Mystic Seaport, in partnership with the New Bedford Whaling Museum, has developed  the world’s most comprehensive whaling history database and it is now available for all to use at WhalingHistory.org. Researchers, genealogists, students, teachers, and history buffs alike will find it to be the most robust and useful repository of whaling history documentation and scholarship.

The data presented combines many sources including logbooks, journals, ship registers, newspapers, business papers, and custom house records. Users will be able to find and trace whaling voyages and ships to specific logbooks, as well as the list of crew members aboard most of the voyages. The foundational fabric of Whaling History features three databases that have been stitched together – the American Offshore Whaling Voyage (AOWV) database, the American Offshore Whaling Log database, and an extensive whaling crew list database. All data is open to the public and is downloadable for any researcher to use with other tools and systems.

“We are so pleased to have been part of this project and so proud of the end result,” said Paul J. O’Pecko, Vice President of Research Collections at Mystic Seaport. “This information, gathered over decades, is invaluable to scholars, students, genealogists and others. And the fact that it is all available on one site with data that can be downloaded and manipulated is unprecedented in the world of maritime history.”

The American Offshore Whaling Voyage (AOWV) database, which was spearheaded by Judith Lund, scholar and former curator at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, includes information about all known American offshore (or “pelagic”) whaling voyages from the 1700s to the 1920s. It does not include the modern factory ship voyages of the mid-20th century. Information is most complete for the 19th century. The voyages included in the database sailed from, or were under the registry of, what is now the United States.

Extensive records of American whaling in the form of daily entries in whaling voyage logbooks contain a great deal of information about where and when the whalemen found whales. The second part of the database’s foundation is the American Offshore Whaling Log database, which includes information from 1,381 logbooks from American offshore whaling voyages between 1784 and 1920. These data were extracted from the original whaling logbooks during three separate scientific research projects, one conducted by Lieutenant Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury in the 1850s, the second conducted by Charles Haskins Townsend in the 1930s, and the third conducted by a team from the Census of Marine Life project lead by Tim Denis Smith between 2000 and 2010. The data file includes 466,134 data records assembled in a common format suitable for spatial and temporal analysis of American whaling throughout the 19th century.

The third database from which Whaling History is built is extensive whaling voyage crew lists from more than 5,300 voyages. Crew lists for whaling voyages recorded at the customs houses in Fall River and Salem, Massachusetts, and in New London, Connecticut, have been compiled as part of various projects and from various sources over the years. Crew lists for New Bedford voyages have been compiled using records kept by the chaplains of the New Bedford Port Society from 1840 to the end of whaling in New Bedford. These crew lists are now in a single searchable, sortable database.

In the next phase of the Whaling History Database, museums’ and other institutions’ collection items will be able to be linked to the database, giving researchers the ability to see a robust and dynamic picture of whaling history and artifacts.

“The future phases that will put linked objects, maps and images at the researchers’ fingertips, will give them the chance to find a particular voyage or person and read  journals or view images and sailing routes directly linked to that particular person or event,” O’Pecko said. “The information gathered here will be an obvious boon to research in social and business history, but also for those studying in such fields as climatology and anthropology.”

Dawn Riley, the first woman to compete in both the America’s Cup and in the Whitbread Round the World Race, will receive the 2018 America and the Sea Award from Mystic Seaport.

“Dawn Riley’s impact on international sailing speaks for itself, and this award gives Mystic Seaport the opportunity to call greater attention to the extraordinary accomplishments of this courageous woman,” said Mystic Seaport President Steve White. The prestigious award recognizes those individuals and organizations whose extraordinary achievements in the world of maritime exploration, competition, scholarship, and design best exemplify the American character.

Riley stands alone as the first woman to compete in both the America’s Cup and in the Whitbread Round the World Race, two of the pinnacles in the sport of sailing that prior to her had been all but closed to women sailors. Riley also went on to become the first American, male or female, to sail in three America’s Cups and two Whitbread Round the World Races.

Riley trains premier-level American sailors for future Olympic, America’s Cup, and other world-class level sailing competitions, and leads a movement to reinvigorate the sport in this country. One nexus of this movement is Oakcliff Sailing Center in Oyster Bay, N.Y., where Dawn serves as Executive Director. A high-performance training center for sailors who have progressed beyond traditional coaching methods, Oakcliff’s vision is to “Build American Leaders through Sailing.” Riley’s leadership and the quality of the programs she oversees were recognized recently by New York Yacht Club’s Belle Mente Quantum Racing, which is currently preparing a challenge for the 36th America’s Cup. This syndicate is partnering with Oakcliff to recruit and train members for their America’s Cup Team.

