Author: dtcaldwell

Dale Chatwin’s index to the scanned Maury Abstract Logbooks is now available on whalinghistory.org. The original source material consists of almost one hundred volumes of handwritten abstracts of logbooks from voyages of American (and a few other) vessels from 1796 to 1861. Among them are at least 650 whaling voyages. The entries contain information about position, wind, weather, and whales captured or seen abstracted from the original logbooks. They are one of the data sources for the American Offshore Whaling Logbook database and the maps on whalinghistory.org. (The transcriptions were done by Tim Smith’s CoML group in the 1990s.)

The abstracts were compiled by the then-new U. S. Naval Observatory before the Civil War, which published maps of where the whales were to aid whalers. The original volumes are held by the National Archives and Records Administration, which recently scanned everything and made it available on the Internet. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/597822

Early this summer Dale Chatwin compiled an index that connects each whaling voyage in the abstracts to the beginning page of its entry in the Maury abstracts, with a URL for that page in the scanned version.

Also, for many voyages there are lists of the major ports of call during the voyage, with dates and travel times. These are linked as “Places visited”. For example, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/454830299?objectPage=247*

To find links to the index and to places visited:

• Search for a vessel, voyage, master or year in the main search box on any page. Maury index records linked to those search terms will come up in their own results tab. For instance, search ‘Thorn 1835’ (no quotation marks). You’ll get results for 2 voyages, 2 voyage maps and 2 Maury abstract logbooks for the 1835 voyages of the ship Thorn. (And 2 other voyages and 2 Dennis Wood abstracts for 1835 voyages owned by G. R. Thornton!)
• Or, choose Maury Abstract Logbook Index from the Explore menu in the heading on any page. This will return all 649 current entries. You can then use the search box to search within the index entries.
• Or, use the rightmost dropdown menu beside the search box to limit your search to ‘Maury Logbook Index’.

* Please be aware that none of the links to NARA’s scans of the abstracts will work properly if using the Firefox browser. NARA’s scan viewer and Firefox’s javascript interpreter don’t see eye to eye.

We are pleased to announce the availability of a database of Australian Colonial Whaling Ship Voyages from 1805 through 1898. The database lists the voyages made by the whaling vessels that were owned, registered or based in Australian ports. A few British whalers are also included, some due to the fact they were temporarily based in an Australian port and others because they were owned, or part-owned, by Australian residents although registered and based in Britain.

The database was built from six lists compiled by Mark Howard—The voyages; The fleet; The owners; The captains; The crewmen; and Where the Australian Whalers Went.

Learn more →

The British Southern Whale Fishery voyage and crew datasets have been updated with 900 amended or new whale oil cargo entries. This represents almost one-third of all known British Southern voyages. The updates have been sourced from the ledgers of the London Gauger held at the London Metropolitan Archives. A Working Paper describing the nature of the Gauger’s records and related matters is available (see sidebar). The new data was extracted with the support of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and will hopefully assist in developing estimates for the historical population of the southern right whale.