# 38510
RITCHIE, Edward Samuel; [GIBBS, Robert]
Catalogue of articles for a whaling voyage.
$3,850.00 AUD
New Bedford, Massachusetts : E. S. Ritchie, dealer in ship chandlery, and importer of hard-ware. Rodman’s Buildings, No. 61 North Water Street, [ca. 1849]. Octodecimo (160 x 100 mm), original leather-backed stiff wrappers (stained, small loss to leather at tail of spine), the upper wrapper lettered in black and inscribed in ink – evidently in the hand of Robert Gibbs, one of the ship’s owners – ‘Ship Hibernia / 13th Voyage / Sailed Oct 2 1849’; pp. 32, [10 blank, intended for notes]. The printed text comprises a comprehensive inventory, arranged in thematic categories, of every imaginable item a whaling master might be expected to procure for his vessel prior to a voyage; in this copy the inventory is extensively annotated in ink (apparently also by Robert Gibbs) with quantities, prices and sundry comments. The eighth unnumbered page is taken up with ‘A True Copy of agreement with Capt. A. Baker, S[kippe]r. of Ship Hibernia’, neatly handwritten in ink and signed ‘In behalf of the Ship’ by Robert Gibbs. In this agreement Gibbs agrees to advance to Captain Baker’s wife ‘at different times to the amount of five hundred dollars’ while the Hibernia is away.
Archelaus Baker Jr. (1815-1898) was a native of Dennis, Massachusetts. He married Lydia Waite Winslow (1818-1868) in Dartmouth in 1841. Their daughter, Sarah, was born in 1835. Baker’s first voyage in the Hibernia, a whaling ship built in New York in 1811, was as a mate in 1846. On the gruelling four-year voyage that departed New Bedford in October, 1849, Baker – this time as master – took the Hibernia at least as far as the Caroline Islands and Western Australia. The Hibernia returned to New Bedford in 1853.