"A Medium in Which I Seek Relief": Manuscripts of American Sailors 1919-1940

Introduction

A Medium in Which I Seek Relief - a Maritime and Naval Studies Graduate Capstone by Annie Tummino

"A Medium in Which I Seek Relief": Manuscripts and Letters of American Sailors, circa 1920-1940​ exists at the intersection of archives, digital scholarship, open-access publishing, and genealogy, bringing to life the experiences of sailors of 80-100 years ago. This project explores how unpublished sailor writings from the SUNY Maritime College Archives and my family’s attic fit into the larger body of sailor literature and associated maritime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. Harnessing the power of the open source digital publishing tool Scalar, the project integrates transcription, annotation, and commentary in a media-rich interactive publication.

Background

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 other 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 close to three years. More broadly, 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.

Structure of this Publication

Annotated transcriptions of journals, memoirs, and letters written by sailors of the 1920s-1940s form the centerpiece of this publication. The subsequent paths provide information on the sailors who authored the materials, the ships they sailed on, and related context and analysis. This publication is still evolving, with plans for additional transcriptions, annotations, and scholarly work. 

Notes/Credits

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