http://www.whalingmuseum.org/kendall/heros/index_h.html
Reviewed: February 6, 2000
Mounted: February 10, 2000
By Jennifer Evans
Heroes in the Ships: African Americans in the Whaling Industry is an online exhibit by the Kendall Whaling Museum in Sharon, Massachusetts, highlighting the activities, contributions, and personalities of African American whalers in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. Overall, the technical and aesthetic aspects of the site, with a few exceptions, are well done, and the content provides a visual and textual introduction to this under-documented, but valuable subject matter. Unfortunately, the site lacks documentation of source material and does not provide much information about the collections from which the exhibit was produced.
The site is divided into nine major sections arranged by subject: Whaling & Crews, Harpooners & Boasteerers, Processing the Whale, Master Mariners, Passing the Idle Hours, Journals & Pictures, Lewis Temple & Harpoons, Whaling Families, and Bequia & the Islands. Each section contains both images and text and is largely self-contained with very few links, if any, to pages off of the Kendall Whaling Museum site. The Master Mariners section, for example, provides a short biography and the portraits of six mariners who in the late 19th and early 20th century seized opportunities and became captains and shipowners. Paul Cuffe (1759-1817), the son of a slave, who "rose to prominence as America's first whaling master and shipowner of African ancestry, and founded the first dynasty of merchant-entrepreneur seafarers" is one of the individuals highlighted in the section, for instance.
Navigation of the site is straightforward. At the top of each page appears a link to the KLM home page and a consistent image of the exhibit title, underneath which is the name of the current section. Links to the other sections of the exhibit and of the KLM Web site are provided in a uniform page footer. Many of the pages are arranged in a two-column format; text often spans the columns, providing variety and an appropriate level of white space. The Harpooners & Boatsteerers section is the only page on which the text does not line up with the image well in a browser that does not recognize the background image. A large amount of white space underneath the top right hand image makes it difficult to read the caption with the image in view and breaks up the page unnecessarily. For the most part, the background images were distracting and made the text difficult to read in places.
Although the text is not extensive, it appears to be void of any grammatical errors or spelling mistakes. Those with lower-end browsers are not provided with ALT tags to identify the images in the event the pictures do not load properly, nor is a text only version provided. However, the layout of the pages remains comprehensible once the font size is increased on the browser. The black text is also a readable font size and type, and the links are easily discernible and work correctly. The images load quickly, and no sound is incorporated into the site, making it accessible by most current browsers.
Most of the images are presented as a thumbnail or slightly larger to decrease the file size. A larger version of the image is available by clicking on the image. Upon selecting the image, the user is also given the name of the work, the date of the work, the collection name from which the work was taken, a link to a short biography of the artist (for some), the medium from which the Web image was made, a short caption (for some), and a link back to the exhibit and other pages of the museum site. Most of the images are black and white with a few color selections, depending on the medium of the original. For instance, in the Journals & Pictures section, scans of hand-drawn color illustrations from the whalers' journals vividly portray life on a whaling ship.
At the bottom of each page, there is a copyright statement, alerting the viewer to the site's institutional sponsor, namely the Kendall Whaling Museum. However, there is no information concerning the author of the text, the date of the site's posting or last revision. Nor does the site include any information, such as a bibliography or works cited page, documenting the sources from which the text came. I was also disappointed in being unable to locate more information about the collections of the Kendall Whaling Museum pertaining to this topic. How much of the William H. Tripp Collection is represented in the online exhibit? What is the scope and content of the collection? Is it all photographs?
I was pleasantly surprised and intrigued upon finding and exploring this site because it introduces a topic that is not often discussed in history classes or in other literature or media. Overall, the Kendall Whaling Museum has provided a good introduction to the subject although I am left wondering if there are any general sources available online or in print, for the online bibliographies were specific to Lewis Temple and Bequia Whaling.
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Jennifer Evans is a graduate student at the University of Maryland, pursuing degrees in history and Library Science. She currently works for the University of Maryland's University Archives where, among other responsibilities, she designs exhibits, researches reference requests, processes collections, and indexes the student newspaper. She also creates and/or maintains various Web pages for the Special Collections Division of the University of Maryland's Libraries. For example, Jennifer designed the Maryland Room site and was an active member of the team that developed the Archives and Manuscripts Department site. Her research interests are varied and include online exhibitions, web design, copyright policy, electronic access to archival materials, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century American women and gender.
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