I’d like to return to the diary of Ann Winchester in my final blog post of the series. In the 1940s, UConn final exams took place during the final week of January, several weeks after students returned from their holiday break. Ann’s feelings toward her final exams vaguely resemble my own:

January 25: Got up at 6:30 to study bac[teriology] but couldn’t take much of it (had gone stale). Final was at 8:30  I thought it was easy. Lab final was at 11:00 – it was a practical and rather hard…Studied psych again tonite but not too enthusiastically.

Ann’s exam week ended five days later after suffering through a “stinking, unfair” Education exam.

Though I’ve spent the semester reading and writing about various different journals, I’ve occasionally returned to Ann’s because her entries are so relatable. Though practical details of life at UConn in the 1940s are very different from the realities of modern life, the experience of being a student here remains the same in many ways. This semester, I reviewed four diaries, each unique in their description and purpose: there was the daily chronicling of Ann, the chatty 1940s UConn co-ed reflecting on her present, past, and future; the superficial impressions recorded by Mr. Dean Walker, a 19^th-century bourgeois American traveler making his way through Europe for the first time; the shared sentiments of friendship collected by Mary Clark, a young lady from Massachusetts ostensibly preparing to depart for school; and the four-year attempt made by Sherwood Ransom, a working-class seamen in the New London whaling industry, to maintain some semblance of privacy while living and working intensely in the same, shared space.

My goal in researching each of these diaries was to understand the reasons why people have written diaries now and in the past. I wanted to challenge the oft-repeated contemporary assumption that a diary is simply a place for superficial, personal reflection. This assumption can hurt our understanding of diaries as historical objects and sources, and it obscures our understanding of the various reasons why people committed their thoughts to paper.

So why do we write diaries? The answer ultimately hinges on the writer and the context of their world. But there are similarities between all four of these that gets us closer to a more general answer: we write journals to disclose, to reflect, to collect objects and thoughts of importance, and to pass the time.

Still – there are at least a dozen more journals in this collection that I did not read, which means there may also be at least a dozen more answers to this question. Writing is always situational. We learn the purpose of a diary to its writer by reading its contents, not by assuming that its “personal” nature gives it a universal purpose.

And as for my own writing? My interest in keeping a journal relates to something author Joan Didion wrote about her own journal-writing tendencies: “My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”

Rebecca D’Angelo is a senior undergraduate student in History and Anthropology. For her blog series For Private Eyes Only she spent the Fall Semester studying diaries available in Archives and Special Collections at the Dodd Research Center and exploring the history of journal writing and reasons why we write journals.

In February of 1845, Sherwood B. Ransom of East Haddam, CT visited the Island of Otaheite (Tahiti) in the Northern Pacific Ocean for his second time in two years. At the time, Ransom was sailing as a crew member aboard the Morrison, a whaling ship bound from New London, CT on what would become a lengthy cruise for whales through the Indian and Northern Pacific Oceans.

At Otaheite, Ransom was greeted by a pleasant surprise: here, he reunited with “Henry and Lyman,” two friends from home. Henry, probably Henry C. Griffens of East Haddam, had sailed with Ransom on a previous whaling voyage in 1842 aboard the New London ship Indian Chief, when Ransom made his first visit to Otaheite. “Lyman” (William Lyman Cole of East Haddam) was a “green hand,” or first time whaler. Ransom writes the following about his encounter with his friends:

got into the harbour about Eight[.] found three New London Ships there the India, Jefferson, and Neptune[.] went aboard of the Nep. Saw Henry and Lyman, found them well…came aboard about dark and started for the Sandwich Islands…Lyman likes whaling first rate[.] we had a first rate visit[.] I took dinner with them, and shall see them at the S. [Sandwich] Islands again.

This run-in with friends, though rare, but not unlikely, with so many New London ships at sea following similar voyage paths in the 1840s.

Opening page of Sherwood Ransom’s journal. The whale stamps at the top were typically used in whaling logbooks to provide a visual record of the number and type of whales caught.

I was over the moon when I saw that the diary collection in Archives and Special Collections at the Dodd Research Center included a whaling diary from a New London ship. In my other life as a student, I am researching the history of New London-based whaling in the southern Indian Ocean for my University Scholar project. During the nineteenth century, New London, CT became the second largest whaling port in the nation (New Bedford was the largest), employing men to sail throughout the Atlantic, and later the Pacific and Indian oceans in search of whales to kill for their blubber. When boiled, the blubber became oil that was used for lighting and as an industrial lubricant.

The Morrison’s journey lasted a total of four years (September 1844 – May 1848), but the majority of Ransom’s diary is composed of daily entries from 1844 and 1845, with a few entries penned in 1847. Ransom served as a boatsteerer on this voyage, a “promotion” from his previous work on the Indian Chief. Though not quite an officer, boatsteerers commanded authority on whaleships, different from regular crewmen in that they were hired for their specialized ability to harpoon whales and to steer the small “whaleboats” deployed from the main ship from which the whalemen hunted whales.

