Sea Control - Sea Control 540 - The Library of Captain John Anderson

Episode Date: July 28, 2024

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today, we're welcoming Robert McLean, aka Bob, and we're going to discuss his chapter contribution to the Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, the Library of Captain John Anderson, a 17th century Glasgow mariner. So, Bob, welcome. Could you tell the audience a little bit more about your background? Yeah, certainly. Thanks for inviting me on, Jared. I appreciate it. I am a rare books librarian. I work in a university in Scotland, University of Glasgow. It's an ancient university. It's one of the oldest universities around, really. It was founded in the 15th century. And we have been, therefore, collecting books for a very long time. and we have a lot of unusual books a lot of old books uh hundreds of thousands of them indeed

and so my uh my job there is to try and manage and curate those those collections and encourage managed careful use of it by our staff and students and researchers well thank you as a reminder to listeners all opinions today are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might otherwise be associated. Bob, my background is I am the son of a librarian. My mother worked for 40 years in a U.S. public school. I was also a ship captain, so this ticks like every box possible for me biographically, and I was texting with my mother last night.

She's very excited. She was concerned whether or not she was going to be able to make it through the brogue and comprehend everything, but no, I've had no problems. The Glaswegian accent, if that's what that is, has not been problematic for me. I shall endeavour to speak as slowly as I can. This is the one thing with West of Scotland, we sometimes speak quite quickly. So I'll try to keep that as slightly slower. I appreciate that.

So we'll start easy. How did you get on the subject of shipboard libraries? Yeah, so it's something that's reasonably new to me. um i mentioned already we we we look after hundreds of thousands of books and we've been collecting them for a long time um one of the the things that researchers particularly are interested in is who has owned those books before we've owned them where they've come from and the sorts of marks and annotations and things that are in those and what that can tell us about how people interacted with books in the past um so i've always been interested in what we call

provenance where the books have come from but yeah for the shipboard library one it was that I discovered reasonably recently which I hadn't known before that we had in the very late 17th century the University of Glasgow had bought around about 100 books from someone called Captain Anderson and that set me on a hunt to try and work out who Captain Anderson was what the what the library was and I managed to establish that it was a sea captain and and therefore started reading up around shipboard libraries yeah is that a common problem at your library specifically just the depth and the breadth of your collection and the age of it I would imagine there's a lot in there that maybe not everyone realizes it's in there yeah completely um we we

most in terms of the actual the texts the authors where those books were published um That's all on our catalogue and is findable. But I suppose increasingly it's thinking about books not just as texts, but as things that people interacted with in the past to learn things and record additional information. So it's those, if you like, what you maybe call copy specific details that increasingly researchers are interested in. And because that's probably a more recent research turn, you know, probably we're talking about the latter half, particularly of the 20th century onwards. And we and because we have so many books, yeah, we haven't often recorded all of those details in our catalogs. So it's the sort of thing we try to to to to to improve on over time. So it was really around that sort of work that my attention started to turn in this direction. So what other shipboard libraries did you look at as part of your research here?

And what would you typically find in a shipboard library? Yeah. So, I mean, this is the thing that surprised me most. For the period that we're talking about, very little has been written. And that's largely because very little is known about this. It's not that many of these books that we can definitely say were owned by 16th or 17th century mariners have survived. So what has been written is actually more recent and is attention starting to turn towards that from a research point of view. So, I mean, I think for a long time, mariners, particularly in this, what we call this early modern period, have been sort of dismissed as not particularly literate or intellectual people.

They were very much thought to be practical people who maybe passed on by word-of-mouth tradition and maybe didn't use books in quite the same way that we would now. And therefore, why would these guys bother having books? That was the kind of the assumption more widely. More recently, that's changing. there's it's it's been established that in fact early modern mariners were often literate they could they could read they could they could they could write um but still there's always been that gap of not not having the books to confirm exactly what they were reading more recently there's there's

one work there's margaret shot has published a really useful work that looks at the sorts of books that were aboard ship uh and and it's focusing largely on the sorts of things one might imagine so navigational texts particularly how to find your way around so so that's if you like applied and practical mathematics astronomy these sorts of skills and we can we can see from what's being published exactly what what sorts of texts would have been useful and were used in addition to that there are there are categories of books that are also of a practical nature so that might be to do with things like weaponry or um things like you know cannons uh for defense of the ship these sorts of things that maybe had a direct practical use um what we are finding uh

from the the the the the kind of sporadic evidence that survives more widely than that is that there were additional categories really of literature there that people used on on books as well so that those were things like medical works they were things like religious works for people's internal religious lives their faith practices on ship but also people wanted to be entertained so people could read and we know that things like novels were taken aboard ship things like plays were read so it's fairly sporadic but what was particularly interesting about my discovery is that i could see there's a hundred books uh that we definitely know were owned by a ship's captain um and i was quite surprised at the breadth of them it was beyond

the the slightly narrow practical range into something something else how did you come across captain henderson's library specifically so it was um it was an invoice showing so it was the sorts of things that survive in our in our archive usually are to do with um money to do with transactions because essentially they're being they're being kept by the university as a record of what it's spending um and this was a list of books and how much was paid for them um so it was just titled books bought of captain anderson 1693 so not an awful lot of information in there but then quite a lot of information about the books themselves author title place of publication and then the price that had been paid so that that was really quite useful because it was enough

detail there that i could then go away and and actually find an awful lot of these books that are still on our shelves uh hundreds of years later because there was enough what we would call bibliographical information in there so that was that was how i first came across it so we didn't discuss this beforehand but you mentioned like the breadth of what was in there can you tell us share a little bit more about what was actually in that library yeah happily yeah so it did have some of the things that one might expect of a sea captain and when i in terms of actually determining that this was owned by a sea captain it was because of those books that it turned me in that direction because i was thinking okay this guy is captain

