Journal of the whaler Globe, homeward from Lahaina to New York, 1850

The whole of a crewman’s journal of the Globe’s passage home from the Sandwich Islands, the last months of her five-year whaling voyage to the North Pacific: every page with writing on it, in order, from the leaf inscribed “Ship Globe.” It opens at Lahaina on 18 Jan 1850, when the crew, with “but 8 men before the mast,” asked to see the consul before they would loose the topsails, and “the Cooper, Antonio, and R. Holbrooks” were tied up in the rigging “for giving the same answer” (page 2). On 6 Feb “the ship is so deep and her bottom so bad that we get along very slow,” and “Mr Johnson and Holbrooks were standing by the pumps talking when the old man came along” (page 13). It follows the ship by Rarotonga, round Cape Horn in the gales of late April, and up the Atlantic by Trindade, through short rations, sickness and the captain’s tempers, to a pilot boat off New York on 21 August. Upside down at the back is “Account of Clothing and Money Received by John Pierce from Ship Globe,” with money received at Guam, Hong Kong and Maui in 1849 and 1850, and a leaf of sums headed “Samuel’s Calculation leaf.” The writer doesn’t give his name.