Passengers

December 2

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , ,

What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Pennsylvania Journal (December 2, 1772).

“For LONDONDERRY, The Ship FAME, HUGH LISLE, Master.”

The Pennsylvania Journal relayed shipping news from other ports as well as lists of vessels that “Entered in,” “Outwards,” and “Cleared” from the customs house in Philadelphia.  In addition, the newspaper carried advertisements about vessels seeking freight and passengers heading to various ports throughout the British Atlantic world.  Stock images of ships at sea often adorned those advertisements.

Sometimes the pages of the newspaper may have seemed as crowded as the docks in Philadelphia, a bustling port and the largest city in the colonies on the eve of the American Revolution.  Fourteen such advertisements, each with an image of a ship, ran in the December 2, 1772, edition in advance of vessels departing for Antigua, Belfast, Charleston, Drogheda, Londonderry, and Newry.  Ten of them appeared on the final page.  Filling an entire column, they impressed on readers the connections between Philadelphia and other parts of the empire.

Other newspapers published in Philadelphia also ran such advertisements, but the Pennsylvania Journal seemed to be the most popular place for merchants and captains to promote upcoming voyages.  On December 2, the Pennsylvania Gazetteran ten of those advertisements, eight of them clustered together in a single column.  Earlier in the week, the Pennsylvania Packet carried only three such advertisements on November 30.  Later in the week, the Pennsylvania Chronicle carried just one on December 5.  Many, but not all, of the advertisements that ran in other newspapers also ran in the Pennsylvania Journal.  The notice concerning the Fame, headed to Londonderry, for instance, appeared in the Pennsylvania Chronicle and the Pennsylvania Packet as well as the Pennsylvania Journal.  The notice about the Minerva’s upcoming voyage to Newry ran in both the Pennsylvania Gazette and the Pennsylvania Journal.  On the other hand, the advertisement announcing that the Industry would sail to Newry and Drogheda appeared solely in the Pennsylvania Packet.

Whether they had been published for decades or just a few years, each of the newspapers printed in Philadelphia featured extensive advertising.  Those who placed notices expressed confidence in the circulation of each newspaper to reach readers who would benefit from the information they paid to insert.  At the same time, merchants and masters of vessels seemed to have the greatest confidence that advertising in the Pennsylvania Journal would yield the results they desired, at least during one week late in the fall of 1772.  This raises a question worth exploring in more detail: did advertisers … and readers … have different expectations about the kinds of notices they would encounter in the various newspapers published in Philadelphia in the 1770s?

December 6

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , ,

What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Pennsylvania Journal (December 6, 1770).

“FOR NEWRY, The SHIP SALLY, WILLIAM KEITH, Master.”

Readers of the Pennsylvania Chronicle, and, especially, the Pennsylvania Gazette and the Pennsylvania Journal did not have to walk along the docks and wharves on the Delaware River to glimpse the ships that transported people and goods to and from Philadelphia.  Instead, they saw visual representations of the bustling coastal and transatlantic trade depicted in newspaper advertisements.  Consider the woodcuts that adorned advertisements for freight and passage that appeared in those newspapers in the first week of December 1770.

The Pennsylvania Chronicle featured the fewest such advertisements, only three, but the first item in the first column of the first page, immediately below the masthead, incorporated a woodcut of a vessel at sea into a notice about the Elizabeth and Mary departing for Barbados, Grenada, and Jamaica.  The Pennsylvania Gazette, in turn, included eleven images of ships at sea, listing destinations such as Belfast, Dublin, Newry, and Londonderry in Ireland, Glasgow in Scotland, and Barbados and Granada in the West Indies.  Ten of those advertisements ran one after the other, filling almost an entire column on the final page of the December 6 edition.

The Pennsylvania Journal had the greatest number of advertisements with depictions of trading vessels, a total of sixteen.  Fourteen of them ran consecutively, filling half of the final page.  Some also appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette on the same day, but others did not.  The map of commerce depicted in the pages of the Pennsylvania Journal was the most extensive, including Charleston, South Carolina, on the mainland; Barbados, Granada, and Jamaica in the West Indies; Cork, Dublin, Newry, and Londonderry in Ireland; and Bristol and London in England.

The pages of Philadelphia’s newspapers testified to the port city’s participation in a bustling network of commerce that crisscrossed the Atlantic.  Readers encountered that story not only in text but also in images that depicted fleets of ships that visited the busy port.  The array of woodcuts depicting ships that accompanied advertisements for passengers and freight often made the pages of newspapers appear as busy as the Delaware River and the wharves that lined it.

July 13

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , ,

What was advertised in a colonial newspaper 250 years ago this week?

Jul 13 - 7:11:1766 Advert 2 New-Hampshire Gazette
New-Hampshire Gazette (July 11, 1766).

“The Portsmouth PACKET sails for Boston next Monday.”

This advertisement caught my eye thanks to its fairly unique format. It ran across the bottom of the three columns on the second page of the July 11, 1766, issue of the New-Hampshire Gazette. It briefly announced that “The Portsmouth PACKET sails for Boston next Monday. Those who incline to go to Commencement may have a Passage, &c.” While it was short on details, the advertisers assumed that readers had sufficient background knowledge to fill in the gaps on their own.

For readers who read or examined this newspaper long after it was published, another advertisement at the bottom of the third column on the facing page told more of the story.

Jul 13 - 7:11:1766 New-Hampshire Gazette
New-Hampshire Gazette (July 11, 1766).

(As an aside, I note that the third page is not the facing page when accessing this issue digitally since only one page at a time can be accessed and viewed. This creates yet another distinction between the manner in which eighteenth-century readers consumed newspapers and modern readers experience their digital surrogates. Researchers working with original newspapers, however, benefit from a better impression of the visual composition of multiple pages in relation to each other.)

This second advertisement revised the schedule for the stagecoach that regularly traveled between Portsmouth and Boston. Instead of leaving on the following Tuesday, it was instead scheduled to depart on Monday “for the better Convenience of those who may incline to go to the ensuing Commencement at Cambridge, on Wednesday next.”

The Commencement ceremony at Harvard College was a significant enough event that the providers of multiple forms of transportation in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, placed advertisements intended to facilitate travel to it and attract passengers. Their advertisements on facing pages created competition between two modes of transportation, a stagecoach by land or a ship by sea.