Naval Logbooks and Captains' Journals

This is the operational paperwork of the ships that hunted pirates: a group of manuscript series, not a single work. Captains' logs of the Royal Navy for 1669 to 1853 are at The National Archives, Kew, as ADM 51, arranged alphabetically by ship and chronologically under each ship; masters' logs for 1672 to 1840 are ADM 52. The lieutenants' logs, the third and often fullest layer, are mostly elsewhere: they went from the Admiralty to the National Maritime Museum in 1938 and form the ADM/L collection, 5,205 volumes covering 1673 to 1809. Beside them sit the musters in ADM 36 and the pay books in ADM 33, which name the men.¹

A captain's log is a ruled volume in which each day of a commission receives an entry: course, distance, latitude, weather, sightings, stores expended, and whatever incident the officer chose to record. Royal Museums Greenwich puts it plainly: "The logs are not a private journal and mainly record details the officers were required to note ...". The volumes were divided by the officer himself, printed forms appearing only from about 1799, so how much narrative a log yields depends on the man keeping it.²

Three streams, one parent

The National Archives states that "Captains' logs were compiled from the masters' logs" and that "Lieutenants' logs were derived from the masters' logs in a similar way to the captains' logs". The three streams are therefore not three independent witnesses. Where a captain's log and a master's log agree for the same ship and day, that agreement is probably copying rather than corroboration, and divergence is what repays attention.³

The pieces this Archive cites

The key exhibit is ADM 51/954, which holds five separate captain's log runs for HMS Swallow; the third, 1718/19 March 13 to 1723 May 10, is Chaloner Ogle's commission, the cruise on which Bartholomew Roberts was killed at Cape Lopez on 10 February 1722. Her consort's log, the Weymouth for 1720 October 20 to 1723 April 6, is ADM 51/1057; the Swallow's own master's log is ADM 52/296, in two runs broken between October 1721 and October 1722, across that action. Her armament is contested in print, 50 guns in the museum's account against the 54 of the Navy Board progress book, which enters her as a fourth rate launched in 1703.⁴

For the Ocracoke operation against Blackbeard in November 1718 the logs of both Virginia station ships survive: HMS Pearl, 1717 April 1 to 1719 December 8, in ADM 51/672, and HMS Lyme, 1716/17 February 23 to 1719 August 14, in ADM 51/4250. These are the parent ships; the Queen Anne's Revenge Project has the fight made in two hired sloops, taken up because the warships were too large for the sounds, so it will appear, if at all, as a detachment in the parent log.⁵

Its limits as evidence

Logs almost never name ordinary seamen, and the naming series fails where it is most wanted. On the catalogue evidence the ADM 36 musters stop and restart in this window: nothing for the Swallow between 1708 and 1726, the Weymouth between 1709 and 1725 or the Pearl between 1709 and 1727, and nothing for the Lyme before 1721. The crew evidence must be sought in the pay books instead, and ADM 33/308 holds the Swallow's for 1718/19 March 13 to 1723 May 13.⁶

They are also terse: a general chase may take fewer lines than the day's beer, and absence of a remark is not evidence that nothing happened. Two dating conventions travel with every date: the noon-to-noon log day, moved onto the civil day only in October 1805, and the legal year beginning 25 March before 1752, which is why Ogle's commission opens at 1718/19 March 13. A log is an interested account of an action, written for the Navy Office and the prize court, while staying a disinterested account of the wind.

How the Archive uses it

The logs date and locate. They discipline the chronology of the printed pirate literature, and they supply the day that the Admiralty court papers do not. Pirates enter them as sails, prizes and prisoners, not as speakers, and John Atkins's narrative of the same squadron is the bridge from log to fiscal record. None of the ADM 51 and ADM 33 pieces named above is flagged as digitised in the catalogue, and the digitisation status of ADM 52/296 was not recorded, so these volumes must be read at Kew.

What this source cannot yet give is the inside of the volumes: no folio has been inspected, so no page reference can honestly be cited, and whether a lieutenant's log survives at Greenwich for any of these four ships is unknown, which leaves the muster gaps and the broken master's log resting on catalogue searches rather than proof that the volumes are gone.