Nuclear Nathanael Greene

In another serendipitous moment, while looking for a sheet of much earlier 5-cent stamps, I found this:

The USS Nathanael Greene was nuclear-powered James Madison class submarine, launched May 12, 1964 and commissioned on December 19, 1964. So 48 years ago tomorrow, this envelope was mailed to the RIHS to commemorate Rhode Island’s most important Revolutionary War general. The USS Nathanael Greene carried Polaris missiles, hence the iconography on either side of the Greene family crest. The Latin motto, nec timeo nec sperano, translates as “I neither fear nor despise.” Perhaps true of General Greene, but a statement somewhat less believable of Cold War America.

With its curious combination of elks and missiles, 18^th and 20^th centuries, the envelope is but two years younger than the Brigade of the American Revolution, the oldest umbrella organization of Revolutionary War reenactors.  The centuries and wars converge on this envelope, a commemoration of the past and a celebration of the bold future of nuclear weaponry (this was also the time of the space race).

The envelope looks almost kitschy now, missiles and elks, something more suited for a hipster t-shirt than a solemn event. How we honor history says as much about us as it does about the past.

~Kirsten Hammerstrom, Director of Collections

Wild goose-foot paddle boat chase

A recent reference inquiry led to a partially successful search for information on a twelve ton boat fitted out by carpenter Elijah Ormsbee of Providence with a steam engine constructed by David Wilkinson of Pawtucket in 1792. According to volume two of State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, edited by Edward Field, Ormsbee and Wilkinson “…navigated their steamboat between Providence and Pawtucket and exhibited her capacity to their admiring fellow citizens ‘between the bridges’ on the Seekonk River. Instead of a side wheel the boat was propelled by a ‘goose-foot paddle’. The boat was named the Experiment, and the inventors had such faith in its success that they had tickets engraved and printed for passages on her.”

A ticket for travel on the Experiment appears with the caption “The above is a fac simile of the tickets that were issued by Elijah Ormsbee and David Wilkinson for contemplated trips on the ‘steamboat’ in 1792.”

The identical ticket  appears online on sheaf: ephemera and is said to have been for travel on a later vessel by the same name, built in 1808 by Varnum Wilkinson for inventor Robert Grieve. This boat was “driven by a propeller, with power supplied by [eight] horses on a treadmill” to put the machinery in motion. (Where exactly were those eight horses?)

The online article goes on to describe the sad fate of the latter Experiment, when on a return trip from Pawtuxet  “a gust of wind drove the boat upon the mud flats . . . where she lay all night.”

For a more detailed account of the early Experiment, see “Elijah Ormsbee”, by Edwin A. Platt, a paper read before the New England Chapter, Steamship Historical Society of America, at Providence, R.I., May 12, 1946 (RI Biog Or-5, Historical Monograph No. 1).

LT 12/19/2011

The Best Pie They Ever Tasted (Martin Page, part II)

In his cypher book, Martin Page let his artistic skills shine, but when the time came to put his life into words, Page resorted to idiosyncratic text in an idiosyncratic format.

Long before Jack Kerouac taped sheets of paper together and fed them into his typewriter to create the On the Road scroll, Martin Page decided that individual pages were too limiting for what he had to say, so he glued about a dozen sheets of individual paper into two scrolls, one measuring nearly six feet in length and the other just over four*.

The text of the scrolls is written in a spidery hand, possible indicating the shakiness of advancing age. Since no description would really do the text justice, here are a few selections:

Jokes, like this one, are common—

A young man stepped into a bookstore and said he wanted to get a young man’s companion. Well, Sir, said the book seller, here is my daughter.

Or observations on issues taken from his life (spelling and punctuation left unchanged)**—

One of my acquainces died Childleless and left his Wife by will as long as she remained his widow avaluable house and all his Personal Property, that she might live independent she made agreat take soon got married, the nexday his Brothers cam in and tooke all of her property and left her poor, her husband that maried for the property found it all gone he left her, would it not be best to give the Wife whare thare is no children such a part on of his Property free and clear of any incubrance, whare tharer is children it belongs to them after Her derth, a man has right to Prevent his widow from marying after he is didd
They come to us, we must soon go there.

Or the occasional gnomic passage that completely defies description—

What bones governs the world the cutridge bon the bull Ballet Bon and Bun et Bon, Interest is the King who Rules the world.

