PALMER LIST OF MERCHANT VESSELS

It is usually not possible to identify a merchant vessel positively by its name alone. Very few names given to merchant vessels in the centuries prior to the 20th are unique. Indeed, names with nautical references, names of ports, names of national symbols or rulers, names of people prominent in politics, the arts and literature, and in business, and common given names (in particular, those female names connoting beauty) were frequently given to merchant vessels. To my knowledge, no nation, with the possible exception of certain totalitarian regimes, has ever maintained an institution to regulate the naming of merchant vessels; there certainly has never been such an institution at the international level. There has therefore been nothing except economic expedience or political prudence to prevent a shipbuilder (or, in latter years, a ship owner) from naming a merchant vessel anything (s)he chooses. As a result there have at any given time been any number of ships, barks, brigs, schooners, barges, etc., named ANN, BRITANNIA, COLUMBIA, COLUMBUS, JANE, JOHN, LIVERPOOL, MARY, MAYFLOWER, NEPTUNE, NEW YORK, OCEAN, SEA, and VICTORIA.

By the mid-19th century, most countries with significant merchant fleets had instituted systems giving each vessel with a unique identifying number or code. Use of these numbers and codes, however, was restricted for the most part to official documents, such as registry, inquests, and admiralty court proceedings.

The information required to identify a merchant sailing vessel with any certainty is:

1. Name of vessel;
2. Rig;
3. Name of master;
4. Place, either of registry, departure, call, or arrival; and
5. A date, as precise as possible.

While not all this information is necessary in all cases to identify a merchant sailing vessel, in the great majority of cases items 1, 4, and 5 constitute the absolute m i n i m u m amount of information necessary.

In the great majority of cases, the first source to check will be either a specialized commercial newspaper such as Lloyd's List (world-wide, although best for vessels of British registry), the Shipping and Mercantile Gazette, Mitchell's Maritime Register (both of London), or the Shipping and Commercial List and New York Price Current, or the "marine intelligence" column of a general newspaper such as the New York Herald. The following extracts from the "Arrivals" section of the Marine Intelligence column of the New York Herald for 16 June 1859, indicate the sort of identifying information these newspapers provide:

1. Ship AMERICAN UNION, [Capt.] Hubbard, [from] Liverpool, May 18, with m[erchan]d[i]se and passengers, to Grinnell, Minturn & Co.
2. Ship HARVEST QUEEN (of Bath), Bachelder, Havre, May 15, with mdse and 249 passengers, to C. C. Duncan & Co.
3. Ship SIR ROBERT PEEL (Hamburg), Jurgens, Hamburg, 40 days, with mdse and 226 passengers, to L. E. Amsinck.
4. Bark LORD PETRE (Br[itish]), Brown, Bristol, 42 days, with railroad iron and brick to H. & F. W. Meyer.

While the information and format in which it is given varies slightly over time and from newspaper to newspaper, the basic facts remain largely the same:

1. Date of arrival;
2. Name of vessel;
3. Rig;
4. Nationality of vessel, if foreign, or port of registry, if not registered at the port at which the newspaper was published;
5. Name of master;
6. Port of departure;
7. Date of departure or length of voyage.

With the information provided in an arrival list such as the one above it should be possible to identify any vessels more fully in one or more of the following published works, as appropriate:

1. Voluntary registration:
   1. Vessels of British registry: Lloyd's Register of Shipping, surviving volumes from 1764.
   2. Vessels of Continental registry, excluding Bremen: Bureau Veritas, Registre Maritime, published since 1829.
   3. Vessels of U.S. registry, and vessels trading with the United States:
      1. New York Marine Register, first published in 1857, 1860-1883 (last volume published) under the title Original American Lloyd's Register.
      2. American Shipmasters' Association (later American Shipowners' Association, now American Bureau of Shipping [ABS]), Recorder, first published as an annual in 1869.
2. National (government) registration:
   1. Great Britain: Mercantile Navy List, first published in 1850.
   2. United States: List of Merchant Vessels of the United States, first published in 1867.

   Note that until at least the 1870's the information in the published voluntary registers is generally fuller (rig, place and date of build, dimensions) than the information in the official government registers. However, as indicated above, as a result of the imperfect nature of pre-20th century communications, the information in the voluntary registers (in particular concerning names of masters and owners and destined voyages) is more likely to be out of date at the time of publication than the information in the government registers.

3. Secondary works:
   1. United States, prior to 1857:
      1. Robert Greenhalgh Albion, Square-riggers on Schedule; The New York Sailing Packets to England, France, and the Cotton Ports (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1938).
      2. Carl C. Cutler, Queens of the Western Ocean; The Story of America's mail and Passenger Sailing Lines (Annapolis: United States Naval Institute, c1961).
      3. William Armstrong Fairburn, Merchant Sail (6 vols.; Center Lovell, Maine: Fairburn Educational Foundation, [1945-55]).
   2. Germany:
      1. Bremen: Peter-Michael Pawlik, Von der Weser in die Welt; Die Geschichte der Segelschiffe von Weser und Lesum und ihrer Bauwerften 1770 bis 1893, Schriften des Deutschen Schiffahrtsmuseums, Bd. 33 (Hamburg: Kabel, c1993).
      2. Hamburg: Walter Kresse, ed., Seeschiffs-Verzeichnis der Hamburger Reedereien, 1824-1888, Mitteilungen aus dem Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte, N. F., Bd. 5. (3 vols.; Hamburg: Museum fü Hamburgische Geschichte, 1969).

These published works in turn refer the researcher back to the most important records for the history of vessels, the ship registries themselves. These records are in most cases now held by the national archives of the appropriate country (while all official transcripts of ship registries for British ports are held by the Public Record Office in London, original ship registries for certain ports are held by local record offices).

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