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==Welcome to the MarineLives project==
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==Our volunteers==
  
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'''MarineLives is a collaborative volunteer driven project. The project started as a spinoff from a National Archives hackathon in early 2012. We are dedicated to the collaborative transcription, linkage and enrichment of primary manuscripts from the High Court of Admiralty, 1650-1669 (with some excursions into data from the 1630s and 1640s).'''
    <div style="background: #b0c4de; padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px; font-size: larger; font-weight: bold;">Four years of collaborative Public History</div>
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<div style="font-famil:Garamond; font-size: normal;">'''The MarineLives collaborative public history project was established in 2012 to digitise, transcribe and annotate the manuscript records of the English High Court of Admiralty from the 1650s and 1660s. The original records are held at the National Archives in Kew.'''</div>
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The project is led and advised by academics and members of the general public.
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In the last four years [[Volunteers|project volunteers]] have transcribed over four million words, which are published on this wiki as full text transcriptions with accompanying metadata
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The wiki has {{NUMBEROFPAGES}} wiki pages, {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} content pages and {{NUMBEROFFILES}} manuscript images. The wiki has had {{NUMBEROFEDITS}} edits.
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To learn more or to volunteer please [http://marinelives.org/contact-us.html contact us]
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[[File:HCA 3 71 Credits 1.png|300px|left|thumb|The MarineLives project was launched in 2012 with the [[HCA 13/71|collaborative transcription of witness statements from 1656 and 1657]]]]
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</div>
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</div>
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==Interviews with historians==
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    <div style="background: #b0c4de; padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px; font-size: larger; font-weight: bold;">Interviews with Historians</div>
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<div style="font-famil:Garamond; font-size: normal;">'''We are conducting a series of interviews with professional historians about their use of electronic search in support of their research strategies'''</div>
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Recent interviews include social historians Dr Andy Burn (Durham University) and Dr James Brown (University of Sheffield) and maritime historian Dr Cathryn Pearce (University of Greenwich)
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[[File:Dr Andy Burn 09072016.PNG|100px|thumbnail|left|[https://durham.academia.edu/AndyBurn Dr Andy Burn, Durham University]]]
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Dr Andy Burn is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Durham. His current research concerns "Social Relations and Everyday Life in England, 1500-1640", a Leverhulme-funded project led by Professor Andy Wood. The first year of this project involved extensive research across England in local record offices and archives in which Andy examined mainly legal documents generated by Church and National courts. Andy's research is now moving more online and will mine State Papers (using State Papers Online) as well as Early English Books Online (EEBO), plus local records accessed electronically.
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[http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Tools:_Team_Two#Dr_Andy_Burn.2C_University_of_Durham Click here to read the interview with Dr Andy Burn].
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[[File:Dr James Brown 08072016.PNG|100px|thumb|left|[http://hridigital.shef.ac.uk/brown Dr James Brown, University of Sheffield]]]
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Dr James Brown is based at the University of Sheffield. He is affiliated both to the Sheffield HRI Digital group and to the Sheffield history faculty.  He is currently one of two research associates on the project [http://www.intoxicantsproject.org 'Intoxicants and Early Modernity: England, 1580-1740' (ESRC; PI: Professor Phil Withington)]. James completed his PhD at the University of Warwick on Inns, Taverns and Alehouses in Early Modern Southampton in 2008. Between 2009 and 2013 he was project coordinator and then digital project manager for 'Cultures of Knowledge: Networking the Republic of Letters, 1550-1750' at the University of Oxford (Mellon Foundation; PI: Professor Howard Hotson), overseeing (inter alia) the development of its union catalogue of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century correspondence, [http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/. Early Modern Letters Online].
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[http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Tools:_Team_Two#Dr_James_Brown.2C_University_of_Sheffield Click here to read the interview with Dr James Brown]
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[[File:Dr Cathryn Pearce 06072016.PNG|100px|thumbnail|left|[http://www.gre.ac.uk/ach/study/hpss/staff/cathryn-pearce Dr Cathryn Pearce, Visiting Lecturer, University of Greenwich]]]
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Dr Cathryn Pearce is an American maritime historian, living and working in the South West of England, who has studied and worked in Alaska, Canada and England. She was an active transcriber in the MarineLives project team back in 2012, when the project was first established. She received her BA in History from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and her MA in British and Maritime history from the University of Victoria in British Columbia. She received her doctorate  in maritime studies from the University of Greenwich. She edits the peer reviewed online journal Troze for the National Maritime Museum, Cornwall.
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Cathryn's current research project is on life saving and coastal communities. This project centres on the private physical manuscript archive of the Shipwrecked Mariners Society. Cathryn has imaged the minute books of the Society, together with associated materials, and is now transcribing the material and exploring the background of the many individuals mentioned therein. The archive is located in Chichester and is a purely a paper archive with no electronic finding aids or search engine.
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[http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Tools:_Team_Two#Dr_Cathryn_Pearce.2C_University_of_Greenwich Click here to read the interview with Dr Cathryn Pearce]
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</div>
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</div>
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==The Silver Ships research project==
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Currently, we have just over 10,000 images available (29 GB) and 11,400 pages of full text transcriptions on the MarineLives wiki.
  
[[File:SilverShipsEtchingDu-Gard BL.PNG|300px|thumb|right|Etching from Thomas Violet, 'A True Narrative of som Remarkable Proceedings Concerning the Ships Sampson, Salvador, and George' (1650s). Source: British Library: [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)] licence]]
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Please [http://marinelives.org/wiki/Special:MarineLivesContact contact us] if you would like to learn more about this summer's project and how you can help, or if you would more generally like to learn about the work of MarineLives volunteers.
  
 
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Dr Andy Burn
 
Dr Andy Burn
 
Elio Calcagno
 
Elio Calcagno
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Michelle María Early Capistrán
 
Rachel Carter
 
Rachel Carter
 
Giovanni Colavizza
 
Giovanni Colavizza
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Anne Mills
 
Anne Mills
 
Kate Morant
 
Kate Morant
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[http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/User:MatthiasMuellerProve Matthias Müller-Prove]
 
Professor Steve Murdoch
 
Professor Steve Murdoch
 
Dr Shavana Musa
 
Dr Shavana Musa
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Roger Towner
 
Roger Towner
 
Alexis Truax
 
Alexis Truax
William Tullett
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Dr William Tullett
 
Oliver Turner
 
Oliver Turner
 
Dr Brodie Waddell
 
Dr Brodie Waddell
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'''Three large ships (The ''Salvador'', the ''Sampson'' and the ''Saint George''), of supposed Lubeck and Hamburg build and ownership, were captured by the English in 1652 with highly valuable cargos of silver bullion.'''
 
