Historical world shipping trends and shipping registers

(revised 8 April 2004)

 

World shipping statistics are necessary to put the shipping fleets, ship movements and the trade of particular countries and periods in international and historical context. Shipping by its very nature is global. A number of available published abstracts of multinational historical statistics and other compilations provide some totals but for many purposes it is necessary to go back to national publications that are often now few and far between in their countries of original publication, let alone on the other side of the world.

 

A major topic in which I am particularly interested, is long-term comparisons of the total numbers and tonnages of ships existing in each year, broken down by sail and steam and country of registration, numbers and tonnages built in particular years and so on. I am particularly interested in the period up to the 1920’s.

 

You’ll find some examples of how this type of information can be used in my graphs illustrating the world transition from Sail to Steam at Transition and comparing the coverage of the different major shipping registers at Comparison .

 

Ships in the latter half of the 19th century numbered in the many tens of thousands but categories of ship numbered only in their hundreds and capable of being individually researched can be shown to be of global significance in particular periods through such comparisons and their waxing and waning significance traced. For example, four-masted full-rigged ships and barques that scarcely existed as a class until the 1880’s and never numbered more than a few hundred can be shown to constitute a significant percentage of the world tonnage of sailing ships by the outbreak of World War I.

 

Appendices to Lloyd’s Register of Shipping provide substantial statistical tables but only from 1890 onwards. These will be the most readily available to maritime researchers in Britain, Australia and New Zealand and probably the English-speaking maritime countries generally. However, it is apparent from comparisons between the figures from this source for particular nations and those compiled by those nations from their own registration records that the coverage of ships is far from complete, particularly in respect of smaller vessels. From 1886 to 1889 Lloyds published Lloyd’s Universal Register in parallel with the standard Lloyd’s Register with much fuller coverage of ships than the standard register and with similar statistical tables to those included in the standard Lloyd’s Register from 1890 onward. This expansion in the scope of Lloyd’s Register is doubtless connected with the merger in 1885 of Lloyd’s Register with the Liverpool Underwriter’s Registry that operated independently from 1862 to 1885. The pre-1890 standard Lloyd’s Registers include only very limited summary statistics about ships which Lloyd’s classed.

 

A major alternative source to Lloyds, properly called the Répertoire Générale (but commonly just referred to as Bureau Veritas) derives from Bureau Veritas, based in Paris but operating globally in competition with Lloyd’s Register. Statistics derived from Bureau Veritas extend back at least to 1870. Comparisons indicate that BV statistics are more comprehensive than Lloyds into the 1890’s, and beyond that for merchant sail although this is partly because Bureau Veritas uses a criterion of 50 tons for Sail while the Lloyd’s criterion is 100. It is noteworthy that when Lloyds themselves sought a statistical time series for their 1901 General Report they turned to Bureau Veritas data as the source (refer Lloyd’s General Report, Henry M. Hozier and E. Puttock, London, 1901, p. 55). Language is not an issue. If you use historic Lloyd’s Registers you’ll be familiar with the way that adjoining pages are labelled in French and English respectively. Bureau Veritas registers are the same.

 

It is extremely difficult to get access to Bureau Veritas material in NZ as BV is not perceived to be of much relevance to British maritime history. I know of no Bureau Veritas registers earlier than the 1930’s in NZ.  I am obtaining sample pages from the 1888 volume of Bureau Veritas for comparison with the coverage of the Lloyds Universal Register and the standard Lloyd’s Register in the same year.

 

Bureau Veritas volumes are available commercially on microfilm (NB: not microfiche). A set is held by the Australian National Maritime Museum. I am potentially interested in contributing towards the co-operative purchase of microfilms for selected years for extended loan to a Wellington institution with microfilm readers (National Library for preference) in order to enable them to be available to me and other researchers, or an arrangement whereby they are available for half the year in one city and half in another. A recent quote was for US$113 per reel (which would generally give you one year).

 

The annual reports of the United States Commissioner of Navigation (Report of the Commissioner of Navigation…etc) provide a somewhat unexpected secondary source of statistics from Bureau Veritas. Comparing figures in this source with those in the table in the 1901 Lloyd’s General Report referred to above confirms their common source. I have obtained some periods from the Report of the Commissioner of Navigation. Copies of this report are available quite cheaply in the US second-hand book trade and are a gold-mine of many shipping statistics, world as well as U.S.

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