Louisa A. Doane's Journal of Two Ocean Voyages (1852-1853)

This edition is still being developed and proofed. Please do not cite this preview until this notice is removed.
The editors welcome suggestions and corrections (see link above).

About the Edition

This project consists of two related parts: the project Web site, which you are now viewing, contains ancillary materials that document the project or provide alternative access to some materials, such as images of the manuscript pages, that are also incorporated into the edition proper; the textual edition, accessible via the "Link to the Journal" above, contains an editorial introduction and several alternate views of the text of Doane's journal.

The current version is a preview release of the edition. 90% of the manuscript has been transcribed, encoded, and annotated to date. Currently, the editorial team is proofing, fact-checking, and editing for consistency.

The Editorial Team. Working in cooperation with the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at The Ohio State University, and in collaboration with Professor H. Lewis Ulman, principal editor, a team of graduate and undergraduate students began editing Doane's journal during two courses offered in the winter of 2010 and the spring of 2011.

Project Guidelines and Standards. The P5 Version of the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines (TEI P5) informed the project's markup guidelines. The editorial team also consulted the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Edition Guidelines as well as recommendations by various essays included in Electronic Textual Editing (MLA 2007). More detailed information about editorial methods can be found in the Editorial Introduction to the text of the Doane edition.

Navigating the Edition. Each page of this Web site contains an identical navigation bar at the top of the screen. The "Link to the Journal" in that navigation bar leads to the introduction to the textual edition proper. Within each view of the journal, a link at the top of the page labeled "Home" leads back to this page; other links lead to other views of the journal.

About Louisa Doane's Journal

Louisa Doane's previously unpublished, manuscript journal records two voyages aboard the merchant ship Commonwealth, the first from New York to Marseilles (February through June 1852), the second from New York to Mexico and Peru via Cape Horn (August 1852 through October 1853), both under the command of Doane's father, Edmund N. Doane. Setting sail on the first voyage four months shy of her 18th birthday, Doane does not indicate whether she has accompanied her parents on such a voyage before. However, her entries convey a familiar, matter-of-fact attitude toward life aboard ship, albeit from the perspective of the ship's captain's daughter (particularly when discussing unruly sailors). She describes her intentions at the beginning of the second voyage as follows:

"I shall now commence my Journal and endeavor to write every day at 12 oclock M and give a discription [sic] of our Voyage record the distance we run every day the changes of wind and weather and whatever occurs on board worthy of note and the time of ariving [sic] and leaving our Port of destination."

For a more detailed overview of the journal's contents, see the Editorial Introduction.

About Louisa Doane

Beyond the experiences recounted in her journal, we know little about the life of Louisa A. Doane (1835-1878). She was the daughter of Almira Thatcher (b. 1810) and Captain Edmund N. Doane (1809–1865). In 1857, She married George W. Wadsworth (1832–1910?), of Charlestown, MA, with whom she had two children, Richard Wadsworth (b. 1858), who died in infancy, and Edmund D. Wadsworth (1861–1887).

Link to the textual edition of Doane's "Journal"