 
'''The ships were on their way from Cadiz with bullion from the Spanish West Indies going northwards. It was disputed in the English Admiralty Court as to whether the ships were bound legally for the Spanish Netherlands, or illegally for Amsterdam.'''
 
 
The case was endowed with political as well as commercial weight - the Commonwealth, and then the Protectorate, was keen to have the bullion declared lawfull prize, but the Spanish government contested this.
 
 
The many and varied court depositions and other English Admiralty (and English and Spanish State Paper) records give very granular and highly colourful accounts of Seville and Cadiz, Hamburg and Lubeck, the Spanish Netherlands, the by-ways between the Spanish Netherlands and Amsterdam by which bullion could be smuggled overland and by canal, and the River Thames, where the ships and sailors were held following seizure.
 
 
Thomas Violet, a rather dodgy goldsmith, was involved as an agitator on behalf of the State, and published a pamphlet pleading for reimbursement of his efforts, which supplements the Admiralty Court material on the MarineLives wiki.
 
 
The Silver Ships project was launched by participants in the [http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Tools:_Three_Silver_Ships#Research_goals_and_approach MarineLives 2015 summer transcription training programme] and continues to be driven by volunteers.
 
 
'''Click to [http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Tools:_Three_Silver_Ships#Narrative read more]''' about the Silver ships and the historical and legal context of the resulting disputes.
 
  
 
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==Summer challenge, 2017: How to make money in C17th commercial shipping?==
  
==Our team based transcription programmes==
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'''This summer the MarineLives project team is looking at the drivers of profit and loss in C17th commercial shipping. We will publish as we go and welcome comments, contradiction, and offers of help and data.'''
 
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We run regular team-based transcription programmes on-line, facilitated by trained team leaders, with teams of three or four volunteer associates. These programmes last ten weeks, and will take a transcriber from a novice to a confident transcriber in that space of time.
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Please [http://marinelives.org/contact-us.html contact us] to discuss volunteering, or to explore how we might work with your University, School or Local History Society.
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[[File:Thomas Davies 14052015.PNG|210px|thumb|left|Thomas Davies]]
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==Early results from our work==
  
'''Thomas Davies was a third year history undergraduate student studying at Bath Spa University. In the summer of 2014, Thomas was a member of a four person virtual team of volunteers transcribing Admiralty Court witness statements from 1658 to 1660, facilitated by Dr. Philip Hnatkovich in Pennsylvania:'''
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    <div style="background: #b0c4de; padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px; font-size: larger; font-weight: bold;">What size were the ships?</div>
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<div style="font-famil:Garamond; font-size: normal;">'''The starting point of our work this summer has been to create a semi-structured database containing quantitative and qualitative data about commercial and naval ships mentioned in English High Court of Admiralty documents between 1630 and 1669. This database draws on the work of our volunteers over the last five years, with transcriptions of depositions, charter parties, and bills of sale forming the main source of data for the database.'''</div>
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[[File:Ship Size Ver2 10072017.JPG|600px|thumbnail|left|]] We have ship tonnage data for 429 ships, of which the vast majority are commercial (n=407) and a small group are naval (n=22), mainly ships in the immediate service of the English Commonwealth, together with English private men of war, and a smattering of non-English naval vessels.
  
"There were some challenging aspects of the programme — the main being distance. This was because we worked as a team and half of the team were based in the United Kingdom and half were based in the United States, so we had to be aware of time differences and that we would be unable to meet in person.  
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There are two clear peaks in the data for commercial ships - the first peak is in the 55 to 99 ton burthen category and the second peak is in the 200 to 249 ton burthen category.
  
To combat this we used email, Google Hangouts, and Skype and made good use of all the resources available to stay in touch when working on the documents together. We had weekly calls to discuss team business. The weekly calls helped because we would talk about the problems or issues we faced weekly and how the transcriptions were to be presented covering topics such as layout or abbreviations.
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Admiralty Court witnesses refer to ships of 50 and 60 tons as "small" and ships of 300 to 350 tons and above as "large". The smallest ton burthen category in our analysis (1-49 ton burthen) contains lighters, some barges and hoys, and other small river and coastal vessels.
  
The biggest challenge I faced in the transcription itself was becoming accustomed to the peculiar writing and distinguishing letters. Some letters look very similar, such as f’s and s’s, r’s and c’s not to mention t’s and l’s. I began transcribing effectively by taking it slow and working out the letters individually instead of looking at the word as a whole as we do with modern writing. I found this approach to be very effective.
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</div>
  
MarineLives created a Bath Spa student section that helped me significantly, showing templates of letters and the different forms they have. This allowed me to tackle the many different writing styles the clerks used. Once I was able to distinguish between letters more clearly with considerable practise, I found I could transcribe enough of the page to get a good idea of what was being said in the documents. Then, I could alter words that did not fit within the context of the deposition, or using the context as a guideline as to what certain words should be."
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    <div style="background: #b0c4de; padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px; font-size: larger; font-weight: bold;">What size were the smaller commercial ships?</div>
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<div style="font-famil:Garamond; font-size: normal;">'''High Court of Admiralty witnesses sometimes describe commercial vessels using specialised vocabulary. For example, hoys, lighters, and ketches. We have analysed these data to explore ship size by specialised type.'''</div>
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[[File:Commercial Ship Size 14072017.JPG|700px|thumbnail|left|]] We have ship tonnage data for forty commercial vessels classified by vessel type. Clearly the sample sizes are very small for many of these vessel types.
  
[http://marinelives-theshippingnews.org/blog/2015/01/05/our-team-reflections-from-the-summer-programme-2014-part-2/ Read full article]
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We would be interested in our readers comments on these data.
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[[File:Katherine Parker 14052015.PNG|250px|thumb|left|Katherine Parker]]
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'''Katherine Parker is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. She is currently writing her dissertation entitled “Toward a more ‘perfect knowledge': British geographic knowledge and South Seas exploration in the eighteenth century. She participated in the MarineLives Ph.D. forum in 2013, and the MarineLives summer programme in 2014:'''
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Are the averages and ranges in the same ballpark as data in the hands of our readers, both from the C17th and earlier and later periods?
  
