A vast collection of handwritten, unique and unpublished logbooks, recorded between 1729 and 1961, forms the foundation of PEM’s collections. The Phillips Library is currently embarking on a long-awaited project to digitize its collection of over 3000 ships’ logbooks and make them available through the Internet Archive for greater public access. This project opens up the wealth of stories and data contained in the logs to a wider audience of researchers, both scientific and historical.

The East India Marine Society, PEM’s grandfather institution, required its members to keep records of their voyages and deposit them with the society, a collection which has been continuously added to over the centuries. The logbooks provide a surprisingly wide-ranging scope of information. While they primarily document the daily latitude and longitude, weather, and sailing conditions for their voyages, log keepers also included descriptions of foreign ports, trade, crew insubordination and other interpersonal drama, sightings of wildlife and astronomical events, and sometimes references to now-famous historical events as news. Some logs contain sketches, paintings, poetry, and sea songs, among other saved items pressed between the pages.

Logbooks were typically laid out as daily reports entered into a standardized table, hand-drawn in early books and pre-printed in some later logs, although some books read more narratively like daily journals or diaries. The table versions include columns titled “H,” “K,” “HK,” “F,” “Courses,” “Winds,” and “Remarks.”

George Schwartz, Associate Curator, explains, “These letters were the sailors' encoded way of recording vital information about the nature of their voyage. The time (H for hour), ship speed (K for knots), depth of water (F for fathoms) could all be read down the page to give a summary of each day's passage.”

This daily record of water and weather, including remarks on the sighting of sea life such as birds, sharks, and whales, provides scientists with an invaluable historical data set for climate and environmental studies. An example of such a study which includes some of PEM’s logbooks is an ongoing project at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in collaboration with the National Archives and a citizen-scientist organization called Old Weather, to digitize and transcribe Arctic whaling vessel logbooks for climate study.

Logbook remarks also frequently include references to illness and descriptions of medical treatment, such as comments about scurvy in the 1784-1786 logbook of the Hind (Log 9) or the description of a smallpox outbreak and the inoculation of the crew, including the captain, found in the 1777 logbook of the brigantine Oliver Cromwell (Log 891).

Readers can also find descriptions of bad behavior and criminal punishments onboard ships at sea or in ports. The log keeper of the ship Hercules wrote about the punishment of sailors for drunkenness and disorderly conduct, a phrase which turns up regularly in logbook accounts of the lives of sailors, as well as about the dismissal of men for being absent from the ship in port for too many days. He also recounts the “confinement” of a sailor named Peter Jones for “disturbances, threats, and thefts,” adding that Jones threatened to commit murder on board after being released from his imprisonment, yet was then returned to his job six days later after promises of good behavior in the future. (Log 1632, pages 78-79, February 5th & 11th, 1794.)