Maritime history

Sources of maritime history include the following:

Material for naval and merchant shipping, port, dockyard,

Breakwater, trade etc

• Shipping registers 1814 to 1820 and 1824 to 1876; ships' logs, 18th to 20th centuries
• Royal Naval Commissions, certificates of service etc, 18th to 20th centuries
• Queen's Harbour Master's records, 19th century
• Correspondence, diaries and journals, 17th-20th centuries
• Plans, 19th to 20th centuries
• National Dock Labour Board, minutes, 20th century
• Eddystone Lighthouse Committee, minutes, 1882 to 1886
• Apprenticeship records, 19th to 20th centuries

For more information on the shipping records we hold, please see our shipping records catalogue and our archives in focus page.

For more information on the transcripts and indexes that are available on CD of our shipping records, please see the Plymouth Merchant Ships website.

Printed sources

• Ships' Crew Lists: A Handlist of Records in the Devon Record Office, (1987)
• Early-Stuart Mariners and Shipping, (The Maritime Surveys of Devon and Cornwall
• (1619-1635), Todd Gray, (Devon and Cornwall Record Society, 1990)
• The New Maritime History of Devon, Volumes 1 and 2, (Conway)
• Maritime Press
• University of Exeter, 1992)
• The Historic Defences of Plymouth, Andrew Pye and Freddy Woodward, (Exeter Archaeology, 1996)

Internet source

Follow the link to the pages of the National Maritime Museum.