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.
