Search for ships by port

This page is an index of ships by their port of registry. It shows first a summary of the data by year, then for a selected year, ship names and official numbers, sorted first by name, then by official number, with other details such as date of registration, and rig.

The sources of this information are:

• the indexes to the shipping register transcripts from BT 111
• the Appropriation Books held at the Registry of Shipping and Seamen in Cardiff,
• the annual returns from ports of registry in BT 162/19 at TNA showing ships extant in 1850, and
• the Mercantile Navy List for the years ending in 0 from 1860 to 1940, together with 1857 and 1915.

The data from BT 111 covers London from 1846 to 1856. We will be adding data for London from 1833 to 1845 in due course and (eventually) for other ports.

The data from BT 162/19 covers all the ports of registry around the British Isles, but not London. We are adding data steadily (August 2021) and hope to add data from colonial ports from BT 162/20 in due course.

Please see the  CLIP data  page for details on sources, the abbreviations we have used, and our acknowledgements. Please note, we transcribed the data 'as seen' - we have not tried to interpret it. For more details on the records of shipping, please see Records of shipping

The icons against each vessel link to an image of the Appropriation Books or to the Mercantile Navy List page for that vessel and year. We do not have images of MNL for 1857.

Images of BT 111 can be downloaded for free from TNA, here: BT 111

Images of BT 162 can be downloaded for free from TNA, here: BT 162/19

Some ports of registry are close to each other, or can be named in different ways. For example, the ports on the Tyne - North and South Shields and Newcastle are within a few miles of each other, and we wonder if the clerks who compiled the lists made much distinction between them. In these cases, we have added the facility to change from one of the ports to another, or see the list for all the ports combined.

For post-1857 data, which has official numbers, there are links to the Maritime History Archive (MHA) and CLIP crew list indexes. A further link on the right hand shows the CLIP data for that official number.

For the pre-1857 data drawn from BT 111 and BT 162, there is a link on the right hand side which will search the CLIP data for later years by name and port, looking for possible matches in the period 1855 to 1870. Beware! because there were no official numbers for this period, these are only tentative suggestions, not definitive links. Some common names could result in many possibilities!