"On summer research trips to London in 2011 and 2012, I had looked at a few HCA documents and knew that the cases recorded in them offered rich material for social, economic, and naval history. Over the course of several skype meetings, I and other PhD students got to give our opinions about the proposed platform and methodology for transcription. Working with a team created a strong community aspect to the project from the beginning; I have always been impressed by the inclusiveness and openness that drives MarineLives. Also, it was refreshing to have my opinion valued as a PhD student, as sometimes that stage in one’s education is isolating and transitional—you are not yet qualified as an expert, but also not unknowledgeable about certain fields.
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What can you tell us about the use to which these different types of commercial vessel were put?
  
The value MarineLives placed on the voices of the PhD forum made me want to participate further, even though the works being transcribed were not strictly within the chronological bounds of my dissertation project. Thus, when the summer transcription project was created, I jumped at the opportunity to use paleographic and transcription skills I had gained after a year in London archives on a Social Sciences Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (2013-14).
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Riverine versus coastal versus longer distance use? Cargo types? Crew and gun levels? Rental rates?
  
Writing styles change over time, just like clothing and furniture styles. Thus, the letters inscribed within HCA volumes from the mid-seventeenth century posed a challenge for me, as I am used to the fluid, upright cursive (often written by a trained scribe or clerk) of the mid-eighteenth-century Admiralty. I came to enjoy the challenge of squinting at the digital pages in front of me, willing the words to make sense, filling in paragraphs slowly until suddenly they all made sense."
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</div>
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</div>
  
[http://marinelives-theshippingnews.org/blog/2015/01/11/our-team-reflections-from-the-2014-summer-programme-part-3/ Read full article]
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    <div style="background: #b0c4de; padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px; font-size: larger; font-weight: bold;">How much did it cost to transport a ton of goods between ports?</div>
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<div style="font-famil:Garamond; font-size: normal;">'''C17th commercial ships could be rented by the month or by the voyage, or freight tonnage could be purchased for a voyage for a specific commodity type. We have collected freight rates for different types of commodity and for different port to port combinations and present our early analysis here. Most of our observations are from the period 1650 to 1666.'''</div>
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[[File:Freight Rates Per Ton 18072017.JPG|600px|thumbnail|left|]]
  
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Our current dataset for tonnage based freight rates consists of forty-four observations for a range of fine, coarse and bulk goods.
==MarineLives Digital Pop Up Lab==
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'''The MarineLives Digital Pop Up Lab started this week.'''
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They cover short transportation distances, such as London to Rouen and Kingsale in Ireland to London through medium distances, such as Cyprus and Scanderoone to London and Brazil to Lisbon, and long distances, such as Bantam in the East Indies to London.
  
'''Team 1 will work on prototyping semi-automated handwriting recognition'''
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The outbreak of war had significant impact on tonnage based freight rates. For example, war between England and the United Provinces in the early 1650s, sharply pushed up freight rates on galls and cotton wool from the Eastern Mediterranean to London.
  
We will explore line and text block recognition of legal documents using software tools developed by the Transkribus project. If we can get a Java coder on the team, we will embed the Transkribus tools in the MarineLives wiki. The team will work with C17th records from the English High Court of Admiralty and from the King's Bench. We will explore whether Transkribus tools can be used by volunteers to create metadata for virgin manuscripts for which there are neither existing metadata, keywords, nor full text transcriptions. We are interested in both the software and workflows required to systematise the creation of metadata and keywords to make previously "invisible" manuscript images discoverable.
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Driving the higher freight rates during times of war was the need to have higher manning levels on ships, higher mariner wages per man, and higher gun intensity per tun of ship burthen.
  
[http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Tools:_Team_One Click here for more detail on Team One]
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     <div style="background: #b0c4de; padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px; font-size: larger; font-weight: bold;">Popular Finding Aids</div>
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     <div style="background: #b0c4de; padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px; font-size: larger; font-weight: bold;">How much did it cost to transport a ton of goods between ports?</div>
 
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'''[[Tools: Slavery|Slavery]]''' - Lists 34 English, Dutch & Portuguese slave ships in 1650s HCA records
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<div style="font-famil:Garamond; font-size: normal;">'''Our latest data table for mid-C17th freight rates per ton of goods transported'''</div>
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[[File:Freight Rates 19072017.JPG|600px|thumbnail|left|]]
  
'''[[Tools: Probate records|Probate records]]''' - Lists full text transcriptions of merchant wills available on MarineLives wiki
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Our current dataset for tonnage based freight rates consists of fifty-two observations for a range of fine, coarse and bulk goods.
 
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'''[[Tools: London 1677 Directory probate record lookup|Probate & London directory 1677 lookup]]''' - Matches merchants in 1650s Admiralty Court records to Probate records and listing of merchants in 1677 London merchant directory
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[[File:Litle London Directory 1677 JC Hotten 1863 Piece 190114 copy.PNG|thumbnail|center|200px|[https://archive.org/stream/littlelondondir00lond#page/2/mode/2up John Camden Hotten (ed.), Little London Directory of 1677 (London, 1863)]]]
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'''Team 2 will work on tailored algorithmic search, and will prototype semantic search methods on our semantic media wiki'''
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    <div style="background: #b0c4de; padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px; font-size: larger; font-weight: bold;">How much did it cost to rent a ship by the month?</div>
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<div style="font-famil:Garamond; font-size: normal;">'''C17th commercial ships could be rented by the month or by the voyage, or freight tonnage could be purchased for a voyage for a specific commodity type. Monthly rental rates can be found in notarised charter parties, which were submitted as schedules in support of High Court of Admiralty cases. Alternatively, monthly rental rates are sometimes recited by witnesses in their Court depositions.'''</div>
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[[File:Monthly Ship Rental Rates 13072017.JPG|600px|thumbnail|left|]]
  
We will explore how historians approach historical search when they are looking for people, places and dates. We will look at search engines employed by archives and libraries such as the National Archives and the British Library, at search tools provided by digital resources such as British History online and at federated search tools such as Connected Histories. We will look at search tools, glossaries, and lookup tables on the MarineLives wiki. Our focus will be on how historians really work, and on how technology can be used to speed up and make more effective the day-to-day task of historical search.
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Our current dataset for monthly rentals consists of forty-nine ships.
  
