Edward Rhodes – His Booke: Examining trade routes, functions and vessel performance through primary source documents

Summary

Edward Rhodes was a seventeenth-century sailor involved in the English-Chesapeake tobacco trade. Little is known of his life, aside from a single, but extremely detailed document housed in the Bodleian library in Oxford. From 1670-1676, he kept a book describing his journeys back and forth across the Atlantic in four different ships, keeping information on daily positions and weather, but also functional aspects of trade, deaths aboard the ship, and other information as he saw fit. Daily position is described with latitude and a relative longitude, showing a very early and curious attempt at lateral navigation. This record and several others like it are currently being used to examine many of the unknown maritime aspects of the early tobacco trade: mapping trade routes, quantifying vessel performance, and better understanding some functional aspects of shipping this commodity, all while adding a more humanistic element to the narrative.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2013   •
• Underwater Archaeology: Methodologies and Interpretation

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 603