Place Names in American Offshore Whaling Logbooks

One way to learn about the names that whalers used for geographic places is to look at their logbooks. This page extracts 17,000 logbook entries that name specific geographic places. These entries were extracted from the American Offshore Whaling Logbook database—more than 466,000 entries from 1,381 logbooks from American offshore whaling voyages between 1784 and 1920.

For frequently-visited places there may be hundreds of entries; all of them may list the same latitude and longitude, or there may be variations. Depending on the source of the entry, the place name may have been modernized or it may be exactly as used in the logbook.

To view a place entry on the map, select it by clicking on it in the data table. (Multiple entries maybe selected using shift-click, ctrl-click or cmd-click, depending on your computer.) Click on any red dot on the map to see its label. Small subsets of the data may be printed or downloaded directly from the table below. Read The Data Viewer Interface for instructions. A viewer for the full logbook database is available here: AOWL. [embedit snippet=”leaflet-js”]