In a chapter headed ‘The Decanter’ in Moby Dick Ishmael the narrator describes an ‘ancient volume’ detailing ‘the larders and cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen’. He is struck by the volume of beer and gin taken on board (an ‘anker’ is roughly 35 litres):
The quantity of beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen, including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea, did not much exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each of their fleet of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all; therefore, I say, we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a twelve weeks’ allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that 550 ankers of gin.
Three centuries later, when Melville’s notional drunken Dutch whalers had been replaced in the fishery by the English, nineteenth century whale ships heading for Greenland would leave their home ports–Whitby, Hull, Liverpool, Peterhead–in March and return in August with the catch. They often called in at Stromness on Orkney, or at the Shetlands, to pick up crew, but they would be at sea for most of the five or six months they were away. The amount of beer they took with them was significant.
In February 1815 whaling captain William Scoresby Jr. was preparing the ship Esk for its voyage from Whitby to the Greenland fishery. His journal* for that year records that besides nine tons of meat, and five of bread the ship took on 11 casks (probably 160 gallons each) of beer ‘from Mr. Stonehouse’ and 10 casks, containing ‘five tons of beer from Clarks’. Stonehouse and Clark later delivered a further four barrels each (36 gallons per barrel) of beer and T. Fishburn Esq provided a cask of fine ale, ‘to be distributed to the crew in the progress of he fishery, if favoured with success’. To supplement this the ship also took on 3300 gallons of fresh water in 11 casks.
Assuming Scoresby’s casks were 160 gallons each it seems the Esk sailed with an allowance of around three and a half pints of beer per man per day; more than enough to ward off scurvy, or so they thought. I’m curious too about what kind of beer this would be. No doubt it was relatively strong by today’s standards, but there is clearly a distinction in quality here between the ‘beer’ taken on board in quantity as a nutritional substitute for water, and the ‘fine ale’ provided as a reward.
There is a clue to the quality of the seamen’s supply in Scoresby’s journal for 1814, in which he details his own bottled supplies. Not for him beer from the common cask:
Wednesday 16th March [1814]. … Received from Gile and Brown stock of spirits for Harbour & Sea use, also 10 Dozn. Bottles of Porter: & from [Pierson?] & Frankland 5 Dozn. Port; 1 1/5 Dozn. Sherry & 1 Dozn. of Vidonia Wine. Completing my Sea & Harbour Stock of Wines, Spirits, & Porter.
In later life Scoresby was concerned about with the amount of alcohol sailors consumed and with the number of shipwrecks that seemed to have been caused by drunkenness among the officers and crew. It would continue to be a problem until fresh water supplies improved.
*The Arctic Whaling Journals of William Scoresby the Younger Vol 2: The Voyages of 1814, 1815, and 1816. Edited by C. Ian Jackson. London: Ashgate, for the Hakluyt Society, 2008.
mybrewerytap.com is a mailorder beer retailer specialising in beer from small and independent breweries. Not long before Christmas my pal the Ormskirk Baron and I decided to sign up to the 52-week Beer Club, which you’ll be amazed to hear consists of 52 bottles of beer sent in four instalments over the course of the year. Since the Baron is an established beer blogger we decided to review the beers together and we’ve just finished the first case. Overall the standard has been very high, which is heartening considering the bashing ale has taken over the last year or two. Our tasting evenings have been a very good way to find out about breweries we would probably never have discovered otherwise. More detailed reviews (with audio) are at the Baron’s blog.
In December 2008 I wrote a short blog post here suggesting that more by accident than anything else Apple had built a device that was a competitor for the Kindle. Back then Steve Jobs was in denial about the popularity of books so it took applications like Stanza to make reading possible on Apple’s handhelds. It worked, and continues to work, very well.
But now the fabled iPad has arrived and it has book reading built in, complete with support for the open ePub format. Of course that pleases those of us who like to read books from Project Gutenberg and Google Books on our iPods, but Apple has done something very strange with the look and feel. Having read books on my iPod Touch for a year and a half now I’ve broken free of the need for pages that look like pages. When I’m reading a book that’s all text, all I need is text. It’s certainly an improvement for books with pictures, but I can’t help thinking Apple’s iBooks look a little cheesy with their flippy-over paper-like pages.
Books though are not the most exciting thing about this device; it offers real possibilities for creating new categories of publication. As this post at Snarkmarket argues:
For all its power and flexibility, the web is really bad at presenting bounded, holistic work in a focused, immersive way. This is why web shows never worked. The web is bad at containers. The web is bad at frames.
What the iPad offers is a frame, and one with well-defined limitations. I’ve been arguing something similar, though less concisely, over at shiftinglandscapeofmagazines. Here is a spur to create new forms of content and perhaps also to persuade people to pay for it. That will please Rupert Murdoch of course, but the real revolution could be for smaller players; it could be a lifeline for struggling literary magazines and a new outlet for authors who want to self-publish and get paid. Writers essentially become app developers.
