Sail on,Albion : the usefulness of Lloyd’s Registers for maritime history,1760–1840

Lloyd’s Registers are an underexploited source for maritime history, particularly during the industrial revolution era. We provide a critical description of this source, then assess its completeness as a record of British and Irish shipping by an analysis of entries for ships named Albion between 1776 and 1840. We pursue the Albions by comparing the information in the Registers with that in Lloyd’s List, a contemporary maritime newspaper. These exercises show that the Registers are much less than a complete census of British shipping, and that systematic analysis of this source must contend with some discontinuities in its quality.