J. Lunze

Announcing Publication of George Washington’s Barbados Diary
By Katie Blizzard, Communications Specialist
July 30, 2018

Photo of the edition authors
Editors Alicia K. Anderson (left) and Lynn A. Price (right) display a copy of George Washington’s Barbados Diary, 1751-1752.

This July, George Washington’s Barbados Diary, 1751–52, edited by The Washington Papers’ Alicia K. Anderson and Lynn A. Price, was published by the University of Virginia Press. As a young man, George Washington kept a journal and ship’s log during his only trip abroad, to the Caribbean island of Barbados. He accompanied his older half brother Lawrence, who suffered from poor health, in the hopes the Barbados might cure him. The Barbados Diary is the first complete edition of the obscure text in 126 years and concludes more than two years of work conducted by Anderson and Price. Historian and archeologist Philip Levy has called the Barbados Diary an “authoritative edition” that is “masterfully edited and annotated.”

The diary’s severely mutilated condition and lack of detail had discouraged previous scholars from most attempts at editing beyond a sparse transcription or photo reproduction. But, as Anderson explained, “Technological advances in preservation and imaging have given us the clearest picture of the diary to date. By making sense of the fragments and providing explanatory essays about the contents, we were able to bring out the meaning of the text and put it in clear view for all to see.”


Cover of George Washington's Barbados diaryResearching and writing the edition’s supplementary essays was much easier said than done. “Young George Washington frequently referred to individuals by their last names, often spelling the names phonetically,” Price described. “Researching people who were alive more than 250 years ago by their (possibly misspelled) last names only—in Barbadian, English, and American archives—was challenging detective work.”

Anderson and Price thus had to be creative and persistent in their efforts to uncover answers. Anderson, for example, used Washington’s financial records to trace his movements leading up to the voyage. She also “dusted off her high-school trigonometry” to determine the information missing from the daily coordinates of latitude and longitude maintained by Washington in his ship’s log.

When all else failed, the editors sought guidance from other scholars. Multiple consultations with maritime archaeologist Jason Lunze helped them “get a sense of the conditions aboard a mid-18th-century sailing vessel.” Anderson recalled finding one encounter to be particularly illuminating: “I’ll never forget the day we went out into our office parking lot and, using a long rope, traced out the circumference of a brigantine. What a compact vessel! Not only was deck space limited for the over-five-week voyage to Barbados, but beneath deck, the floors might be no more than four feet tall—a real strain on a 6’2” George Washington!”

Editors enjoy looking at the Barbados diary
Editors Alicia K. Anderson (right) and Kathryn I. Gehred (left), flip through a copy of the volume.

As a result of all their hard work, Anderson and Price uncovered new details about the voyage and challenged previously held assumptions. They discovered that George and Lawrence began their journey well before the first date recorded in the diary: Sept. 28, 1751. The Washington brothers would have been halfway to Bermuda by that time. Through the use of naval shipping lists, they also found that the owner of the brigantine Success was Lawrence’s brother-in-law. Though former Washington Papers editors had theorized already that the brothers sailed on the Success, Anderson and Price’s revelation lent the assertion even more credibility.

With the edition now accessible to modern readers, both editors hope the public can use the volume to learn more about a young George Washington and his world as well as about the practice of documentary editing. “I’m excited that a relatively obscure part of George Washington’s life will be in the spotlight,” Price added. “We worked on this project for so long. It is the first volume for the new Washington Family Papers project, and to see it come to fruition in a beautiful book, accessible to a wide audience, is a satisfying conclusion.”

