Hydraulic Dredging

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five (it lacks an rss feed & commenting):

(by Mariah Robertson, Archivist)
Patent no. 318,859 was designed by Alphonzo B. Bowers and patented in 1885 via the United States Patent Office. Bowers was originally from Maine and moved to the San Francisco area in 1853 and began to design machinery engineered to advance the development of the Bay Area just after the Gold Rush. Nearly 85 years after his passing, the Alphonzo B. Bowers Papers were donated to the Historic Documents Department and have been processed and are open for researcher use.

A very interesting aspect of this collection is it seems to be an accepted fact that Von Schmidt was the inventor of the hydraulic dredge. But according to the court documents contained in the collection, in 1888, Bowers sued Colonel A.W. Von Schmidt for infringement and won. This suit was the basis for many future lawsuits regarding infringement of his patents. Some of the companies sued were Williams & Bixler, the Golden State and Miners' Iron Works, the San Francisco Bridge Company, the Pacific Coast Dredging and Reclamation Company (San Francisco), L.W. Bates of Chicago, and the New York Dredging Company. An 1897 appeal case ruling declared Bowers to be the inventor of the hydraulic system of dredging. He spent the rest of his life in litigation regarding infringement lawsuits in the United States, Cuba, and other countries.

What time is it?

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five (it lacks rss feeds & commenting):

Aboard a ship, time is told by the striking of the ship's bell. Charts at the Antique Horology website, and the Wikipedia article, illustrate how many bells at what time. In the library we have extensive collections of ephemeral items, and this handy chart is part of our file of printed ephemera dealing with bells--it illustrates the system graphically:


What time is it where you are? How many bells?

What d'ya mean by "Donkey's Breakfast?"

A "donkey's breakfast" is "a sailor's nickname for a straw mattress, issued in some forecastles in the early 19th century."

(Source: Rogers, John G. Origins of sea terms.)

And, what's a "forecastle?" "A forward living compartment for the crew."

(Source: Kerchove, Rene de. International maritime dictionary.)

(Contributors: Palma J. You, Archives Technician & Heather Hernandez, Technical Services Librarian)

--Mirrored from Full Fathom Five due to its lack of rss feed & commenting.

Digging for Gold at the Library: Shipshape

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

(by Gina Bardi, Reference Librarian)

In my last post, we discussed what to pack on an ocean voyage. So now that you are sure to look your best, we’ll move on to what to do when you’re under way (besides standing there looking fabulous).

The book Shipshape or Sea-legs Without Tears by Edmund Vale will be our guide. Written in 1931, Shipshape has excellent advice for the novice traveler. There’s scads of technical information--entire chapters devoted to the Engine Room and the Bridge, for instance. But let’s be honest. What we care about is the nitty-gritty on the social scene. That’s where Shipshape shines. For example, the third most important thing to do as soon as you board (after finding your room and noting the time of breakfast) is to "fix the time of your bath" (177). Would you have had the forethought to do that on your own? No, of course not. The rest of your voyage would be spent sneaking in baths willy-nilly, haphazardly washing yourself in an unscheduled manner. It’s simply not decent.


Caption: Unfixed bath times result in chaos and anarchy.

Shipshape also gives the low down on the officers. "The captain is generally polite but a silent man" and "If you want liveliness, it will be bad luck, should you sit at the doctor’s table and not get it" (178) and "Your modern Steward is human, almost humane" (184).


Caption: This guy would beg to differ with that statement.

But the most intriguing part of Shipshape is the chapter dealing with deck games. In my last post, we discussed what to wear while playing quoits. Now, we finally learn what quoits is. Or at least you would have learned, but I’ve decided to cut the quoits description to focus instead on Bumble Puppy.


Caption: BUMBLE PUPPIES!

The name of the game is actually more thrilling than the game itself, which is basically tetherball on a ship. But if you are on a ship and are anxious to make friends, I recommend suggesting a friendly game of Bumble Puppy. Who could refuse such an offer?


Caption: Play Bumble Puppy with me! (photo credit Nixx Photography)

Ships on the Shore

For those of you reading the blog via your feeds, I wanted to call your attention to an addition to our blog roll, Ships on the Shore, a very interesting blog where Jamin Wells writes about shipwrecks--news, research, and the thoughts of one who studies them.

Thanks to Jamin for alerting me to Ships on the Shore!

Wind on Different Sides

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

Here's another instructive rhyme from Nautical Nursery Rhymes by Billy Ringbolt, which resides in the Park's Peterson, Peter H. (Capt.) Papers (SAFR 18665, HDC 571):

Wind on Different Sides

With wind on starboard you hold right of way,
But with it to port you must not delay
To do what is best in order to steer
Quite clear of the other and not interfere.

New in the SF Maritime NHP Library

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

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, May 16-31, 2011 (.pdf file, 32Kb)
  
• Library New Accessions, June 1-15, 2011 (.pdf file, 29 Kb)
  

Hal Roth Papers

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

The Hal Roth Papers, 1938-2009 have been cataloged and are now available to researchers. During the work on the collection, Alison Fudge, Archives Technician, wrote:

The Archives recently acquired the collection of Hal Roth, and I am hard at work helping to process the collection so that it will soon be ready to share with researchers. Roth was a noted seaman and author who sailed around the world with his wife, Margaret, aboard their yacht Whisper, and wrote 13 books and numerous articles regarding their journeys.

Roth's travels took him to many faraway locales, including French Polynesia, the Mediterranean, South America, Japan, and around Cape Horn. In 1971, he was awarded the Blue Water Medal from the Cruising Club of America for his circumnavigation of the Pacific Basin.

He was also an accomplished photographer who studied under Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. In addition to an extensive representation of maritime photography, the collection also includes beautiful images of California landscapes and San Francisco's Chinatown.

There are so many treasures waiting to be discovered!

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