Welcome to the British Southern Whale Fishery Website
For 350 years until the early 1960s the British were involved in several types of whaling. This involvement was divided into three distinct trades; the northern whale fishery between 1610 and 1914; the southern whale fishery or ‘south seas trade’ from 1775 to 1861; and the modern whaling trade, from 1904 to 1963. Each of these trades was distinguished by the geographical location in which it was undertaken, the types of whales pursued and to some extent by the methods and techniques used to capture whales. The traditional northern and southern whale fisheries were even differentiated and defined by law.
The British Southern Whale Fishery VOYAGE and CREW Datasets have just been updated on our companion website Whaling History. Lots of new information added as well as four Voyage Maps including a map for the first voyage to the 'Japans' by the Syren under the command of Nantucketer, Frederick Coffin. Check out the NOTES Field accessible from the Data Viewer in the Crew List Dataset where you can 'Search For' and 'Find' instances of 'shark attacks'; "killed by a whale" and many other events in the lives (or deaths) of whaling men.
A most regrettable aspect in the study of the British Southern Whale Fishery is that few detailed voyage accounts exist. That said, there is a amazing richness in a few surviving accounts as a consequence of the requirement to carry a surgeon on British whaling ships. A particularly outstanding example kept by surgeon Richard Francis Burton on board the whaleship Reliance off the coast of east Africa has been digitised by the State Library of South Australia. It includes a daily record of the voyage, illustrations, discoveries, charts, commentary on islands visited and detailed information on the operation of the vessel. Read it here.
A important contribution to the history of the British Southern Whale Fishery, the story of the 'House of Enderby' by Charles Payton. Read 'The Enderby Family and their World' here ...
A most regrettable aspect in the study of the British Southern Whale Fishery is that few detailed voyage accounts exist. That said, there is a amazing richness in a few surviving accounts as a consequence of the requirement to carry a surgeon on British whaling ships. A particularly outstanding example kept by surgeon Richard Francis Burton on board the whaleship Reliance off the coast of east Africa has been digitised by the State Library of South Australia. It includes a daily record of the voyage, illustrations, discoveries, charts, commentary on islands visited and detailed information on the operation of the vessel. Read it here.
A important contribution to the history of the British Southern Whale Fishery, the story of the 'House of Enderby' by Charles Payton. Read 'The Enderby Family and their World' here ...
Dedication |
The BSWF Project Team |
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This independent research project seeks to make available and build on work initially undertaken by A. G. E. (Joe) Jones. During a period of over thirty years Mr. Jones twice read through over 15 million entries in Lloyds List, extracting some 15,000 entries for ships participating in British southern whaling between the years 1775 and 1861.
If you are using this site to support academic research please properly acknowledge the people who did the work! |
Rhys Richards compiled the initial voyage data. Dale Chatwin edited the data and created the Voyage and Crew Databases. Mark Howard and Jane Clayton contributed extra information to the databases and website. More recently valued contributions have been made by Adrian Tschoegl and Julie Papworth to the Voyage dataset. Other acknowledgments are contained in our Notes and Acknowledgements document and on the Voyage and Crew Databases page.
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