Study title

Dutch Ships and Sailors is a project that aims to provide an infrastructure for maritime historical datasets, linking correlating data through semantic web technology. It brings together datasets related to recruitment and shipping in the East-India trade (mainly 18th century) and in the shipping of the northern provinces of the Netherlands (mainly 19th century). For the northern provinces, the database contains data on the personnel recruited, the ships, and other variables (muster rolls of the northern provinces of the Netherlands).

Dutch Ships and Sailors is a CLARIN IV-project, hosted by Huygens ING in collaboration with VU University Amsterdam, the International Institute of Social History and Scheepvaartmuseum Amsterdam.

The data from this project are divided over 5 datasets. See the ‘Thematic collection: Dutch Ships and Sailors’ dataset for a full overview.

This dataset is a conversion to RDF/Turtle of a previous data collection from Dutch northern muster rolls and mustering registers. These original sources contain information on the ship, the name of the ship, the captain, the crew, the tonnage, the data and place of monstering, and the ships destination. In the original sources this information is broken down in separate categories and is documented according to a standard format.

The source data for this dataset were the Noordelijke Monsterollen Databases (MDB) (Northern Muster Rolls Databases) created by historian Jurjen Leinenga. These databases contain mustering information from the period 1803-1837 found in archives, maritime museums and private collections in the four northern Dutch provinces (Groningen, Friesland, Drenthe and Overijssel).