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• 1 media/SSH Church Music Hall and Fountain.jpg 2020-05-23T16:53:02-07:00 Sailors as Readers: The Sailors' Snug Harbor Library 168 image_header 2021-08-26T16:24:31-07:00

  In The View from the Masthead Hester Blum makes the case that sailors "were a class of workers who attained an above-average degree of literacy and who participated in a robust culture of reading and writing" (25). In making this case, Blum relied on the findings of Harry Skallerup, who used signature estimates, charitable organizations' surveys, naval library records, and mechanics' library histories to quantify sailor literacy (see Books Afloat & Ashore: a History of Books, Libraries, and Reading Among Seamen During the Age of Sail, 1974). Blum expanded on Skallerup's research by examining sailor writings, which provide further evidence of their literary interests and ambitions. 
  
  SUNY Maritime College is home to an additional, largely unexplored, trove of data on sailors' reading habits: library records in the Sailors' Snug Harbor archives. Sailors’ Snug Harbor was the first home for retired seamen in the United States, dedicated to the welfare of “aged, decrepit, and worn out” mariners. Established through through the 1801 will of Robert Richard Randall (son of wealthy privateer Thomas Randall), the home opened on Staten Island in 1833.
  
  According to the Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden, "by the turn of the century, Sailors’ Snug Harbor was reputedly the richest charitable institution in the United States and a self-sustaining community with farms, a dairy, a bakery, workshops, a power plant, a chapel, a sanatorium, a hospital, a concert hall, dormitories, recreation areas, gardens, and a cemetery." Omitted from this list of amenities was the library, which was used extensively by the residents.

  Six library registers are among the 375 linear feet of materials that comprise the Sailors' Snug Harbor archival collection.  The registers span from 1884 through 1909, containing thousands of entries demonstrating the residents' reading habits and interests. Contemporary scholars are lucky that the registers survived; administrators had begun to re-use the ledgers, taping business documents over some of the pages. 
  
  It would be difficult to draw conclusions from the registers without a robust transcription project; however, even a casual browse reveals that these retired mariners had diverse reading tastes. This transcribed page lists periodicals, classic novels, popular fiction, and memoirs as items that were checked out between October 8th to 10th, 1884.

  Transcription

  *Links to public domain versions of the books in parenthesis
  
  • Novels and Tales (Goethe) 
  • Two Years Ago (Charles Kingsley - the Epub is for a 1901 edition, but Kingsley died in 1875)
  • Harper's
  • Scribner's
  • Court of London (The mysteries of the court of London by George W M Reynolds)
  • Camp and Field (Volunteers' Camp and Field Book: Containing Useful and General Information on the Art and Science of War, for the Leisure Moments of the Soldier by John P. Curry)
  • Lady of Lyndon (The Lady of Lyndon by Louise Pilkington Blake)
  • Seaside Library (presumably related to the Seaside Library editions of popular titles published by George Munro) 
  • Our Saturday Nights (Mark Mills Pomeroy)
  • Three Spaniards (Three Spaniards: A Romance By George Walker)
  • Hidden Perils (Mary Cecil Hay)
  • King's Own (Frederick Marryat)
  • Arabian Nights
  • Christina North (Eleanor A. Towle)
  • Brave Old Salt (Brave Old Salt, Or, Life on the Quarter Deck, A Story of the Great Rebellion by Oliver Optic)

  Notes

  • The Stephen B. Luce Library's finding aid for the Sailors Snug Harbor Records is available at https://sunymaritimearchives.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/11.
  • The 1884 library borrowing register is digitized in full on Maritime Digital Collections at https://maritimedigitalcollections.com/Detail/objects/195.
  • Header image: Sailors' Snug Harbor Postcard; Source: Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York
• 1 media/CA-RG1-0007-Whipple-0009.jpg 2020-03-30T18:58:57-07:00 Future Directions for Research 16 plain 2021-08-26T11:09:58-07:00 Ultimately, in-depth research was difficult for a one-semester capstone, especially when a good chunk of my time went to developing this scalar site, as well as scanning, transcribing, and annotating texts. The interdisciplinary nature of the subject matter, in areas in which I am not an expert, also made this project challenging. Possible future tasks, topics, and areas to dig into include:
  • Transcribe and annotate more 1920s journals from the SUNY Maritime Archives for comparison and contrast
  • Add more media to bring the first-hand accounts to life
  • Use tags to create an alternative/ additional paths through the materials
  • Further investigate reading habits of the residents of Sailors' Snug Harbor, using the library lending registers
  • Maritime education - explore the development of maritime education in the 1920s in more depth using the SUNY Maritime Archives
  • Race and masculinity - trace how theses themes played out within the texts
  • Compare the 1925 Newport logbook and Thomas Caldwell's 1925 diary; visually present side-by-side
  • Explore the history and current uses of sailor logbooks and their connections to diaries and maritime fiction
  • Geo-mapping -- map the locations visited by sailors in this publication; pin visuals and excerpts from first-hand accounts to the location