Historical shiplog manifest, 1841-1912

• Main Author: Mahoney, Andy
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Axiom Data Science 2020
• Subjects: Arctic; Bedford; New Bedford; Pacific; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.24431/rw1k43q; https://search.dataone.org/#view/10.24431/rw1k43q

This dataset describes historical shiplogs from vessels in the North Pacific and Arctic Oceans between 1841 and 1912. These shiplogs were used as part of an historical sea ice mapping project, focused on the large-scale recovery of Arctic and North Pacific historical environmental data---amounting to millions of individual observations---and making them available for new research, such as extended retrospective analysis (reanalysis) to study a range of lower-frequency climate phenomena and better understand their impact on the Arctic environment. Specifically, this data table is a manifest of high resolution digital images of 185 vessel logbooks that were digitized for the project by Digital Commonwealth (https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/) and at an imaging station at the New Bedford Whaling Museum (NBWM). The original manuscripts included here are held NBWM. The temporal range of the collection spans 1841 to 1912, and represents ~418 ship-years of record. Geographic coverage is global, with an emphasis on the North Pacific and Arctic. The information contained in the digitized vessel logbooks includes descriptions of historical weather, sea ice, and other environmental observations of the Arctic, as well as myriad details of life on board whaling vessels in the 19th century. This dataset was generated under NPRB project 1421.