Ignorance is undeniably ever present in the act of knowledge generation and the published continuity of academic traditions. Ignorance and fact are woven together in cultural historical narratives to provide readers with societal " truths, " which are comforting. Most modern anthropologists would recognize that ignorance is a significant aspect of any academic publication in two ways. First, can we really quantify everything we don't know which applies to the narrative our published work is supposed to entail versus the sources we have cited? Second, how does our preference for our own societal norms via selecting comfortable accepted secondary sources contradict the generation of knowledge by framing our narrative in a manner inconsistent with the reality the primary historical data presents us with? In other words, how can we gain awareness of our own subjectivity and use that awareness to create a more objective narrative? In the field of maritime archaeology for the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, no one vessel type has been subject to the generation and continuity of published ignorance more than that of the logboat. To understand this, we must take a step back and start a narrative with influence in the Annales school of thought. Let us start our narrative at the beginning with the work of M. V. Brewington, heavily cited in our current literature. " After 1590 when the drawings of John White had made at Raleigh's Roanoke settlement were published, Englishmen were familiar with the dugout canoes the southern Indians built. The colonists were quick to adopt these canoes, so great was their need for watercraft which could not be otherwise obtained. The white man's superior knowledge of small craft soon indicated changes which would improve the canoe: sharp ends would make her easier to propel and more seaworthy; broader beam and a keel would increase stability: sail would lessen the work of getting from place to place. " From an anthropological perspective, the above quote which is often cited regarding logboats, is problematic for the Chesapeake. It is riddled with the causal yet persistent racism directed at the First Nations of North America that was part of our populist cultural historical narrative well into the 1970s. In addition, M. V. Brewington, clearly race biased in the above quote, also fails to examine cause and effect outside of a white British colonial perspective in any of his works. He fails to investigate deeper and move past his own British colonial cultural historicism. He assigns technological development to a specific race, without taking into account the fact that cultural continuity has nothing to do with ethnicity, just as technology use has no strict correlation with ethnicity.

Curci in her dissertation from East Carolina University continued the tradition of trying to create a typology of logboats based upon hull form. While in her work looking at pre-and post-contact logboats in North Carolina, she admitted that the environment in which a logboat are used often dictates the hull form. She also in her dissertation conceded that the type of tree, the constraining material, is very important to hull form. In her work as well as most recent scholarship a distinctive issue has emerged. That is preservation and recording biases can often skew data analysis of logboats. Logboats which are often chance finds, are recovered by untrained personnel, which leads to data loss and rough handling. Due to this, by the time archaeologists are contacted, logboats often become distorted from drying, fragmented, or even modified by the people who find them. The recorded data recovered for logboat finds varies between each region of the logboat find due to North America's disparate data collection traditions, each region placing emphasis on different logboat features they consider to be markers of culture or technological importance. Often logboats are recorded by local vocational groups who do not have the resources to document construction features, repairs, and other data making in depth comparison impossible. Another inherent bias is a result of site formation processes. If a logboat has been expanded, when the logboat is discarded or lost, the hull becoming waterlogged may have a tendency to relax back to the C or U shaped cross-section it started out as before being manipulated by its builders. A recent thesis at Texas A & M University, which used similar methods to Jessica Lee Curci's was unable to find clear typological order in the logboats documented. Both of these attempts were very well framed studies, but the haphazard way in which data was collected by the original principal investigators makes any attempt to differentiate site formation processes, construction constraints, and the areas in which the logboats were used by the people who built them from the features that would define any concise technological or cultural tradition impossible. European scholars, while still examining hull form, have attempted to stress aspects of a logboats initial construction and repair. A move has been made in much of the European literature to document logboats heavily first, stressing data recovery, followed by the use of the data collection to look at how the ethnic groups present when it was constructed used it. While this type of analysis does not lend itself presently to the formation of large scale typologies, until we collect data of high consistent resolution we will never be able to tease out " identity " of the people who built them. While the concept that distinct ethnic groups have distinct technological or material culture traditions is entrenched in modern historical archaeology, the use of technology or certain classes of material culture to define ethnicity can only hint at identity. Boats by their very nature are tools; they are built for various purposes but enable contact with other groups

