In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seaports around the world were responsible for enforcing laws governing trade, travel, health, peace, and war. The result was that ships carried clearances, bills of health, manifests, permits, licenses, and receipts for payments of duties. Although these documents were created for strictly bureaucratic reasons, over time they have taken on layers of historical meaning.
For example, when in 1800 the Baltimore-based ship Eagle left Sainte-Domingue (today the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic) the printed clearance its captain received shows how the influence of the French Revolution stretched even to routine documents issued in France’s Caribbean colonies. The Eagle’s clearance is headed Liberté, Egalité, and is dated according to the French revolutionary calendar: “le 17 Pluviose l’an huit de la République Française, une & indivisible” (17 Pluviose, year eight of the French Republic, one and indivisible). The port from which the Eagle sailed, Port-Républicain, was previously Port au Prince. It became Port au Prince again with the creation of the independent nation of Haiti in 1804.
The clearance of another Baltimore ship, Adventure, tells a similar story. When it passed through the port of New York on August 15, 1783, seaport officials issued the clearance on a printed form headed with the name of Sir Guy Carleton, the British commander-in-chief of North America. The American Revolution was then ongoing and British forces occupied New York. When they evacuated the city in November 1783, New York’s printers undoubtedly benefited from the work required to print new port documents, just as their counterparts would later in Port au Prince/Port-Républicain.
The clearances issued to the Adventure and the Eagle are among the 138 files of ships’ papers, each containing from one to several documents, that the Library of Congress bought in two installments from a rare book dealer named C. S. Hook in 1903. Hook was and remains an indistinct character. An advertisement he placed in the May 20, 1917, issue of the New York Times reads: “Old Law Books Wanted. Spot cash paid for Acts, Laws, etc. of all states. Correspondence solicited.” The address he provided was a post office box in Staunton, Virginia. In his dealings with the Library of Congress between 1903 and the 1920s, the always acronymic Hook’s addresses included the Staunton post office box and others in Atlantic City, Charlottesville, Cincinnati, New York, Richmond, and Savannah.
The first batch of ships’ papers Hook sold the Library of Congress consisted of eleven documents (accession #463, October 16, 1903) and was jumbled together with a miscellaneous group of nineteenth-century manuscript letters and printed documents on a range of unrelated maritime and non-maritime subjects. Hook included letters by a few prominent figures, including Henry Ward Beecher, Peter Cooper, and Toussaint L’Ouverture. He charged the Library $21 for everything, making it hard to know how he valued the ships’ papers specifically. Their monetary value became clearer on December 1, 1903 (accession #491) when Hook sold the Library another lot consisting of 127 ship documents for $33.
To make the ships’ papers accessible to researchers, the Manuscript Division initially added them to a category called “Marine Miscellany.” By 1918 Marine Miscellany consisted of eight volumes and two large portfolios of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ships’ papers and logbooks. Marine Miscellany was one of several “Miscellany” collections that were later broken up and added to the Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection (MMC). (Marine Miscellany persists as just a small collection in the MMC, as do remnants of a few others, including Connecticut Miscellany, Irish Miscellany, and Poetry Miscellany.) Hook’s ships’ papers were each cataloged by the ship’s name and filed alphabetically in the MMC, which is how they remain today. Now a new project to digitize the MMC will make these papers, along with the rest of the rich cacophony of voices in the MMC, available online for the first time. (This is an ongoing digitization project, which is moving through the collection alphabetically, which is why all the digital images you see in this post are of ships whose names begin with A.)
Much was gained when the ships’ papers were cataloged individually and researchers could search the Library’s online catalog by ships’ names. But when the ships’ papers were alphabetically interspersed with the other small collections in the MMC, something was lost – their connection to Hook and his mysterious source.
What was that source? On closer look it becomes clear that the ships’ papers that Hook sold to the Library in 1903 have enough in common to make them seem more like a coherent collection than a random group. They probably have a connection to some common source. Most of the ships represented by papers in the Hook purchases date from the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth, stopping with the embargoes that halted trade just before the War of 1812. While some of these ships sailed to ports in the United States, Europe, South America, and as far away as Indonesia and the Canary Islands, most went to the colonial Caribbean. Perhaps most important: almost all these ships originated in the port of Baltimore. This points to the possibility that sometime around the turn of the twentieth century the customs house in Baltimore, or maybe a Baltimore shipping company, sold off, or perhaps discarded, this group of by then century-old ships’ papers.
In 2013 I used a digital platform developed at the Library of Congress called Viewshare to map a sample of ships’ papers in the MMC, including Hook’s 1903 accessions, #463 and #491, plus several others. The digital map I made with Viewshare made it possible to visualize Hook’s ships traveling back and forth between Baltimore and ports in such Caribbean colonies as Antiqua, Cuba, Guadeloupe, and Martinique, to name just a few. The ships chiefly carried coffee, cocoa, and sugar, crops produced mainly by the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Other cargoes included salt, rum, wine, and campeche wood, or logwood, which was used to make dye. The ship captains are named, as are the English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and Swedish colonial customs officers, health inspectors, and other port officials who signed these documents. Crew members typically were not named, but in some cases they are, as with the Adventure’s clearance, where a list of “Mens Names” appears in the left margin.
Individually, each of the ships’ documents is an eloquent record of the history of the colonial Caribbean, the trade in the products of enslaved labor, the careers of sea captains, sailors, and colonial port officials, the management of infectious disease in the era before scientific medicine, and the way that waves of political change affected the operations of everyday life. Taken as a group, they tell a story about the port of Baltimore in an era of revolutions and war. They are just one example of the riches to be found in the Manuscript Division’s Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection.
For more on the ships’ papers and Viewshare see:
Camille Salas, “Exploring Cultural Heritage Collections with Viewshare,” Library of Congress, June 11, 2013.
Camille Salas, “Bringing Hidden Collections to Light with Viewshare: An Interview with Julie Miller, Historian at the Library of Congress,” The Signal: Digital Happenings at the Library of Congress blog, July 31, 2013.
Julie Miller, “Ravens, Lemons, and Peste: 19th-Century Maritime Health Certificates in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress,” 4 Corners of the World: International Collections at the Library of Congress blog, April 7, 2021.
“In his dealings…” The Manuscript Division’s accession files provide information about Hook’s sales over many years.
“eight volumes…” Handbook of Manuscripts in the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1918), 245-246.
“made with Viewshare…” The Library discontinued Viewshare in 2018.