The National Maritime Museum holds information relating to over 20,000 British warships from about 1500 to 1950. The data includes the name, type and launch date of almost every British warship in the time period concerned. For many ships there is also data on the shipyard which built a vessel, and details of the service history and captains of the ship concerned. For some ships further technical details (for instance, construction materials or dimensions) are available.

Help us enhance the data

However, this data is considered incomplete as it was compiled over many years by many people through a variety of methods.

We would like to enlist the help of the public to help us enhance this data. We have partnered with Wikimedia UK to reach out to the many knowledgeable experts and enthusiasts around the world. For more information on the project please visit the Wikipedia project page.

Download Warship Histories data

You can download all the Warship Histories vessels records as PDFs. Each file contains approximately 2500 records:

• Warship Histories vessels i (3.7MB)
• Warship Histories vessels ii (3.7MB)
• Warship Histories vessels iii (3.8MB)
• Warship Histories vessels iv (3.9MB)
• Warship Histories vessels v (4.9MB)
• Warship Histories vessels vi (4.1MB)
• Warship Histories vessels vii (4.0MB)
• Warship Histories vessels viii (4.0MB)
• Warship Histories vessels ix (4.1MB)
• Warship Histories vessels x (4.1MB)
• Warship Histories vessels xi (4.1MB)
• Warship Histories vessels xii (5.2MB)

This data is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0).