Related data resources

Tableau Public

• “Where Whalers Encountered Whales, 1784–1920“, an interactive visualization in Tableau Public using the American Offshore Whaling Logbook database

Mystic Seaport Museum

• Collections & Online Resources
• The “Registers of Seamen’s Protection Certificates” issued at the custom houses of Fall River, Gloucester, New Haven, New London, Newport, Marblehead, and Salem from 1796–1871
• Whaling vessels and crew may have sailed on voyages that were not whaling voyages—the complete crew list databases for these ports are available: New London crew lists and Salem crew lists.
• Index of Ship Registers (1858-1900), containing annual information on commercial vessels
• Connecticut Ships, vessels registered in Connecticut (1789-1939)
• New London Whaling Masters (biographies)

New Bedford Whaling Museum

• Logbooks, on Internet Archive
• Nautical charts, hosted on Digital Commonwealth
• Research Resources
• Collections Search

Nantucket Historical Association

• Collections Search
• Ship’s Logs Collection
• Ship’s Papers Collection
• Research Resources
• Nantucket History Topics

National Maritime Digital Library

The Digital Library’s mission is to collect, preserve and make accessible maritime resources in electronic format, thereby promoting maritime cultural heritage scholarship.

• Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchants’ Transcript, 1843-1914
• Information is available for about 250 whaling voyages from San Francisco in the San Francisco Shanghaiers database

British Southern Whale Fishery 1775 to 1861

• The official BSWF website, including background information for the database as well as related essays, datasets, timelines, biographies of masters and owners, gazetteers, and working papers.

Tools for Logbook Readers

• A calculator that takes entry dates in the form “Sunday, July 4” plus the starting year of the logbook, and returns the next year where July 4th is a Sunday. No more flipping through pages trying to figure out what year it is.
• A map that plots positions. Give it a latitude and a longitude, and see that location on a map. Add as many positions as you would like to the map.
• Search tools to look up place names and see them on a map. Searchable indexes to 3,300 places from the 1861 edition of Bowditch’s New American Practical Navigator, and to all the place names used in the American Offshore Whaling Logbook database. Links to the World Historical Gazetteer and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographical Names, both searchable, and to additional place resources on the British Southern Whale Fishery website.

View all tools →

CLIP—The Crew List Index Project

CLIP is a not-for-profit volunteer project, set up to assist research into the records of British merchant seafarers of the late 19th and early 20th century.

• Records of seafarers and ships
• CLIP databases

Maritime History Archive at the Memorial University in Newfoundland

Crew lists and logbooks for voyages of British registered vessels terminating in the years 1857-1942 can be searched here.

• Maritime History Archive
• Crew List Index search (by vessel registration number)
• 1881 Crew List search (by vessel and crew names)

Lindsay MacFarland Alexander

• Checklist of Whaleship arrivals at the ports on the North-East coast of New Zealand 1803-1895

Falkland Islands Government Archives

• Shipping Registers, 1842-1947

Bocher Elsa & Bocher Erwan

• SPACK : spatio-temporal database dedicated to whaling, sealing and fishing in Saint-Paul, Amsterdam, Crozet and Kerguelen Islands between 1780’s and 1930’s (2024) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8380676