Answer: Did Jefferson Think She Was, or Wasn&#39;t, a Pirate Ship?S

Googler Daniel Russell knows how to find the answers to questions you can't get to with a simple Google query. In his weekly Search Research column, Russell issues a search challenge, then follows up later in the week with his solution—using whatever search technology and methodology fits the bill. This week's challenge: Did Jefferson think she was, or wasn't, a pirate ship?



To find the answer to this question, I started by first looking for the entire collected works of Thomas Jefferson. I figured that the answer would be somewhere in his collected writings, and I had suspicion that I could probably find every instance of the word "Jane" and jump right to the answer.

A query [ Thomas Jefferson collected writings ] led me to a few good collections such as the "Online Library of Liberty" which has the complete writings. (As does and the Jefferson collection at

The trick with such collections is to very carefully check to make sure it's the COMPLETE collection (and not just the "Founding Documents" collection, or just his letters, or similar subset). ALSO, be careful that the collection isn't larded up with lots of notes and commentaries, especially at the beginning of each chapter when a learned scholar writes his analysis of what lies in the chapter to come… these aren't useful for our primary document research and can seriously mislead you if you're not careful in your search.



Huh? THAT didn't make any sense. I know that there must be more hits than that (after all, Jefferson's mother, sister and baby daughter were all named "Jane").

So I kept looking for a better resource.

In a separate tab I pursued another strategy - to see if I could find some document written by Jefferson in 1793 about the Jane as a ship. So I used my old friend the AROUND operator like this to find the word "ship" within 3 words of the word "Jane" — that removed any spurious hits.

[ Thomas Jefferson ship AROUND(3) Jane 1793 ]

This in turn led me to a number of books that collected the writings of Jefferson. The first hit was "A message of the President of the United States to Congress relative to France and Great-Britain: delivered December 5, 1793, with the papers therein referred, to which are added the French originals." This is a scanned book published in 1793 (so I think it's a pretty reputable source).




From the note (in a slightly more readable format):


By the way, notice the variant spellings ("shew" and "defence"). Writing at this time had lots of interesting variations. Be sure to plan to search for those alternates as well!


Search lessons: In this case I pursued two strategies in parallel. My search for an easily searchable full-text of Jefferson's writings didn't quite work out the way I'd hoped. But my more general search DID work, and I was able to find what I needed in Google Books… from the original 1793 printing.

Another key point to remember is that even relatively simple questions ("Was the Jane a pirate or not?") often have richer, more complex answers than you might think. Jefferson's choice was not just a simple yes/no determination of what the Jane's intent was, but was played against a backdrop of a complex political situation that heavily influenced what judgments might be. Sometimes you just have to read a bit more than you'd think, just to understand what's going on.

But that's real research. And I find this kind of searching to be completely fascinating.

Search on!

Wednesday Search Challenge (Feb 22, 2012) Answer: Did Jefferson think she was, or wasn't? | SearchReSearch
