“Hetty Ellen of Aberystwyth and Doctor Livingstone”

Summary

Relatively little has been written about the trading patterns of typical nineteenthcentury merchant ships before 1880, the year in which Lloyd's Weekly Shipping Indexbegan publication. The Indexfurnishes the means by which we can easily and quickly summarise the voyages of many thousands of sailing and steam vessels, but before 1880 we must all too often rely upon the chance survival of voyage accounts, narratives, and daily logs. The only other easily utilized source for determining the trade routes of individual vessels from the 1850s is the vast and now partially dispersed archive of the Registrar General of Shipping and Seamen, but the official logs and crew agreements are less than perfect guides to voyages, although they can be extremely valuable in fixing upon ports of departure. Furthermore, by examining the consular stamps on crew agreements we may often establish the principal ports visited, together with the relevant dates. Another valuable source is, of course, the printed Bill of Entry; the Bill furnishes much valuable additional data concerning cargoes, consignees, and ports of discharge in Britain, and it is equally useful in permitting us to record certain datum points in the trading careers of numberless merchant ships.

The persistent student of maritime history has, however, another source, namely, the daily or weekly press, particularly Lloyd's Listand Shipping and Mercantile Gazette, the latter being by far the better of the two principal shipping journals for most of the nineteenth century. Local papers can also be rewarding, particularly for those ports which had good shipping correspondents or which devoted a sizeable section of their commercial coverage to shipping matters. For South Wales, The Western Mailis particularly valuable. The great drawback to research in the press, however, is that work is extremely time-consuming and tedious and the rewards may be discouragingly sparse. It would rarely be rewarding to attempt such research unless the voyages of a considerable number of vessels were being investigated simultaneously. Occasionally an unusual occurrence or event lends greater significance to this rather painstaking task: such was the case when the voyages of the Welsh vessel Hetty Ellenof Aberystwyth were traced during her long life between 1860 and 1881.