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Each year, numerous ships carry passengers and cargo across the oceans and seas worldwide.
Two centuries ago, the ships that sailed in these waters had a distinct appearance. During the colonial era, explorers and traders sailed from one coast to another in order to expand their empires or to seek personal wealth.
In the past, ships used to maintain detailed logbooks to navigate and keep track of the winds, waves, and any notable weather patterns before modern technology made bookkeeping simpler.
The University of Madrid completed an UN-funded project to fully digitize handwritten logbooks, which are now stored in the CLIWOC database.
Ben Schmidt has used this database to made a fascinating visualization of 18th and 19th-century shipping ways that sing more than one hundred years of ship paths in the seas, as recorded in hundreds of vessel’s logbooks, by hand, one or several times a day.
The animated map shows primarily Spanish, English, and Dutch courses. They are surprisingly steady over the period. And there are some macro patterns – the movement of British business towards India, the effect of the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and so on.
The second map exposes the seasonality of ship movement. It summarizes all those years onto a single span of January-December, to exhibit seasonal patterns.
Adam Symington has used this database to create other maps that visualize the shipping routes of the British, French, Spanish, and Dutch between the years 1700 and 1850.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, the British, French, Spanish, and Dutch empires held control over global trade via their colonial shipping routes.
During that period, the four nations frequently sailed not only across the Atlantic Ocean but also across the Pacific and Indian Ocean.
The British shipping map indicates a consistent presence in both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Before gaining independence, they had strong connections to the United States, Canada, and India, and utilized many ports in Europe for convenient trade.
The majority of Spanish ships were focused on Central and South America. The Spanish colonies played a crucial role in providing raw materials like gold, silver, sugar, tobacco, and cotton.
France’s maritime logbooks were the least detailed. According to the ship records, regular travel and trade were happening across the North Atlantic Ocean, specifically to Canada and the Caribbean.
Dutch shipping traffic include significant traffic to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), Cape Colony (now South Africa), and the Guianas in South America.