And for anyone planning a menu based on historic recipes, Page’s codfish and potatoes recipe sounds pretty good (you might consider pairing it with Benjamin Franklin’s milk punch)—

With the Cook I went to work pounding up dunfish Codfish and new Potatoes in the moster with a Little flour Plenty of fresh Butter a little mustard Oil Clover mau and Pepper as thisck and fine as Indian Bread dow, put in the Pan and baked a little when put on the table asked what it was I told them Fish and Potatoes, a baked Pie, they made the mount of Their dinner of 8 it was Excellent the best Pie They Ever tasted

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* “Reminiscences,” in the Martin Page Papers, MSS 599, Box 1, Folder 14, Rhode Island Historical Society. Transcription folder 14a. www.rihs.org/mssinv/Mss599.htm

** Transcription by Harriet Sprague Doolittle Rosch, one of Page’s descendants.

Grog O’ Clock (Martin Page, part I)

Faced with a diary or a memoir or a collection of someone’s correspondence, it’s a natural impulse to try to recreate an image of what that person might have been like. In some cases—and Martin Page is one of those cases—the picture that emerges is surprisingly colorful and complex.

Born in 1772, Page spent nearly half a century at sea, rising from cabin boy to captain. So it’s not surprising that his “cyphering book”* would include maps and charts like this one:

This particular map likely depicts the islands off the coast of Gotheburg, Sweden, an area also featured in other manuscript maps in the collection,** and it features details like a very nice ship:

and Monopoly-style houses at the base of what looks like a cell-phone tower:

A lesson on right triangles offers another opportunity for Page’s artistic skills to shine. The assignment involves finding the height of a steeple:

Strictly speaking, of course, most of the illustration is unnecessary; all that Page really needed was a vertical line to represent a steeple. But that’s not nearly as much fun as sketching out an entire steeple and it’s bell, tower and flag, and once it’s gone that far, he might as well put the rest of the building in too. The level of detail extends even to the clock and its inscription:

Before there was “Beer O’Clock“, there was Grog Time.

(In the next post we’ll leave Page’s artistic abilities to focus on his literary merit…)

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* “Cyphering book” of Martin Page, 1805-15, in the Martin Page Papers, MSS 599, Box 1, Folder 15, Rhode Island Historical Society. www.rihs.org/mssinv/Mss599.htm

A ciphering book operated as a notebook in which to work out problems and also save formulas and examples for the future, as suggested in Samuel Read Hall’s Lectures on School-Keeping, published not long after this cipher book was used.

** In many of the maps (located in folder 13), Page has pasted in printed illustrations of ships, presumably cut from books.

“This Sanguinary Monster”*: The Pirate Gibbs, pt. 2

The recent high-profile acts of piracy in Somalia have highlighted the divide between the reality of piracy and our romanticized notions of it. But the desire to glamorize the swashbuckling while ignoring the blood and guts is nothing new**. A New York Times article of 1892 cataloging various famous pirates begins, “It cannot but be a source of regret to every true lover of the picturesque that pirates are no more and piracy has lost its popularity. What tremendous fellows they must have been!” The article includes a paragraph on Charles Gibbs, who is described as having a “soft spot for the fair sex” and being “remarkable for quoting the Bible with great frequency and fluency.” Describing Gibbs’ conversion from grocer to pirate, the author asks “who wouldn’t rather be a gallant pirate with a smart vessel and a picked crew than a grocer in Ann Street, near the Tin Pot?”

The previous post offered an overview of Gibbs’ career as offered in a single one of many published accounts of his life and death, Mutiny and Murder: Confession of Charles Gibbs. This post will highlight a few of the other versions of this popular tale that were offered to the public.***

In The Annals of Murder Thomas McDade lists 13 individual editions prior to 1900 offering an account of Gibbs’ life (Although one particular item makes the count a little difficult.). All those that are dated were published in 1831 or 1832. The Historical Society holds seven of those listed as well as two that are not recorded in Annals of Murder. The latter two imprints**** are apparently unique to the Historical Society; no other copies are listed either in OCLC or a number of international library catalogs.

While not unique, one item—Confessions and Execution of the Pirates, Gibbs & Wansley—is by far the most graphically and bibliographically unusual. This is how McDade describes the book’s physical construction*****:

1 p.l., [2]-32 [i.e. 8] p.; 16, 32 [i.e. 8] p.: total 32p.

“I.e.” usually indicates something out of the ordinary, and this publication offers plenty of that. The item appears to be a sammelband made up of three separate publications, as indicated in the collational formula above, but even that is uncertain.

