Seas of ink-and-wash

Working in the Public Record Office some years ago, I ordered up the logbook of the badly damaged HMS Scylla on her return to Britain after D-Day. There was something very moving in seeing the bare navigational details noted in my uncle’s familiar hand. But then can anything be so immediate a point of contact with the past as a ship’s log as, watch by watch, the location, the wind and the weather are recorded with relentless discipline? Is there a more eloquent message than the odd water stain during a ‘fresh gale’? And if this is telling, what of the journals and diaries, sketchbooks and maps that give a graphic dimension to the mere facts?

This is the domain of The Sea Journal, a beautifully illustrated compendium of the records of  captains, seamen, whalers, conservationists, Pacific Islanders, botanists, naturalists, meteorologists, adventurers, merchants, physicians, cooks, stowaways, artists and cartographers. Interspersed among details of this motley collection —mostly men, but there are a notable handful of women too — are short essays by contemporary seafarers.

Selected by Huw Lewis-Jones, sometime curator at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge and the National Maritime Museum, the entries span the globe from Arctic to Antarctic, from Pacific to Atlantic, from the 14th century to the present day.  The text is dotted with some real gems: I had no idea, for example, that Beaufort of the Beaufort Scale had suffered 16 musket shots and three sabre wounds in a single action with a Spanish ship. Or, on a rather different note, that in the early 1800s there was so much contraband gin in Kent that it was used to wash windows.

Among the individuals brought together here, few will be widely known, and even the more famous are represented by excerpts that may shed a new light on them: Captain Bligh’s notes on the mutineers (Christian Fletcher was ‘subject to violent perspiration & particularly in his hands, so that he soils anything he handles’) are as fascinating as his ink-and-wash drawings of birds and fish are beautiful.