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

The Map and Chart Collection at Mystic Seaport

July 28, 2017

Two grants from private foundations helped to arrange, describe and create a database of the chart and map collection at Mystic Seaport, a heretofore underutilized collection.

Beginning in the early 1930’s, Mystic Seaport began collecting, among many other things, charts and maps of the entire world. Many of the charts we received came as parts of larger gifts that included logbooks and business papers of ships from ports up and down the east coast. Many of the charts were used aboard ship and show the wear and tear of numerous sea journeys as well as the penciled tracks that the ships folowed on their trek around the globe. One such chart in our possession belonged to Mystic captain Joseph Warren Holmes, someone who spent almost his entire life at sea. Indeed, Holmes holds the record for any sailing ship captain going around Cape Horn on journeys between the east and west coast. 84 times around the Horn.

Captain Joseph Warren Holmes of Mystic, CT. Photograph accession number 1937.63

And we have the charts he used on many of those trips. One such chart shows the penciled markings of numerous trips around the Horn with many separate lines converging at the tip of South America to form one thick, black line that looks as if the good captain was using fat-tipped magic markers instead of a pencil.

Some incredible people represented in our collection of well over 10,000 charts and maps include Irving and Exy Johnson, the husband and wife team that began taking young adults around the world on adventures in the 1930’s. We have hundreds of the charts used by the Johnsons as they made there way to Tahiti, New Guinea and other exotic areas both before and after World War II.

Other charts express the American spirit of enterprise and exploration. The whalers of the early to mid-1800’s who ventured into the unknown in search of their quarry whose oil would light the lamps of the world. Below is an advertising label that appears on one of those charts used by a whaler out of New Bedford.

Most of the charts and maps date from the 19th and 20th centuries, but there are a number that predate the period as well, such as the collection of charts from 1671 called the English Pilot and published by John Seller. As the world experiences rising sea levels, accurate charts such as the Atlantic Neptune, a series of detailed charts of the American coastline published by the British Admiralty in the late 18th century, can be used to compare the current coastal outlines to those of centuries past.

Two grants over the last three years from the Acorn Foundation and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, gave us the resources to hire an expert to both assess and catalog the collection to make it more readily accessible to our research community.

Title page from The English Pilot, 1671.

The chart and map collection is one of many truly extraordinary collections at Mystic Seaport. You can see the description of the entire collection and the list of charts here.

21st Century Drone Meets a 19th Century Clock

June 26, 2017

Museum staff use a drone to understand conservation issues on a 19th- century tower clock.

Back in February, volunteer Jim Anderson was interviewed for an article about the work he and another volunteer, Bill Michael, were doing on the Museum’s 1857 tower clock located in the Greenmanville Church. You can see that article here. In it, Jim talks of the challenges the two men faced in repairing the mechanism that runs the four separate clock faces, one for each face of the tower. While Jim and Bill have worked wonders with the clock, they still face a few challenges to keep the clock running regularly.

One issue that raises its ugly head on occasion is the fact that the clock stops before the regular rewinding because of a problem with hands on one of the faces binding. Because the problem seems to be on the exterior of the building, and the building is quite high, the two decided to contact our Film and Video crew to help troubleshoot the matter. That’s right, film and video. You see, Dan Harvison and Brandon Morgan, the creative team that shoots and produces much of the Museum’s programs, have been trained in operating a drone for their work. In order to get some good shots of the clock hands to see how they are attached on the outside of the building, Dan was asked to pilot the mosquito-sounding drone close enough to the tower to try and get appropriately detailed images to analyze the problem. Once the issues are identified, someone will still need to get in a lift and take their tools up to do the job, but our hope is that we will only need to employ the bucket lift once, rather than twice. See some images of the shooting below.

Dan Harvison operates the drone under the watchful eyes of Anderson, Michael and O’Pecko.

The drone moves in for a close-up of the east clock face.

A Packet Ship’s Demise and a Book’s Salvation

May 26, 2017

When the Packet Ship Leeds wrecked in 1828, Mate George Kurtz rescued one of the ship's library books.

In 1828 George Kurtz left New York City as the mate of the ship LEEDS on its last voyage as an American packet ship. Kurtz, born in Philadelphia in 1803, had received his seaman’s protection certificate in the port of New York in January of the previous year. The LEEDS had been a Liverpool packet from 1823 until 1828, beginning her career about 5 years after the commencement of the American packet trade. Packet ships were vessels that sailed on a regular schedule, whether they had a full cargo hold and passenger contingent or not.

According to Robert G. Albion in his book Square Riggers on Schedule about the packet trade, the LEEDS lasted only 6 years in packet service after some unusual happenings over the years. Early in her career she was grounded in the Mersey River at Liverpool and only survived because she was so strongly built. Another episode had her Captain discharged for trying to smuggle contraband in a bale of hay. Her final indignity was suffered on Christmas Eve of 1828, soon after she became a London packet. She ran aground in the Thames and was “bilged” according to the Shipping and Commercial List and New York Price Current for February 14, 1829. The March 11 issue of the same paper noted that Captain Sprague had to sell her after the vessel was condemned on January 21st.

The image above is taken from the inside cover of a book from the LEEDS’ ship’s library. The penmanship belongs to our friend George Kurtz who must have rescued the book the day before the vessel was condemned. There are two unusual things about the image. The first being Kurtz’ use of the word “police” after the phrase “lost on the Thames.” The second is the unusual ship’s stamp on the right hand side. This coat of arms, if you will, of the ship says “Packet Ship Leeds New York and L’pool.” In addition to the triumvirate of owls shown, the shield seems to bear the image of some form of livestock (cow or pig) being carried by a bird of some sort.

Captain Benjamin Sprague of Bridgewater, Massachusetts, had been a packet ship captain for about 5 years prior to his losing the LEEDS. He does not appear as a packet captain afterwards. George Kurtz, however, appears at least once as a captain in 1839 aboard the ship OHIO trading between New York and New Orleans. The book that was saved by George is The Percy Anecdotes, by Sholto and Reuben Percy, published in New York in 1822.

The name at the top of the page, James Brown Bach, is a bit of a mystery. He may have been another crew member, but that is unknown at this point. However, it seems likely that he is the James Brown Bach who was born in 1808 and died when he was only 33 years old. His name appears on a passenger list returning to New York from London in October of 1829. His son, James Brown Bach, would go on to be a pioneer in American baseball in forming the Niagara Club in Buffalo, New York, in the mid-1850’s according to the book Base Ball Pioneers, 1850-1870.

The Percy Anecdotes was brought to the G.W. Blunt White Library by one of our many dedicated volunteers.