The Mercantile Navy List
(Revised November 2003)
The Mercantile Navy List is the major published annual register of British shipping from the 1850’s onward. The phrase “mercantile navy list” also appears in the title of some spin-off local Australasian publications which should not be confused with it.
The MNL provides a record of all British ships for many years as separate national registration systems were not established in the former colonies until well into the 20th century.
The List includes only cryptic information in the earlier years about each ship but its comprehensiveness is a great virtue. It is much more comprehensive than the better known Lloyd’s Register which has very poor coverage of smaller ships and is never fully comprehensive. From the early 1870’s onward fuller details of ships are included in the MNL
Up to and including 1864, ships are listed in order of official number with an alphabetic index (from 1865 they are listed only alphabetically). The numerical listings have the advantage that official numbers were issued in port-specific numerical batches of ships so that ships initially registered in a particular locality can be identified.
The volumes from 1860 to 1864 also have useful listings of American and European ships for which international signal codes of individual ship recognition flags had been issued (possibly also 1858 and 1859 which I do not have access to in order to check). Again, ship details are cryptic but the value is in the comprehensiveness as the lists provide a yardstick against which the comprehensiveness of alternative listings can be assessed. Some ships as small as 60 tons are included.
I have written a working paper on New Zealand and Australian ship registers in which the early numerical ranges are identified and the utility of the MNL in conjunction with alternative registers for studying Australasian ships is discussed (see also menu item C2).
Availability:
The 1857 volume has been published as an ebook and in hard copy form by Elibron Books (refer http://www.elibron.com/english/
The NZ National Maritime Museum has a long sequence from the early 1870’s onward.
The Auckland Public Library holds 1864, 1865, 1866, 1867, 1874, 1901, 1914, and 1923 in the Special Collections section.
The NZ National Library and the Hocken Library hold scattered volumes.
Volumes sometimes appear on the market through specialist
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