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 Dataset is about to be updated [November 2023] on our companion website Whaling History.  The update will include new or updated cargo information for nearly 200 voyages after 1817 from HM's Customs. The new information was uncovered as a result of a Project to re-investigate the records of HM Customs. A Working Paper has been produced describing the value of the Bills of Entry records to the history of the British Southern Whale Fishery. Many thanks to the staff at the Archives Centre at the Maritime Museum in Liverpool, especially Lorna who was most helpful. 

A particularly outstanding example of a Journal, kept by surgeon Richard Francis Burton on board the whaleship Reliance, has been digitised by the State Library of South Australia. Read it here.  And a poem published in 1836 about whaling in the south seas.

An 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

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.
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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.