WhalingHistory.org has been greatly expanded in the past year to include whaling data from more countries, links to scanned documents online, and a new global search.
New Data
- British North American (BNA). A database of whaling voyage data has been added. This includes information on 170 masters, 84 vessels and almost 300 whaling voyages from the east coast of British North America from 1779 through 1845 The details of these voyages are largely the work of Andrea Kirkpatrick, compiled for her forthcoming book on this fishery.
- Les Baleiniers Français (LBF). Almost 1,000 records for French whaling voyages come primarily from digitization of Thierry DuPasquier’s tables from his two books documenting that country’s whaling trade. The data was confirmed and augmented by the generous contributions of Peter Tremewan who shared his translations of French maritime documents from the Archives Nationales, in Paris.
- American Offshore Whaling Voyages (AOWV). The data already on WhalingHistory.org has been edited and augmented with new biographical information about whaling masters and their wives. And, crew lists for another 350 voyages have been added by a volunteer project at New Bedford Whaling Museum.
- British Southern Whale Fishery (BSWF). The voyage and crew list databases have been extensively revised and updated.
New Search
- Global Search. A new search page makes it possible to search all of the databases on WhalingHistory.org at the same time. Now that we have five major data collections, each with multiple datasets, global search is the most powerful way to start your exploration of Whaling History. Search for a name to find every occurrence—as a whaling master, crew member, owner, agent, master’s wife, vessel, … —in any database on the site.
- Advanced Search. Each database has a data viewer—a tabular display window to interact with the data—for precision searching and access to every data field available. Researchers can search, sort, and select subsets of the data for printing, copying to spreadsheets or other documents, and downloading.
New Access to Voyage Maps
Whaling History has from its beginning displayed maps of more than 1,300 whaling voyages based on data from the American Offshore Whaling Logbook database. Maps are included in the new Global Search, making them easier to locate. Browse voyage maps →
New Connections
- Many vessels and masters sailed from more than one country. Considerable work has gone into connecting our databases to each other. Global searches will find these linkages among the American, French and British North American databases. For example:
- French whaling masters who also sailed as American masters. View the list →
- British N. American vessels who also sailed from American ports. View the list →
New Scanned Documents
- Logbooks. Several hundred logbooks from whaling voyages are available for reading online. Read scanned logbooks →
- Sources. Source entries now include links to view the original source documents when they are available online. Browse scanned sources →
New Explore Menu
We have added an Explore menu to offer new ways to dig into the Whaling History databases and to feature aspects of the data that might not otherwise be discovered. One of the first Explore topics is Women who went whaling, an opportunity to find voyages on which the master’s wife sailed.