Padstow Port Books

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The following set of simple - even simplistic - analyses have been produced in an attempt to discover patterns of captaincy of Clovelly vessels from the records that have been kept of their voyages to and from Padstow. The results highlight the fact that in many cases a given vessel was captained at different times not just by lots of different captains, but captains from many different families. However, there are a small number of cases where for all or much of the entire period covered, just one family provided the masters for a given ship on numerous occasions, and so can perhaps be assumed to have been its owners.

Summary Statistics

No. of voyages: 866

Including:

    From Neath: 466
    From Swansey/Swanzey: 260
    From Tenby/Tinby: 77

    For Bristol: 13
    For Chepstow: 5
    For Neath: 1
    For Aberthaw: 1

No. of different vessels: 36
No. of different masters' surnames: 65

Masters and their Vessels

The following table shows how many masters from evidently different families each vessel had. Allowance is made, in this and subsequent analyses, for what are presumed to be simply variant spellings, both of surnames and vessel names.

This next table brings together the various masters sharing the same surname (and hence presumably from the same family), and lists how many times they were involved in voyages to or from Padstow, over what period of years, in which vessels.

In the above table, the following stand out as cases in which, for all or much of the entire period in which references occur to a vessel, just one family provided the masters of the vessel, and did so on numerous occasions.

Portrayal of Communities of Masters

This figure is produced using CFinder, a tool for finding and portraying overlapping dense groups of nodes in networks. It has been applied to the above data, so as to try to illustrate the extent to which the Clovelly mariners formed a set of somewhat separate but overlapping communities. The lines in the graph join pairs of nodes that represent masters who have served in the same vessel. A "community" in such a graph is a group of nodes more densely connected to each other than to nodes outside the group. Not all masters are shown - just those that are involved in significantly-sized communities. (The Randell and Chapleman families are marked as having been associated, through their captaincies, with the largest number of different masters.

Portrayal of Families of Masters and their Vessels

The following figure lists all the different families of masters (identified by similarity of surname), and indicates which vessels they were associated with.

Last updated: 27 Jun 2006 - Brian Randell