August 2011
7 posts
1 tag
Heywood Manuscript
The Heywood Manuscript Letters have been uploaded to the website.
1 tag
Heywood Manuscript
I’ve completed the indexing and when I get links updated on existing pages, should be uploading everything later today. I’ll post when I’ve done it.
Of course I’ve put off updating the databases for who people are and where places are, but I’m behind on that already - it’s on my to do list.
Heywood Manuscript
I have worked my way through letter No. 76. No. 77 is from Peter Heywood to family friend Dr. Patrick Scott, written on September 20, 1792. The court-martial ended on the 18th, and Peter is a bit put out. An excerpt:
“& all my Hope of worldly joy is fled far from me! On Tuesday Morning the 18th Inst. the dreadful sentence of Death was pronounced upon me! — to which (being the just...
1 tag
Heywood Manuscript
I’ve done the housekeeping & indexed the first 23 files. It has not gone easily. The housekeeping turned out to be a breeze. Then I was in the middle of indexing the 8th file when I noticed that I wasn’t getting the output that I needed. Fortunately, when I index, I don’t make entries to the various Find Stuff databases directly, but accumulate sql statements for each one in...
1 tag
Heywood Manuscript
Well, it did take a while, a month, but the transcribing is done; there are 125 content files, plus the index page.
Unlike the Providence material, these pages have to be indexed and have the unfamiliar word popups added.
There’s some housekeeping that has to be done before I can do that. After that’s done I have to add the pages to the ‘What’s Here” page and the...
1 tag
Heywood Manuscript
90 Letters completed, the last dated October 7, 1792, from Peter Heywood to his sister Nessy. The court-martial has come and gone, but the pardons have not been handed down and Peter and the other mutineers are still imprisoned aboard the Hector.
Nessy and Peter’s elder brother James have come down to London from the Isle of Man in anticipation of seeing him, but Peter has told Nessy in no...
1 tag
Heywood Manuscript
51 Letters completed. Well, I wasn’t going to include the poems, but I’ve decided that when they are referenced in a letter, I should include them with that letter. The compiler of the manuscript, Mary Heywood, has helpfully included a page number when a poem is mentioned. The page numbers are not easy to read as they are small and in the top corner of the page, which gets the most...
July 2011
3 posts
1 tag
Heywood Manuscript
27 letters completed. I’ve discovered that one of the letters I have on the site, from Peter Heywood to his mother from Batavia, is incomplete. I suspect others will be as well, as my source for them was a book about Nessy Heywood by A. W. Moore and the author apparently edited them before including them.
1 tag
Heywood Manuscript
I’ve finished the index page, added a little who’s who for the writers and recipients, made some adjustments to my editing program, and started transcribing the letters. There are actually 118, two are numbered 34.
1 tag
Heywood Manuscript
I’ve put the ebooks on hold as I’ve received jpeg images of the Heywood Manuscript from the State Library of New South Wales. The manuscript is a collection of poetry and letters of the Heywood family. The letters are primarily concerned with Peter Heywood and his appearance at the court-martial of the Bounty mutineers. I already have a few of these letters on the site, but this...
June 2011
2 posts
1 tag
eBooks
Finally uploaded Diana Belcher’s ‘The Mutineers of the Bounty and their Descendants in Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands.’ In the process of converting the book from epub to mobi, I discovered how to use Mobipocket Creator to convert the book. I ran the epub file through Calibre, but that program has a tendency to insert page breaks where they’re not wanted. The program makes...
eBooks
I’ve been at work on ‘The Bounty Mutineers and their Descendants on Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands’ by Diana Jolliffe Belcher. It already exists in ebook format, but it was done by ‘machine’ and is so rife with errors that I’m redoing it…
I ran across the following sentence in a letter by Mrs Sarah Selwyn, wife of Bishop Selwyn of New Zealand, visiting at...
1 tag
eBooks
Added The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Causes and Consequences, by Sir John Barrow, to the library.
May 2011
10 posts
1 tag
eBooks
Added Voyage of the Matavy Tender by Renouard, and Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora to my little library. The latter includes Captain Edwards’ Instructions and Reports, and Surgeon Hamilton’s A Voyage Round the World, plus an Introduction and footnotes by Basil Thomson which isn’t on the website. The latter was invaluable to me in figuring out the Pandora’s route and which islands...
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eBooks
Uploaded Court-martial of the Bounty Mutineers.
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eBooks
Put all the footnotes at the end of the book so they don’t need to be skipped over.
Uploaded Peter Heywood’s Royal Naval Biography.
