1783 at RockinghamBlack Refugees and the Crisis of American Freedom Search

The register, ship by ship

The sailings of 1783

188 sailings carried the 3,009 people in the register out of New York between April 23 and November 30, 1783. Press play to watch them go: each dot is a ship, sized by the number of people aboard.

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The British fleet took the people in the register to a dozen places. Most went to Port Roseway, where the town of Shelburne was being laid out and Black settlers founded Birchtown across the harbour; the rest to Port Mouton, to Annapolis Royal and the Saint John River on the Bay of Fundy, to Halifax and Fort Cumberland, to Quebec, to Abaco and Cat Island in the Bahamas, and, with the German regiments going home, to Spithead, the Downs, Ostend and Bremerlehe. The largest sailings were the naval transport L’Abondance in July and again in November, the Clinton in August, the Ranger and the Nesbitt in November.

The register gives no dates for its entries. The dates shown here are placed by register order between five dated inspections (April 23, July 31, September 22, November 19 and November 30) and are approximate to within a week or two; crossing times are assumed. Ships that carried some of the twenty-nine from around Franklin Township are marked with a gold ring on the map and a dot in the list.

AboutVesselMasterBound forPeople

Tap a row to jump the map to that sailing.

Which ships went where

Each ribbon joins a vessel to a port, as wide as the number of people it carried. The fourteen busiest vessels are named; the other 99 are grouped. Hover a ribbon for the count.

About this data. The dots, ships and names come from the Nova Scotia Archives open dataset “Book of Negroes”, 1783 (xxcy-v3fh, Nova Scotia Open Government Licence), a transcription of the British copy of the register in the Carleton Papers (The National Archives, Kew, PRO 30/55/100): 3,009 entries with name, age, sex, vessel, master, destination and register page. Ship names and ports are standardized for the charts (“L’Abondence”, “L’Abundance” and “L’Abondance” are one ship; “Port Mattoon” is Port Mouton); the search shows each entry as written. The dataset has no dates: where a date is given it is placed by register order between dated inspections (April 23, July 31, September 22, November 19 and November 30, 1783) and is approximate. Each entry links to the page image at the Nova Scotia Archives. The register does not record the people who were seized before sailing, who left without registration, or who sailed from other ports. About the register · The twenty-nine.