An explicit goal of team two will be to understand the semantic properties of the MarineLives semantic media wiki. This wiki was implemented in May 2015 by one of our volunteers, Rowan Beentje. With four million words of full text, over 10,000 manuscript images and over 20,000 pages, improved search will have a dramatic impact for all users of the wiki. A number of potential semantic search plug-ins exist, and we would like our volunteers to specify the functionality our users need and to explore the appropriate semantic search solution.
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Twenty-seven of these are rental rates for hull plus apparel, tackle, furniture and ordinance, but excluding provisions and wages, which were to be paid directly by the renting agent.
  
[http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Tools:_Team_Two Click here for more detail on Team Two]
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Fourteen are rental rates for hull plus apparel, tackle, furniture and ordinance and including provisions and wages, which were to be paid by the ship owner and recovered through the monthly rental. We know the monthly rental rates for three of these fourteen also on the basis of excluding provisions and wages.
  
[http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Tools:_Semantic_Queries Click here for background on semantic search techniques] applied to the MarineLives wiki
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Finally, we have eight rental rates for which it is unclear on what basis the rentals were contracted.
  
[http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Special:Ask Click here for access to the Special:Ask Semantic Query Form] to query our the MarineLives wiki
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'''Team 3 will work on visualisation techniques'''
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    <div style="background: #b0c4de; padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px; font-size: larger; font-weight: bold;">How much were ships worth?</div>
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<div style="font-famil:Garamond; font-size: normal;">'''We are at an early stage of analysing value of ships. Our current data look at the value of ships for the hull plus apparel, tackle and furniture and often also the ordinance on board the ship. We distinguish between unnotarised and notarised values, with notarised values referring to specific bills of sale and unnotarised values often based upon witness estimates of ship value given in court for ships seized during voyages.'''</div>
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[[File:Ship Value Per Ton Burthen 13072017.JPG|600px|thumbnail|left|]]
  
We will explore how visualisation techniques can be used by historians for multiple purposes - to improve the discoverability of data, to highlight and analyse linkages in data, and to aid the comprehension of data. We will undertake an analysis of our own needs as historians and will explore how software designers have approached meeting those needs.
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Our current dataset consists of one hundred and one ships, of which seventy-eight ship values are unnotarised and twenty-three ship values are notarised. Notarised values are lower (average = £3.90 per ton of ship burthen) comparised with unnotarised vales (average = ££6.40 per ton of ship burthen). Notarised values show a significantly tighter range around the average and mean than do unnotarised values.
  
An explicit goal of team three is to understand the visualisation potential of the MarineLives full text corpus and to explore approaches to mining the data for visualisation applications.
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We are working on disambiguating our data, but believe the differences in averages, means and range are due to the unnotarised data being more mixed in nature. Specifically, unnotarised data tends to be generated from witness statements of ship value following the seizure of a ship. We have excluded witness valuations of ships where it is clear that the outward, interim or return lading of the ship has been included in the witness valuation. Similarly, we have excluded witness valuations of ships where it is clear that an outward monetary stock has been included in the valuation.
We would like to explore the use an off-the-shelf Named Entity Recogniser to detect places, ships and dates, and to visualise the results in multiple ways and for multiple analytical purposes. We would like to compare this automated approach to the generation of tagged data to the hand extraction of geographical and other tagged data. We will build off earlier work done in collaboration with the Department of Informatics at the University of Mannheim. Team members will have an opportunity to work with, and improve upon, a MarineLives dataset for C17th ship sailing times between ports and dwell time in ports
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[http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Tools:_Team_Three Click here for more detail on Team Three]
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However, even with these exclusions, the valuation of ships during their voyage usually includes some portion of the provisions carried on board the ship. If a seizure is early in a planned long voyage, these provisions could amount from anything between six and twenty months.
  
'''For further background please use our [http://marinelives.org/wiki/Special:MarineLivesContact contact form].'''
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Moreover, the valuations of ships during their voyage will include some attribution of value to the refitting and setting out of a ship prior to a voyage, which can vary in the case of the hull from repairs to full graving and caulking or even resheathing, and in the case of the apparel, tackle and furniture, can include totally new provision of sails, rigging, blocks and other materials. Witnesses appear to make some allowance for the wear and tear of a ship on a long voyage and sometimes comment on this when giving their unnotarised valuations in their depositions in the High Court of Admiralty.
  
'''For information on the technical background to the MarineLives semantic media wiki and to the three teams, please look at [http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Tools:_Tech_Talk 'Tech Talk' by our semantic media wiki designer, Rowan Beentje]
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We plan to add ship inventories to our database, sourced from High Court of Admiralty appraisements of seized ships. These inventories will provide detailed breakdowns of the value of the physical components of ships in this period.
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==The Court records==
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<div style="border:1px solid #90C0FF; background:#D0E0FF; width:99%; padding:4px; margin-bottom:10px">
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<div style="border:1px solid #90C0FF; background:#F0F0FF; width:99%; padding:4px">
+
</div>
[[File:Court_Procedure_060515.jpg|400px|thumb|right|Admiralty court procedure]]
+
  
'''The [[Introduction to the High Court of Admiralty|English High Court of Admiralty]] produced a wide range of documents. [[Court Records|Click here for a full listing of the Admiralty Court records within scope of MarineLives project]]'''
+
<div style="float: left; vertical-align: bottom; margin-right: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; background:#dcdcdc; border: 1px solid #b0c4de; width: 1000px;">
 +
    <div style="background: #b0c4de; padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px; font-size: larger; font-weight: bold;">How old were the ships?</div>
 +
    <div style="padding: 10px;">
 +
<div style="font-famil:Garamond; font-size: normal;">'''The size of our dataset for the analysis of ship age is one hundred and fifteen; of which thirteen datapoints simply state "new" or "old"; a further twenty-four datapoints are minimum ages, with the possibility that the ships were older; and seventy-eight datapoints give ship age accurate to the year. For these latter seventy-nine datapoints we have ship burthen data in tonnage for thirty-seven of them, which we display below in graphical form'''</div>
 +
The average age of ships for which we have age and tonnage data is 6.1 years (n=37), whereas the average age of ships for which we have age data accurate to the year for which we have no tonnage data is 7.1 years (n=41).
 +
[[File:Ship Age 10072017.JPG|600px|thumbnail|left|]]
  
The various steps in a particular case can be followed in summary form in the '''Acts of Court'''.  
+
[https://twitter.com/DrIanFriel Dr Ian Friel] has shared with us [https://twitter.com/DrIanFriel/status/884360083634892800 a summary of data from his unpublished survey of High Court of Admiralty inventory documents from the 1580s]. His data are for a period forty to eighty years earlier than our own High Court of Admiralty data. Ian's survey found ages for thirty-nine ships, with an average age of nearly fifteen years and twenty-nine of them of ten years or more in age.
  
A case was commenced with the issuing of a '''Warrant''' by the Court, and the preparation of a '''Libell''' or an '''Allegation''' by the party commencing the case.
+
Comparison of textual and numerical data for 1630-1670, with the bulk of the data from the 1650s, suggest Admiralty Court witnesses regarded ships aged between zero and five years as "new" and ships of fourteen years and above as "old".
  
Prior to witnesses being called to make their depositions, the defendant or "respondent" might make a '''Personal Answer''' in response to the Libell or Allegation.
+
</div>
 +
</div>
  
The most accessible of the court records are the statements made by witnesses, which are called '''Depositions'''. These depositions were in response to written '''Interrogatories''', which were prepared by both plaintiffs and defendants in a case.  
+
<div style="float: left; vertical-align: bottom; margin-right: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; background:#dcdcdc; border: 1px solid #b0c4de; width: 1000px;">
 +
    <div style="background: #b0c4de; padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px; font-size: larger; font-weight: bold;">How many tons of shipping could one crew member support?</div>
 +
    <div style="padding: 10px;">
 +
<div style="font-famil:Garamond; font-size: normal;">'''The size of our dataset for the analysis of tons of ship burthen per crew member is one hundred and sixteen. We have crew size data for one hundred and seventy-two ships, but lack ship burthen data in tons for fifty-six of these.'''</div>
 +
The average crew size for the larger dataset is 47.3, including six exceptionally manned men of war with 275 or more men per ship (n = 172). The average crew size for the smaller dataset, where we have crew number and ship tonnage is 36.5 (n=116).
  
Various written documents were submitted by plaintiffs and defendants, as well as witnesses, during a court case. Some of these have survived as loose documents in the '''Instance Papers'''.
+
[[File:Tons Ship Burthen Per Crew Member 09072017.JPG|600px|thumbnail|left|]]
  
Many cases were settled prior to the giving of a formal verdict or '''Sentence'''. For those cases which went to sentence, the sentences can be found in document bundles. These bundles often include bills of expense related to the case, and in some cases include copies of the allegations or libells, and other miscellaneous documents.
+
</div>
 +
</div>
  
 +
<div style="float: left; vertical-align: bottom; margin-right: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; background:#dcdcdc; border: 1px solid #b0c4de; width: 1000px;">
 +
    <div style="background: #b0c4de; padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px; font-size: larger; font-weight: bold;">How many guns were enough to defend a ship?</div>
 +
    <div style="padding: 10px;">
 +
<div style="font-famil:Garamond; font-size: normal;">'''We have addressed this question by looking at the number of guns mounted on commercial and naval ships per hundred tons of ship burthen. The size of the relevant dataset is one hundred and twenty-nine ships, of which one hundred and six are commercial and twenty-three are naval.'''</div>
 +
[[File:Guns Per 100 Ton Burthen 11072017.JPG|600px|thumbnail|left|]] There is a huge range in gun intensity per hundred tons of ship burthen amongst commercial ships, with some, particularly the small commercial ships, carrying no guns or just lightly armed, and other commercial ships as heavily armed as naval ships.
  
</div>
+
We are in the process of analysing these commercial data by geography and by commodity as well as by year to look for patterns within the commercial data.
----
+
  
==Finding Aids==
+
Amongst the naval ships (a category which includes both ships in the immediate service of a state as well as private men of war under commissions from a state), there is a clear pattern for smaller ships to be particularly heavily gunned.
  
<big><div style="text-align: center;">Gallery of High Court of Admiralty deposition books <br />Finding aids by alphabet, age, folio, geography and occupation</div></big>
+
</div>
 +
</div>
  
<gallery class="center">
+
<div style="float: left; vertical-align: bottom; margin-right: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; background:#dcdcdc; border: 1px solid #b0c4de; width: 1000px;">
File:HCA 13 67 FC.PNG|[[HCA 13/67|HCA 13/67]] <br />Feb 1653 - Sep 1653 <br />170 pages
+
    <div style="background: #b0c4de; padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px; font-size: larger; font-weight: bold;">Digging into the data on how many guns were enough to defend a ship</div>
File:HCA 13 68 Credits4.PNG|[[HCA 13/68|HCA 13/68]] <br />1653 - 1654 <br />1405 pages <br />734 deponents <br />[[HCA 13/68 Deponents|Alphabetical]] <br />[[HCA 13/68 Deponents - by folio|By Folio]]
+
    <div style="padding: 10px;">
File:HCA 13 70 Credits 1.png|[[HCA 13/70|HCA 13/70]] <br />1654 - 1656 <br />1511 pages <br />286 deponents <br />[[HCA 13/70 Deponents - By Folio|By Folio]]
+
<div style="font-famil:Garamond; font-size: normal;">'''The difference in gun intensity amongst commercial ships is likely to be driven by the relative value of cargo carried per ton of ship burthen and the level of predation on commercial shipping in the geographies in which ships traded.'''</div>
File:HCA 3 71 Credits 1.png|[[HCA 13/71|HCA 13/71]] <br /> 1656 - 1657 <br />1366 pages <br />[[HCA 13/71 Deponents|Alphabetical]] <br />[[HCA 13/71 Deponents - By Geography|By Geography]]
+
[[File:Guns Per 100 Ton Burthen Segmented Commodity 11072017.JPG|600px|thumbnail|left|]]  
File:HCA 1372 Credits.PNG|[[HCA 13/72|HCA 13/72]]  <br /> 1657 - 1659 <br />1330 pages <br />[[HCA 13/72 Deponents|Alphabetical]] <br />[[HCA 13/72 Deponents - By Age|By Age]] <br />[[HCA 13/72 Deponents - By Geography|By Geography]] <br />[[HCA 13/72 Deponents - By Occupation|By Occupation]]
+
File:HCA 13 73 Credits.png|[[HCA 13/73|HCA 13/73]]  <br /> 1659 - 1660 <br />1333 pages <br />[[HCA 13/73 Deponents|Alphabetical]] <br />[[HCA 13/73 Deponents - By Age|By Age]] <br />[[HCA 13/73 Deponents - By Folio|By Folio]] <br />[[HCA 13/73 Deponents - By Geography|By Geography]] <br />[[HCA 13/73 Deponents - By Occupation|By Occupation]]
+
File:HCA 13 76 Credits 2.PNG|[[HCA 13/76|HCA 13/76]] <br /> 1666 - 1669 <br />250 pages <br />23 deponents <br />[[HCA 13/76 Deponents - By Folio|By Folio]]
+
</gallery>
+
  
<big><div style="text-align: center;">Gallery of High Court of Admiralty Act Books and Personal Answers <br />Finding aids by folio</div></big>
+
Commercial ships carrying salt had few if any guns, in contrast to ships carrying Canary wines or cotton wool as their main return cargos.
  
<gallery class="center">
+
This is likely to be driven by the low manning levels on salt ships per ton of burthen. Low manning levels meant that there were fewer people available to man guns.
File:HCA 13 124 Credits 1.png|[[HCA 13/124|HCA 13/124]] <br />  Personal Answers<br />1650 - 1652 <br />385 pages <br />[[Tools: 13/124: Index of Personal Answers|By Folio]]
+
File:HCA 3 46 Credits.png|[[HCA 3/46|HCA 3/46]] <br />  Act Book <br />1654 - 1656 <br />307 pages
+
File:HCA 3 47 Credits.png|[[HCA 3/47|HCA 3/47]] <br />  Act Book<br />1656 - 1658 <br />52 pages
+
  
</gallery>
+
We are looking at relative freight rates for salt, Canary wines and cotton wool, and at sale prices for different commodities, to see if these also drove gun levels.
  
----
+
Coal ships are also likely to have had few if any guns. However, most of the coal ship cases in High Court of Admiralty data concern collisions, resulting in court cases which do not ask about guns. Whereas, most of the salt ship cases in the High Court of Admiralty data concern seizures, and elicit Court cases in which gun intensity is relevant and asked about.
  
==Themes==
+
As we dig further into the general commercial category, we should be able to allocate a good portion of these to specific commodity groups and thus be able to improve our analysis of the drivers of guns mounted on commercial ships
  
<div style="border:1px solid #A3BFB1; background:#F0F0FF; width:99%; padding:4px; margin-bottom:10px">
+
</div>
<div style="background:#F0F0FF; width:99%; padding:4px">
+
</div>
  
 +
<div style="float: left; vertical-align: bottom; margin-right: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; background:#dcdcdc; border: 1px solid #b0c4de; width: 1000px;">
 +
    <div style="background: #b0c4de; padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px; font-size: larger; font-weight: bold;">How does crew size relate to gun carrying?</div>
 +
    <div style="padding: 10px;">
 +
<div style="font-famil:Garamond; font-size: normal;">'''The size of our dataset for the analysis of crew size and gun number is sixty-nine, where we have both crew size and gun number. We have crew size data for one hundred and seventy-two ships in total and have gun number for one hundred and seventy-nine ships. Twenty-seven of the ships for which we have crew size are men of war and one hundred and forty-five are commercial ships. Forty-two of the ships for which we have gun number are men of war and one hundred and thirty-seven are commercial.'''</div>
 +
[[File:Guns Crew Size 07072017.JPG|600px|thumbnail|left|]]
  
<big><div style="text-align: center;">Thematic finding aids</div></big>
+
The average gun number for just men of war is 22.4 (n=2). The average gun number for just commercial ships is 12.8 (n=137). Our sample of commercial ships where we have tonnage as well as gun number (n=69) has a slightly higher average gun number than for all commercial ships, where only gun number is known.
<gallery class="center">
+
  
File:Invective 11072016.PNG|[[Bad behaviour & Invective|Bad behaviour and invective]]
+
The commercial gun number average overestimates the gun carrying propensity of commercial ships, since there is a systematic tendency not to report absence of guns from smaller vessels (vessels of thirty to sixty tons burthen). Many of these vessels, particularly those involved in coastal trade or fishing, as hoys, busses and ketches, would not have carried guns.
File:BOOK MAP Lygon R Map Barbados 1657 IArch DL CSG 040212.PNG|[[Tools: Slavery|Slavery]]
+
File:Jan Steen Hear It Sing It 1665 11072016.PNG|[[Inns, Taverns, and Victualling Houses|Inns, taverns & victualling houses]]
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</gallery>
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</div>
 +
</div>

Revision as of 19:25, July 19, 2017

Our volunteers


MarineLives is a collaborative volunteer driven project. The project started as a spinoff from a National Archives hackathon in early 2012. We are dedicated to the collaborative transcription, linkage and enrichment of primary manuscripts from the High Court of Admiralty, 1650-1669 (with some excursions into data from the 1630s and 1640s).

Currently, we have just over 10,000 images available (29 GB) and 11,400 pages of full text transcriptions on the MarineLives wiki.

Please contact us if you would like to learn more about this summer's project and how you can help, or if you would more generally like to learn about the work of MarineLives volunteers.

Our volunteers
Our volunteers make the MarineLives project special. Do please contact us if you would like to discuss volunteering, or if you have ideas to improve our wiki.

We would like to recognise and thank all those who have contributed to our project (in alphabetical order), whether as volunteer transcribers, annotators, commentators, advisors, interviewees, or PhD Forum participants.



