About this website
Aim and purpose
This site is a work in progress. It is a database-driven site which will be fully searchable in many different ways.
When completed it will provide information on all the ships, voyages and seafarers of the East India Company's mercantile services.
- ships (construction details, owners, service history, ultimate fate)
- seafarers (sea service, ships served on, personal details, biographies)
- voyages (dates of voyages, crew, ports of call, wrecks, captures, missing)
It is intended that the site will bring together in one place information which is otherwise only available if you consult different sources in many locations.
Who has put this site together?
My name is Andrea Cordani. I have been interested in East India Company ships for many years and for about fifteen years I worked as an independent professional researcher, specialising in maritime history, particularly shipwrecks.
Background to the site build
This section provides general progress on the construction
of the database and the stages involved in filling it with data
for you to retrieve.
I have done this so that you may understand why things
take as long as they do! Since it is my aim to build a useful
resource which will eventually allow searches in a variety of
ways, I think it will be worth the wait. This is a spare time
activity for me, so inevitably progress creeps along when I have
a moment or two.
If your interest is in which individual items of have been added (ships, seafarers or voyages), please go to What's New instead.
Date |
Site work |
March 2006 |
Added functional matrices for Wrecked and Captured ships. |
August 2005 |
Added a ship summmary explanation sheet. |
June 2004 |
Work on the Contributors section started. |
March 2004 |
Functionality for Narratives and Links section refined. |
September 2003 |
New on the ship details page is a heading called Narratives and Links. As the site builds up with other documents relating to this ship, or links to other websites, you will be able to access this additional material from here. |
August 2003 |
I have now built the functionality to display the reference sources for each ship, including page numbers. This appears as a link called Sources and References on the ship details page and enables you to visit the separate reference page for that ship. At the moment it contains only secondary sources (book references) but I will add primary sources (archive references) later. |
April 2003 |
Continuing to populate with ships and captains. The database now outputs to the ship details page a composite list of the shipowners for each vessel. These comprise two sorts: first, those who are called in the records 'ships husbands' (the modern equivalent term would be Principal Managing Owner); secondly, the usual mix of partnerships and companies. |
March 2003 |
Continuing to populate with ships and captains. Have now added the functionality to output details of ship history. This now includes details of change of ownership, as well as events such as damage, repairs, capture, loss, plus fate and ultimate disposal. In the pipeline are details of the bibliographic references for each ship. |
February 2003 |
Continuing to populate with ships and captains. Now starting to add functionality to output related details of which shipbuilder and where built. Also working on outputting details of ship history, in addition to fate and ultimate disposal. |
January 2003 |
Building relational functionality to output Captains of ships when ship details of ships are searched on. Gradually inputting more captains' names as I go along. |
December 2002 |
Starting to populate seriously. Now, details of voyages and the captains on those voyages are starting to be inputted. Very complex underlying relational database elements being built to accomodate this data. At the moment, no personal details (vital records etc) of people being input, just names. Full details of some sample ships going in, hence named items on the what's new page, but this is really for test purposes. |
November 2002 |
Experimenting with layouts for the the ship details pages. Several versions before settled on a workable one which is both easy to see and quick to load. Added a More link to the results page, so that now further details about the ships than just the four identifying indicators can be pulled out when you click through. Still populating the database with ship details. |
May 2002 |
Building free text search functionality so that text searches can be made directly by name of ship without going to the alphabetical lists first. Adding more ships' details to the database. More is going in than currently can be pulled out by the search! |
March 2002 |
Started building the basic database in relational form, for ships, seafarers and voyages. Decided to start with the ships information, as I have to associate the seafarers and the voyages with the vessels, even though I know people are keen on surname indexes! But it will be better in the long run to do it this way. Populated the database with over 1200 ship names, tons, EIC type and period of service. Adding the additional functionality to pull out all the ships by individual alphabetical listings A to Z. |
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