For Ransom, writing in a journal seems to have been both a refuge from the claustrophobic realities of whaling life as well as a way to pass the time. The majority of working time during a whaling voyage was spent performing mundane, shipboard duties or boiling blubber on a ship’s “tryworks” until a lookout sighted whales to hunt. In between, there was plenty of time to write. That being said, with the routine of the ship always contingent on the whims of nature (the availability of whales or changing wind patterns that made it necessary to adjust the sails) leisure time could easily transform into work time.

The lack of distinction between work and leisure is clearly evident in Ransom’s journal, with daily entries including both personal details and descriptions of routine shipboard work. “No[t] all hands to day and not much doing except two hours scrubbing decks and two spells setting up some of the head gear” he writes on September 22 (1844). “[H]ave had a good wash and shave and feel much revived after the operation. Stiff breeze as yesterday.” A report on the direction and strength of the wind is included in each of Ransom’s entries.

Ransom also scribbles details about latitude and longitude, as well as any whales captured on a given day in the margins of his journal. These details, normally committed to official ship’s logbooks, suggest that Ransom was understandably doing a bit of unofficial record-keeping himself. With the ship being both his workplace and his home, details that were important to the ship’s work became important to him; they determined his routine, his fatigue, and his happiness on any given day.

The regular timing of Ransom’s journaling suggests that writing became part of his shipboard routine, but was uniquely one of the only activities that afforded him a sense of privacy and security. The sense of refuge gained from writing in his journal is indicated by Ransom’s use of the diary to disclose intimate concerns. His entry from New Year’s Day 1845 reveals his feelings about missing home and family:

This is the first day of the year[.] how I wish I was at home to enjoy it by meeting in the social circle of young friends and to greet them a Happy New Year. But fate was so ordered that this poor devil is to be here in the ship Morrison many thousand miles from home and friends[,] though not friendless I hope and if my life is spared will be here twelve months from this. I have thought of home much to day, and of the past summer which I spent in East Haddam and how differently I am situated from what I was then.

However, the refuge provided by writing was only temporary; the intrusion of life at sea is continuously present. A page, smeared with ink includes the following note: “While I have been writing the foolish old ship gave a lee lurch and capsized. My ink on my book and has made a pretty spot so I think I will below and wait for better weather.”

As the voyage progressed, Ransom used his diary to voice frustrations about the officers on board, notably Captain Samuel Green. He writes the following after Green scolds him for an unsuccessful whale hunt:

Friday 25^th [May 1845]: …I darted at him [the whale] but did not get fast and off he went as if the Devil was after him[.] came aboard and the old man [Capt. Green] was savage Enough but who cares for his lip[?] I do not[.] if he does not like my boat steering he can get some one else and I shall tell him so if he says anything more on the subject.

It is likely that writing these frustrations in a diary was the only way that Ransom could safely voice them without running the risk of being overheard, which would have resulted in him “catching it,” or being punished, by one of the officers.

At one point in 1845, Ransom, fed up with his captain, work, abysmal living conditions, and the inexperienced “fools” who were his fellow crewmen, threatens to abandon the operation altogether: “..[I]f ever I get into a good port,” writes Ransom, “I shall ask him [Captain Green] for my charge and if he does not give it to me he must keep a good lookout for me[.] he is a drascal as has ever lived these are my feelings at the present.”

The lock of hair and letter of reference for George Ransom included in the back of Sherwood Ransom’s whaling journal.

Whether or not Ransom ever did abandon the voyage is unclear – his journal ends abruptly in 1847.

Though his quick promotion to a boatsteerer indicates he was a competent whaler, it seems clear that Ransom was more interested in returning to East Haddam to work and live. Close ties to home are suggested by his New Year’s lamentations and his excitement over seeing Henry and Lyman at Otaheite, but they are also a physical feature of his journal. Tucked in the back pages are military papers and a letter of reference written for his father, George Ransom, as well as a lock of hair, likely belonging to a deceased family member.

Though these were likely added by Sherwood or another family member upon his return, their presence in the journal is tantalizing and indicative of a larger trend – most whalemen did not stay in the whaling industry for all of their lives. Many worked as whalemen for only a few voyages before earning enough money to return home and start a family; it appears Sherwood did this, marrying Abbie Payne, a woman from Colchester, CT in 1851, and living out the rest of his life on land until his death in 1893.

Rebecca D’Angelo is a senior undergraduate student in History and Anthropology. In her blog series For Private Eyes Only she studies diaries available in Archives and Special Collections at the Dodd Research Center and explores the history of journal writing and reasons why we write journals.

In August of 1851, Mr. Dean Walker, a Massachusetts man, visited Liverpool, England for the very first time. His initial impression of the city could be described as underwhelmed:

Saturday [August 2] – I have spent the day in travelling about the town. Find the people looking better than I expected. I do not think there are more dirty shabby looking people here than in New York, or more of the low classes here than there. They do not appear to be employed here, they only come from Ireland to ship to New York and other places. I went to see the “Great Western” start for New York. Those who were going I think were the most dirty-looking people I ever saw. A few ragged people are begging in the streets but not as many as I expected to see.

