Records of ships that were captured by the British Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars are now free to search online thanks to The National Archives at Kew (TNA).
In 2018 TNA, in partnership with the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg in Germany, launched the ‘Prize Papers’ project to catalogue and digitise the contents of 4,088 boxes, including 160,000 undelivered letters, logbooks, ships papers and bills, poems, drawings, fabrics and playing cards, confiscated from 35,000 ships during 14 wars between 1652 and 1817.
The project’s open-access portal has now launched at prizepapers.de, providing access to 55 case books relating to disputes over 1,500 ships seized between 1793 and 1815 and their cargo.
Dr Amanda Bevan, head of legal records at TNA, said, “In the days when wooden ships could be taken by threat of force, without necessarily sinking, the capture of enemy or neutral ships and their cargoes as ‘prize’ was a standard part of warfare, to disrupt enemy trade; and neutral ships were captured, if they were suspected of carrying enemy goods.”
Bevan added that during the wars with France the British alone captured more than 25,000 ships around the world. Each capture’s legality was judged at the High Court of Admiralty in London, or a Vice-Admiralty court in the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean or the Mediterranean.
“The case books uploaded today serve as an excellent point of entry into the historical period,” she said.
The portal allows researchers to find out about ships, court processes and document types, as well as how they relate to such subjects as anthropology and history, arts and music, and finance and commerce. You can also search the documents, including by the names of the individuals involved.
The project is part of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities, working with the German Historical Institute London and the Common Library Network of German States.
All of the Prize Papers documents will be uploaded to the portal over the next 20 years.