Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Unfortunate Shipwright is an important primary source for the slave trade but one that is used sparingly. David Richardson did not use it in his research on the Bristol slave trade; Marcus Rediker cited it twice in The Slave Ship ; and Emma Christopher deployed it selectively to detail the poverty of seamen and one fleeting episode of sailor-slave amity. The tract has surfaced in Bristol, where it is noted in the Port Cities website as one of three first-person accounts of the Bristol slave trade, and it is mentioned in a number of local histories. Even so, the larger story has not been told, despite the fact it is a valuable eye-witness account of a slave voyage by a literate artisan, and one that he subsequently fleshed out in a much larger version. Many of the life writings of seafarers in this period come from people of a somewhat higher station, déclassé mariners who went to sea for youthful adventure, men like Robert Stanfield or William Butterworth. It is unusual to find a perspective from a labouring man. There are very few of them for the eighteenth century. The Unfortunate Shipwright is important not simply because it throws insider light on shipboard tensions and chains of command, but because it reveals quite graphically the difficulties of seamen getting legal redress for wrongs committed on the voyage. It links the power dynamics of the ship to the power dynamics of the port and its courts of law. The Unfortunate Shipwright belongs to a strain of travel literature in which adventures overseas are discussed to edify the public about exotic lands and peoples. As a genre it could be traced back to the picaresque novel of Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, first published in 1593, although it is not as jocosely satirical as that account since it was designed as a prelude to a legal suit and fired by a strong sense of personal grievance. It was also a narrative of life on the high seas and, in the spirit of Defoe, of ‘extraordinary Events, unexpected Accidents and miraculous Deliverances’. There was a spate of these productions in the 1740s when Britain engaged first Spain and then France to protect colonial possessions and promote freer trade in Atlantic waters.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.023 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".