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 involved three distinct trades; the northern whale fishery 1610 to 1914; the southern whale fishery 1775 to 1861; and the modern whaling trade 1904 to 1963. Each of these trades was distinguished by the geographical location in which it was undertaken, types of whales pursued and by the methods 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 on Whaling History have been updated with hundreds of new whale oil cargo entries. The updates are from the ledgers of the London Gauger. A Working Paper describing the nature of the records is available. The new data was extracted with the support of the International Whaling Commission (IWC).
A particularly outstanding example of a British whaling journal, kept by surgeon Richard Francis Burton on board whaleship Reliance is available at the State Library of South Australia. Read it here. 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 ...
A particularly outstanding example of a British whaling journal, kept by surgeon Richard Francis Burton on board whaleship Reliance is available at the State Library of South Australia. Read it here. 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 |
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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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