Marking 11/15/17

This evening starting around 10pm, I spent an hour and a half reading and marking important information in an old private log book, from the Pacific Steam Whaling Co. This was a steam and sail powered whaling ship in the 1900 whaling season out on its 14th voyage.
Each page had a series of questions that would popup with inquiries needing to be answered with either a yes or no for better analysis of the entries. The questions were: Are there any unmarked date entries present? Is there location or position information present that has not been marked? Is there any unmarked mentions of sea ice? Are there any unmarked descriptions of the weather? Select any additional unmarked items that are present/mentioned. It would give the option of event, art, or next question. If there was an unmarked event, it would give you the options of whaling activity, ship interaction, interaction with natives, social, and other. If there was an unmarked item that fell under art, then the options of illustration, poem, clipping, whale/stamp, and other could be selected. These selections would be made and marked for analysis if present. The last question for a certain page is if there is anything else to mark, if so clicking yes and if not clicking no, then lastly selecting the next page to move through the log entries.

Below are a few screen shots of an entry I thought was pretty interesting, where the writer details the daily weather and events that occurred on that day. I have transcribed them as well, found below the screen shots.




Tuesday June 19th
 Light and variable air till 4a.m. 
Then a moderate gale from the W(west) . s.w. (south west)
Cloudy with rain and snow squalls. Bar. 29.80 [Bar. may mean barometer] 
Fast to the ice in the "Bight" 
At 10 p.m. Steam Karluck [Another whaling ship], wounded a whale. Mated with them, both ships lowered boats. Mr. Garvin struck at 10 a.m. but line fasted and lost him at 11:10 a.m. Mr. Zook struck and killed him. I cut him and took half of the head, Steam Karluck the other half. Gave the body and blubber to the Indians. Mr. Sanders was taken quite sick with diarrhea during the night. William Baylus boat also struck the whale.
I thought the writer depicted the weather well, even including a barometer reading for that day. It seemed to be a very interesting day including multiple ship crews and even some interactions with the natives, as well as even later on with poor Mr. Sanders illness. I found it captivating and helped me to better understand the relations as well as the potential challenges of being a whaler. I also thought the sketch of the whale head was a pretty neat find as well in the old log entry.

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