[WHALING] – MANUSCRIPT LOG of Captain Peleg Cornell (1805-1876), aboard the brig Leonidas, the bark Orray Taft, and the bark Ocean, Westport, New Bedford, Sandwich and at sea [Atlantic], December 1851 – June 1859, 338 drawings of whales, ships and other marine subjects including lighthouses and turtles, three volumes bound in one, 294 written pages, folio (350 x 202mm), contemporary half calf.
[WHALING] – MANUSCRIPT LOG of Captain Peleg Cornell (1805-1876), aboard the brig Leonidas, the bark Orray Taft, and the bark Ocean, Westport, New Bedford, Sandwich and at sea [Atlantic], December 1851 – June 1859, 338 drawings of whales, ships and other marine subjects including lighthouses and turtles, three volumes bound in one, 294 written pages, folio (350 x 202mm), contemporary half calf.

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[WHALING] – MANUSCRIPT LOG of Captain Peleg Cornell (1805-1876), aboard the brig Leonidas, the bark Orray Taft, and the bark Ocean, Westport, New Bedford, Sandwich and at sea [Atlantic], December 1851 – June 1859, 338 drawings of whales, ships and other marine subjects including lighthouses and turtles, three volumes bound in one, 294 written pages, folio (350 x 202mm), contemporary half calf.

The logs kept by Captain Peleg Cornell, active as a whaling master from 1831-59, are particularly distinctive for his idiosyncratic illustration of life aboard a whaling vessel, which includes turtles, porpoises, anchorages, and lighthouses, alongside whales and ships spoken with. At the helm of three different vessels, Cornell hunts in the Atlantic with considerable success, returning with 431, 540 and 408 barrels of sperm oil in the holds of the Leonidas, Orray Taft, and Ocean respectively, after a series of tense chases and captures that he carefully records. Not included in his log for the Ocean, however, is the mutiny that Alexander Starbuck records for this voyage, noting ‘Returned once, the crew having mutinied’. Presumably, Cornell’s log begins after the Ocean had set out afresh from Sandwich in 1857. Starbuck 484, 516, 552.

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