Furlong, Joseph:

$2,500 · Offered by William Reese Company

[CIVIL WAR-ERA MANUSCRIPT NOTEBOOK KEPT BY A UNION NAVAL GUNNER ABOARD THE USS QUAKER CITY]. An engaging manuscript journal kept by "Joseph Furlong, Acting Gunner, U.S.N.," per his ownership inscription on the first leaf. According to David Dixon's Naval History of the Civil War, Furlong served as the acting gunner on the USS Quaker City, a heavy sidewheel steamship built in 1854 and leased by the Union Navy at the start of the Civil War. Chartered in 1861 and subsequently purchased by the Navy, the ship was outfitted with a powerful twenty-pound long rifle and assigned to help enforce the Union blockade of the ports of the Confederate States of America.The journal opens with fifteen manuscript pages in pencil listing the "Table of Allowances of Ordnance Stores for 2nd Class Sidewheel Steamer" and other "Miscellaneous" supplies. This is followed by ninety-one manuscript pages in ink titled "Questions & Answers in Naval Gunnery" and consisting of 396 numbered questions and answers ranging from "Q. What is a Gun made of? A. Of Cast Iron Metal" to "Q. What is the charge for a 24 Pdr Howitzer of 1310 lbs? A. 2 lbs." One of the last entries addresses the recipe for gunpowder, here given as fifteen parts nitre, ten parts sulphur, and fifteen parts charcoal. There are no notations or references for the source of these entries, but they read as class notes copied from a standard reference work. It would be another fifty years before the publication of the first Bluejacket's Manual, t

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