anderson um what sort of captain could he be because he could be a kind of military captain or he could be uh or he could be um something maritime but there are there are this chunk of books that are of the sort you might expect so those are kind of um maps there were there were there were texts on navigation texts on uh looking at uh how to function canons and things like that um so that there there's that kind of core group that one might might expect but then beyond that um you've got works of politics works of philosophy um there were uh i mean i can give you i'll give you some of the titles uh here i don't know if your your listeners are particularly interested in i'm interested you're you're interested so so i think that the ones that that really jumped out

at me and turned my attention weren't really these sorts of practical categories it was the literature that was in there so we have things like uh john gower's confessio amantis now that's a a medieval poem so that's surprising uh we've got spencer's fairy queen so this is a a late 16th century again uh verse uh we've got thomas moore's utopia this is a work of political philosophy of uh utopian ideals that kind of thing uh we've got burton's anatomy of melancholy which again is is a kind of uh was it was a really important um work that is looking at i suppose it's it's literary but it's actually also almost early psychiatry looking at depression looking at melancholy and madness that kind of thing um coriates crudities which was again historical

travel writing um that kind of thing uh the thing that really jumped out at me was um a copy of um don quixote cervantes don quixote but not in english in spanish and it wasn't the only spanish work in there there was a quevedo uh who was a playwright a spanish playwright so these were the things that really jumped out at me as surprising beyond the kind of core practical practical things that that one might expect then who is john anderson and how did you go about identifying him yeah so there are a variety of steps involved in this i suppose the first one was establishing who captain anderson was and that he was a john anderson so that that first step was using that invoice list that I had to try and find the matching books that the invoice

was talking about. Unfortunately, that was reasonably straightforward because it was quite a lot of detail in the invoice in terms of, say, the place of publication, so I could establish exactly what the edition of the text was. And with that information, I could then search our catalogue and although we now have hundreds of thousands of books at that time in the late 17th century the library was reasonably small there were maybe something like 4,000 books so I could limit my search to just those 4,000 so I managed to find a lot of the books and then I found within those books the name John Anderson written in a nice clear hand in quite a lot of them so I thought okay i now have a first uh first name for my captain but who was he um and at that point

as i say because of the navigational and and sort of seafaring nature of a number of them um and because of the spanish angle as well i was quite interested i thought maybe this is guy who's abroad as a sailor or a mariner of some sort so at that point without any great hope i just actually turned to start googling and i used internet searches to try and put those names in with roughly dates to see what popped up what was what was what the breakthrough was the um i managed to establish through i think it was google books search for the first published history of glasgow which was published in the early 18th century and it mentions a captain john anderson and it talked about him having traveled abroad to spain and i thought oh that might be my guy

Glasgow was quite small at this point. It's now, in terms of the population of Glasgow, it's now somewhere like 750,000 people. At that point, you're probably talking about a few tens of thousands. So although John Anderson is not an unusual name, there can't have been that many. So from that, I then had to try and find where this Captain John Anderson,

the one that was mentioned in the book, might have written his name down. And so I could compare his handwriting and his signature with the ones that I had in the book. I eventually managed to do that by finding in another archive a court case where the Captain John Anderson that was mentioned in the history book had had a dispute with his partners. And it had gone to court over money, as these things are. And I found that the signatures matched. So that's my proof that this is the same John Anderson as the books that were bought. That is a great detective story.

You are to be commended for your persistence because that is tremendous. What did the library teach you about Anderson as a mariner and as a Scot? Yeah. So I think as a mariner, the first thing that the library teaches us is that early modern mariners were pretty intelligent people occasionally. If he is representative, then if one was trading abroad from Scotland to Spain, Italy, which this man was, you needed to be pretty well read. You needed to understand the politics of the country you were trading in. You needed to know enough about the marketplaces. You needed to know enough about good prices for the goods that you're trading. And the same sort of people who had that sort of level of inquiry and interest also were potentially quite cultured. So this is what I would say about him, is that it's possibly surprising where we may have thought that that sort of cultural interest and that sort of academic knowledge was limited to the very upper classes of society at this point.

It really wasn't. This is a far more of a kind of, if you like, a middling sort, this man, and so far more sophisticated education and reading than probably we historically have thought of. So that's what it tells me about him as a mariner. As a Scot, I think this is another thing that's really quite interesting is that we've known that Scotland had direct trade links with Europe around this point, but it wasn't even the library so much as the documents that I found where the signature matched the court case. The court case documents confirm that not only was he trading to Spain and to Portugal, but he was trading right the way into the Mediterranean. So Scottish merchants were active all the way through this area and trading in very specific ways that we haven't understood previously. So that's the other takeaway from this is the kind of mercantile and merchant history angle, which I found quite interesting. Bob, unfortunately, that's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guests, Bob McLean.

Where can we find you online and what are you working on next? So online, I'm on what was Twitter and is now X. i am at bob underscore mclean that's m-a-c-l-e-a-l-e-a-n i can't even spell my name in terms of what i'm working on next i am wanting to pick up on john anderson a little bit and move away from the book side of things to look at that mercantile history so i'm using maybe the court rather than the library i'm using the court documents that i've discussed to try and maybe write something more general about scottish trade with with europe at that point well i look forward to seeing what comes out of that research and please reach out to us we'd love to bring you

back and discuss it once you're once you feel like you've completed that project but thank you again for joining us to the listeners thanks for tuning in we'll see you next time © transcript Emily Beynon © BF-WATCH TV 2021