Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl is a work of digital fiction. Many of its resemblances to actual events or locals or persons or texts are entirely intentional. The combinatorial powers of computer-generated narrative have been harnessed to conflate and confabulate characters, facts, and forms of narrative accounts of sea voyages into the unknown North undertaken over the past 2340 years.
TEXT SOURCES:
"The second voyage attempted by Mr John Davis with others, for the discovery of the Northwest Passage, in Anno 1586" as found in "The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation" complied by Richard Hakluyt, first published 1589–1600.
"The Owl and the Pussycat" by Edward Lear, first published 1871.
"Wynken, Blynken, and Nod" by Eugene Field, first published 1889.
SOURCE CHART: A conflation of islands and soundings of Ellefsen Harbour, Scotia Bay and the South Orkney Islands, from a chart of the Antarctic Ocean published by the Defence Mapping Agency Hydrographic / Topographic Centre, Washington, D.C. 1967.
SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS: J. R. Carpenter 2008-2011
SOURCE CODE: Steve Booth, Amy Macdeath, Braille Fem, Caden Lovelace
MANY THANKS: Barbara Bridger, Jerome Fletcher
7 May: departed from Dartmouth
15 June: mightily pestered with ice and snow
no hope of landing
29 June: a company of isles
full of fair sounds
the sea void of ice
the land untroubled with snow
with earth and grass such as our moor and waste grounds of England
17 July: we fell upon a most strange quantity of ice
we supposed it to be land
we coasted this mass
our shrouds, ropes, and sails frozen
compassed with ice
2 August: much troubled with a fly which is called mosquito
15 August: here we had great hope of a through passage
this land is nothing in sight but isles
19 August: it began to snow
all night with foul weather
20 August: we bare in with the land
28 August: in this place we continued
1 September: this place yieldith
great store of birds
at the harbour mouth
great store of cod
6 September: purposed to depart
presently let slip our cables
11 September: a fair westnorthwest wind
we departed with trust
shaping our course
