(Roughly) Daily

“AmStar 7,” by Wollex

Your correspondent makes lots of use of Wikimedia Commons, “a database of 8,052,028 [as of January 2, 2011] freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.”  Most (Roughly) Daily use is in the almanac section, memorializing each date’s honoree.  But the Commons contains a wealth of other, less archival photos as well…

“The Commons Picture of the Year is a competition that was first run in 2006. It aims to identify the best freely-licensed images from those that during the year have been awarded Featured picture status.”

See the photo above, and 2010’s 22 other winners at Web Urbanist.

As we adjust out f-stops, we might recall that it was on this date in 1841 that Herman Melville shipped out to the South Seas on the whaler Acushnet.  The ship anchored near Tahiti, where Melville was jailed for his part in a mutiny; he escaped, and wandered around the South Sea islands for two years. In 1846, he published his first novel, Typee, based on his Polynesian adventures. His second book, Omoo (1847), also dealt with the region. Those two novels were popular successes, but his third, Mardi (1849), more experimental in nature, failed to catch on with the public.  In 1851, Harper & Brothers published Moby-Dick— at first another flop… it wasn’t recognized as the classic it’s become for many years.

The Acushnet, hunting (source: Columbia University)