English: Visualization of 18th and 19th-century shipping routes: it shows about 100 years of ship paths in the seas, as recorded in hundreds of ship's log books, by hand, one or several times a day. The data source is a dataset of the Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans 1750-1850 (CLIWOC) project (European Union funded project, 2001-2003). This dataset contains information from the log books of ships (mostly from Britain, France, Spain and The Netherlands) sailing between 1750 and 1850, which have been digitized for climatological purposes.

The routes are plotted from the lat/long positions derived from the ships’ logs. The data base is far from comprehensive. http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2012/04/visualizing-ocean-shipping.html

According to CLIWOC, the project concentrates on British, Dutch, French, Spanish and Argentinean sources:

• In Britain the principal sources are the National Maritime Museum (NMM) and the Public Records Office (PRO), both in London, where the logs prepared by masters and captains of Royal Navy vessels are held. To this important source should be added the log books of vessels owned by the British East India Company. These are held in the British Library, also in London. The PRO also holds the log books from the voyages of discovery from this period.
• Dutch records derive from the Royal Dutch Navy vessels and those of the Dutch East Indies Company. Many are held in the Hague archives and additionally in Jakarta and Cape Town.
• French sources are concentrated in Service Historique de la Marine and Centre des Archives d’Outre Mer as well as in the Archives Nationales.
• The principal archives are, for Spanish sources, the Archivo General de Indias (Seville) and the Archivo Museo Naval (Madrid). Closely related to these sources are those held in Buenos Aires from the Spanish colonial period. Many of these log books are derived from the imperial postal system linking Spain to her American colonies which was established under the reign of Charles III.

http://www.ucm.es/info/cliwoc/logbooks.htm