 years, is inquired for by his nephew, Bernt Valdemar Blomquist, Box 65, Seattle Wash. "

Or this heartbreaker with a $50 reward for information:

"Albert Dietrich, bluish eyes and prominent upper teeth, fair complexion, dark blonde hair, 13 years of age, 4 feet 8 inches tall, missing from his home, 1539 9th Avenue, Sunset, San Francisco, since November 27th, 1907, is inquired for by his parents."

Another feature is that of the "Letters List". Family and friends could send letters to sailors at sea care of the union offices and they would be held there until the sailor returned from their voyage. Each week a list of lucky sailors who have letters waiting for them would be printed. There are also regular inclusions of sea shanties, With the Wits (a joke section of dubious nature) and some wonderful advertisements.

I've only scratched the surface, so to speak, of what this journal offers. Please come by and peruse our collection of the Coast Seamen's Journal and see what you can dig up.

Citations:

"Home News." Coast Seamen's Journal 22.33 (1909): 13. Print.

"Index". Coast Seamen's Journal 22 (1909). Print.

"Information Wanted." Coast Seamen's Journal 22.26 (1909): 12. Print.

"News from Abroad." Coast Seamen's Journal 22.24 (1909): 12. Print.

Nautical Nursery Rhymes

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five:

This small treasure resides in the "Peterson, Peter H. (Capt.) Papers," (SAFR 18665, HDC 571) and expresses principles of seamanship in verse, such as:



Meeting on Opposite Tacks
On opposite tacks, when approaching too near,
The ship on the starboard has nothing to fear;
The one on the port tack has either to stay,
Or put up her helm and get out of the way.


For more on Taylor's Nautical School, the issuer of the booklet, see the promotional pamphlet, Taylor's Nautical School, San Francisco, in the Library collection at r V430.A4 T39, and Taylor's modern navigation, also in the Library at VK401.T3 1904.

Contributors: Keri Koehler, Collections Manager; Palma J. You, Archives Technician; Heather Hernandez, Technical Services Librarian.

Ship model conservation course, England

International Academic Projects is pleased to announce a 3 day
course 'Ship Models: Care, Conservation and Display' which will be
held at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich and the Historic
Dockyard, Chatham, 11-13 October 2011. This is a new addition to the
2011 course calendar of International Academic Projects.

The course, aimed at collections managers, curators and
conservators, will be conducted by the curatorial and conservation
specialists of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich and will
cover: the history of the making of ship models; the materials from
which models are made and issues concerning their handling and
movement; display methods; storage and display conditions; making
the materials required for restoration; and the use of plans,
paintings and photographs in the conservation process.

Course details and the proposed timetable are available at

http://www.academicprojects.co.uk/course-details.php?courseID=765

Places are also still available on several other courses offered by
International Academic Projects - including:

Conservation of Glass Objects
(London) 12 - 16 September, 2011

Making Replicas of Museum Objects
(Denmark) 6 - 10 June, 2011

Making Electroform Replicas of Museum Objects
(Denmark) 20 - 24 June, 2011

Digital Photography of Museum Objects
(London) 21 - 22 June, 2011

The Identification of Paper
(London) 4-5 July, 2011

Chemistry for Conservators correspondence course
(September - December 2011)

Please check No comments:

New in the SF Maritime NHP Library

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five, due to its lack of an rss feed:

New in the Library:

The Library's new accessions lists from the later half of February and the first half of March are now available.

We download these lists from OCLC, whose public interface is known as WorldCat.org. Although we catalog directly on OCLC, we do not have the type of subscription that would allow us to appear as a holding library on WorldCat.org, but you can see our holdings in the NPS Combined Library Catalog. (See our Catalogs & Finding Aids page for catalogs listing other Museum Collections.)

* Library New Accessions, Feb. 16-28, 2011 (.pdf file, 19Kb)
* Library New Accessions, Mar. 1-15, 2011 (.pdf file, 14 Kb)

Do you have traveling plans?

Mirrored below is Palma J. You's new post from over at Full Fathom Five, Do you have traveling plans?

We do! Prior to the digital revolution, marine engineering plans often needed to travel between builders, owners, consultants and architects. Document tubes were used to protect plans while in transport. I am currently processing a large (94 linear feet) collection donated by Pillsbury & Martignoni, Naval Architects and Marine Engineers of San Francisco who were in business during the first half of the 20th century. Most of the plans inventoried thus far relate to tugs, towboats, sport fishing boats, freighters, barges and passengers vessels. Very interesting, but I also find the storage tube an interesting pre-plastic artifact.

