| Administrative history | The Shipping Act of 1786 required that all ships over 15 tons be registered at the port from which they usually traded and registers for both Scarborough and Whitby are available from this date. The crew lists and agreements cover the period 1857-1872 but are only a small proportion of the surviving records. They were originally held by the Public Record Office who extracted a sample and offered the remainder to County Record Offices. They were divided by port of registration and records for some ships registered at the North Riding ports of Whitby, Scarborough and Middlesbrough were extracted from the five miles of records then held in London. The vast majority of the records were taken by The Maritime History Archive, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St Johns, Newfoundland. The Sea Fisheries Act 1868 required that all sea fishing boats be registered. |
| Copies | Parts of this collection have been microfilmed [MIC 1749, 1753, 1817, 1818, 1833, 1838, 2172, 2405, 2450, 2966, 2967, 2968, 2969, 2970, 2972, 2974, 2975, 3279, 3280, 4288, 4296]. |