[Logbook] [1789?] November [16?] / Obed Hathaway.

The first section of the logbook contains navigational prompts and problems, then records of three voyages. The remainder of the logbook contains notes, lists, and songs and poetry.

Within this ship's log, Obed Hathaway records data regarding the art of navigation, notes on his voyages, useful information on weights and measures, as well as several manuscripts for poems and songs. His creative outpourings seem to have occurred in late fall 1793 through the spring of 1794. He then returned to the log to record two voyages in 1796. The first few pages indicate that Hathaway may have still been learning navigation; there are problems posed about latitude and longitude, with long answers and calculations answering them, and the tops of these pages are sequentially marked "Exm 4th" and so on. Next, Hathaway's proper log begins, on which he plots the specifics about "A Journal of a Voyage from Dominica to Port Caville" November 11, 1793 (04 verso); his next voyage is "from Crooked Island to Charlestown" on board the ship Bedford on January 10, 1796 (06 verso); the final voyage recorded here is from Charlestown to Amsterdam on the Bedford commanded by Cornealus Grinnell on April 12, 1796 (10 verso). Of this last voyage, Hathaway notes that they struck a reef in a "gail" and there was "a man over Bord throde over... it was not possible of Geting him" (17 recto). Despite the formality of the log, it is interspersed with personal references, such as Hathaway's mention of the "sweat lovely Jinny" (02 verso), his repeated writing of a platitude (04 recto), his IOU's with Benjamin Goodspeed (24 verso and 33 recto), a genealogy of his family (22 verso) and his numerous poetic songs and revisions. These verses focus on the call to lead a sea-faring life (21 verso), facing enemies like the "Spanish inveleads" (22 recto), narratives of the voyage of a "yanky heero... manly by name" who exchanges broadsides with British "Tirants" in a battle at sea (22-23), meeting a young damsel alone on a May morning (24 recto), and the involved "A Song of a Sheffield Prentice" who runs away from his master to accompany a rich young woman to Holland. She offers him gold and jewels to be hers, but he refuses as "I have allredy promised and mad a solom vow/ To wed with Saly your hansom Chamber made" (25 recto); thus scorned, she accuses him of theft, and he is left awaiting the hangman. The name "Sally" also appears in a song written on February 10, 1794 (26 verso) in which the speaker is again an apprentice who shirks his work and Sunday sermons to "slink away with Sally" (27 recto). Another song of the sea appears from April 18, 1794 (28 verso), followed by a pastoral ode "A Song of Yore" (29 verso), then a series of pages dealing with more prosaic weights and measures for cloth, wool, wine, beer, oil, land, and time (30). On 32 recto there's a November 1, 1793 letter to Hathaways's sister in which he asks to be remembered to a young lady and regrets that he has not visited sooner. The next song refers to a 7-month voyage during which the crew drinks to sweethearts and wives on Saturday nights (32 verso). The final page includes an inventory of the possessions in Hathaway's sea chest as he came on board the ship on October 13, 1793 including clothing, knives, "fore books one testament," a scale, and a "pound of money" (33 verso).