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Capt. Josiah C. Long and His Logs Memorial to Nantucket Whaling Master by Edgar L. McCormick
IN 1887, THE ATWATER correspondent for the Ravenna, Ohio, Republican, had never seen such sea-journals: ledger-like books fill ed with daily notations about weather and navigation, sprinkled liberally with drawings, often in color, of whales, flukes, ships, and landfalls. The Nantucketers who had come to Portage County from 1839 on into the 1850's were familiar with such records in this inland farming community. Captain Josiah C.Long had brought them with him to Atwater township late in 1886 when he came as an invalid to be cared for by his daughter, Mary Frances, and her husband, Ira Jackson. Captain Long and his wife, Mary Ray, and their three children, Josiah C., Jr., Charles William, and Mary Frances, had come from Nantucket to Ravenna, Ohio, in 1853, immediately after Josiah's return from his eighth voyage to the Pacific. He preferred life in town to life on a farm, and soon found employment in Stowe's Steam Hub Factory, making bent materials for carriages and wagons. He was also actively engaged for years as sexton and treasurer of the Ravenna Congrega tional Church. Captain Long was 80 years old when he fell on the pavement late in 1886 and injured himself critically. His wife, Mary, and son Charles W. were dead. Charles, a Civil War veteran, had died on September 1,1868, just four hours after he managed to get home from Minnesota where he had spent the summer, hoping that a change of climate would help him overcome tuberculosis. Josiah C., Jr., the other son, and his wife, Em ma Reed, had left Ravenna in 1874, and were living in New York. So it was his daughter, Mary, who cared for the invalid Captain in her home about ten miles southeast of Ravenna. He died there on February 16, 1887. Although the Ravenna Republican took note of his death im mediately and carried a long obituary on February 23, it was the paper's Atwater correspondent who fortuitously let the dead captain's logs speak for him about his long career in the whale fishery. Everything the obituary said about the Captain always being "at his post" was vague and general beside the specific details in the journals he kept during thirty years at sea. The township correspondent found these records "very interesting
