The Maritime History Archive was established at Memorial University of Newfoundland in order to host the bulk of the British Government’s Registrar General of Shipping and Seamen records, specifically the Crew Agreements and Official Logs created by the Merchant Shipping Act. These records contain information about ships and the seafarers employed on them. In tandem with the Official Logs, which contain self-reported information about the voyage such as fights, desertions, disease, injury, medical treatment, and death records, these records give historians and family history researchers an incredibly rich source of information on lives of working men and women in merchant shipping at the height of Britain’s imperial and economic reach.
The RGSS records at the MHA were formerly housed in a government archive in the Port of London, near the Tower Bridge and the customs office for the city. In the early months of World War II, British officials made plans to move all large collections of official papers and cultural artefacts out of the city where possible in anticipation of the Blitz and the RGSS records were moved to an aircraft hanger in Hayes, Middlesex. This portion of the collection up to 1939 contained 29,593 boxes or 8,000 square feet of floor space.
After the war, the records remained in Hayes in limbo and a study was made by the British government about what to do with them. The UK National Archives (then the Public Records Office) committed to only a 10% sample of the collection, in addition to a category called “Famous Ships”, while the UK National Maritime Museum also took a 10% sample, and then county record offices were invited to retrieve the documents corresponding to their regions or communities. Ultimately, however, it was decided to destroy the remaining 80% for cost- and space-savings.
British historians, convinced of the importance of these records, campaigned ardently to save them and it was Memorial University of Newfoundland that agreed to take the remainder. This would facilitate the SSHRCC-funded quantitative Atlantic Canada Shipping Project, which used cutting-edge mainframe computers to correlate the vast data of these documents. The project was in operation from 1971, with the arrival of the records from Britain, to 1988, and produced several publications along with the ACSP Database.
Currently, the MHA holds Crew Agreements and Official Logs from the period between 1863 to 1975, excepting the papers retained by British institutions. Despite this, the Maritime History Archive has in its possession one of the most vast and comprehensive collections of records documenting working people in the 19th and 20th century British Empire.
In addition to this central collection, the Maritime History Archive has become a major archive of Newfoundland and Labrador shipping, merchant, and fisheries records. The collection holds physical copies of many Newfoundland newspapers, the accounts and journals of major and minor merchant firms in operation in the colony, the records of the Fisherman’s Protective Union, papers relating to the Cod Moratorium, and an extensive collection of photographs, maps, and charts.
We are very grateful and proud to work with the archivists at the MHA and thank them so much for their time and assistance with the Maritime History Workshops we offer.
For more information about the creation of MHA, the history of the RGSS records, and their arrival and use in Newfoundland, visit More Than a List of Crew: A History of the Agreements and Archiving the Agreements.
Your message will reach us at infomarworkshops@gmail.com
Documents below are all from the Maritime History Archive collection at Memorial University of Newfoundland, in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.