doodles on ship manifests

[joetucciarone]

Has anyone ever seen scribbles or doodles on old documents? These are doodles I found on various ship manifests. Beneath each drawing is the date of the manifest and the name of the ship.

At the top is a picture of a feather that might represent the quill pen used to create the list of passengers. On the banner near its tip is written “cabin 32-5.” The two pictures in the middle row might represent the faces of passengers. The second face is scratched, maybe because of that passenger’s poor attitude toward the clerk?

The swan on the bottom left is the most detailed of the illustrations, and I suspect it was drawn by the agent who drew the quill pen. The banner in its beak says “cabin 36-12.” The most interesting of all the pictures is on the bottom-right. At first glance, I thought it was just a smudge. But if you look closely, you can see it’s a strange creature with folded wings.

All of these pictures are superimposed against a nondescript doodle from the January 23, 1872 manifest of the steamship Holsatia.

steamship_doodles.jpg

[darkerhorse]

I've never seen such doodles.

I read that some Riveli records have a portrait sketch of the person, but I assume that's extremely rare.

[darkerhorse]

"I have even found pages with ink line drawings of the person taxed."

https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/It ... li_Records

[victorable112]

I first saw this image Drift Boss here. Looks pretty good