Journal of Thomas Chalkley
Thomas Chalkley went to sea as a boy and never really came ashore. He was a master mariner and merchant who paid the charges of his own ministry out of his own trade, refusing to live on the meetings he visited, and for more than forty years he worked the Atlantic as both a trader and a travelling minister. He crossed repeatedly between England and America. He rode the seaboard from New England to Carolina and inland into the back settlements. He worked Barbadoes, Bermuda, Antigua, Jamaica and the other Caribbee islands, and he went to Holland and Germany. He was pressed by press-gangs, chased by privateers, becalmed, wrecked, frozen and repeatedly nearly drowned, and he sets all of it down in the same steady voice he uses for a good meeting at Frankford — including the passage at sea, retold a century later by Whittier in Snow-Bound, in which his starving crew cast lots for his life. He buried a son, saw his own father convinced, and died at Tortola in 1741 in the middle of yet another religious visit, in the sixty-seventh year of his age. This edition gathers the journal, the collected epistles and the essays with the testimony of Philadelphia Monthly Meeting concerning him, in clear modern English.
- Fully modernized English — every long sentence broken, every inversion untangled
- 1,697-word editorial introduction placing the mariner-minister in context
- 38 chapters — the journal entire, plus fifteen collected epistles and essays
- His own account of the Atlantic crossings, the press-gangs and the casting of lots
- 1,335 linked Scripture and reference notes throughout
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read11.8 hours
- Length168,442 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 11.8 hours
This figure is here so you can compare one book against another. Every title on the site is timed from its own word count at the same reading speed — nothing is adjusted book by book — so if this edition says 11.8 hours and another says half that, the second one really is about half the reading. It is a measure of size, in the way a page count is. Your own pace is your own: at the speeds typical adult readers actually manage, this edition runs anywhere from 9.4 hours to 16 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 166,802 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 1,640 words |
| Total | 168,442 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 1,640 of the 168,442 words above, and they are part of what you are buying.
Counted from the text of the EPUB you receive. Navigation, the title page, the table of contents and the licence page are excluded — they are packaging, not reading.
The reading rate
238 words per minute, for adult silent reading of non-fiction, applied unchanged to every title on the site. We did not pick the number; it is the pooled result of a published meta-analysis. Nothing is adjusted book by book — that consistency is what makes two of these figures worth comparing.
Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
190 studies, 18,573 participants.
The same paper puts most adult readers between 175 and
300 words per minute, and those two speeds give the
9.4 hours and 16 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 11.8 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 481–674 pages.
Words per printed page is a typesetting convention, not a measurement — it moves with trim size, type size and leading. The range above assumes 250–350 words a page. Friends Illuminated publishes no print edition of this book; the figure is here only because pages are a more familiar size than words.
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About This Edition
He was born in Southwark on the third of the Third month [May], 1675, and he was convinced as a child — not argued into it, but stopped in the street by it. He went to sea young, and the sea is where most of this book happens.
A minister who paid his own way
Chalkley was a working master mariner and merchant. That is not incidental to the book; it is the book’s spine. He would not be maintained by the meetings he visited, so he carried freight, traded cargoes, took command of vessels, and fitted his religious visits around the sailing season. When the ministry cost him money, he earned the money. When a voyage went badly — and voyages went badly often — he wrote down the loss with the same flat honesty he used for a good meeting.
The Atlantic
From 1697 until his death he was almost continuously moving. England and Ireland. Wales. Holland and Germany. The whole American seaboard from New England down to Carolina, and inland into the back settlements where there were no meetings yet. And the islands: Barbadoes, Bermuda, Antigua, Jamaica, Tortola. He was pressed by press-gangs, chased by privateers, becalmed, wrecked, frozen into a river, robbed, and repeatedly nearly drowned.
The most famous passage in the book is one he plainly did not enjoy writing. Becalmed and starving, his crew cast lots to decide which of them should be killed for food. Whittier retold it a century later in Snow-Bound. Chalkley’s own account is shorter and much harder.
The close
He settled his family at Frankford, near Philadelphia, buried a son there, and lived to see his own father convinced. He died at Tortola in the Virgin Islands late in 1741, in the middle of yet another religious visit to the islands, in the sixty-seventh year of his age. The last pages of the journal are not his: they are the account of the Friend who nursed him.
About this edition
Every sentence has been rebuilt for a modern reader. His vocabulary of conviction — Truth, the Seed, First-day, the numbered months of the old calendar — is bracketed on first use and then left alone, because translating it would translate him out of the book. One thousand three hundred and thirty-five Scripture and reference links are set into the text; every Scripture reference was checked against the King James text rather than recalled, and every person and place link was checked by hand.
