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

All British ships were registered at one of the hundreds of ports of registry around Britain and the then British Colonies. The documents relating to them, including the crew lists and agreements are now at The National Archives (TNA).

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

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

How to search for ships pre-1855 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.

For Exact searches only, if you know the ship's port of registry you can choose that from the list. Otherwise, just leave this blank.

Then click Search

Reading the results

For exact searches, the results show the ships' ports of registry.

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 registry details, together with other details such as tonnage. Some data sources show the official number which was allocated from 1855 onwards and which we include as a convenient link to data for the ship post-1855.

Any available details of the register closure are shown.

The source of our information is shown. In some cases, the icons link to images of the Appropriation Books which show data for ships registered pre-1855. You can check our data for yourself.

On the right-hand side of the page, there are further links.

 TNA BT 98 provides details of the crew list holdings at TNA for ships of that name and port (with further links to the FamilySearch films online). Be aware The TNA catalogue shows only the range of names held in each box. There is no guarantee that there will be records for a particular ship.

 Data post 1855 links to the CLIP advanced search pages which will show any data we have for ships post-1855 of that name and port. Be aware Because that search is by name and port, these are only tentative suggestions - the ship may have ceased to exist, or her port of registry may have changed.

The final column, Port no/PR no, shows port number and port rotation number combinations for that ship, which we have recorded or have interpolated from crew list records for the period 1845 to 1854 in BT 98 at TNA. These numbers were used in the records of seafarers such as BT 113 and BT 124.

For more details of port numbers, see Port numbers . For more details of port rotation numbers, see Port rotation numbers

The entries are colour coded.  nn/nnn  indicates data drawn from BT 98.  nn/nnn  indicates data interpolated from BT 98 data. Blank entries indicate where we have no data and are not able to interpolate data reliably, for example registrations pre-1845. Many early (and some post-1853) registrations may never have been allocated a port rotation number.

The link next to the data  PR goes to the main port rotation numbers page for that registration.

Our thanks to James Canney for suggesting adding the port rotation number data.

Data sources

The sources of the data are:

• The indexes to the shipping register transcripts from BT 111 at TNA. This covers all the ports of registry around the British Isles from 1825 to 1856, though not all ships are shown. Please note, this source is difficult to read and data has been lightly edited to correct discrepancies where we have evidence available from other sources. Images of BT 111 can be downloaded for free from TNA, here: BT 111
• The annual returns from ports of registry in BT 162/19 at TNA showing ships extant in 1850 from all British ports except London, together with similar data from BT 162/20 for the Colonial ports (but transcribed for the Canadian ports only). Images of BT 162 can be downloaded for free from TNA: BT 162/19
• 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
• 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. We have a small amount of data, taken from the crew lists themselves. For more details, please see our page: Crew Lists

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