Consolidated Logbook Data

The database of logbook entries includes information from 1,381 logbooks from American offshore whaling voyages between 1784 and 1920. These data were extracted from the original whaling logbooks during three separate scientific research projects, one conducted by Lt. Cmdr Matthew Fontaine Maury in the 1850s, the second conducted by Charles Haskins Townsend in the 1930s, and the third conducted by a team from the Census of Marine Life project (CoML, www.coml.org) led by Tim Denis Smith between 2000 and 2010. The Maury and Townsend data were assembled by the CoML team from archival sources. Dale Chatwin transcribed logbook data for ten British Southern voyages that were added to the consolidated data in 2024 and for 58 American voyages that caught right whales in the Indian Ocean added in 2025.

In the Encounter column, values are: Strike (one or more whales were struck, i.e., harpooned); Sight (whales were seen); Spoke (contacted another whaler that had captured whales nearby); NoEnc (no contact with whales). In the Tried column, values are the number of whales that were captured and ‘tried out’ (rendered into oil). For more, see the Column Definitions →

Small subsets of the data may be printed or downloaded directly from the table below. Read The Data Viewer Interface for instructions. For research purposes, the complete database may be downloaded for processing on your local computer.