—–Harris (AM2464)

Capt. Harris, otherwise identified, whoever he may be, appears in AOWV only as a replacement master on one voyage for one ship, home port New London:

HANNIBAL (AS1529): (ship, 441 tons, length, built in New York NY in 1821, abandoned in Cumberland Inlet in 1861). HANNIBAL sailed on May 21, 1855 for Spitzbergen (Svalbard) and returned on March 21, 1856. Dennis Wood Abstract 3-550. Benjamin F. Brown & Sons was the agent. AV06135.

The sources conflict as to the identity of the master when HANNIBAL sailed in May 1855. AOWV and Decker show “Harris”. Other sources including Colby (in his list of New London whaling master and in the quote below), Starbuck, Whalemens Shipping List, and Dennis Wood Abstract 3-550 record Thomas W. Roys (sometimes shown as Royce) (AM4167) as the master. Perhaps more authoritatively, the ship register dated May 15, 1855 (six days before sailing) shows Thomas as the master. The author believes that most likely Thomas was the sailing master. He left the ship for some unexplained reason and was replaced by Capt. Harris.

Colby (p. 19) adds an interesting note: “If agent Benjamin Brown and Captain Thomas Welcome Roys had come to an agreement over the use of the Hannibal in 1855, New London might have been the port that introduced modern whaling technology”.

In another historical note, Starbuck writes that HANNIBAL was the “[F]irst American vessel sailing for [Spitzbergen]”.

Sources used: see sidebar and sources cited in text.

George Shaw

American Institute for Maritime Studies

Mystic Seaport Museum

January 2026

-----Harris, in American Offshore Whaling Voyages on WhalingHistory.org
Return to New London Whaling Masters

Sources for New London Whaling Masters

For genealogical information: Ancestry.com, Family Search, Genealogybank.org, Find A Grave, and newspapers.com. I later discovered and made good use of newspaper.com and genealogybank.com for sources in old newspapers.

For whaling-related topics: The principal online sites are available at research.mysticseaport.org. It has numerous valuable drop-down menus including American Offshore Whaling Voyages (AOWV), Connecticut Ship Database and New London Crew Lists as well as others. AOWV is organized around identifier numbers for masters (AM….), ships (AS….), and voyages (AV….), all easily searchable. It can also be reached directly at whalinghistory.org and whalemens shipping list. Three secondary sources that I used in almost every case were Alexander Starbuck’s History of the American Whale Fishery (Starbuck), Barnard Colby’s For Oil and Buggy Whips (Colby), and Robert Decker’s Whaling Industry of New London (Decker). Dennis Wood Abstracts, indexed and searchable in AOWV, contains useful abstracts of logbooks. The abstract number is often cited for a voyage. Other sources are cited in the text in particular cases. Almost without exception, the books and other secondary sources referred to in the text or sources are in the library of Mystic Seaport Museum.

I had the good fortune to correspond and meet with Judith Lund, the person behind the massive American Offshore Whaling Voyages database, who provided useful guidance along the way and was a resource when I found possible errors or inconsistencies in the sources. I refer to AOWV’s Whaling Resource Identifiers for masters (AM…), vessels (AS…), and voyages (AV…) in the text. Number references in AOWV are to those identifiers. The dates of voyages are approximate as the records vary.