century. This resource is partly digitised but some parts, including the unique and important BT98/615-618 records (Voyage Agreements and Crew Lists for Cork ships in 1845), must be accessed in person, an opportunity I availed myself of, a few years past. The UK National Archives also provided ship registration numbers, enhancing ship identification. In 1855 the system of registration of shipping was reorganised so that each vessel, old and new, was given a unique lifetime Official Number (ON), particularly important for differentiation of ships with similar names. These numbers are available in the Appropriation Books of the Registrar General of Shipping (accessible on CLIP). Since some ships in my catalogue (Section 4) pre- date the latter system, I have adhered to the term ‘registration number’ for all the nineteenth - century vessels in my research. Around the mid-nineteenth century it became obligatory for ship officers to be certified and so for the second half of the nineteenth century the Registry of Shipping and Seamen: Registers of Certificates of Competency, Masters and Mates, foreign trade (UK M&M) was consulted. This record is for the United Kingdom of the time, so includes Ireland and covers the period from 1850 – 1927. This is also held by the National Archives. This is checked and sometimes added to from the Irish Merchant Navy Crew Lists (IMNCL) 1857 – 1922. Spellings of persons, ships and places throughout the catalogue have been derived from the source material: hence Cobh is listed Cove or Queenstown. Similarly, regarding the listing of individuals or companies in the ‘Owner’ category, these are written as found in Lloyd’s Register and often utilise unconventional abbreviations by standards of present-day usage. They may also differ in spelling and/or identity from owners found concomitantly in other sources (CLIP and IMNCL). All these primary sources (and if available, online access to them) are listed in the first part of the bibliography. Following this comprehensive catalogue of 370 vessels is an associated crew list (Section 5), arranged alphabetically and cross-referenced to the ships in the main catalogue. This is followed by an alphabetical list of related topics; each entry being linked to the relevant ships (Section 6). Finally, there is a bibliography of primary and secondary sources accessed and referenced during the research. James Dano Troy characterised the nineteenth- century mariners in this short phrase: ‘when I was a sailor, we had timber boats sailed by iron men’ (Hackett). In the present work, the result of decades of research, I resolved that I would memorialise these long dead and mostly forgotten sailors of my family and the nineteenth-century Cork fleets. Although the record is often defective and many of these skilled and courageous men remain anonymous, I feel that my small success in uncovering a moderate number of names and details makes this endeavour a fitting tribute to the mariners as well as an invaluable tool for future researchers.
John Sutton February 2022
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