The Snapshots in Time Collection

'The Harbor, How Sea Gulls Live' — View Along Ship's Boat Boom with Feeding Gulls, USS Columbia Album, c. 1898-1910s

'The Harbor, How Sea Gulls Live' — View Along Ship's Boat Boom with Feeding Gulls, USS Columbia Album, c. 1898-1910s

Photographed from the deck of a U.S. Navy cruiser, this image captures an everyday shipboard moment: gulls swarming around a ship's boat as scraps are thrown overboard into a crowded harbor anchorage. Captioned by the sailor-photographer as 'How Sea Gulls Live,' the snapshot reflects the informal, personal photography common in sailors' scrapbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Project: 218600