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The Virginia Gazette Domestic News October 17, 1751
Richmond, Richmond, Virginia
What is this article about?
Extract of a letter from Capt. Wood describing a violent storm on the voyage from Cadiz to South Carolina: a thunderclap and shower of fire killed three crewmen, injured others, and severely damaged his ship.
Quality green show the numbers
Measured from the scan
— how cleanly the OCR engine read the characters
- Mean ink quality
- 99.0% The length-weighted average confidence across the OCR lines — the mean of exactly the per-line scores whose tails the two figures below report. Typical is 99%.
- Illegible ink
- 0.0% Text sitting in OCR-detected lines that scored below 80% confidence — very shaky reads. Weighted by line length, so one long bad line counts for more than a short one.
- Uncertain ink
- 0.0% Text in lines that scored 80–90% — somewhat shaky reads.
- Matches source
- 97.03% How closely the served text matches the raw OCR of the same boxes, letter by letter, after collapsing spacing and case. This measures agreement, not correctness: the OCR is often wrong and the extractor corrects it, so 100% does not mean perfect, and a low figure usually means poor scan text was rewritten rather than that text was lost (length vs source shows loss).
- Length vs source
- 99.25% Below 100% means text was dropped from the OCR; above means text was added to make it read.
Assembled by the extraction model
— whether the stitched-together text holds up; catches layout and segmentation errors, which the scores above cannot see
- Transcription confidence
- 96.0% (typical 96%) How cleanly the extractor could assemble what it was given. Low here with clean ink scores points at layout analysis — the characters were read correctly but grouped or ordered wrongly.
- Comprehension
- 92.0% Whether the piece reads coherently start to finish. Can stay high while transcription confidence drops, when only part of the component is affected.
Clipping
Full Text
Extract of a Letter from Capt. Wood, at South-Carolina, to his Friend in London.
"We left Cadiz the 20th of January, and next Day had a hard Gale of Wind westerly, which drove me into Gibraltar; which I left the 3d of February, and had a fine Passage until I got within 150 Leagues of this Place; where on the 10th of March, about Midnight, I met with a dismal Crack, together with a Shower of Fire, which broke over us, as if the whole Dissolution of the World was come. It killed me three Men, and several others much hurt; it split my Topgallant Mast to Pieces, shattered my Main-mast in such a Manner that I am obliged to get a new one. It split my Pumps, burst one of them between Decks, tore up three of my lower Deck Planks, and burst through my main Wale, about two Foot above Water, and filled the Ship full of a Cloud of sulphrous Smoke. The Crack was of no longer Continuance than the Snap of breaking a Pipe."
"We left Cadiz the 20th of January, and next Day had a hard Gale of Wind westerly, which drove me into Gibraltar; which I left the 3d of February, and had a fine Passage until I got within 150 Leagues of this Place; where on the 10th of March, about Midnight, I met with a dismal Crack, together with a Shower of Fire, which broke over us, as if the whole Dissolution of the World was come. It killed me three Men, and several others much hurt; it split my Topgallant Mast to Pieces, shattered my Main-mast in such a Manner that I am obliged to get a new one. It split my Pumps, burst one of them between Decks, tore up three of my lower Deck Planks, and burst through my main Wale, about two Foot above Water, and filled the Ship full of a Cloud of sulphrous Smoke. The Crack was of no longer Continuance than the Snap of breaking a Pipe."
What sub-type of article is it?
Disaster
Shipping
Accident
What keywords are associated?
Storm At Sea
Ship Damage
Maritime Accident
Lightning
South Carolina
Captain Wood
What entities or persons were involved?
Capt. Wood
Where did it happen?
South Carolina
Domestic News Details
Primary Location
South Carolina
Event Date
The 10th Of March
Key Persons
Capt. Wood
Outcome
three men killed, several others hurt; topgallant mast split to pieces, main-mast shattered requiring replacement, pumps split with one burst between decks, three lower deck planks torn up, main wale burst about two feet above water, and the ship filled with a cloud of sulphurous smoke.