Thomas Bowrey : What’s in a Name?

When I started writing Thomas Bowrey’s biography, I thought of him as Bowrey. After all, my connection with him was through my Bowry One-Name Study. His surname was important. But for that, I would never have found him and learned of his extraordinary life.

As I have mentioned on many occasions, over a period of just over two years between 2015 and 2017, I undertook Gill Blanchard’s wonderful Writing Your Family History workshops. At the start, my subject was still Bowrey. The exercises set as part of the second workshop pushed me to uncover more of Thomas Bowrey’s early life and, at around the same time, I drew a sketch of him and his wife Mary.

Suddenly, Bowrey came to life and he became Thomas. He was a real person and, in my mind, he has been Thomas ever since. Despite this, for reasons of consistency, I continued to use Bowrey in my social media posts.

It is now time for a change. As I begin to give my talks based on Thomas’ papers it will become even more difficult to maintain this naming inconsistency. From now on, I will no longer refer to him as Bowrey but use his given name hoping that my followers will also come to feel closer to him.

It’s a very small Early Modern world!

Those of you who have been following this blog from the beginning (and thanks for doing so) will know that, not only was I new to writing, but I was new to the maritime world and the East Indies. The one previous interest I brought to the party which is the biography of Captain Thomas Bowrey was a love of the Early Modern period, especially in London. I have learned a great deal since then and have, certainly, gained new interests.

I was reminded of one as I waited in the queue at the British Library on Saturday morning. It is always a place for interesting conversations – those there for the opening of the library are almost always those with their own personal obsessions. The small group of us this Saturday included an academic from America over here for the Leeds Libraries’ 250th anniversary conference. His particular area of interest is the dissemination of knowledge in the Early Modern world. Regular followers will know that one of the numerous books I have found over the  passed few years was Anna Winterbottom’s Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World. I have also read a great deal about pirates of the period. My current reading is Anton Gill’s The Devil’s Mariner, a biography of William Dampier.

It is clear from my research how connected the Early Modern world was. The Royal Society was founded in 1660 by a group of people hungry for knowledge of the world and this hunger spread through much of society at the time. In the days before social media, knowledge was still spread through a network of personal contacts – an Early Modern six degrees of separation. The same names occur time and again through Bowrey’s story. His tangled network included Bodleian Librarian Thomas Hyde, reformed pirate William Dampier, Daniel Defoe, Hans Sloane, Edward Barlow, Robert Knox and many more hidden in Bowrey’s papers and elsewhere whose names are no longer remembered.

Was this knowledge always true? No, fake news is nothing new. Thomas Hyde was obsessed with obtaining the hand of a merman and another contemporary, Isaac Newton, spent much of his life carrying experiments in alchemy. Was the search always legal? No, William Dampier thought nothing of joining a pirate crew as his means of collecting knowledge of the world. It seems that there is nothing new in this world.

 

2016 Progress Update

It is hard to believe that it is already November. 2017 is rapidly approaching and we have reached that time of the year when real life starts to take over. I knew this would happen and allowed for it in my plan. It is time to reflect on my progress writing Bowrey’s biography.

This afternoon, I completed the revisions of my East Indies chapters. What I originally expected to be just one chapter had turned into three with a total of over 16,500 words. Despite that, I have finished everything I planned to do this year. OK, it took a little longer than expected but that is why plans include contingency.

At the start of this year, I had written nothing. Now I have written more than 40,000 words. I have begun to understand my style and its faults. I have learned to review and revised what I have written. OK, I know I need to be more ruthless. I know I need to restructure what I have written. But I have come a long way. This time last year, I had no idea if I could do this. Now I know I can.

That is not all. When I started on this project, I had not planned to write a blog nor engage with social media. So far, I have avoided twitter and I am still very much a beginner on facebook and google+ – I seem to be sharing with just myself so they need more work. I have had a little more success with this blog and have some followers. Thank you very much for showing some interest.

WordPress have notified me that I will soon be able to have a domain name which will hopefully mean that I can make this a little more interesting. So, please continuing following me. I hope I can make it worthwhile.