Accession consists of records created and/or maintained by the Registrar of Ships of the Port of Victoria, Port of Nanaimo, and Port Alberni. The accession includes the Shipping Registers for each of these ports as well as Transaction Books for the Port of Victoria. The Shipping Registers record information related to the original registration of ships, such as their official measurements, owner information, builder information, and legal information on mortgages and other transactions on the ship. One Shipping Register is labelled 'Seaspan' and appears to be related to registered ships built at the Seaspan Shipyard at the Port of Victoria, though this is unclear from the records.
These Shipping Registers come in two forms: blue binders and oversized volumes. The types of information recorded in these two forms of Shipping Registers are the same, though they are organized differently. The oversized books contain two pages for each ship, with information about the ship, its owner and its builder listed on the top halves of the pages and transaction information on the bottom halves. The blue binders appear to have been created in the 1980s or 1990s to transcribe registration information of all ships active at the time. They contain one page for the information about the ship, its owner and its builder, with as many subsequent pages as needed for listing transaction information.
The blue binders also include two indexes: one for the Port of Victoria and one for both the Port of Nanaimo and Port Alberni. These indexes list, in alphabetical order, the ships active at the time that were registered at a given port, with their initial registration dates and the register book or binder in which they can be found.
The Transactions Books for the Port of Victoria include further information on legal transactions performed on select ships. In cases in which space to record transactions in the Shipping Register is full, these books were used to record subsequent transactions.
