In his 1574 A Regiment for Sea, William Bourne describes how, with a line tied to it, a log was thrown over the side of the ship, and the length of line was measured “while someone turned a minute sand glass” or in some cases “spoke some number of woordes ” in order to measure the ship’s speed. The origin of the logbook, and of its basis as a tool of navigation, mediating sailors’ knowledge of their movement through space, lies in that most material of artifacts, a wooden log. įor these artifacts and their own movement and mediation offer suggestive occasions for sympathy-in the repetitive meteorological phrases that travel from the journals and logs into other forms of writing, in odd moments of personalization, and, in the journals of the well-known sailor-poet William Falconer and the less known Richard Blechynden, in original poems or quotations of sentiment.
I mean this language of mediating distances between sailors and those distant from them to echo, slightly, the language of moral sense and sympathy (recall Adam Smith’s claim-that we are affected by another’s agonies when they are “brought home to ourselves”). Yet second, of course, they became the record that mediated the relationship between those aboard ships and those on land, a means for those on shore to apprehend the situation and sometimes selves of their far-flung compatriots, a way of bringing sailors and their distant experiences at sea home, as it were. First and foremost, they oriented sailors to their location, functioning as a medium for tracking a ship’s movement through oceanic space. These logs and journals mediated, we might say, two distinct sets of relationships. The material cultures of seafaring I discuss in this brief paper are those artifacts of onboard ship writing, the log books and journals that eighteenth-century mariners kept.
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