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[Extract] In his will of 1704, John Locke (1632–1704) bequeathed his manuscripts to his relative Peter King (1669–1734), first Baron King. King’s descendants, the earls of Lovelace, preserved these manuscripts until 1947, when the collection was acquired by the Bodleian Library en bloc.1 This collection was catalogued by Philip Long in his Summary Catalogue of the Lovelace Collection of the Papers of John Locke in the Bodleian Library (1959).2 Scholars interested in consulting Locke’s manuscripts can refer to Long’s Summary Catalogue for a guide to the Lovelace Collection; however, a systematic catalogue of the smaller deposits of Locke’s manuscripts in several other repositories remains a desideratum. These repositories acquired Locke’s manuscripts from a variety of different sources, particularly the nineteenth-century autograph market and a small number of sales presided over by the descendants of Locke’s close friend Edward Clarke (1650–1710), the MP for Taunton (1690–1710).3

This paper corrects an error in the comprehensive Explanatory Notes to Luther Mansfield and Howard Vincent’s scholarly centennial edition of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). In their discussion of the novel’s opening lines and the narrator’s name Ishmael, Mansfield and Vincent write, “There is no instance of the name [Ishmael] in the Nantucket Vital records to 1850, just as, also understandably, there is no instance of Ahab” (1952: 587). A review of the early vital records of Massachusetts in fact turns up two Ishmaels on Nantucket, along with at least 30 others across the state prior to 1850. And while Mansfield and Vincent are correct that the name Ahab does not appear in the early Nantucket vital records, elsewhere in Massachusetts we can find seven men named Ahab, all of them in the southeastern part of the state near the Rhode Island border. These distinctive names Melville chose for his nineteenth-century Massachusetts characters were thus not pure fictions — as modern readers might expect — but rather were borne in fact by actual people of that time and place. As Melville’s Ahab did glory in his genealogy, so may we likewise take delight in the genealogical authenticity that Melville wove into the text of Moby-Dick.