By Doug Fraser, The Cape Cod Times

NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — Cobblestone streets lead to the New Bedford Whaling Museumwhere Abigail Field is seated in the library, isolated from the heat and humidity, the blazing sun reduced to a creamy vanilla by the drawn blinds.

At 21, Field, a history major at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, is firmly in the here and now.
But, for four days a week, she travels with the 18th- and 19th-century whaling vessels that made the ports of New Bedford and Nantucket among the richest in the world. The harbors were filled with vessels headed to exotic locations and the streets lined with the large homes of the dot-com millionaires of their day, whaling captains and ship owners.

As she navigates the ship’s log, a forefinger hovering over a particularly intractable scrawl or inscrutable nautical term, Field is in pursuit of certain details like ship location, cloud cover, wind speed and direction, wrung from the ancient mariners’ handwriting.

Library of Congress

She will add to the database that researchers like UMass Dartmouth history professor Timothy Walker and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Physical Oceanographer Caroline Ummenhofer hope will give context to climate models for some of the most data-poor regions of the world.

“We pitched to (Ummenhofer) that there were large caches of climate knowledge (in the journals),” Walker said.

Log books were a required record of the voyage, turned over to the ship’s owners at trip’s end. The log keeper was required to make a daily entry at noon, but sometimes two to three times a day, that included weather observations and the ship’s position.
Log books were used to determine pay, keep a check on the behavior of officers and crew, and were sometimes submitted as evidence in a trial. The logbook was one of the vital items mariners made sure to take when abandoning a sinking ship.

Walker and Ummenhofer hope to eventually extract data from over 5,500 whaling logbooks and journals, including almost 2,400 in the New Bedford museum.
“We are building up a mosaic of data points,” Walker said. “With that we can do fairly sophisticated climate modeling.”

It’s not the first time that mundane record keeping has been mined for science.
Ship passenger lists are routinely used in genealogical work, and the “Old Weather” online project employs citizen-scientists in reading digitized reproductions of whaling logs and Navy and Coast Guard ship logs to produce a database of Arctic weather in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Unlike merchant ships and naval vessels, which generally traveled known trade routes, the old whaling vessels went wherever whales could be found, including some of the remotest and least visited parts of the planet, even today.