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eBooks
I found the solution to the cover problem in Adobe Digital Editions. The ‘rock-solid’ template files I’ve built my ebook program from references two stylesheets on all the pages, which is normal practice. But Adobe has no standard way to handle covers and I discovered on some blog that the stylesheets should not be referenced on the cover page. Took out the references and the...
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eBooks
I’ve finished Glossary and Nautical Dictionary in both epub and mobi, but there are problems. As mentioned before, mobi doesn’t know how to position small images, but I’ve also discovered it doesn’t handle tables very well either. This is a small table rendered in epub on Sony’s PC software:
And here is the same table rendered in mobi on Kindle for PC:
Again,...
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eBooks
Uploaded James Morrison’s Journal and put a link to the page on the Home page.
The epub versions have it over mobi. The problem is that mobi (Kindle) doesn’t know how to float an image right or left and flow the text around it. A glaring oversight on someone’s part it seems to me, as this is very common in books. Morrison’s Journal has all these little images showing where...
“Passing Morea or Eymayo in the Night—evry body seemd In high spirits and began...”
– James Morrison, Boatswain’s Mate of the Bounty, on their departure from Tahiti.
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eBooks
I finished Voyage to the South Sea and uploaded it and the mobi version I had built already to the site.
Then I built Minutes and Appendix by Barney and Edward Christian, with footnotes no less, using my program, ran it through Calibre to create the mobi version, and uploaded both to the site. The only hiccup was the cover image. Adobe Digital Editions has a flaw which mispositions it. I added...
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eBooks
This morning I actually produced an epub book that validates, sort of. The validator complains about missing references, but that’s because I haven’t added those files yet. I’m validating as I go, to catch and correct errors, both in the book and the program.
The Fateful Voyage website is in html 4.01 transitional and epub uses xhtml 1.1 strict. So, aside from pruning out...
April 2011
5 posts
1 tag
Microsoft %$#!(*
I use the Microsoft NET framework for programming. An epub book is all XML and NET has extensive classes for dealing with XML. Of course, as always with MS, you have to always be on the lookout for gotcha’s. Case in point.
<books xmlns=”Whoopdeedoo.html” />
That is a node, or element, in XML, books is the name and Whoopdeedoo.html is the namespace.
The specification...
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eBooks
Well, I’ve been at work and have the rudiments of an interface built. All it has at present is an html editor that I can find text in and that does syntax highlighting, something I’m so used to I can’t do without it.
On the other hand I’ve created a bunch of classes and can create the bare bones of an epub book and zip it up. (An epub file is really just a zip file. You...
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eBooks
As it usually happens, as soon as I jumped into the morass of ebook creation, I discovered a solution to the presentation of large documents in a more readable manner, from, where else, Google, in the from of the Google Viewer from Google Docs. All it requires is converting the web pages of a document, Mutiny on the Bounty for example, to a .doc file, uploading that to the website, put some code...
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eBooks
To create the Mutiny on the Bounty books I first stripped the unnecessary stuff out of the original web pages (using methods added to my Fateful editor) added the resulting files to Mobipocket Creator along with a cover image, did the other things the docs said to do and clicked Build. (Actually, I did this several times till I got it right.) Then I loaded that file into Calibre, an ebook...
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eBooks
I’ve known right from the beginning that only the intrepid are going to read some of the longer documents on Fateful. Reading long docs on a browser is no fun. So, I’ve toyed with the idea of making some of them available as ebooks.
What I’ve discovered is that ebook creation software largely sucks. Still, I thought the same thing about website creation software when I started...
March 2011
8 posts
1 tag
Providence uploaded
I’ve just uploaded the Providence material to Fateful Voyage.
3 tags
Tobin narrative
The Tobin narrative is now completed, which completes the transcription of all the Providence documents.
There is a good deal of checking and housekeeping work I have to do before uploading the material to Fateful, but I’ll try to get that done this weekend.
2 tags
Tobin narrative
280 of ~308 source pages of the Tobin narrative completed, completing chapter eight, which takes them through Torres Straits, about to enter the Indian Ocean.
The ninth, and final, chapter opens with their arrival at Coupang, in Timor, and ends with the ship being paid off in England; covering about as much ocean in the final chapter as was covered in the first eight.
2 tags
Tobin narrative
242 of ~308 source pages of the Tobin narrative completed, completing chapter seven, which consists of further observations on Tahiti and its people.
Tobin narrative
210 of ~308 source pages of the Tobin narrative completed, completing chapter six which takes them through their departure from Tahiti on July 19, 1792.
