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.
NEWS
A major contribution to the history of the BSWF has recently been made - Whaling Voyages Round the World in the Britannia and Speedy (Capt. Thomas Melvill) 1791–1796: The Journal of Surgeon David Brown, Introduced and Edited by John Melville. It has an excellent introduction and is a fine addition to the records of whales and whaling kept by British Whaling Surgeons. It's available from the author's website or from Amazon.
The British Southern Whale Fishery VOYAGE and CREW Datasets on Whaling History have been updated with hundreds of whale oil cargo entries from the ledgers of the London Gauger. A Working Paper describing the nature of the records is available. The data was extracted with the support of the IWC.
We've previously noted the existence of a particularly outstanding example of a British south seas whaling journal, kept by surgeon Richard Francis Burton on board whaleship Reliance and digitised by the State Library of South Australia (read it here). More recently a number of American whaling museums have digitised the British south seas and northern whale fishery logs and journals in their collections. In particular, New Bedford Whaling Museum has made a number of very interesting south seas whaling accounts available online. You can access them via the following link.
A major contribution to the history of the BSWF has recently been made - Whaling Voyages Round the World in the Britannia and Speedy (Capt. Thomas Melvill) 1791–1796: The Journal of Surgeon David Brown, Introduced and Edited by John Melville. It has an excellent introduction and is a fine addition to the records of whales and whaling kept by British Whaling Surgeons. It's available from the author's website or from Amazon.
The British Southern Whale Fishery VOYAGE and CREW Datasets on Whaling History have been updated with hundreds of whale oil cargo entries from the ledgers of the London Gauger. A Working Paper describing the nature of the records is available. The data was extracted with the support of the IWC.
We've previously noted the existence of a particularly outstanding example of a British south seas whaling journal, kept by surgeon Richard Francis Burton on board whaleship Reliance and digitised by the State Library of South Australia (read it here). More recently a number of American whaling museums have digitised the British south seas and northern whale fishery logs and journals in their collections. In particular, New Bedford Whaling Museum has made a number of very interesting south seas whaling accounts available online. You can access them via the following link.
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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