The two varieties of materials used in construction of traveling tubes for this marine engineering firm are aluminum and fiber board. The plans stored inside are circa 1943-1965. More on the plans stored inside the tubes next time!





--Contributor: Palma J. You, Archives Technician

Full Fathom Five

There's a new blog from the Collections Department at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, Full Fathom Five, where I'm a contributing editor. The software that we use does not yet have an rss feed, so for the time being, I'll be mirroring posts over here. Do please check it out--we'd appreciate your input.

The debut post:

Welcome to Full Fathom Five

When Shakespeare has Ariel sing this song in Act 1, scene ii of The Tempest, he sings of transformation--of the ordinary becoming something beautiful at the end of its life:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rare and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-Dong.
Hark! now I hear them -- Ding-dong, bell.

Here in the Collections Department at San Francisco Maritime, what we collect, preserve and make available were often ordinary objects at the ends of their useful lives--sometimes, literally, from "full fathom five," in the case of objects retrieved from shipwrecks. Through our care, we give them new life as museum collections, and we help them to emerge into exhibits and into the arena of research, study, and enjoyment.

Join us in our journey, deep in the collections, through the rich and strange.

UK ship models conservation course & conservation assistant position

The latest issue of the Conservation Distlist had news of interest to the maritime conservation community; an interesting course:

International Academic Projects is pleased to announce a 3 day
course 'Ship Models: Care, Conservation and Display' which will be
held at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich and the Historic
Dockyard, Chatham, 11-13 October 2011. This is a new addition to the
2011 course calendar of International Academic Projects.

The course, aimed at collections managers, curators and
conservators, will be conducted by the curatorial and conservation
specialists of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich and will
cover: the history of the making of ship models; the materials from
which models are made and issues concerning their handling and
movement; display methods; storage and display conditions; making
the materials required for restoration; and the use of plans,
paintings and photographs in the conservation process.

Course details and the proposed timetable are available at

http://www.academicprojects.co.uk/course-details.php?courseID=765

Places are also still available on several other courses offered by
International Academic Projects - including:

Conservation of Glass Objects
(London) 12 - 16 September, 2011

Making Replicas of Museum Objects
(Denmark) 6 - 10 June, 2011

Making Electroform Replicas of Museum Objects
(Denmark) 20 - 24 June, 2011

Digital Photography of Museum Objects
(London) 21 - 22 June, 2011

The Identification of Paper
(London) 4-5 July, 2011

Chemistry for Conservators correspondence course
(September - December 2011)

Please check http://www.academicprojects.co.uk for full
information or get in touch by email or telephone if you have any
questions.

Hannah Turk
Administrative Assistant
International Academic Projects
6 Fitzroy Square, London W1T 5HJ
+44 207 380 0800
Fax: +44 207 380 0500

And an interesting position announcement:

Preventive Conservation Assistant
National Maritime Museum
London

UKP18,000 - UKP22,000

With three historic sites housing a range of world-renowned
collections, the National Maritime Museum is a unique and
stimulating environment. With the opening of the brand new Sammy
Ofer Wing this summer, we are looking for an individual to join our
Preventive Conservation team to provide key support in the
preservation and care of our collections across all sites.

Your role will be to carry out cleaning and other housekeeping
duties in addition to assisting in the implementation of the Pest
Management Plan and Environmental Monitoring Strategy. We will also
need you to write method statements and reports, work with team
members on larger projects and suggest improvements to working
practices.

A good understanding of conservation, security and Health and Safety
relating to collections care is essential, along with the ability to
select appropriate cleaning options. A high level of manual
dexterity, experience of working with a range of hand tools and the
ability to work at heights are also important, plus strong
documentation and IT skills. A relevant qualification and experience
within a heritage environment would both be preferred.

For a full job description and details of how to apply, please visit

http://www.nmm.ac.uk/jobs

Closing date: 20 March 2011.

Birthe Christensen
Head of Conservation and Preservation
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich
London SE10 9NF
+44 20 8312 6504

Happy birthday Kurt Weill

Kurt Weill was born 111 years ago today in Dessau, Germany. He composed the music for Seeräuber Jenny, known in English as "Pirate Jenny," one of the very famous songs from Die Dreigroschenoper (The Three Penny Opera) with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht.