MarineLives

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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.

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.

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 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.