Original provider:
Wildlife Conservation Society

Dataset credits:
Wildlife Conservation Society

Abstract:
The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has digitally captured the Townsend Whaling Charts that were published as a series of 4 charts with the article titled "The distribution of certain whales as shown by logbook records of American whale ships" by Charles Haskins Townsend in the journal Zoologica in 1935.
The 4 charts show the locations of over 50,000 captures of 4 whale species; sperm whales (36,908), right whales (8,415), humpback whales (2,883) and bowhead whales (5,114). Capture locations were transcribed from North American (“Yankee”) pelagic whale vessel log books dating from 1761 to 1920 and plotted onto nautical charts in a Mercator projection by a cartographer. Each point plotted on the charts represents the location of a whaling ship on a day when one or more whales were taken and is symbolized by month of the year using a combination of color and open and closed circles.
Townsend and his cartographer plotted vessel locations as accurately as possible according to log book records. When plotting locations on an earlier sperm whale chart published in 1931 the cartographer spaced points where locations were very dense, "extending areas slightly" for a number of whaling grounds. However, for charts in preparation at this time, Townsend states that "this difficulty is avoided by omitting some of the data, rather than extend the ground beyond actual whaling limits." We assumed that this statement refers to the 1935 charts but there is still some question as to whether the cartographer did in fact space locations and thus expand whaling grounds.

GBIF url: https://www.gbif.org/dataset/01d9d254-b18c-458e-b6e1-fc569edb7f09
Homepage: https://seamap.env.duke.edu/dataset/885
Citation: Woolmer, G. 2013. Historical distribution of whales shown by logbook records 1785-1913. Version 1.6.0. Dataset published in OBIS-SEAMAP. https://doi.org/10.82144/f3b623de. accessed via GBIF.org on 2025-10-28.