Vol. 63, No. 3 autumn 2018


188 document. It is your offi cial record of what you ordered. As such, it should be the fi rst photograph


you take for that document. Keep it with your image fi les. T ere is a perhaps apocryphal story about an Australian researcher who had to return to London to photograph a forgotten yellow slip so that his fi ndings could be properly attributed—an expensive oversight!


After the archives


Back at your hotel, take time to scan the pictures you have taken that day. Photographing large documents can be tedious, and mistakes are easier to make than you might think—pages that stick together, missing pages in the original, two pages turned at once. If you are going back for another day, you can correct these problems on the spot but only if you fi nd them before you go home.


Preserve your original image fi les with their camera- generated fi le names. Copy all of your image originals onto your computer and at least one external fl ash drive. Also, consider assigning your numbering scheme to copies of your original image fi les as soon as possible. Acquiring a free bulk fi le naming program for your computer can make this easier. Pick one that suits your needs. (I got mine at http:// www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk. It works great, but experiment with it in advance before committing changes to your fi les.) Do this aſt er every day at the archives; if you wait, your probability of mistakes will likely increase with time. Before you go home, consider mailing to yourself a fl ash drive with all your images.


In my notes, I learned to keep a list of how camera- generated image fi le IDs map to my numbering scheme to help sort out problems later (don’t ask why I know this!)


Be aware that you may not fi nd everything you desire at the archives. Sometimes, documents are located off site, unavailable for maintenance or cleaning, or just did not survive to make it into the archives. Logs oſt en survived because they were required


to close a ship’s books so everyone could be paid. Letters survived if they were sent to the Admiralty or Navy Board directly, but letters to the local admiral on station oſt en did not. T e station admiral might abstract reports from his subordinate captains into his own reports back to the Admiralty. Sometimes, important letters were preserved in contemporary secondary sources such as Charnock(1796) biographies. It is amazing that you can fi nd anything at all approaching three hundred years aſt er the actual events.


Tips on reading eighteenth-century documents


Contemporary eighteenth-century documents were handwritten with a goose quill pen on rag or other contemporary paper. T e documents you see will either be originals or perhaps handwritten copies of originals (it is very hard to tell which, and likely does not matter much; Figure 5 shows a typical captain’s log page). Important shipboard documents, such as captain’s logs, oſt en were written by professional clerks and rarely by captains themselves. Clerks were trained to have similar, clearly legible cursive handwriting to provide a common look and readability to documents. With some practice you may be able to spot when a new clerk starts writing log entries, but you will have to look closely.


One of the most remarkable things about ships logs is the commonality of phrasing and terminology across clerks, logs, and ships. For example, every log talks about the weather using the same small number of phrases and the same limited list of terms. Clearly, these people were well-trained for their jobs.


Fortunately, eighteenth-century English is very readable by a twenty-fi rst-century audience, and with practice, you will be able to read contemporary documents at speed. T e occasional eighteenth- century vocabulary word or phrase may cause a stumble as you read, but you will become familiar with them without much eff ort. Available contemporary marine dictionaries (like Falconer 1815) and modern search engines (like Google) will be very helpful in


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