Ian Petrie is not a maritime historian. And none of the 12 students who enrolled in his freshmen seminar had substantive experience with handwritten 19th-century manuscripts. But together, they delved into a 150-year-old ship log held by the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, as well as other primary documents, to shed light on a voyage of thousands of miles that altered the course of hundreds of people’s lives.

The course concluded in the fall semester but lives on through an interactive website that the students and Petrie, senior associate director of Penn’s Center for Teaching and Learning, designed together. Each student contributed research on an area of interest related to the voyage of the ship, the Clarence.

“My goal was to have 12 individual projects emerging from the same source so it was an individual but also a collective endeavor,” says Petrie. “And I wanted it to be published as a way of making it engaging for the students and showing off this lovely item in Penn’s rare books collection.”

Petrie came up with the idea for the class, “Voyages of Discovery,” after teaching two other courses on South Asian history. While preparing for the first, he wanted to make use of items in Penn’s special collections and came across a few ship logs and shipboard diaries, accounts of ships’ voyage. One of the students researched a log from the Clarence and wrote a short paper on the subject.

The log of the Clarence detailed a journey of several thousand miles. The voyage began in London in June of 1864 and took 237 men, a cavalry regiment of the British army, to Madras, India, where they were to defend the British colony. From there the Clarence went on to Calcutta to pick up more than 500 Indians, mostly indentured laborers, for transport to Demerara in British Guiana, today known as Guyana, in South America, where they would work on sugar plantations. The ship then returned to London in May 1865, carrying the products of indentured labor, including rum, sugar and cocoa. There was plenty of drama over the course of the year, including an outbreak of fever that necessitated quarantine, attempted suicides and a close encounter with a cyclone.

The log, kept by the ship’s captain, Joseph Watson, recorded weather, the ship’s position and other details, “interspersed with occasional notes on major events which,” says Petrie, “from a historian’s point of view are both beguiling and hopelessly laconic. The idea is, how can we try to contextualize these notes.”

Petrie incorporated the Clarence log in a second class, asking students to select different aspects of the voyage to research. But, even after that experience, he still felt there was more ground to cover. So he proposed designing a whole class around the Clarence and its log, teaching it as a freshmen seminar in the Science, Technology and Society program in the School of Arts & Sciences’ Department of History and Sociology of Science.

“It’s got technology, it’s got environmental history, it’s got medical history, it’s got social history. It would give the freshmen a chance to have an experience with rare books; there was just a lot there,” he says. “It also happened to be the Year of Discovery at Penn, which was a happy coincidence.”

Petrie spent the summer preparing, visiting London’s British Library and the National Maritime Museum in nearby Greenwich, as well as the Maritime History Archive in St. John’s, Newfoundland, to gather material for the students to work with. He also ordered material from collections in Australia, where the Clarence traveled later in its career.

“So I had a little mini-archive I could let the students loose on,” he says. “My dream was to try to motivate 12 young people to share my enthusiasm for this ship’s travels.”

Petrie began the course by having the students read about various 19th-century ocean voyages, such as scientific expeditions and trips to transport convicts to Australia. Next the students read the book Coolie Woman — part family memoir, part archival history — by former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Gaiutra Bahadur. The story details Bahadur’s great-grandmother’s life as an indentured servant in Guiana, much like those who traveled on the Clarence. Bahadur also came to the class as a guest lecturer.

Then came time for independent inquiry with the students using the materials Petrie had gathered as well as resources from the Kislak Center to probe areas that interested them.

Matthew Spellman, a Wharton student from Rye, N.Y., was drawn in by the idea of conflict at sea.

“When I read the course description, I immediately thought of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean,’” he says. “I ended up focusing my project on mutiny aboard ships carrying indentured laborers, including a little bit of piracy.”  

Neeraj Chandrasekar, who is from Singapore, was motivated by a sense of a personal connection to the study of the Indian diaspora. His contribution to the class website explored the history of cholera epidemics and other diseases on ocean-going vessels.

Other students investigated the ship’s builder, its owner, the career of Joseph Watson and other crew members, modifications made to the ship over time and working conditions on Guiana plantations, among other topics.

Petrie says he envisioned the class as a way of engaging students with different interests to interact with primary manuscripts, use databases and take advantage of digital research resources. In addition, he wanted to give students the experience of writing and presenting information for a broad audience, a skill useful across disciplines.

In the end the course — and the students — surpassed his expectations. As an example, Petrie notes the work of Nate Robinson of Dothan, Ala., who read upwards of 200 pages of cursive, handwritten diaries in the course of his research on the Clarence’s later journeys to Australia.

“I ended up bringing a lot of different resources together,” says Robinson, “using primary sources like diaries and logs to tell the story of what was going on and then using newspaper articles and advertisements to find out the dates when the ship was coming through. It was a great research experience because it really taught me that, it may not be easy, but, if you spend enough time, you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

“There was a moment on a Saturday night,” Petrie adds, “when I was emailing back and forth with Nate about his research and I suddenly realized, he is doing work I didn’t do until I was a master’s student, cross-referencing logs and diaries and newspaper accounts. It made me feel terrifically happy.”

Still enthused by the tales of the Clarence, Petrie is continuing his research and is hoping to publish an article on his and the class’s findings, perhaps enlisting one of his students as a coauthor.

And what’s next in Petrie’s teaching adventures?

“I have to go back to the Kislak Center and figure out the latest cool thing they’ve acquired,” he says.