Vessels and Networks: Shipowning in north-west England's coasting trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

Abstract

The article examines vessel ownership in the coasting trade of north-west England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Earlier work undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s identified differences in ownership patterns that were thought to have some social and economic significance. This work seeks to provide explanations for the differences by examining ownership in more detail, by vessel type and the trade in which the vessels were involved, looking particularly for connections between the vessel owners and the industries of the region.

Keywords:

• north-west England
• regional economies
• coasting trade
• vessel ownership patterns

Notes

¹The author would like to thank the previous Hon. Editor and anonymous referees for their comments.

² Jarvis, ‘Liverpool Statutory Registers of British Merchant Ships’ and ‘Cumberland Shipping in the Eighteenth Century’; Craig and Jarvis, Liverpool Registry of Merchant Ships; Schofield, ‘The Statutory Registers of British Merchant Ships for North Lancashire in 1786’; and Craig, ‘Shipping and Shipbuilding in the Port of Chester in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth centuries’.

³ Armstrong, ‘The Vital Spark: The British coastal trade 1700–1930’, vii.

⁴ Jackson, Hull in the Eighteenth Century, 71.

⁵ Jarvis in ‘Cumberland Shipping in the Eighteenth Century’, 226–7 commented that the ownership groups identified for vessels owned in Cumberland were significantly larger than those for a sample of 500 vessels arriving in Liverpool in 1788 and suggested that this could be a matter of some economic and social significance that could well repay further enquiry.

⁶ Pope, ‘Shipping and Trade in the Port of Liverpool 1783–93’; Eaglesham, ‘The Growth and Influence of the West Cumberland Shipping Industry, 1660–1800’.

⁷ The States of Navigation, Commerce and Revenue Reports are held in The National Archives of England and Wales, Kew (hereafter TNA), TNA CUST 17.

⁸ The King's Remembrancer Exchequer Port Books are held in TNA E190 and the principal collection of the Customs Bills of Entry is held in the archive of the Merseyside Maritime Museum, Albert Dock, Liverpool.

⁹ Exceptionally the port books for the port of Chester and the ports of north Wales are available into the fourth quarter of the eighteenth century.

¹⁰ The newspapers used are the Cumberland Pacquet, the Carlisle Journal, the Lancaster Gazette and the Preston Journal and Croft's Lancashire General Advertiser. The Chester Chronicle and the Chester Courant, which started publication in the mid eighteenth century, did not include shipping lists during the period of the study. The shipping lists used were selected from the year 1801 which was the earliest year that a reasonably complete contemporaneous analysis could be made across the ports. The records for Carlisle and Preston fell outside this window; the earliest records available for Carlisle are from 1802 and those for Preston are from 1807. In the absence of shipping lists for Chester the latest available Port Books, those for 1774, were used.

¹¹ Jackson, ‘The Significance of Unimportant Ports’.

¹² Clemens, ‘The rise of Liverpool, 1665–1750’.

¹³ Hughes, North Country Life in the Eighteenth Century; Beckett, Coal and Tobacco; Marshall, Furness and the Industrial Revolution and Fell, The Early Iron Industry of Furness and District.

¹⁴ Singleton, ‘The flax merchants of Kirkham’ and Wadsworth and Mann, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire.

¹⁵ Dalziel, ‘Trade and Transition, 1690–1815’.

¹⁶ Parson and White, A History, Directory and Gazetteer of Cumberland and Westmorland.

¹⁷ Marshall, Furness and the Industrial Revolution, 95.

¹⁸ Craig, ‘Some aspects of the trade and shipping of the River Dee in the eighteenth century’.

¹⁹ Barker, ‘Lancashire coal, Cheshire salt and the rise of Liverpool’.

²⁰ Firn, ‘An eighteenth century shipping enterprise based at Tarleton’.

²¹ The Lancaster canal is shown incorrectly by Langton (see figure 2) as terminating at Lancaster.

²² Hindle, Roads and Tracks of the Lake District, 147–77.

²³ The Active account book for the period 1796 to 1820 is in the personal collection of D. Kirby. A transcription was kindly provided by Peter Shakeshaft.

²⁴ The mixed trade was often described as ‘sundries’. This applied particularly to cargoes carried to and from Liverpool. We are able to gain an indication of the composition of this trade from extant port books for the north Wales ports which provide details of the cargoes carried between Liverpool and north Wales in the late eighteenth century. These show that the cargoes consisted of a mix of local materials, manufactured goods and imported materials transhipped in the port. The port books for the north Wales ports are held in TNA E190.

²⁵ Dickson, General View of the Agriculture of Lancashire, 634–5.

²⁶ Shipping lists in the Preston Journal and Crofts Lancashire General Advertiser show the 48ton Preston sloop Delight clearing for Drogheda on 21 Mar. 1807 and the account book of the 50ton Preston sloop Active records the vessel being at Drogheda with coals on 11 Apr. 1806. Shipping lists published in the Lancaster Gazette from 1801 correlated with the shipping registers for the port show that brigantines were prominent in the West Indies trade.

²⁷ Stammers, Mersey Flats and Flatmen, 20.

