California Ship Registry, 1769

id	date	ship	flag	anchorage	purpose	outcome	evidence

ship	name variants (as written)	flag	seen	visits

circle size = documented visits at that anchorage (filtered)

Documented ship events per year by flag hint. Click a bar to open that year's visits. Dashed lines mark reference events. Draft data: this measures the archive's coverage as much as the traffic — the Bancroft and Ogden layers (v0.2–0.3) will begin to separate the two.

only years with 2+ vessels (the encounters)

Vessels documented at the same anchorage in the same year — where encounters live. Year-level precision at this draft stage; the review pass will tighten to same-week where dates allow.

About

The first machine-readable registry of documented vessel visits to the Californias, 1769–1846. Unit of record: the visit — one vessel, one anchorage, one time — each row carrying its evidence (currently: leaf-verified records of the Savage transcripts via the Archives of California calendar, with links to the manuscript scans). Fields and vocabularies: see CODEBOOK.md in this repository.

v0.1 status. Seeded from the calendar alone by a documented harvester. Every row is draft. Pending source families, in order: Bancroft's History of California narrative (1769–1824 — never before consolidated), Ogden’s 1941 otter-trade appendix + Archer 1973, the Russian record (Gibson–Istomin, Khlebnikov, Tikhmenev, Ivashintsov), Howay and Cook cross-checks. Completeness is claimed for Alta California only; Baja rows are incidental after the 1804 division of the provinces.

Absence of a row is not absence of a ship — contraband was under-recorded by design; the asymmetry is a finding, not a flaw.