Dr Aquiles Alencar-Brayner
Dr Roberta Anderson
Deborah Ashby
Rachel Bates
Rowan Beentje
Dr Richard Blakemore
Lior Blum
Katie Broke
Dr James Brown
Dr Andy Burn
Elio Calcagno
Michelle María Early Capistrán
Rachel Carter
Giovanni Colavizza
Dr Justin Colson
Thierry Daunois
Dr John Davies
Thomas Davies
Jonathan Dent
Melvyn Dresner
Dr Stuart Dunn
Professor Kai Eckert
Bob Egan
Dr Charlene Eska
Louise Falcini
Emilie-Jane Farrimond
Dr Janet Few
Sara Fox
Dr Ian Friel
Dr Perry Gauci
Marja Geesink
Adam Georgie
Jaap Geraerts
Jamie LH Goodall
Guy Grannum
Colin Greenstreet
Francesca Greenstreet
Adam Grimshaw
Karen Gunnell
Yerevag Hagopian
Dr Liam Haydon
Phillipa Hellawell
Dr Helmer Helmers
Dr Philip Hnatkovich
Rachel E. Holmes
Dr Jenni Hyde
Steve Ives
Alex Jackson
Stefan Jäggi
Elin Jones
Sue Jones
Ross Keel
Dr Patricia Keller
William Kellett
Sara Kerr
John Kuhn
John Layt
Sjoerd Levelt
John Levin
Grace Mallon
Simon Marsh
Dr Alan Marshall
John Miller
Anne Mills
Kate Morant
Matthias Müller-Prove
Professor Steve Murdoch
Dr Shavana Musa
Harriet Richardson
Gordon O'Sullivan
Katherine Parker
David Pashley
Dr Cathryn Pearce
Nga Phan-Bellis
Professor Simone Paolo Ponzetto
Jo Pugh
Patrizia Rebulla
Bethan Reynolds
Daniel Richards
Andrew Richens
Dr Mia Ridge
Dominique Ritze
Dr Gavin Robinson
Margaret Schotte
Steven Schrum
Laura Seymour
Ida Sjoberg
Edmond Smith
Daniel Stewart-Roberts
Chad Stolper
Roger Towner
Alexis Truax
Dr William Tullett
Oliver Turner
Dr Brodie Waddell
Samuel Watson
Jill Wilcox
Royline Williams-Fontenelle
Ad van der Zee
Dr Kathrin Zickermann
Dr Suze Zijlstra
Cäcilia Zirn
and the ever helpful but anonymous @_mapnut



Summer challenge, 2017: How to make money in C17th commercial shipping?


This summer the MarineLives project team is looking at the drivers of profit and loss in C17th commercial shipping. We will publish as we go and welcome comments, contradiction, and offers of help and data.



Early results from our work

What size were the ships?
The starting point of our work this summer has been to create a semi-structured database containing quantitative and qualitative data about commercial and naval ships mentioned in English High Court of Admiralty documents between 1630 and 1669. This database draws on the work of our volunteers over the last five years, with transcriptions of depositions, charter parties, and bills of sale forming the main source of data for the database.
Ship Size Ver2 10072017.JPG
We have ship tonnage data for 429 ships, of which the vast majority are commercial (n=407) and a small group are naval (n=22), mainly ships in the immediate service of the English Commonwealth, together with English private men of war, and a smattering of non-English naval vessels.

There are two clear peaks in the data for commercial ships - the first peak is in the 55 to 99 ton burthen category and the second peak is in the 200 to 249 ton burthen category.

Admiralty Court witnesses refer to ships of 50 and 60 tons as "small" and ships of 300 to 350 tons and above as "large". The smallest ton burthen category in our analysis (1-49 ton burthen) contains lighters, some barges and hoys, and other small river and coastal vessels.

What size were the smaller commercial ships?
High Court of Admiralty witnesses sometimes describe commercial vessels using specialised vocabulary. For example, hoys, lighters, and ketches. We have analysed these data to explore ship size by specialised type.
Commercial Ship Size 14072017.JPG
We have ship tonnage data for forty commercial vessels classified by vessel type. Clearly the sample sizes are very small for many of these vessel types.

We would be interested in our readers comments on these data.

Are the averages and ranges in the same ballpark as data in the hands of our readers, both from the C17th and earlier and later periods?

What can you tell us about the use to which these different types of commercial vessel were put?

Riverine versus coastal versus longer distance use? Cargo types? Crew and gun levels? Rental rates?

How much did it cost to transport a ton of goods between ports?
C17th commercial ships could be rented by the month or by the voyage, or freight tonnage could be purchased for a voyage for a specific commodity type. We have collected freight rates for different types of commodity and for different port to port combinations and present our early analysis here. Most of our observations are from the period 1650 to 1666.
Freight Rates Per Ton 18072017.JPG

Our current dataset for tonnage based freight rates consists of forty-four observations for a range of fine, coarse and bulk goods.

They cover short transportation distances, such as London to Rouen and Kingsale in Ireland to London through medium distances, such as Cyprus and Scanderoone to London and Brazil to Lisbon, and long distances, such as Bantam in the East Indies to London.

The outbreak of war had significant impact on tonnage based freight rates. For example, war between England and the United Provinces in the early 1650s, sharply pushed up freight rates on galls and cotton wool from the Eastern Mediterranean to London.

Driving the higher freight rates during times of war was the need to have higher manning levels on ships, higher mariner wages per man, and higher gun intensity per tun of ship burthen.

How much did it cost to transport a ton of goods between ports?
Our latest data table for mid-C17th freight rates per ton of goods transported
Freight Rates 19072017.JPG

Our current dataset for tonnage based freight rates consists of fifty-two observations for a range of fine, coarse and bulk goods.

How much did it cost to rent a ship by the month?
C17th commercial ships could be rented by the month or by the voyage, or freight tonnage could be purchased for a voyage for a specific commodity type. Monthly rental rates can be found in notarised charter parties, which were submitted as schedules in support of High Court of Admiralty cases. Alternatively, monthly rental rates are sometimes recited by witnesses in their Court depositions.
Monthly Ship Rental Rates 13072017.JPG

Our current dataset for monthly rentals consists of forty-nine ships.

Twenty-seven of these are rental rates for hull plus apparel, tackle, furniture and ordinance, but excluding provisions and wages, which were to be paid directly by the renting agent.

Fourteen are rental rates for hull plus apparel, tackle, furniture and ordinance and including provisions and wages, which were to be paid by the ship owner and recovered through the monthly rental. We know the monthly rental rates for three of these fourteen also on the basis of excluding provisions and wages.

Finally, we have eight rental rates for which it is unclear on what basis the rentals were contracted.

