Crossing the North Atlantic was one of the world's most important oceanic voyages by the eighteenth century. By then, ships built and owned in the British North American colonies and, late in the period, the United States were crossing this dangerous and often-fickle ocean in large numbers. The surviving logbooks of such vessels can serve as unique source material for understanding the Atlantic experience for scholars prepared to interpret and exploit them. Recording the Atlantic passages of the small schooner Sultana, the snow George, and the brig Reward in the Global Sea Routes (GSR) database creates a record for future researchers with a broad array of interests, but only after the obstacles to interpretation are overcome, to the extent possible. I will discuss what those obstacles are, laying out the information to be found in these logs, how it is entered and why, and what it has to tell us about the Atlantic and those who used it at the time. I will make the case that what is contained in these sources justifies the acquisition of the technical and historical expertise necessary to use them.

Note: the snow rig was popular among mid-size ocean-going Atlantic merchant ships by the mid-eighteenth century. It is similar to the two-masted brig, as opposed to the three-masted ship, but it has a small “try-mast” just behind the main mast (the after mast), on which the mizzen sail was hoisted.

Research into maritime history using digital tools is a growing field, with projects that in recent years have focused on the role of sea spaces in the dynamics of globalisation on an economic and juridical level as well as on a cultural level, with respect to the circulation of knowledge. In this introduction to our special issue, we offer some historiographical observations on the codification of knowledge in seafaring practice, emphasising how the use of digital tools to process and represent primary sources may encourage historians to formulate new questions about the relationship between European culture and the sea during the early modern age. In order to present the articles in this issue and the original contribution they make to the field, we also focus on the historical and cultural significance and methodological challenges posed by primary sources such as logbooks. We illustrate how the analysis of logbooks in a digital environment such as Global Sea Routes (GSR), a project conceived and coordinated by Guido Abbattista, can foster a better understanding of the role of routine navigations in early commercial globalisation.

In the 19th century, sealing vessels visited the South Shetland Islands to exploit animal resources for the global skin and oil markets. The captains or mates of these vessels were responsible for keeping a logbook in which they recorded daily observations of weather conditions, hunting activities, etc. Despite the value of these documents as a source of information, archaeologists studying Antarctic sealing have not always relied on them. This paper examines the potential of logbooks for providing information that is relevant to the archaeological study of sealing in the South Shetland Islands. In particular, it discusses how documentary analysis of exploitation strategies can provide insight into the dynamics that influenced the configuration of sealers’ sites. To this end, we propose a methodology for investigating exploitation strategies, taking into account several archaeologically sensitive variables, including the number, location and duration of landings, as well as the activities carried out during these events. We have taken four logbooks dating from the early and late 19th century – specifically those of the Aurora (1820–1821), the Huron (1820–1822), the Thomas Hunt (1873–1874) and the Sarah W. Hunt (1887–1888) – as case studies to test the proposed methodology.