Every state or region on the eastern seaboard of North America has attempted to develop a typology for both pre-and post-contact archaeologically documented logboats. In many ways these typologies have not helped scholars understand the reasons for variation or change of this technology through time. A partial fault exists in the tendency of the senior literature to downplay the complexity of possible manufacturing sequence for logboats. Even recent scholarship has attempted to look at their hull form instead of the techniques used to build them. Much has been done to describe the building sequence of logboats in European, African, and Asian/ Pacific literature over the last three decades which has removed the conclusions based on biological racism of their being inferior watercraft. Rather than highlighting cultural features, the literature places emphasis on hull form, which may be more linked to the logboats construction from a single log, and the different waterways and environments it needed to traverse. The following section is a very condensed version of the works of Arnold, Crumlin-Pedersen, Hirte, Kegler, Leshikar, McGrail, and Mowat cited in the references of this work. Ethnographic data is drawn from many sources cited in the reference section; however, the work of Barbot, Kegler, Leshikar, and Meide are of importance. All of these studies have the advantage of not being bound to the paradigm that they are simply dugouts; that is, they are all made from trees felled and burnt and dug out with stone and shell tools only. There are consistent practices of contemporary Amerindian groups using expansion and extension practices pre-and post-contact with surviving groups still making them. However, expansion and extension in logboats, which is a global technology, is largely ignored by scholars of the Mid-Atlantic. The author, knowing the audience will not be familiar with this concept, here gives a brief description of the practices of making an expanded/-extended logboat. The core of logboat technology is the log, a fact reflected in the European words for these watercraft. In Dutch they are referred to as Boomstamkano, which means " tree trunk canoe. " In German literature they are referred to as Einbaum, which translates to " one log. " Regardless of where on the planet a logboat is built, and regardless of whether the tree is felled with fire, stone, copper, bronze, or iron tools, some constraints are forced upon the builder of a logboat by the material itself. In spite of the constraints a solid log generates, logboats are extremely complex and make up one of the most diverse groups of watercraft. Peoples who live in pre-industrial societies have a far more intimate relationship with natural materials than those that inhabit our detached postmodern world. In order to understand the expanded/-extended logboat we need to build one.

The Lunze family has been for generations at the forefront of both watchmaking and applied engineering.  This talk details over 100 years of our influence on the watch, motorcycle, and aircraft industry globally, showing our rocky start in the period of the First World War through the Global Economic Depression which followed.

Jason Lunze (Virginia Maritime Heritage & Conservation Association)The 18th Century Alexandria Ship and the Diffusion of Continental Shipbuilding Traditions to 17th and 18th Century New England.
The recent excavation of the 18th century Alexandria ship throws in sharp contrast the difference from “traditional” English mercantile shipbuilding traditions from those employed to build ship in Great Britain’s North American colonies.  The use on the Alexandria ship of wrought iron longitudinal drift pins to fasten together “master molding frames” of floors and futtocks, which is a typically French and Dutch technique while employing “whole floors” without French half floor structure, utilizing instead traditional “English” “master molding frames” form, highlights the diffusion of Continental traditional shipbuilding to North America either by direct trade with the Continent or diffusion via the Caribbean sugar, tobacco, lumber, and slave trades.  This pattern has been seen before in the form of the 18th c. Reader’s Point wreck.  Unlike the similar Reader’s Point wreck however, the Alexandria Ship possesses transverse trapezoidal cross-section forward stem framing instead of the traditional English “canted” frames found on wrecks like Reader’s Point, and the recently documented World Trade Center Wreck.  The older transverse trapezoidal cross-section forward stem framing is thought to have gone out of fashion with English shipwrights sometime between the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars.  The older technique continuing to be used in shipyards on the Continent and the Baltic into the latter half of the 18th century.  This paper presents the evidence of possible diffusion of Continental traditions in ship construction to the North American British colonies, or possible to beginning of the innovation which lead to the 19th century establishment of an “American” tradition of shipbuilding.  Gunston Hall Symposium of Maritime Archaeology in the Mid-Atlantic 2017.

This lecture details what the 16th century British ship Tyger that was temporarily stranded on Ocracoke in 1585 may have looked like.  I will discuss how to spot British shipwrecks in the archaeological record in light of the acceptance by scholars of the diffusion of the Venetian and Iberian Atlantic traditions of shipbuilding to England.  I will also discuss early navigation practices and why so many early colony vessels were lost due to faulty navigation and accidents.

