The Cassin diaries are contained in six volumes. The first, spanning 1865-66, documents his travel by steamer. Cassin records crossing the equator (7/30/1865), visiting a volcano at Cape Verde (7/25/1865), and arriving in Brazil. Enterprising researchers might research his course using the longitudes and latitudes he records throughout this volume.
 
The second volume picks up more than a year later and commits significant attention to the medical profession. The first entry voices concern about the medical department at the University of Pennsylvania (12/10/1868), and subsequent pages enclose copies of letters from 1869, including his committee appointments, especially Assistant Surgeon in the Navy (4/2/1869). Sequential entries begin in earnest on 5/6/1869, when Cassin recounts his travels aboard the brig Ohieflaua from the Chicago Harbor to Lake St. Clair.
 
Cassin's third and fourth volumes are less descriptive but remarkable for the extent of his travels. In his 1870 "New York" diary, Cassin notes another journey to Brazil in June, South China Sea in August, and Hong Kong and Shanghai in September. His 1870-71 diary dovetails with the latter, recording a trip to Rio de Janeiro (6/6/1870) and undated notes pertaining to a voyage to South Africa. Once again, Cassin captures many longitudes and latitudes.
 
The "Clayton's Octovo Diary 1872" is perhaps the richest from an ethnographic perspective. Cassin provides detailed accounts of visits to Key West (2/10/1872), Havana and Matanzas (between February and April 1872), and even a brief reflection on the act of journaling. "A diary is something like a resolve to call professionally on a dentist
 
you may keep it, but the chances are much in the favor of your putting it off," Cassin observes on 4/26/7182. "Diary writing is almost the stupidest thing that I know of, unless one can make a writing task in no other way." Between May and June 1872, he travels throughout the Caribbean, furnishing descriptions of the peoples and villages he encounters. Interested researchers will find a particularly evocative entry of Key West society women in a 6/21/1872 quotation below.
 
A Pocket Diary dated 1875, finds Cassin landlocked, maintaining a more traditional journal of meetings, calls, letters, and weather conditions. The volume opens in St. Louis where he has apparently purchased a home, and it is not until September that he begins to travel again. That fall he returns to Brazil (11/6) and visits Uruguay (12/1).

Serving as a U.S. Navy physician, Charles Luke Cassin traveled extensively, recording firsthand accounts of Brazil, Canada, South Africa, the South China Sea, and the Caribbean during the postbellum period. His six-volume journal, which spans 1865-1875, offers glimpses at those far flung locations and the various peoples who inhabited them. Cassin's journals ought to appeal to a wide range of researchers, including those interested in the history of seafaring, the West Indies, ethnography, and late-eighteenth-century medical practices.
 
The Cassin diaries are contained in six volumes. The first, spanning 1865-66, documents his travel by steamer. Cassin records crossing the equator (7/30/1865), visiting a volcano at Cape Verde (7/25/1865), and arriving in Brazil. Enterprising researchers might research his course using the longitudes and latitudes he records throughout this volume.
 
The second volume picks up more than a year later and commits significant attention to the medical profession. The first entry voices concern about the medical department at the University of Pennsylvania (12/10/1868), and subsequent pages enclose copies of letters from 1869, including his committee appointments, especially Assistant Surgeon in the Navy (4/2/1869). Sequential entries begin in earnest on 5/6/1869, when Cassin recounts his travels aboard the brig Ohieflaua from the Chicago Harbor to Lake St. Clair.
 
Cassin's third and fourth volumes are less descriptive but remarkable for the extent of his travels. In his 1870 "New York" diary, Cassin notes another journey to Brazil in June, South China Sea in August, and Hong Kong and Shanghai in September. His 1870-71 diary dovetails with the latter, recording a trip to Rio de Janeiro (6/6/1870) and undated notes pertaining to a voyage to South Africa. Once again, Cassin captures many longitudes and latitudes.
 
The "Clayton's Octovo Diary 1872" is perhaps the richest from an ethnographic perspective. Cassin provides detailed accounts of visits to Key West (2/10/1872), Havana and Matanzas (between February and April 1872), and even a brief reflection on the act of journaling. "A diary is something like a resolve to call professionally on a dentist
 
you may keep it, but the chances are much in the favor of your putting it off," Cassin observes on 4/26/7182. "Diary writing is almost the stupidest thing that I know of, unless one can make a writing task in no other way." Between May and June 1872, he travels throughout the Caribbean, furnishing descriptions of the peoples and villages he encounters. Interested researchers will find a particularly evocative entry of Key West society women in a 6/21/1872 quotation below.
 
A Pocket Diary dated 1875, finds Cassin landlocked, maintaining a more traditional journal of meetings, calls, letters, and weather conditions. The volume opens in St. Louis where he has apparently purchased a home, and it is not until September that he begins to travel again. That fall he returns to Brazil (11/6) and visits Uruguay (12/1).

The Elisha Kent Kane Papers and Logbooks include at least 50 heterogeneous notebooks, journals, and logs that may be loosely termed diaries and clustered into four main categories: Kane's arctic expeditions (containing six notebooks); his world travel (eight notebooks); his education, training, and medical practice (24 notebooks); and the various ship logs contained in the Kane Ship Log collection (12 notebooks). Although some of these records are difficult to interpret in isolation, when read together in these suggestive clusters, they will richly reward scholars interested in trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific travel, antebellum medicine, colonialism, and ethnography. Reference F. A. Parker's "Log of the U.S. Frigate Brandywine" (Kane Logbooks, No.7) and Samuel L. Breeze's "Journal of the U.S. Sloop of War Albany" (Kane Logbooks, No.8) for detailed illustrations of antebellum Rio de Janeiro, Macao, Hong Kong, Honolulu, Valparaiso, Veracruz, and the Yucatan.