The Merrimac Journal Manuscript
In August 2020, the Frank L. McGuire Library at the Custom House acquired an important addition to its manuscript collection. It is a journal that begins on July 17, 1844, the day that the whaler “Merrimac” and its crew set sail from New London to begin a voyage that would take them half-way around the world, with its last entry dated March 1, 1847. After a gap of several years the manuscript starts again on July 30, 1852 on board the whaler General Williams of New London, in the Arctic Sea, with its final entry dated Thursday, November 7, 1852, in Maui.
The manuscript is untitled and the author is not identified. It is at once a log to record navigational information and the sighting and taking of whales but it also records incidents that happened on board and observations about places where they visited. Although it also covers a period spent on board another whaler, General Williams, our working title for this manuscript is the “Journal of the Merrimac.”
The journal is old and fragile, bound in stained homemade canvas wrappers and now totally disbound, but written in a clear hand on unlined paper that is still in fine condition although frayed around the edges. The pages were once sewn together. There are 156 pages or 78 leaves, of which 2 pages are blank, not including the covers. Most of the journal is written in black ink on cream-colored paper but on page 115 the color of the paper changes to a very light blue. The lining of the inside back cover is a page from the Saturday, May 7, 1842 edition of the Quarto Boston Notion, Or, Roberts' Weekly Journal of American and Foreign Literature, Fine Arts, and General News, which was published from 1841 to 1842. The manuscript measures 13 ¼ inches long by 8 ½ wide and is about half an inch thick..
The Journal of the Merrimac is the gift of Mrs. Edwina Owens Badger of Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts. Mrs. Badger was given the Journal by her grandmother, who lived in Connecticut, and she does not know who the author was or if there was a family connection. This gift to the Maritime Society from Mrs. Badger was facilitated by Bowden Van Riper, researcher at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum, and Skip Finley, author of Whaling Captains of Color, and a former Vineyard Museum board member.
---Laurie M. Deredita, librarian and editor
