Introduction
"A Medium in Which I Seek Relief" - a Maritime and Naval Studies Graduate Capstone by Annie Tummino
In this digital publication I explore how unpublished sailor writings from the SUNY Maritime College Archives and my family’s attic fit into the larger body of sailor literature and associated maritime scholarship. I harness the power of transcription, annotation, and commentary to create a media-rich interactive site that brings these previously unknown sailor texts from the archives to life.As the archivist at Maritime College’s Stephen B. Luce Library (2016-2018), I was tasked with preserving and making accessible a significant body of maritime records, papers, and artifacts. The sailor memoirs and diaries sprinkled among the more formal documents in the collections piqued my interest, beckoning as rich sources of insight that would elucidate the seafaring life. My capstone project for the Maritime and Naval Studies graduate program was a perfect opportunity to explore these materials in more depth.
The golden age of sail dominates most investigations into American sea fiction and sea memoirs. Here, I expand that discussion to first hand accounts of maritime life produced by students of the New York State Nautical School (now SUNY Maritime College) who went to sea between the world wars (1919-1930). The Maritime Archives contain a particularly extensive corpus of manuscripts from this period, providing fertile ground for comparison and analysis. In order to make the scope of my capstone manageable, I elected to focus on the writings of Cecil Northrop, whose diaries represent a particularly vivid and literary rendering of life at sea.
Born in Brooklyn in 1901, Cecil Northrop shipped on the SS Santa Paula as an 18 year old greenhorn in 1919, attended the New York State Nautical School from 1921-1922, and became a third (and then second) mate on the Dollar Line, the most dominant shipping company of the 1920s. Throughout his time as a mariner, Northrop recorded his experience of life aboard the ship, impressions of foreign ports, and relationships with friends, family, and love interests in his diaries. It appears Northrop was compiling some of the manuscripts into essays, and viewed his writing as part of the great sea narrative tradition popularized by Richard Henry Dana in the 1840s.
The second sailor I feature in this project is Van Horne Morris, my maternal grandfather. While I was previously vaguely aware that he was a merchant mariner, I hadn't thought much about it. He died tragically when my mother was only nine, so I never got to meet him. The inclusion of his story and letters was an unexpected and happy twist, which emerged after I described this project to my mother. Luckily, she had saved a treasure trove of documents from her parent's formative years, including diaries, letters, and photographs, which she pulled out of the attic for me to examine and preserve. These papers provide fascinating textual and visual evidence of life in the Merchant Marine in the late 1930s and in the United States Naval Reserve during World War II. Moreover, my grandfather’s letters are exceptionally poetic and well written.
My own journey with the Cecil Northrop and Van Horne Morris papers was intensely personal, leading to a new understanding of my family history, and a deeper appreciation of the collections held at the Stephen B. Luce Library, where I worked for 2.5 years. More generally, the sources that I digitized, transcribed, uploaded, and annotated on this site will prove useful for anyone seeking to understand the lived experience of sailors in the 1920s and 1930s.
Chapters
- The Sailors: This section consists of biographical essays, photographs, and transcriptions of sailor writings. Cecil Northrop and Van Horne Morris are currently featured, though I hope to add more sailors in the future.
- The Ships: This section consists of historical information, images, and data for the ships on which “The Sailors” served.
- Analysis and Context: This section consists of original analysis and close readings of the texts presented in “The Sailors".
- Notes, Embedded Media, and Links: These are utilized throughout to contextualize, illustrate, and make connections within and between texts on this site and elsewhere.
Additional Notes/Credits
- This publication is not “done,” rather it’s continually expanding with new annotations and media.
- Feedback is welcome! Use the thought bubbles at the bottom of each page to leave a comment, or contact me at annie.tummino{at}qc.cuny.edu.
- This project was created under the supervision of Dr. John Rocco, Professor of Humanities and Maritime and Naval Studies Program Coordinator; and evaluated and improved by my committee, Dr. John Rocco, Dr. Elissa Defalco and Dr. Chris Holmes. Many thanks for their support in pursuing a creative project!
- The site is powered by Scalar, an open source digital publishing tool by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. More at https://scalar.me/anvc/about/.
- This project grew out of my work as an archivist. In my archives life I manage, arrange, describe, preserve (and sometimes digitize) collections for use by researchers (in this case, including myself!). For more information, please see Stephen B. Luce Library Archival Collections and Maritime Digital Collections, my labors of love at Maritime College.