Lunze, Jason (Virginia Maritime Heritage), S. Colebank George Washington University), H.Sprinkle (City of Alexandria), F. Bromberg (Alexandria Archaeology), E. Breen (AlexandriaArchaeology), R. Reeder (Alexandria Archaeology), G. Schwarz (Navy History and HeritageCommand) Hold Fast to Your Timbers: The Documentation and Analysis of the Wood and Iron Fastenings From the Late 18th Century Alexandria Ship.

The H. L. Hunley, the world's first successful submarine which sank in 1864 offshore of Charleston, South Carolina, contains a number of rusticles identified on the interior of the hull during excavation. Rusticles are biologically mediated iron concretions that form on exposed iron in marine environments; within the Hunley they are generally one-half to two centimeters in diameter, two to six centimeters in length, and extend down from hull pertubations such as rivet heads, plate seams, and other metal objects. Petrographic observations made with fabricated polished thin sections in both normal and reflected light provide insights on the internal morphology of several rusticles in this preliminary investigation. Different internal regions of the rusticles were found to have different morphologic and chemical character. Chemical assays from SEM/EDS were used to characterize and map the elemental distributions in the rusticles. Different regions, as segregated by their morphology, were found to have different elemental concentrations. It was found that the elemental assemblage from the rusticles as observed in SEM/EDS included; O, Fe, C, Si, Zn, Ca, Cl, S, Mg, Al, Mn, Ti, K, and P. These chemical assays allow for comparison between rusticles collected and studied from other marine wrecks. XRD techniques have also been used to attempt characterization of the specific mineralogy of the generally amorphous samples. These rusticles may provide useful information as to the nature of their formation through time and the environment in which they formed.

Previous work suggests that the structure of ecological diversity may vary across a major extinction boundary. This study uses additive diversity partitioning (ADP) to examine whether diversity partitioning varies during periods of background extinction. Patterns in beta diversity were analyzed at a variety of spatial scales within shallow benthic marine bivalve paleocommunities in the Miocene Eastover Formation and the Pliocene Yorktown Formation of the Virginia Coastal Plain. These stratigraphic units represent deposition in similar shallow subtidal environments. Sixteen bulk samples were collected from two locations along the James River in Surry County, Virginia using a hierarchical methodology involving multiple samples from each formation at individual cliffs, and multiple cliffs per location. Samples were wet-sieved to 2 mm. All bivalve material was sorted and counted at the species level. ADP analysis indicates that there is no change in overall diversity structure of the bivalve fauna during the 4.3 Ma represented by these units. When considering all collected data, there was no significant change from the Eastover to the Yorktown in either the raw beta values or the partitioning of beta diversity. This suggests that taxonomic rates of origination and immigration in the study area are similar to those of extinction and emigration. If taxa unique to the Yorktown in this data set are excluded, there is an overall decrease in beta diversity at all levels, but partitioning does not change. The lack of change in partitioning for both sets of data suggest that background extinction during this interval is not selective at any of the geographic scales included in the sampling hierarchy.

The H. L. Hunley, the world's first successful submarine which sank in 1864 offshore of Charleston, South Carolina, contains a number of rusticles identified on the interior of the hull during excavation. Rusticles are biologically mediated iron concretions that form on exposed iron in marine environments; within the Hunley they are generally one-half to two centimeters in diameter, two to six centimeters in length, and extend down from hull pertubations such as rivet heads, plate seams, and other metal objects. Petrographic observations made with fabricated polished thin sections in both normal and reflected light provide insights on the internal morphology of several rusticles in this preliminary investigation. Different internal regions of the rusticles were found to have different morphologic and chemical character. Chemical assays from SEM/EDS were used to characterize and map the elemental distributions in the rusticles. Different regions, as segregated by their morphology, were found to have different elemental concentrations. It was found that the elemental assemblage from the rusticles as observed in SEM/EDS included; O, Fe, C, Si, Zn, Ca, Cl, S, Mg, Al, Mn, Ti, K, and P. These chemical assays allow for comparison between rusticles collected and studied from other marine wrecks. XRD techniques have also been used to attempt characterization of the specific mineralogy of the generally amorphous samples. These rusticles may provide useful information as to the nature of their formation through time and the environment in which they formed.