Materials that were born digital, and printed materials that have been digitized, have aided an updated examination of nineteenth-century US whaling voyages’ financial returns. Items included the American Offshore Whaling Voyages dataset from whalinghistory.org, The Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchant’s Transcript, a congressman’s speech and a state’s census reports. These works and others, with analysis, showed that for the 11,257 analysable voyages ending in the 1800s, the mean return was 4.7% and 4.6% for whaling and US government bonds, respectively. Ideally, this work will place the nineteenth-century US whaling industry returns in context of other investments.

最初数字化的材料和数字化的印刷材料有助于对 19 世纪美国捕鲸航行的财务回报进行最新研究。项目包括来自 whalinghistory.org 的美国近海捕鲸航行数据集、捕鲸人的运输清单和商人的成绩单、国会议员的演讲和州的人口普查报告。这些工作和其他工作经过分析表明，在 1800 年代结束的 11,257 次可分析航次中，捕鲸和美国政府债券的平均回报率分别为 4.7% 和 4.6%。理想情况下，这项工作会将 19 世纪美国捕鲸业的回报置于其他投资的背景下。