Riley pursued an impressive racing career on the water punctuated by unprecedented accomplishments such as her role as the watch captain/engineer on Maiden, the first all-women’s team in the 1989-90 Whitbread Round the World Race; pit person for America³, winner of the 1992 America’s Cup and first woman to have an active role on an America’s Cup team; skipper of Heineken, the only all-women’s entry in the 1993-94 Whitbread Race; team captain of America³, the women’s team in the 1995 America’s Cup; 1999 US Sailing’s Rolex Yachtswoman of the Year; America True CEO and Captain in the 2000 America’s Cup; and winning skipper at the 2002 IC45 World Championships.

A black tie gala will be held in Riley and Oakcliff Sailing’s honor in New York City Wednesday, October 3, 2018. This affair is the premier fund-raising event for Mystic Seaport. Past recipients of the America and the Sea Award include philanthropist and environmentalist David Rockefeller, Jr.; oceanographer and explorer Sylvia Earle; historian David McCullough; legendary yacht designer Olin Stephens; President and CEO of Crowley Maritime Corporation, Thomas Crowley;  philanthropist William Koch; former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman; WoodenBoat Publications founder Jon Wilson; yachtsman and author Gary Jobson; maritime industrialist Charles A. Robertson; author Nathaniel Philbrick; and Rod and Bob Johnstone and their company J/Boats.

 

The world-famous Budweiser Clydesdales will be at Mystic Seaport March 22-25, in a special stable on the Museum’s Village Green, in advance of their appearance in the Mystic Irish Parade.

The horses will be available for public viewing during regular Museum hours March 22-25.

To prepare for their return to the Museum (they stayed here when they marched in the parade in 2008), we brushed up on our Clydesdale trivia. Here are 10 things you need to know about Clydesdales:

How long have Clydesdales been bred?
In the early 19th century, farmers living along the banks of the River Clyde in Lanarkshire, Scotland imported a few Great Flemish Horses and mated them with local mares. This was the birth of the Clydesdale.

Can any Clydesdale be a Budweiser Clydesdale?
No. In order to join the World Famous Budweiser hitch, a Clydesdale must:

• stand at least 18 hands high (6 feet tall)
• be a gelding and at least 4 years old
• have a bay coat, four white stockings, a blaze of white on the face, a black mane and a black tail
• weigh between 1,800 and 2,300 pounds

How much does a Clydesdale eat and drink?
Each hitch horse consumes as much as 20 to 25 quarts of whole grains, minerals, and vitamins, 50 to 60 pounds of hay and 30 gallons of water per day.

How big is a Clydesdale horseshoe?
Clydesdale horseshoes measure more than 20 inches from end to end and weigh about five pounds – more than twice as long and five times as heavy as the shoe worn by a light horse.

Do the Clydesdales have names?
Yes, the Budweiser Clydesdales are given short names like Duke, Mark, Captain and Bud so that it’s easier for drivers to give commands to the horses during a performance.

Where is the official home of the Budweiser Clydesdales?
The official home of the Budweiser Clydesdales is an ornate brick and stained-glass stable built in 1885 on the historic 100-acre Anheuser-Busch Brewery complex in St. Louis.

Where are all the hitches located?
The traveling hitches of the Budweiser Clydesdales are based in St. Louis, Missouri; Fort Collins, Colorado; and Merrimack, New Hampshire.

How do the Clydesdales travel?
Ten horses, the famous red, white, and gold beer wagon and other essential pieces of equipment are transported in three 50-foot tractor-trailers. Air cushioned suspension and thick rubber flooring in the trailers ease the rigors of travelling. And the team stops each night at local stables so the gentle giants can rest.

Do the Clydesdales have a special harness?
Yes. Each harness is handcrafted with solid brass, patent leather, and stitched with pure linen thread. The harness is made to fit any Clydesdale; however, collars come in various sizes and must be individually fitted to the Clydesdales like a finely tailored suit. Each harness and collar weigh approximately 130 pounds.

What does it take to drive a hitch of Clydesdales?
Driving the combined 12 tons of wagon and horses requires expert skill and physical strength. The 40 pounds of lines held by the driver plus the tension of the horses pulling creates a weight of over 75 pounds. That’s why the hitch drivers endure a lengthy training process before they assume the prestigious role of “Budweiser Clydesdale Hitch Driver.”

Source: Anheuser-Busch

John Grade likes to think in extremes.

His sculptures, for example, are massive. They don’t weigh just pounds, they weigh tons. They can be hundreds of feet long, or tall. They can made from wood salvaged from a 115-year-old schooner, or harvested from a long-dead forest in southeastern Alaska. They can be created to last forever, or to be eaten by termites.

And so it makes sense that Grade, who lives in Seattle, would eventually find his way to Alaska. Three years ago he was invited by Anchorage Museum to join its Polar Lab program, an immersion-type residency that would bring an international variety of artists to Alaska to be educated and inspired and then to create. His initial idea (again, extreme) was to find the northern-most tree in the U.S. It was to go along with the oldest tree (4,000 years old and atop an 11,000-foot mountain in Nevada) and the most banal (a hemlock in the Cascade range in Washington state).

