Records of ships that were captured by the British Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars are now free to search online thanks to The National Archives at Kew (TNA).
In 2018 TNA, in partnership with the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg in Germany, launched the ‘Prize Papers’ project to catalogue and digitise the contents of 4,088 boxes, including 160,000 undelivered letters, logbooks, ships papers and bills, poems, drawings, fabrics and playing cards, confiscated from 35,000 ships during 14 wars between 1652 and 1817.
The project’s open-access portal has now launched at prizepapers.de, providing access to 55 case books relating to disputes over 1,500 ships seized between 1793 and 1815 and their cargo.
Dr Amanda Bevan, head of legal records at TNA, said, “In the days when wooden…
