Journal kept by William Edward Mayes as master of the brig KEWADIN (1866), owned by John Bloom of Folkestone, covering voyages to Pernambuco and Aracaju in Brazil, and Memel in the Baltic, between December 1877 and January 1879. This is a handwritten journal written after the voyages took place. It provides an interesting insight into a sailing ship carrying bulk cargo during the 1870s.

Administrative / biographical background
Mayes was born at Great Yarmouth in Norfolk in 1831 and went to sea as a boy. During the 1850s he was employed on merchant vessels including the SARAH SANDS (1845), used to transport troops to the Crimea, and the barque HARVEST HOME (1853), caught in a typhoon at Swatow (Shantou) in China. He qualified as master in 1867 (certificate number 24845). He was master of the brig KEWADIN (1866), when this vessel was run down and sunk by a steamer near Whitby in 1879. Mayes drowned in the River Thames near Gravesend in 1891, after being knocked overboard by a boom on the schooner TEKLA (1878). For more information see ‘Kewadin: William Edward Mayes and Two Trading Voyages in the 1870s’ by Michael E. Leveridge, Cambridge, 2015 (see PBH7479 in the Library collection).