²⁸ The brigantine was a variation of the brig with the foremast square rigged similar to the brig but with the mainmast fore and aft rigged instead of square. See Kemp, Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea, 109.

²⁹ The chart is prepared from samples of around 40 vessels, if available, in the shipping registers for the ports. The Carlisle and Whitehaven registers are held in the Cumbria Record Office, Carlisle; the Ulverston, Milnthorpe and Lancaster vessels are all included in the Lancaster registers held in the Lancashire Record Office, Preston; the Preston registers are also held in the Lancashire Record Office and include the vessels belonging to Poulton. The samples include all the vessels registered as belonging to Carlisle, Ulverston, Poulton and Preston in the ten-year period 1786–95 but for the larger ports the sample covered a lesser period. For Whitehaven the 40 registrations only represented 12 per cent of the total for 1786. For Lancaster the sample of 63 represented all the registrations in the two-year period, 1786–7. The Liverpool sample was taken from data collected by Pope for his thesis and the sample for Chester was taken from the Liverpool register of vessels entering but not belonging to the port held in the archive of Merseyside Maritime Museum.

³⁰ Direct trade between Lancaster and Ireland was minimal at this time. Lancaster Port Commission records, displayed on a wall chart in the Lancaster Maritime Museum, show that for the year May 1800 to May 1801 only two vessels were employed in the trade with Ireland and the Isle of Man compared with 240 in the ‘near’ coasting trade north of Holyhead and south of the Mull of Galloway and 23 in the coasting trade outside this region. Extensive references to brigantines in the Irish coal trade are contained in Eaglesham's thesis.

³¹ Langton and Birley and Hornby & Co., flax processors in Kirkham, both had interests in Ulverston-registered brigantines. Langton and Birley were investors in the Ellen and the Young William of 158 and 118 tons, Lancaster Register nos 23/1786 and 7/1787 and the Birleys had shares in the 185-ton Albion, Lancaster Register no. 11/1787.

³² Pope did not analyse ownership by vessel type and the numbers for Liverpool are taken from the first ten records for each type of vessel included in the Liverpool Shipping Registers for 1786.

³³ An important reference for this is Fell, The Early Iron Industry of Furness and District.

³⁴ Carlisle Register no. 1/1786. Thomas Alison is identified in the 1781 edition of Gore's Liverpool Directory sharing the same address, 13 Temple Street, with Richard and James Alison, corn merchants

³⁵ Merchant goods were a mixed cargo often also described as sundries.

³⁶ Joshua, Whitehaven Register no. 175/1786; Nelly, Lancaster Register no. 69/1786.

³⁷ Jenny, Lancaster Register no. 61/1786. Shipping lists published in the Lancaster Gazette show three entries into Lancaster carrying wool from Tobermory, Greenock and Fort William in the period Aug. to Nov. 1801. Friendship, Preston Register no. 3/1787.

³⁸ Lancaster Register no. 3/1787. Oban was the nearest port to Lorne where the company had earlier built a furnace to take advantage of the local woodlands for the supply of charcoal.

³⁹ Lancaster Register no.: 71/1786.

⁴⁰ Lancaster Register nos: Pennybridge, 41/1786, Hollow Oak, 4/1787.

⁴¹ Lancaster Register nos: Friendship, 5/1794, Elisabeth, 53/1786.

⁴² Pattys, Liverpool Register no. 11/1786; Ellen and Susan, Preston Register no. 11/1786.

⁴³ Table 3 shows that women, mainly spinsters, held a significant level of investment in west Cumberland vessels but not elsewhere. Helen Doe also found the investment by spinsters in Whitehaven to be the highest in the six well-dispersed British ports she examined in the period 1824–92 and investigated how they might have acquired the funds. See Doe, Enterprising Women and Shipping in the Nineteenth Century, 80, 88–9.

⁴⁴ Thomas Briggs was the sole owner of the flats William and Jennet, Preston Register nos 2/1792 and 1/1794 and the sloop Bessy, Preston Register no. 1/1793. The vessels in which John Mayor had interests were the flats Content and Lion, Preston Register nos 3/1786 and 5/1794 and the sloops Delight, Unity, Active and Hero, Preston Register nos 1/1786, 8/1786, 2/1790 and 2/1795.

⁴⁵ The Clare family interests are referenced in Pope ‘Shipping and Trade in the Port of Liverpool 1783–93’, vol. 2, 301.

⁴⁶ Samuel Bold shared an interest in the sloops Lively, Venus and Glory (Preston Register nos 9/1786, 10/1786 and 19/1786), in each case with a mariner, and was identified as one of eight people named on a lease of land for a coal mine in Orrell dated 7 Jan. 1773, see Lancashire Record Office, Catalogue Reference, DDX 233/5.

⁴⁷ Eames, Ships and Seamen of Anglesey, 186–9 and Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 92.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Skidmore

Peter Skidmore was awarded a PhD by the University of Greenwich in 2009 for his work on the maritime economy of the north-west of England in the late eighteenth century. His more recent work has been concerned with shipping in the southwest of England and he is currently researching merchants and trade on the north Cornwall coast in the early nineteenth century.