“Paid my Respects to Generall Washington”

By Saturday, 24 March, the merchant John Rowe was so used to dining at home that in his diary he started off describing dinner there before remembering he’d dined with a friend and relative, shown here courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum:

I din’d at home with at Mr. [Ralph] Inman’s with him Mrs. [Elizabeth] Inman Genl. [Nathanael] Green Mrs. [Catherine] Green Tuthill Hubbard Mrs. [Dorothy] Forbes, Mr. [John?] Lowell Mrs. Rowe Capt. Gilbt. Speakman & Doctr. [blank] & Spent the Evening at home with Mrs. Rowe Capt. Speakman & Jack Rowe

Some Fire below Nantasket Road—I take it to be a Transport set on Fire to destroy her

Tuthill Hubbard was another Boston merchant, not very active politically. He would become the town’s postmaster.

If another of Inman’s guests was John Lowell (the surname isn’t clear in the manuscript), Rowe might have spoken to him about recovering the value of the goods the British military confiscated on their departure. Later in the year, Lowell would represent Rowe and other merchants in that effort.

The next day was a Sunday:

afternoon I went to Church Mr. [Samuel] Parker Read prayers & preached from the 22d. Chapter of St. Mathew . . . This was a very Good Sermon & considering the distressing Time A Good many People At Church. . . .

A Transport was burnt Last night in the Lighthouse Channell

The British evacuation fleet was still hovering in the outer harbor as 25 March dawned, and Rowe tracked its movement on Monday:

The Fleet still in Nantasket Road—

A Great many of the Ships in Nantasket Sailed this Afternoon

278 Dollars continintall

There’s no indication what that last line referred to, but Rowe was getting used to a new currency.

On Tuesday, 26 March, John Rowe completed the task of cozying up to the new power structure to protect his commercial interests:

Snowd a Little to Night— . . .

I waited on Genl. Greene this morning with Mr. Baker abo. Some Iron on my Wharff.

I din’d at home with Capt. Timothy Folger The Revd. Mr. [Samuel] Parker Mr. [Jonathan] Warner Mr. Richd. Greene Mrs. Rowe & Jack Rowe—

after dinner I went with Mr. Parker & paid my Respects to Generall [George] Washington who Receivd us Very Politely.

I’ll leave Rowe there for the nonce, having successfully trimmed his sails in March 1776.

From Experimental Seamanship to the Naval Art

Fans of the Age of Sail might enjoy reading Elin Jones’s article “Stratifying Seamanship: Sailors’ Knowledge and the Mechanical Arts in Eighteenth-century Britain” in the British Journal for the History of Science, accessible here.

As the abstract explains, in the mid- and late 1700s a few British “seamen with decades of experience on the lower deck of merchant and naval vessels” published books about the practical aspects of sailing large ships. Those titles were popular, going through multiple editions.

But after a few more years those authors were supplanted by “land-bound authors and naval officers” from the upper class. That change erased the first group’s emphasis on the collective knowledge and ingenuity of working sailors.

British mariners already viewed “seamanship” and “navigation” as separate areas of knowledge, divided by class. Young Royal Navy officers learned to manage the vessel from veteran sailors, but only officers were expected to know how to figure out where the ship was. For an ordinary seaman to appear on deck with a sextant was not only rare, but possibly mutinous.

It takes a while for the article to get through theories of knowledge to its evidence, but here’s a compelling example:

In 1792, William Nichelson, who had been a seaman on merchant ships before becoming master attendant at Portsmouth throughout the American Revolutionary Wars, published his A Treatise on Practical Navigation and Seamanship. . . .

Nichelson’s work was structured around occurrences and weather events he had encountered under sail and his observations on the best methods to rig, reef, furl, steer and haul, and to improve the ship whilst at sea. . . .

This is most thoroughly demonstrated in Nichelson’s forty-page recounting of the voyage of the East India Company ship Elizabeth from India to England in 1764, aboard which he had acted as master. Whilst sailing 650 leagues off the Cape of Good Hope, the crew of the Elizabeth had encountered a storm which had almost wrecked the ship, and required them to sail for thirty-five days back towards the Cape without a working rudder. Nichelson’s account of this period recounts the inventiveness and ingenuity of an experienced seafaring crew in the face of immediate danger. The ship again was represented as a site of experiment, as the author described in great detail the process by which the crew arrived at the invention of a temporary rudder, made by sawing part of the top mast and lashing it to the outside of the ship, which would form the main part of the new ‘machine’, then sawing an oak plank until it resembled a ‘key’ which could manipulate the mast's direction.

While old salts like Nichelson emphasized gaining knowledge through “experimental” practice, the succeeding set of genteel authors wrote of a “naval art” available to only a few.

This shift from a prizing of collective manual labour to individual mental acumen is further represented in a 1793 publication of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce which details the ‘invention’ by Captain Edward Pakenham of ‘a substitute for a lost rudder’. The invention is remarkably similar to that described by Hutchinson and Nichelson several years earlier, but the account given of its creation is very different. Whilst Nichelson's representation of events emphasized the work of the crew in pooling their experience to arrive at the invention of their new ‘machine’, Pakenham's account describes him as a ‘highly-esteemed inventor’ and includes a plan of ‘my machine’, which he seems miraculously to have devised and wrought single-handedly.

The plan for a temporary rudder is almost identical to that designed by Nichelson's crew, but it would come to be known as ‘Pakenham's Rudder’, described as ‘genius working for the benefit of humanity’, and accordingly awarded a gold medal by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

There are no American examples in the article, but it put me in mind of how Capt. Timothy Folger of Nantucket told his cousin, Benjamin Franklin, about the Gulf Stream. Franklin sent his first report on this ocean current to London in 1768. British authorities mostly ignored it. Franklin ended up republishing his map in later decades in France and the U.S. of A.

The Shifting Gulf Stream

American ships’ captains in the Atlantic appear to have caught on early to the steady northeast current along North America’s eastern coast and across to northern Europe. However, no one apparently mapped that whole current until the late 1760s, when Benjamin Franklin and his cousin, Nantucket captain Timothy Folger (shown here, courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association), created and privately published the first chart of the Gulf Stream.

That map can be explored at the Library of Congress website. Franklin wanted to speed up mail delivery across the Atlantic by showing British captains how to avoid the current when sailing west. Apparently most captains ignored him.

Coming home to America in 1775 in bureaucratic disgrace after leaking Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s letters, Franklin apparently took his supply of printed maps with him; none survived in Britain. For two centuries that printing was thought to be entirely lost, but then a couple of examples turned up in French archives. Either French captains saw more potential in them, or Franklin brought a few copies when he arrived in France as an American diplomat.

While in Paris, Franklin allowed another map to be engraved. Yesterday I described how the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library discovered Franklin’s own copy in its collection. That map’s labels are in French, and they suggest the Gulf Stream points to France, not Britain—emphasizing natural ties between the new allies?

On returning to the U.S. of A., Franklin commissioned yet another engraving of the Gulf Stream chart, this time published in Philadelphia by his American Philosophical Society in 1786. Here’s the Library of Congress’s image. This map’s inset shows all of western Europe equally, but this time the main map offers a lot more detail about the enticing Northwest Territory.

Thus, though the Gulf Stream doesn’t change much from one of Franklin’s maps to another, the lands shown around it change significantly.