Library & Archive blog

Boteler was appointed Second Lieutenant of the Leven under Captain William Fitz-William Owen, and later First Lieutenant of the Barracouta. During a long surveying voyage between 1821 and 1826 to map parts of the coast of Africa which hadn’t been surveyed since the first wave of Portuguese explorers 300 years earlier, Boteler wrote a personal account of what he saw, and created many detailed and interesting drawings. This blog aims to show some of the highlights from this collection of drawings, which I had the pleasure of cataloguing last year alongside a manuscript copy of the account. 

Looking back 100 years into the creation of the Royal Air Force through the words of the pilots.

From 2014 the archives department has been focusing on cataloguing World War One manuscripts. In October 2017 while cataloguing, I came across the diary of a man who wrote only so his children would have something first hand from their father rather than just what they read in the news.

Discover records relating to the Women’s Royal Naval Service in this new Caird Library and Archive display, February - June 2018. 

James Creassy’s journal (Item ID: JOD/304) is over 300 pages long and written in perfectly legible handwriting – a rare find for material from 1777! He does not say why he is travelling to Bengal, but records in detail the entertaining, dramatic and sometimes rather distressing events that take place during the journey.

For February’s item of the month I have chosen JOD/133 a logbook written by T.F. Miller, the gunner on the whaling ship ‘Erik’ which records a voyage undertaken in 1876 from Dundee to the Davis Strait and Baffin Bay between Canada and Greenland.

What does a recent auction of a piece of a flag flown on HMS Victory have in common with this recently catalogued Dobbie collection?