Hudson's Bay Company voyages weather data 1750-1850

These datasets contain spreadsheet weather data collated from Hudson’s Bay Company ships' logbooks between 1750 and 1850. Each dataset contains relevant accompanying metadata.

These logbooks are valuable for covering the whole of the 100-year study period of the ARCdoc project (1750 to 1850) https://arcdoc.wordpress.com/ with only a few gaps (four years only are missing). The original Hudson's Bay Company ships' logbooks are held in the Manitoba State Archives (http://www.gov.mb.ca/chc/archives/hbca/) but microfilm copies are available in the UK National Archives in Kew (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk), the latter are however not of good quality.

The original logbooks were prepared by the various captains who sailed annually between London and the Company’s factories in Hudson’s Bay. The ships set out in early summer, returning usually in September; voyages planned to avoid the winter ice. They tended to take the same route each year following more-or-less the same latitude, and for the purposes of climate studies this is a great advantage as replicate routes provide for a geographically consistent data set.

The Hudson’s Bay Company logbooks are a unique and complete set of merchant shipping documents that have provided much useful Arctic climatic information not available from any other source.

Related publications:

Ward, C. and Wheeler, D. (2011) Hudson’s Bay Company ship’s logbooks: a source of far North Atlantic weather data. Polar Record doi:10.1017

Ayre, M., Nicholls, J., Ward, C. and Wheeler, D. (2015), Ships’ logbooks from the Arctic in the pre-instrumental period. Geoscience Data Journal. doi: 10.1002/gdj3.27