If the iPad doesn’t do it for you, there are lots of alternatives.
Edited 29/1/10 because Wordpress originally exposed a draft. Probably my fault in some way.
It's not pretty, but it works.
I’ve been on the lookout for good todo list software for a while now. My primary machine is a Mac, but I also use Linux and Windows and these days an iPod Touch has taken over most of the duties of a laptop when I’m out and about. Since it’s my main machine I looked first for Mac software and tried Omnifocus (powerful, complicated, expensive) and the Things (simple, brilliant, pretty, great support) but quickly realised that none of the standard solutions were really cross platform. Certainly none of them had the ability to sync from Mac to Linux. I could sync from desktop to iPod/iPhone, and Mac to Mac (sorta, using Dropbox), but Windows and Linux might as well not exist.
Then I discovered Tasque, which is an underdeveloped free application from the Linux-centric Gnome desktop. Tasque is simple and straightforward and runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. It isn’t pretty and isn’t especially Mac-like, but its killer feature is that it syncs with the web-based todo list Remember The Milk. So Tasque, plus a $25 per year Remember The Milk Pro account and free iPhone app (there are apps for other handhelds, including Android and Blackberry) means I can sync my todos across platforms and across computers; there’s always Remember The Milk on the web too. Despite its lack of shiny shiny I find Tasque works very well on my Mac with very little fuss.
I love magazines and I buy more of them now than I ever have. I love the feel of them, the shiny pages and the big glossy images. I like the way good design and good writing work together to create something that feels made or intended. I don’t get those experiences from the Web, though the vast majority of my reading is now done online. Magazines are like an icecream sculpture in a fancy restaurant; the Web, by comparison, is an unstable snowfield on the brink of avalanche.
But I have hope. Firstly iPhone apps such as McSweeney’s show what can be done in terms of delivering nicely produced, good-looking content on a small device. McSweeney’s has proper typesetting and feels good to read even given the constraints of a tiny screen. Secondly Apple’s attempt to revive the album through iTunes LP shows what can be done when the constraints of the devices involved can be tightly controlled. Interestingly, given the current hype surrounding ‘content in the cloud’, neither of these examples is truly an ‘online’ experience, since the content is downloaded to a device. The result is that it is tightly controlled and not subject to bandwidth issues. Apple does something similar with its Apple TV, storing content on the device, rather than streaming it on demand across the network like other media players. In terms of magazines the following remarkable video shows what might be possible.
Yesterday I came across (via Twitter) a post about New York’s floating chapels and this started me thinking about Liverpool’s own floating churches. It seems there were two, one of which was a nonconformist chapel based on board a former whaling ship the William, which in its heyday as a whaler would have looked something like the one in the picture, the James. The William had been built in Liverpool for the Greenland fishery in 1785 and became a chapel in 1822. The William remained in the King’s Dock until 1850, when she was broken up. The journal of Robert Day, (1848-1850), Agent to the Liverpool Seamen’s Friend Society, held in the Liverpool Records office, records that “she sold for £105. The amount of dock dues incurred for 28 years and 7 months amounted to £1277 13s 7d”.
The other floating church in Liverpool belonged to the Church of England. Based in the donated former frigate HMS Tees, the Mariner’s Floating Church opened its companionways to worshippers in 1827 and remained in place in George’s Dock until 1872, when it sank at its moorings. The first chaplain of the Floating Church was William Scoresby Jr., the former whaler and arctic scientist turned minister. Scoresby had always had a strong religious sense and was well known as a whaling captain for refusing to catch whales on a Sunday. This was partly because he believed in observing the sabbath, but also because he believed that a day of rest would be beneficial to the crew. He was deeply concerned for the moral and spiritual health of sailors and was also a Temperance campaigner, arguing that drunkenness at sea was at least partly responsible for the large numbers of ships lost. Scoresby first moved to Liverpool from Whitby in 1819 and built his ship the Baffin there. He returned to the city as chaplain in 1827 and stayed for five years before moving on.
In February Blackwell publishes its Companion to Crime Fiction. My contribution is a long-ish (6000 words) article on ‘Crime and Detective Literature for Young Readers’, which is an historical overview of crime and detective fiction for children. I’ve just added it to my archive. Here’s a taster:
Crime and Detective Literature for Young Readers
The category of crime and detective fiction for young readers is in many ways an artificial one. Children and young readers are not restricted to stories written specifically for them and anthologies of crime and detective fiction produced for younger readers often include a mix of stories, at least some of which were originally intended for adults. Detective Stories (1998), edited by Philip Pullman, is a case in point. Although the anthology overall is produced as a collection for young readers, it includes stories by Dashiell Hammett, Damon Runyon and Agatha Christie, all known as writers for adults, alongside an excerpt from Erich Kästner’s 1929 detective novel for children, Emil and the Detectives. While the market for crime and detective literature written specifically for young readers expanded rapidly in the early twentieth century, it has frequently overlapped with crime and detective writing for an adult audience. Crime and detective literature for children allows for different possibilities in detection and plotting, especially in cases where the detective is a child, or part of a group of children, but it shares common origins with the genre as a whole.
