When a Royal Navy vessel or a private man-of-war captured an enemy ship, a court needed to establish whether the vessel was in fact a lawful prize: in other words whether the ship, crew or cargo belonged to an enemy state. To determine this, crew members were cross-examined (if necessary with the help of a sworn-in interpreter) about all matters relating to the ownership of the ship and its cargo. Commonly, three crew members were questioned, usually a cross section of the ranks aboard. From these interrogations, we have created a database, containing all the information required by the interrogation rubric and therefore consistently present in the interrogations.The database comprises two tables, one of which deal with information about the ship, such as geographical markers of its ports of origin and destination, its tonnage, the number of nationalities aboard and information about its owner. This is linked to information about the crew, since there was normally more than one crew member interrogated per vessel. The crew table includes demographic information about the individual interrogated, an indicator of his literacy, his rank and the length and nature of his relationship with the master of the vessel.

This project used a sample of three periods from the Prize Paper archive (which can be found in the National Archives in Kew (TNA), High Court of Admiralty (HCA) 32) to construct a relational database, in order to examine the characteristics of migrants in the sector, the nature of the labour market and its relationship to skill and wage premiums, and the role of mobility in wider economic and social networks. The dataset contains a selection of variables extracted (verbatim) from the archive (TNA HCA 32), an archive that contains a series of (written) interrogations of maritime personnel. The dataset contains data for three periods: (1) 1702-1712; (2) 1772-1789; (3)1793-1803. It is important to note that the dataset is a sample. It contains only data relating to interrogations of crews of merchant vessels. All other types of ships (and hence their crews), such as fishing and navy vessels, have not been been entered. For more information please see the file 'Project details'.