The first eight pages offer a blow-by-blow account of the execution itself, with a strong emphasis on the penitent attitude of the pirates as they faced their death. Thomas Wansley, Gibbs companion and clearly described and depicted as a black pirate in this publication, had apparently been writing poetry in his cell:

On the verso of the poem is the following illustration, just in case we’ve begun to sympathize with the penitent and poetic buccaneers:

These eight pages function as a self-contained, coherent unit, and this is echoed in their physical makeup: they are a single four-leaf gathering.

The next gathering begins with the image used at the beginning of this post, a title page with vertical text and a full-length portrait of Gibbs. As you can see from the image, this copy was published after the execution, as it describes Gibbs as the pirate “who was executed on the 22nd of April”. Another variant state of the work also in the Library’s holdings is composed of a nearly identical text (the first and last words of each page match) and a slightly, but significantly, different title page. Rather than “Who was executed,” this title page reads “To be Executed.” The only other significant difference is that the publisher’s name is misspelled as “Christitn Brown” rather than “Christian Brown,” possibly providing evidence that the pre-execution version was offered with a hastily put-together title page. In either case, the two variants bracket the moment of execution in a concrete way (Gibbs is alive for the first and not for the second.).

The third and final gathering is a work titled “A Visit to the Condemned Criminals, Gibbs and Wansley, By a Layman.” (It’s unclear whether “layman” in this context indicates that the author is not a professional pirate or not a professional jail-visitor.). Like the first gathering, it is of 4 leaves, and like the first gathering it includes poetry and an image on a page incorrectly numbered “32″:******

And on the preceding page, this illustration of the ultimate end for pirates (or, perhaps, vampires):

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* The description of Gibbs used at the beginning of the narration of his execution in Horrible Confessions of the Pirate and Murderer.

** A recent New Yorker article reviews the legitimate economic and political aspects behind a favorable view of piracy: Caleb Crain, “Bootylicious: What Do the Pirates of Yore Tell Us about Their Modern Counterparts?”  The New Yorker, 2 September 2009.

***Call numbers and titles:

• Vault F 2162 .G44 H8: Horrible Confessions of the Pirate and Murderer; Charles Gibbs, alias James Jeffreys. [s.l.]: Printed for the Purchasers, April 1831.
• Vault F 2161 .G44 C74:  Confession of Charles Gibbs the Pirate. To Be Executed the 22d of April, 1831. New York: Printed and Sold by Christitn [Christian] Brown, n.d.
• Vault F 2161 .G44 L34: The Confessions of Charles Gibbs, the Pirate, Who Acknowledges that He Has Assisted in the Murder of Four Hundred Human Beings! [s.l.]: Printed for the Purchasers, 1831.
  bound with:
  Last Dying Words and Confession of Charles Gibbs, The Pirate. [s.l.]: [s.n.], 1831.
• Vault F 2161 .G44 C748: Confessions and Execution of the Pirates, Gibbs & Wansley. New York: Printed and Sold by Christian Brown, [n.d.]. Includes McDade nos. 337, 342 / 345.

**** Horrible Confessions and The Confession of Charles Gibbs, the Pirate, Who Acknowledges . . . are the unique copies. Oddly, both copies’ imprints state, “Printed for the Purchasers,” a curious attribution that seems, based on searches in WorldCat and the ESTC, to have been used solely in the US during a period from 1775-1831.

***** McDade’s response: “This kind of publication taxes the resources of the bibliographer.”

****** For the numerologico-bibliographers out there, yes, this is a 32-page (16 leaf) item with a central gathering of 8 leaves surrounded by two 4 leaf gatherings, pages 8 and 32 both marked “32″, even though the preceding pages are “5″ and “7″.

The Land of Generica

Nathaniel Bowditch’s American Practical Navigator is the classic manual for sailors, offering practical (not surprisingly) advice for all manner of maritime situations. Our Technical Services Librarian recently added a copy to our online catalog, which gave me a reason to look through the volume, and I came across the following image (borrowed from Google Books):

Click to view in Google Books

Designed as an teaching aid for future navigators, this map depicts all the usual parts of the map labeled generically (e.g. the “Ocean” ocean surrounds the island “Island”), creating an imaginary land of the generic (not to be confused with Generica proper). If you’re interested in this type of imaginary cartography, the Strange Maps blog has many more examples