After doing research and talking to Inuit hunters, he narrowed down the location. He and his wife Maria were dropped by a plane in Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve. They rafted about 100 miles down the Noatak River, and then hiked to find the tree. And there it was. The old Inuit hunter had told him “There will be a tree where it shouldn’t be” and that was, in fact, the case. The 18-foot tall poplar was easy to spot because, Grade notes, nothing on the tundra grows taller than about a couple feet.

There was also, as the hunter warned there could be, a grizzly bear at the tree, using it as a scratching post. They had to wait about 24 hours before that bear had every itch scratched, and left the area. When they got closer, Grade saw that the bark of the tree was coated in beautiful, thick, cinnamon-colored bear fur.

Once they were bear free, Grade laid plastic all around the base of the trunk, and then covered the tree in tin foil so he could make a plaster mold of it. When the mold was hardened, he broke it into pieces that would fit in the raft, and brought it home to create the third piece of his oldest-most northern- most banal tree concept. That project is still ongoing in his Seattle studio, one of 12 pieces he is working on simultaneously.

What’s that? A pingo.

While they were trekking to the tree, Grade said he noticed these large earthen mounds randomly poking up across the

tundra. “I was curious,” Grade said. “They were pingos (pingo means “small hill” in Inuvialuktun). I wanted to learn more about them. They are so old, and so slow growing, and outside of the Inuit people, few people know about them.”

Pingos occur where the ground remains frozen for years at a time, in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Siberia. There are two types — an open-system pingo occurs when artesian water pushes up near the surface and freezes into an ice lens that forces the topsoil upward as it continues to grow. A closed-system pingo occurs when a former lakebed or dry river channel refreezes and develops a pressurized ice lens that pushes on the tundra. Most pingos along the lower Noatak River are closed-system pingos. Over centuries, pingos may grow as large as 2,000 feet across and 180 feet tall.

“I knew I wanted to work with a pingo very directly,” Grade says. “I wanted to marry what I studied empirically with what I experienced personally. They are two very different things.”

He found a pair of scientists who are inventorying pingos, and they shared aerial photos of hundreds of them with him. There was one particular pingo in this inventory that Grade was particularly drawn to, and he made it the background photo for his computer monitor so he could look at it often.

Then back he went to Noatak Preserve, this time by helicopter, which allowed him to spend time over various pingos, getting a deep “bird’s eye view” of each one, and its relationship to the landscape around it. He mapped the area using photogrammetry, which is the science of making measurements from photographs, especially for recovering the exact positions of surface points. Grade’s goal was to determine which pingo he found most compelling, to use as the basis for his sculpture.

He discovered later, back in Seattle, that the one he chose was the same one that served as his computer desktop photo. He liked this pingo because it was “a little off kilter at the top. It spoke to me. Is it growing? Is it collapsing? Is it somewhere in between? Sometimes they have foliage on them but this one was relatively bare. It was compelling.”

The pingo, from memory

As soon as he was back in the studio, Grade re-created the pingo from memory. He wanted to be able to combine his personal recollection of the area with the categorical information he had from his photogrammetry. “I didn’t want to make a piece of science,” he said. “It’s historic, it’s a barometer of time, it’s a measurement of this landscape in time. But it’s more than that. It’s so slow. I wanted to juxtapose that with a murmuration of birds, which is so fleeting. That was an ‘a ha’ moment for me. In the Arctic there are these strange topographical shifts, the tussocks, the bog. You can really only see these differences from a bird’s perspective.”

And so Murmur: Arctic Realities began to take shape in his mind, and in his studio. He assembled a team of 20 who worked straight through for five months to make a deadline for the debut exhibition at Mystic Seaport. It involves carved Alaskan yellow cedar, fabricated steel, computer assisted design, computer programming to make it move, hydraulics and pneumatics and an air compressor to give it life.

And he knew it would be big, although the sculpted pingo is about half the size of the real life pingo, which rose about 30 feet from the tundra floor and was about 100 feet long. “I want people to feel something viscerally,” he said of his broader work, and “Murmur” specifically. “When it’s bigger, it’s on its own terms. It’s not a metaphor. This piece helps us see history as something alive, evolving, and current. And it’s messy. It’s not one thing. It’s layering, it’s multiple vantages, it’s two things at once.”

The team he assembled to move the piece from concept to reality was just as layered. “There are so many threads of expertise in this project,” Grade said. “I’m there sitting with the structural engineer and the metal fabrication people, talking about the design and how it can all work together. The biggest distinction between my work now and my work when I started is that 20 years ago I worked in complete solitude and now I am surrounded by a social dynamic. Now I would say it’s half solitary and half a total social immersion. But the key to me is, all these people and all these special skills, they bring their ideas and their input and it makes the project that much richer.”