Liverpool was the first of many stops Walker made in a multiple-month-long “European trip,” during which he visited parts of England, Ireland, Scotland France, and Italy. During his travels, he recorded his initial impressions and quick observations on European life, landscape, and people in a journal.

Crystal Palace (engraving), Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London, 1852).

Walker’s journal is one of several travel journals within the Diary Collection. Travel journals are personal, narrative accounts of an author’s travels – broadly defined here as experiences that involve long or short-distance movement across a geographic space. The four travel journals contained within this collection were all written by Americans traveling through Europe during the late nineteenth century.

Walker, whose age is unknown, lived during a time when travel between the United States and Europe was accelerating – literally. He left Boston bound for Liverpool, England on July 15, 1851 in what was likely the packet ship (or “clipper ship”) Daniel Webster, built and run by the Boston-based Enoch Train & Company line.[1] He arrived in Liverpool after sixteen days of travel on August 1, a “fast passage” according to the Webster’s captain. Clipper ships, the iconic speedy cargo ships of the nineteenth century, are one of several signs of the nineteenth century transportation revolution, alongside railroads and steamships, evident in Walker’s journal.

Though we know little about Walker, we do know that he was likely a man of means, as he was able to afford passage as a “cabin” (or “first class”) passenger during his journey to Liverpool, on a shipping line popularly perceived as “expensive.” [2] As historian Daniel Kilbride notes in his book Being American in Europe (1750 – 1860), even though the cost of trans-Atlantic travel was declining by mid-nineteenth century and many Americans counted themselves amongst the ranks of the “comfortable” middle class, European travel was still a luxury enjoyed only by the wealthiest citizens.[3]

We also know that Walker was not alone in his travels. In fact, I was first drawn to Mr. Walker’s journal because of its suggested co-authorship. The inside cover of its first page reads, “Journal of European trip made by Mr. Dean Walker + Addison P. Thayer (July 1851).” At early points in the journal, when Walker describes his passage to Europe, he occasionally uses the pronoun “we,” suggesting the presence of a companion; however, he describes most of his experiences using the singular first person pronoun “I.” It isn’t until Walker reaches France, several weeks into his journey, that he mentions: “Mr. Thayer was with me.” Their relationship remains unclear.

Perhaps this is because Walker is largely concerned with using his journal to discuss other matters. He focuses on describing his new experiences and his impressions of things that seem particularly “curious” to him. He notes seeing “black fish” porpoises and whales during the voyage to Liverpool, seeing his first Hippopotamus at the Zoological Gardens, and taking a meal at the Mechanics Eating House in London – significant to him because he could enjoy a book from their large library with his meal. His interest in using his journal to describe the extraordinary material things he sees is evident from an entry he writes about his visit to the Crystal Palace in London to see the “Great Exhibition of 1851,” a “World’s Fair” housing display of technology:

Tues. [September] 26^th: I went today for the third time to the Glass Palace…I thought I would today begin and go through and [write] down the prices and try to give a description of the most curious things I saw, but I directly became discouraged and gave it up as a bad job. The best way I can give one an idea of the things is to describe some of the most extravagant things and some of the most simple, and then have any one form an idea from the size of the building how much was to be seen.

He goes on to describe several extraordinary and expensive objects he sees at the exhibition– a large diamond, expensive furniture. His interest in wealth is telling, as his the suggestion that he may be describing these objects “for someone else.” Unlike Ann Winchester, it seems as if Walker may have had an audience in mind for his diary – perhaps family and friends back home, who would read his journal upon his return.

Walker’s journal is filled with comparisons, as well as descriptions. As evident in the above-quoted passage about the Irish immigrants passing through Liverpool on their way to the United States, Walker frequently compares European people, as well as landscape, architecture, food, and habits to American ones. In a few instances, he also compares his experiences in each European nation he visits to his experiences in other places in Europe. Consider the following excerpt from his journal, in which he describes a train ride he takes on his way from Hull, England to London:

[August, around the 16^th]: The land on the rail-road for the most part is well cultivated, but not as neatly as in Ireland. The hedges looked much more uneven – a considerable woodland – the trees not large, and when we were within 10 miles of London it looked more like Massachusetts than it had at any time, on account of the wood.

Some of the comparisons Walker makes are purely descriptive, such as his recognition of the British landscape as very similar to that of Massachusetts. But there are many more that are qualitative in nature, including his comment included above about the “neatness” of British “cultivation.” Walker’s journal is therefore a place where he evaluates the quality of European culture, food, and conditions, by comparing them to the quality of American goods. As a person clearly cognizant of status and quality, this seems consistent with Walker’s character; as an American in Europe for the first time, it may have been Walker’s self-conscious attempt to understand America’s place in the world.

Rebecca D’Angelo is a senior undergraduate student in History and Anthropology. In her blog series For Private Eyes Only she studies diaries available in Archives and Special Collections at the Dodd Research Center to explore the history of journal writing and reasons why we write journals.