2 tags
Tobin narrative
173 of ~308 source pages of the Tobin narrative completed, completing chapter five which covers various observations at Tahiti through May 20, 1792.
2 tags
Tobin narrative
144 of ~308 source pages of the Tobin narrative completed, which completes the fourth chapter, covering the arrival at Tahiti and various observances there up to April 25, 1792.
2 tags
Tobin narrative
112 of ~308 source pages of the Tobin narrative completed. That completes the third chapter, which has taken them from the Cape of Good Hope, through their stop at Adventure Bay, Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), to the discovery of Tematugi Atoll some 550 nautical miles SSE of Tahiti.
February 2011
11 posts
2 tags
Tobin narrative
85 of ~308 source pages of the Tobin narrative completed. That completes the second chapter, which covers their stay at the Cape of Good Hope.
2 tags
Tobin narrative
47 of ~308 source pages of the Tobin narrative completed. This completes the first of nine chapters, which ends with their arrival at the Cape of Good Hope.
The narrative is written in the form of a letter to a friend in 1797, some four years after the voyage of the Providence. He complains that, even at this late date, the Admiralty will not release his log, confiscated at the end of the...
3 tags
Flinders log
274 pages of the Flinders log completed, through February 10, 1793, where it ends.
Next up, George Tobin’s narrative. I have been doing these logbooks so long that doing a narrative will require switching several gears.
The Tobin narrative was not published until 2007, when it was published by the Chatham Publishing as Captain Bligh’s Second Chance, by Roy E. Schreiber.
However,...
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Flinders log
261 pages of the Flinders log completed, through January 24, 1793. The ships have moored in Jamestown harbor, St. Vincent’s.
(The last entry in this log is February 10, 1793.)
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Flinders log
234 pages of the Flinders log completed, through December 28, 1792. They have made St. Helena and sailed thence on December 27.
2 tags
HTML Entities
HTML entities, for those who don’t know, are codes used for special characters on web pages. & is the entity for &, " for ” (that’s supposed to be a straight quote, but gd tumblr insists on turning it into an curly quote), etc. Not all have names but there are decimal and hex forms for all of them. For & the decimal would be & and the hex...
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Flinders log
215 pages of the Flinders log completed, through December 7, 1792. They have rounded the Cape of Good Hope and are headed NNE towards the Island of St. Helena, about 1,730 nautical miles distant.
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Flinders log
198 pages of the Flinders log completed, through November 20, 1792. They are about 1200 nautical miles East by North of the Cape of Good Hope and about 500 nautical miles South by West of the southern tip of Madagascar.
This is the end of the second of three pdf files containing these images, and the physical end of one of Flinders’s logbooks. The third pdf file covers 82 days, from...
1 tag
Flinders log
157 pages of the Flinders log completed, through October 10, 1792. On this day they set sail from Coupang (Kupang) in Timor.
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Flinders log
140 pages of the Flinders log completed, through September 19, 1792.
“At Noon Fresh Breezes and fair Weather but still hazey. No Land or Danger in sight, a fine prospect before us in great Hopes we have got thro’ most of the Difficulties in passing these Streights”
Next stop, Coupang (Kupang) in Timor.
1 tag
Flinders log
122 pages of the Flinders log completed, through September 1, 1792. On this day they sighted the first shoals in Endeavor (Torres) Straits.
January 2011
7 posts
1 tag
Flinders log
78 pages of the Flinders log completed, through July 19, 1792, on which day the Providence and Assistant unmoored, the Tahitian dignitaries were sent ashore, and the ships set sail from Tahiti.
1 tag
Flinders log
47 pages of the Flinders log completed, February 24 through April 9, 1792, on which date they arrived at Matavai Bay, Tahiti.
Midshipman Matthew Flinders kept a neater log and had a more legible hand than Third Lieutenant George Tobin, for which I am grateful.
1 tag
Tobin log
570 pages of the Tobin log completed, through August 2, 1793, the end of the log.
The last entry reads, “Delivered my Log to Captain Bligh by his Directions”
Next up, the log of Midshipman Matthew Flinders which is incomplete. It begins on February 24, 1792, two days after they leave Adventure Bay, Tasmania, outward bound. The last entry is for February 10, 1793, when they are moored...
1 tag
Tobin log
521 pages of the Tobin log completed, through June 14, 1793. Weather prevented their sailing this day, but they will get away on the 15th:
H M Ship Providence from Bluefields Jamaica towards England – 1793
They spent over two months at Port Royal, Jamaica, and then sailed up the coast to Bluefields. The Assistant was away on some business and Bligh, tired of waiting, sailed without her. But on...