Collections & Research

Preserving the past and ensuring a bright future.

The Collections Research Center (CRC) is the nation’s leading maritime research facility. Located across the street from Mystic Seaport, the former J. Rossie Velvet Company houses the Museum’s collections and offers safe and easy access to maritime researchers and scholars. Artifacts at the CRC include more than two million examples of maritime art, artifacts, tools, buildings, imprints and other documents, photographs, 1,000 ships registers, 600 audiotaped oral history interviews, 200 videotaped interviews, and 1.5 million feet of historic and contemporary maritime-related footage. The CRC opened in the fall of 2002 and was designed to exceed national museum standards for conservation, preservation, accessibility, and safety. The research center provides cutting-edge temperature and humidity control for the Museum’s artifacts and also boasts audio/video production suites and extensive photo processing and digitizing labs.

News from the Collections

Christmas in the Galapagos

November 28, 2018

The G.W Blunt White Library at Mystic Seaport Museum has a large collection of papers (and other materials as well) of the late Captain Irving Johnson and his wife Electa (Exy). Interested family members and friends have donated some funds to help the Library scan some of the materials and make them available to researchers … Continue reading "Christmas in the Galapagos"

During their first round-the-world voyage from 1933-35 there was great interest in their adventure and the Johnsons garnered a lot of press, and not just locally in Massachusetts, as you can see from the following letter to Irving written on the letterhead of the Waldorf Astoria in November of 1933. The author is none other than Lowell Thomas, the famous radio commentator from the period. Irving had become quite a celebrity and news of his proposed 2-year global undertaking brought applications from around the country. With a (mostly) young crew of voyagers who paid to make the trip, the schooner YANKEE left Gloucester in 1933 and spent that Christmas in the Galapagos Islands.

Letter from Lowell Thomas to Irving Johnson.

Irving had grown up in the small town of Hadley, Massachusetts and during that school year of 1933 a number of grade-school students from the Hadley school (seen below) penned letters to Irving and Exy to wish them a merry Christmas and ask of news of faraway places.

Courtesy of the Hadley Historical Society

The letter below from young Marion Shipman was typical of the correspondence from the young scholars but is especially touching in that she was worried that the YANKEE crew members might not have had a visit from Santa. The Johnsons and crew enjoyed their Christmas and went on to finish the cruise in 1935 and eventually embark on another six world cruises over the following decades.

Letter from Marion Shipman to the Johnsons.

We expect to have plenty more material online soon, but you can see the first scrapbook here, the second here and enjoy a story map of one of their later voyages here.

ROANN in Graphite and Watercolor

September 28, 2018

The Museum recently acquired a painting by Arthur Moniz of the dragger ROANN.

Seen below is a detail from a recent gift from the family of marine artist Arthur Moniz. The artist passed away this year and his widow kindly offered the painting of the Mystic Seaport Museum fishing vessel ROANN to us as a remembrance of her husband. Moniz used a combination of graphite drawings for detail with watercolor washes to give his paintings a unique texture.

Detail of ROANN, painted by Arthur Moniz.

Moniz worked with Museum volunteers in the ROANN program to get proper details of the ROANN for his painting. The ROANN is an eastern rig dragger with her pilothouse aft and working area amidships as opposed to western rig draggers with the pilothouse forward.

ROANN was designed by Albert Condon and built at the yard of Newbert and Wallace in Thomaston, Maine in 1947. ROANN is one of a number of fishing vessels in the Museum’s stable with the progression beginning with the EMMA C. BERRY, a Noank smack built in 1866, to the L.A. DUNTON, a Gloucester fishing schooner built in 1921, on to the FLORENCE, a western rig dragger built in 1926 and finally culminating with ROANN.

Arthur Moniz was a well-known artist in New Bedford and created numerous works on the subject of fisheries and whaling. We are glad to welcome this beautiful little representation of ROANN into the permanent collection of Mystic Seaport Museum.

Blockade-running Document Added to Mystic Seaport Collection

July 30, 2018

During the Civil War, a number of Confederate companies were formed for the sole purpose of running goods through the blockade. As with any other company, stock was sold to support the ventures. Here is one such stock.

The stock certificate seen here was from the Palmetto Exporting and Importing Company of Charleston, South Carolina. Why on earth would Mystic Seaport Museum be interested in such a certificate? The initial reason that caught our eye was the name of the person, W.R. Mallory, who paid two thousand dollars for two shares in the company. The Mallory family has been very involved with Mystic Seaport Museum since the 1930’s and at least four family members have held positions on the Museum’s Board of Directors. However, the more interesting aspect of the stock certificate in a maritime sense is that it represents shares in a company that ran blockade runners for the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Stock Certificate for the Palmetto Exporting and Importing Company

William Ravenel, listed as the President of the company in the lower right-hand corner, also held shares and board positions in at least one other blockade running company, the Importing and Exporting Company of South Carolina. It was one of the Palmetto Company’s boats, however, that encouraged blockade runners to once again use Charleston as a port of entry after most had abandoned it for Wilmington, North Carolina after the blockade of Charleston. While many blockade running boas were sleek, fast English-built steamers, Ravenel bought an old Charleston dredge, the GENERAL MOULTRIE, and in 1864 managed to send her through the blockade to Nassau in the Bahamas with a profitable cargo of cotton. As a matter-of-fact, the Palmetto Exporting and Importing Company (and the Exporting and Importing Company of South Carolina as well) was one of the few such companies to turn a profit. While Palmetto did not lose any money for its investors, the EICSC declared dividends totaling nearly 200 British Pounds and 9,000 Confederate dollars to investors by the time the company liquidated all its assets after the war.

Palmetto ran at least one other steamer through the blockade the same year as the GENERAL MOULTRIE. The GENRAL CLINCH made the same run to Nassau at the end of the year and both boats stayed there for the remainder of the war.

Much of the information here is taken from Stephen R. Wise’s Lifeline of the Confederacy: Blockade Running during the Civil War (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989).

Papers pertaining to William Ravenel and his business interests are held at the South Carolina Historical Society.