This is an incomplete logbook for the whaling ship Thorn, with daily entries spanning Nov. 15, 1825, and April 16, 1826. It is unknown who kept this particular log for this voyage. The names that appear written in different ink on its first and last pages appear to be added later, as some sort of unrelated notes or doodles.
One of the names included reads "Captain Edward D. Topping (1799-1873), Moriches, N.Y.," but there is no evidence that he ever sailed with the Thorn, and the other names appear to have been added after the initial account was written, based on the layering of handwriting.
According to Judith Lund's "American Offshore Whaling Voyages, 1667-1927," published in 2010, the Thorn sailed as a whaling vessel from 1821 to 1840, making at least 18 voyages from Sag Harbor. George Howell (1793-1873) captained this particular trip, sailing to Brazil and the South Atlantic Ocean from 1825 into 1826. This was the first of two voyages Howell captained on the Thorn.
On July 15, 1826, The Sag Harbor Corrector reported that Howell married Ursula P. Mulford (1802-1886) in Sag Harbor. He must have departed shortly after the wedding for his second voyage as the captain of the Thorn, which lasted from July 1826 to May 1827. Ms. Lund does not have any record of how well the ship did on the first voyage with Howell as the captain, but the second one yielded 1,900 pounds of whale oil, which is relatively successful compared to other whaling expeditions of the same time period.
Howell captained four additional whaling voyages on the Cadmus. After 1834, he transitioned to working as a merchant in East Hampton. As Sag Harbor's whaling industry declined, by 1870 he moved to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where he died three years later at the residence of his daughter Elizabeth and his son-in-law Julius S. Hitchcock (1823-1888).
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Christina Pellegrino is a librarian and archivist in the Long Island Collection.
