Daily positions kept in a fast, forward-slanting hand. Entries for 14–19 October are written across the gutter and continue upside down at the rear — the mate appears to have turned the book over during a gale. Two pages excised. The cataloguer of 1952 has pencilled “not the Aurelia of Bergen” in the margin, and she was right.
Restricted — reading roomMaritime Records
Cards 1–46 · logs, charts, salvage
Every claim lodged against wrecks on the bar for three decades, with the adjudicator's terse verdicts. Volume 2 carries a folded tracing of the 1911 channel survey, tipped in and never digitised.
Marsh surveyed the drowned grazing land at low water over eleven winters, walking the flats with a plane table. Field names survive here that appear in no other source. The green wash has faded to grey along the folds.
Oversize — call aheadMeteorology
Cards 47–98 · registers, cloud studies, instruments
A single five-inch gauge read at nine each morning for half a century. Annie's hand takes over mid-volume without comment. She adds a column for wind and, from 1904, a line of weather in plain words: “sullen”, “bright, then not”.
Vane proposed nine cloud forms that the Committee declined to adopt. All nine are illustrated here from his own negatives. The rejected term “fleeting castellatus” has quietly re-entered use among glider pilots.
Music, Folk & Vernacular
Cards 99–164 · wax cylinders, tune books, field notes
Recorded in kitchens and one barn across four parishes. Thirty-one singers are named on the tin lids; nine are not. Cylinder 88 is a child counting sheep in a dialect number-system that had otherwise vanished by 1930.
Fragile — do not threadNinety-four pages of dance tunes ruled by hand, several with soot fingerprints still legible in the margins. Four tunes are unique to this book. Rebound 1968; the original thongs are retained in an envelope at the rear.
Northern Expeditions
Cards 165–212 · ends of this drawer
The only account of the winter written below decks. Kastrup records the menu each day and, beneath it, who spoke at table. By February the second line is usually blank. Pencil throughout; the last forty leaves are unused.
Digitised 2019Eleven plates show the camp dogs by name — the names are scratched into the emulsion, mirror-reversed. Two plates are cracked and have been printed as found rather than retouched.
— end of drawer 273 · continues in drawer 274: NOS – OZO —
Tier 4 · North Range · 212 cards
Pull firmly, then release the rod catch