Vol. 63, No. 3 autumn 2018


190 of the word being abbreviated and yyy is some frequently variable part of the trailing characters


of the word the scribe chose to preserve in the abbreviation. T e yyy letters are oſt en written as superscript characters, sometimes with a period or colon character underneath them to indicate their superscript status. With an annoying frequency, they may be little more than squiggles, and you must rely on the xxx characters, context, and your experience to fi gure out what was meant. For example, in my survey of ten captains’ logs from one ship during the Seven Years War, the word “Majesty’s,” as in “His Majesty’s Ship,” appeared 915 times in 16 diff erent forms. (T e 16 forms, ignoring variable capitalization of the initial letter, are Majesty’s, Majestys Majestys, Majests Majs


, Maj’s, Majys


, Majest, Majest., Majestys , Majts


, Majesys , Majests


, Majesties, , Majtys


, and Majties , .)


In this case, the abbreviations’ meanings are clear, but now and then, they can be positively inscrutable.


(T e HMS abbreviation for “His Majesty’s Ship” did not come into common use until the 1790s, with the fi rst use being recorded for HMS Phoenix in 1789. Before that, the entire phrase was used every time. https://www.nmrn-portsmouth.org.uk/sailing- navy-gallery-frequently-asked-questions.)


T e intent of capitalization is hard to discern. It is inconsistently used and may be little more than an artifact of individual habits of cursive penmanship by various clerks. Initial capital letters, especially on nouns, are suffi ciently frequent that document texts bear a superfi cial resemblance to German language texts where nouns are regularly capitalized. Combined with the paucity of punctuation to delimit thoughts in a manner familiar to modern readers, the absence of initial capital letters on the fi rst word of a thought (that is, a sentence) contributes to a “run- on” quality of texts that would leave your high school English teacher aghast. With practice, you will be able to fi nd the boundaries between thoughts in spite of the absence of the clues off ered by our modern standardized capitalization and punctuation habits.


T e fi nal challenges to reading eighteenth-century documents are archaic character forms then still in


use. T ese include that odd-looking “s” thing that seems a bit like a lowercase “f” and the “yx


” forms


of articles and pronouns beginning with our modern “th” sound. T e long or medial “s” character, written like a lowercase “f” at the beginning and in the middle of words where we would use an “s”, was starting to go out of fashion during the mid-eighteenth century and more or less disappeared from new typefaces by about 1800. If your mind is organized like mine, these pesky characters cause your twenty-fi rst- century word scanner to experience abrupt stops; they simply look wrong to modern eyes. But it seems unlikely that eighteenth-century eyes would have been so disrupted. Some clerks used the long “s” regularly and others almost never. As with so many other things in contemporary documents, the long “s” can be both present and absent in the same line of text.


T ree yx documents I have read: ye


forms appear in the contemporary , yt


and ym , yt and ym . T e “y” is a


cursive form of the Middle English “thorn” character that was pronounced as the “th” sound with which modern speakers are familiar. So, ye


should


be read as “the,” “that” and “them.” Again, use of these forms is inconsistent. You regularly can fi nd “ye


” and “the” in the same line.


Secondary and modern sources Ship’s logs, especially the captain’s and master’s logs, will tell you where a ship was located and summarize weather information, many


operational and


maintenance details, provisioning activity, unusual events such as crew deaths and punishments, other Royal Navy ships encountered and their chases, activities of nearby admirals and commodores, and battle engagement details. However, logs will not tell you why the ship was engaged in these activities, where it was headed next, or other tactical and order- based information. For example, logs might describe specifi c activities related to a battle, but will rarely note that “today we had the Battle of Such-and-So.” For context information of this sort, you must rely on secondary sources to fi ll in the whys and wherefores of events noted in logs.


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