Most studies of children’s literature, including Peter Hunt’s An Introduction to Children’s Literature (1994), identify a period in the mid-nineteenth-century in which children’s literature began to move away from didacticism and moralising and towards entertainment and adventure. This took place in the 1840s, at much the same time as detective fiction for adults was beginning to gain popularity among readers in the fast-growing cities of Europe and the United States. Dennis Butts (1997) argues that in the 1840s adventure and fantasy stories began to take over from religious and moral tales as suitable material for children, partly as a form of escape from the turmoil and uncertainties of life in the early nineteenth-century, but also because attitudes towards children were changing:
The emerging children’s literature, with its growing tolerance of children’s playful behaviour, its recognition of the importance of feelings as opposed to reliance upon reason and repression, and its relaxation of didacticism because it was less certain of dogmas, all reflect what was happening in the world beyond children’s books. It is surely remarkable that, whereas fairy tales had to fight for recognition in the 1820s, no fewer than four different translations of Hans Andersen’s stories for children should have been published in England in the year of 1846 alone. (Butts 1997: 159-160).
Elements of mystery, crime, and detection have long been important features of stories enjoyed by young readers. Yet despite the element of play that seems inherent to solving mysteries, crime and detective literature written specifically for young readers was slower to develop than the adult form, perhaps because children’s literacy in the major countries of Europe, and in the United States, did not become a general expectation until the late nineteenth century. Arguably the landmark moment in the emergence of detective fiction for children, at least in a widespread and popular sense, did not arrive until the appearance of the first ‘Hardy Boys’ story in 1927. [Read more]
Loren Latker, whose Shamus Town website is a great resource for anyone interested in Raymond Chandler and Los Angeles, has been doing some excellent research on Chandler’s early life and his family. His Chandler Timeline has just been updated with new material. Loren writes:
It now starts in 1858 with the birth of Morris, or Maurice, B Chandler. I’ve added many popup images for Ray’s birth certificate, his school records, a Laramie new item about an M Chandler attending a party in 1886, obits about his uncle Fitt’s brother and his aunt Francis Grace. I also found the document from 1927 where Ray started the process to regain his U.S. Citizenship. From that we learn that after WWI he returned to Canada, made is way to Victoria BC, boarded the Governor bound for San Francisco and arrived in March of 1919. He and Florence [Ray's mother] were living at the West 12th Street address then. [Link to the Chandler Timeline]
My own take on Chandler’s early life is here.
A few days before Christmas the editor’s blog at Identity Theory featured an insightful post in which Andrew Whittaker wondered what the point of small print-run literary magazines might be. Many of these journals, he notes, have at best a limited online presence; some are not online at all. In 2008 while I was employed as Online Editor of The Reader Magazine, tasked with creating a website for the magazine and the Reader Organisation itself, the problem of how much material to put online came up a lot. The fact that it was seen as a problem is instructive enough. I contacted several of the magazine’s contributors to ask if I could publish their work online, but every one refused. In one case a poet actually had ‘his’ editor contact me to explain why exposing his work to (back then) 5000 eyeballs was a bad idea. I guess that poet must be selling thousands of books and being read by millions. Or maybe not.
In fact the Reader Magazine under editor Philip Davis was quite open to trying online publication. We started a blog and began publishing back issues of the magazine online as a download and using Scribd (and I’d recommend you take a look), but after I stopped being a paid employee back in October 2008, the online development went no further. The magazine remains primarily a print journal; it is trailing behind excellent online journals such as The Rumpus and Identity Theory and finds itself speaking only to a (relative) handful of people. The Reader is a journal that measures its subscribers in hundreds yet features big names such as Andrew Motion, Seamus Heaney and Camile Paglia. That’s a terrible shame.
Here’s a taste of the Identity Theory post:
These publications put their stories above their readers. But without readers, the best story is as good as a blank page. Readers, it turns out, want different things than they did fifty or even ten years ago.
The necessities of print submission and distribution created, over decades, an entrenched sense of hierarchy, that good stories logically move from writer up to editor and back down to reader. But readers, with new online practices introduced by other media and applied to everyday life, expect a conversation with the people whose work they read. They expect a feedback loop. They expect access to literature.
…
This should be a golden age of literary journals. And it is, for some larger forward-looking publications. McSweeney’s, the New Yorker, Tin House, and others have found compatibility between financial sustainability and what my old boss Henry Jenkins calls “spreadability”, removing barriers to sharing content so that fans can build communities around that content.
Successful literary publications know that obscurity is the shortest path to failure.
Feeding Swans at Martin Mere
In October and November Whooper Swans arrive in their thousands at the WWT reserve at Martin Mere in Lancashire. As we found out on an icy day out on Boxing Day, they are quite a spectacle at feeding time.
