This page is an index of ships by name drawn from the primary records of British shipping from 1855 to the 1950s.

All British ships were registered at one of the hundreds of ports of registry around Britain and the then British Colonies. From 1855 onwards, each ship was allocated an official number. These numbers provided a unique reference and they are still used by modern archives as a means of identification of documents.

The prime purpose of this page is to aid the identification of official numbers from ships' names.

The index shows the ships' names, official numbers and ports of registry, with links to other data such as the location of crew list holdings and clear references to the sources of our data.

The database includes every British registered ship from 1855 to the early 1950s with official numbers 1 to 200000. It was last updated on 6th May 2023 and contains 794743 entries.

For a full explanation of the records of British shipping, please see our information page: Records of British ships

How to search for ships by name

On the search form, enter at least three letters of the ship's name and select whether you wish to make an Exact match search, or a fuzzy search based on whether the name Starts with this, Includes this or Ends with this.

The form will not accept wild-card searches using '*', '%', '?' and suchlike.

Then click Search

For a search which does allow wild-cards, please see our advanced search page: Advanced search

If you know an approximate date for the ship, the images of Mercantile Navy List (MNL) available on this site provide an alternative way to search by name. Our coverage up to 1939 is nearly 100% and you can easily work through the images year by year. MNL images are here: Mercantile Navy List

For fishing vessels, Olsen's Almanack provides a similar year by year search: Olsen's Almanack

Reading the results

For exact searches, the results show matching names and their official number.

For the fuzzy searches, the results show an alphabetic list of possible ship names, from which you can select one to go to an exact search result.

The results show a list of ship's names, with their official numbers and ports of registry, together with other detail such as tonnage, sorted first by name, then by official number.

The source of our information is shown in all cases, with links to images of documents or to archive catalogues wherever possible. For example, the icons link to images of the Appropriation Books or the exact Mercantile Navy List page. You can check our data for yourself.

Using the results

On the right hand side of the results table, there are links to the MHA and CLIP indexes of crew lists and agreements.

There is also a link More... to more details on the CLIP site showing any other details and links for ships with that particular official number.

There are also links below the results which will search for ships of that name on the Mercantile Navy List and on other web sites.

Some searches may produce data from shipping registers for ships with official numbers greater than 300000 from the second series of allocations. We have no further crew list data and nor does MHA, so the crew list links are disabled for these ships. The links to the registers data will work, however.

Data sources

The sources of the data are:

• The Appropriation Books held at the Registry of Shipping and Seamen in Cardiff covering the years from 1855 to the 1950s for all British and Colonial ports. For more details, please see our page: Appropriation Books
• The Mercantile Navy List (MNL) for the years ending in 0 from 1860 to 1940, together with 1857 and 1915. MNL shows all ships extant that year for all British and Colonial ports. Editions of MNL from 1875 to 1904 record the closure of registrations. For more details, please see our page: Mercantile Navy List
• Shipping registers and Ship registration documents include all the British registered ships, but few have been indexed. For more details, please see our page: Registration of shipping
• Crew lists record the ship's name and port of registry and, from 1855 onwards, the official number. Our data is taken either from the crew list itself, or from archive catalogues. For more details, please see our page: Crew Lists
• We have included a small amount of data from Publications where official numbers are shown.
• The National Archives (TNA) catalogue for BT 110 which contains closed registration documents. For more details, please see TNA's Discovery page: BT 110
• The Royal Commission on Unseaworthy Ships (RCUS) report of 1874 into the reasons for the huge losses of British merchant ships included an appendix listing several thousand ships lost in the period from 1850 to 1870. For the data, please see: Unseaworthy ships
• TNA's catalogue for BT 165, which contains ships' log books from the period 1902 to 1919, shows the names and official numbers of the ships. For more details, please see TNA's Discovery page: BT 165

Please see our general information page  CLIP data   for details on sources, methodology, the abbreviations we have used, and our acknowledgements.