Seeing it through…the eyes of a voyageur
If you read the notes from the painting, Seeing It Through, you will understand
where much of this still life came from.
Set in my library, sadly not on the USS Jamestown, you may recognize that inkwell,
and though I use the pen not the quill I have tried to write with it.
The little oil lamp lives on a library shelf…patiently waiting
and the signal flags are never in the same place when I search for them in the new studio.
The eyeglasses and this journal itself were handed to me by C. Morse himself.
As was typical for the time period
when paper didn’t grow on trees
someone in the last two hundred years used the first half of this old whaling journal for a scrapbook
carefully gluing religious tracts and society news clippings all the heck over entire pages.
But the last few pages were free of this detritus and in the most exquisite script,
which I didn’t even try to render, the captain or probably boatswain recorded the comings and goings
of the last days of a several years’ long whaling adventure of the ship Java out of New Bedford.
Even today the log entries of a commercial fishing vessel differ from that of a naval vessel.
The 1861 log I am editing mostly lists weather, reckoning data, who got thrown into irons
and the occasional details of the odd court martial.
The Java’s log book reads more like a journal
and we learn of the cases of scurvy and birds that follow the ship.
And on at least one page, revealed under the corner of the pasted clippings,
were those drawings of whales. It was common to illustrate the ones they captured,
perhaps by way of some kind of inventory and documentation.
This was the final entry
written as they had Cuttyhunk in sight
which means they were sailing past the Aquinnah lighthouse as he put down the pen
…homeward bound.
