• The Website Explained
• Toolkit Index
• Welcome to the MHA [Video]
• Anatomy of an Agreement
• Indentifying Ships & Voyages
  • Introduction
  • A Foreign-Going Seafarer
  • Home Trade: Willliam Cram's Story
• A History of the Agreements
• Archiving the Agreements
• Finding Official Numbers
• Reading the Handwriting
• Understanding the Currency
• Abbreviations used on the site
• Glossary of the site
• Selected Sources

Identifying Ships & Voyages

If you have arrived at this part of the site with the anatomies of foreign-going and home trade Agreements explored, you will be familiar already with Henry Johnson (a sailor on the Juno in 1871) and William Cram (an AB on the steamer Brio in 1908). Here is an opportunity to get to know them better.

They are the subjects whose careers the “More than a List of Crew” team have traced in the Agreements. The significance of the kinds of shipping in which they worked, and how it connects with the spatial and commercial organization of commodity trades, is treated. Some of the social dimensions of the seafarers’ lives are explored, notably by linking to the census. 

But keep in mind how different the Crew Agreement is from the census. The Agreement is a serial, longitudinal and mobile record. Using it to best advantage means using different research strategies. It is a state-generated record too, and it takes a prescribed form, meaning this is the appropriate place to raise the question of how researchers might position themselves in respect of the subjects whose histories they seek to discover through the Agreements.