How much were ships worth?
We are at an early stage of analysing value of ships. Our current data look at the value of ships for the hull plus apparel, tackle and furniture and often also the ordinance on board the ship. We distinguish between unnotarised and notarised values, with notarised values referring to specific bills of sale and unnotarised values often based upon witness estimates of ship value given in court for ships seized during voyages.
Ship Value Per Ton Burthen 13072017.JPG

Our current dataset consists of one hundred and one ships, of which seventy-eight ship values are unnotarised and twenty-three ship values are notarised. Notarised values are lower (average = £3.90 per ton of ship burthen) comparised with unnotarised vales (average = ££6.40 per ton of ship burthen). Notarised values show a significantly tighter range around the average and mean than do unnotarised values.

We are working on disambiguating our data, but believe the differences in averages, means and range are due to the unnotarised data being more mixed in nature. Specifically, unnotarised data tends to be generated from witness statements of ship value following the seizure of a ship. We have excluded witness valuations of ships where it is clear that the outward, interim or return lading of the ship has been included in the witness valuation. Similarly, we have excluded witness valuations of ships where it is clear that an outward monetary stock has been included in the valuation.

However, even with these exclusions, the valuation of ships during their voyage usually includes some portion of the provisions carried on board the ship. If a seizure is early in a planned long voyage, these provisions could amount from anything between six and twenty months.

Moreover, the valuations of ships during their voyage will include some attribution of value to the refitting and setting out of a ship prior to a voyage, which can vary in the case of the hull from repairs to full graving and caulking or even resheathing, and in the case of the apparel, tackle and furniture, can include totally new provision of sails, rigging, blocks and other materials. Witnesses appear to make some allowance for the wear and tear of a ship on a long voyage and sometimes comment on this when giving their unnotarised valuations in their depositions in the High Court of Admiralty.

We plan to add ship inventories to our database, sourced from High Court of Admiralty appraisements of seized ships. These inventories will provide detailed breakdowns of the value of the physical components of ships in this period.

How old were the ships?
The size of our dataset for the analysis of ship age is one hundred and fifteen; of which thirteen datapoints simply state "new" or "old"; a further twenty-four datapoints are minimum ages, with the possibility that the ships were older; and seventy-eight datapoints give ship age accurate to the year. For these latter seventy-nine datapoints we have ship burthen data in tonnage for thirty-seven of them, which we display below in graphical form

The average age of ships for which we have age and tonnage data is 6.1 years (n=37), whereas the average age of ships for which we have age data accurate to the year for which we have no tonnage data is 7.1 years (n=41).

Ship Age 10072017.JPG

Dr Ian Friel has shared with us a summary of data from his unpublished survey of High Court of Admiralty inventory documents from the 1580s. His data are for a period forty to eighty years earlier than our own High Court of Admiralty data. Ian's survey found ages for thirty-nine ships, with an average age of nearly fifteen years and twenty-nine of them of ten years or more in age.

Comparison of textual and numerical data for 1630-1670, with the bulk of the data from the 1650s, suggest Admiralty Court witnesses regarded ships aged between zero and five years as "new" and ships of fourteen years and above as "old".

How many tons of shipping could one crew member support?
The size of our dataset for the analysis of tons of ship burthen per crew member is one hundred and sixteen. We have crew size data for one hundred and seventy-two ships, but lack ship burthen data in tons for fifty-six of these.

The average crew size for the larger dataset is 47.3, including six exceptionally manned men of war with 275 or more men per ship (n = 172). The average crew size for the smaller dataset, where we have crew number and ship tonnage is 36.5 (n=116).

Tons Ship Burthen Per Crew Member 09072017.JPG
How many guns were enough to defend a ship?
We have addressed this question by looking at the number of guns mounted on commercial and naval ships per hundred tons of ship burthen. The size of the relevant dataset is one hundred and twenty-nine ships, of which one hundred and six are commercial and twenty-three are naval.
Guns Per 100 Ton Burthen 11072017.JPG
There is a huge range in gun intensity per hundred tons of ship burthen amongst commercial ships, with some, particularly the small commercial ships, carrying no guns or just lightly armed, and other commercial ships as heavily armed as naval ships.

We are in the process of analysing these commercial data by geography and by commodity as well as by year to look for patterns within the commercial data.

Amongst the naval ships (a category which includes both ships in the immediate service of a state as well as private men of war under commissions from a state), there is a clear pattern for smaller ships to be particularly heavily gunned.

Digging into the data on how many guns were enough to defend a ship
The difference in gun intensity amongst commercial ships is likely to be driven by the relative value of cargo carried per ton of ship burthen and the level of predation on commercial shipping in the geographies in which ships traded.
Guns Per 100 Ton Burthen Segmented Commodity 11072017.JPG

Commercial ships carrying salt had few if any guns, in contrast to ships carrying Canary wines or cotton wool as their main return cargos.

This is likely to be driven by the low manning levels on salt ships per ton of burthen. Low manning levels meant that there were fewer people available to man guns.

We are looking at relative freight rates for salt, Canary wines and cotton wool, and at sale prices for different commodities, to see if these also drove gun levels.

Coal ships are also likely to have had few if any guns. However, most of the coal ship cases in High Court of Admiralty data concern collisions, resulting in court cases which do not ask about guns. Whereas, most of the salt ship cases in the High Court of Admiralty data concern seizures, and elicit Court cases in which gun intensity is relevant and asked about.

As we dig further into the general commercial category, we should be able to allocate a good portion of these to specific commodity groups and thus be able to improve our analysis of the drivers of guns mounted on commercial ships

How does crew size relate to gun carrying?
The size of our dataset for the analysis of crew size and gun number is sixty-nine, where we have both crew size and gun number. We have crew size data for one hundred and seventy-two ships in total and have gun number for one hundred and seventy-nine ships. Twenty-seven of the ships for which we have crew size are men of war and one hundred and forty-five are commercial ships. Forty-two of the ships for which we have gun number are men of war and one hundred and thirty-seven are commercial.
Guns Crew Size 07072017.JPG

The average gun number for just men of war is 22.4 (n=2). The average gun number for just commercial ships is 12.8 (n=137). Our sample of commercial ships where we have tonnage as well as gun number (n=69) has a slightly higher average gun number than for all commercial ships, where only gun number is known.

The commercial gun number average overestimates the gun carrying propensity of commercial ships, since there is a systematic tendency not to report absence of guns from smaller vessels (vessels of thirty to sixty tons burthen). Many of these vessels, particularly those involved in coastal trade or fishing, as hoys, busses and ketches, would not have carried guns.