Tristan Hotham

Researcher of campaigns and platforms. Maker of other things.

Shipwrecks of the world, and how many over time

Title card reading 'Shipwrecks of the world' in black and red on pale paper, beside a bar chart of wrecks listed per year from 1700 to 2025: a long ochre plateau in the 1800s and two red spikes in the world wars. Text: 243,071 wrecks listed on Wikipedia since 1700; worst year 1944, with 4,570.

Wikipedia’s volunteers have listed 243,071 shipwrecks, year by year, since 1700. I counted them all. Three of the five worst years are war years, with 1944 the worst of all. But the biggest pile of wrecks comes from the 1800s, and that tells a story about British newspapers as much as about the sea.

Explore the interactive version
Read the paper

Tucked away in English Wikipedia is one of the most patient pieces of volunteer history I know. For every month since the 1820s, and for every year or decade before, there is a page called “List of shipwrecks in…” Each one lists the ships lost, day by day: the name, the flag, and a line on what happened. “Driven ashore near Whitby.” “Foundered in the North Sea; her crew were rescued.” “Torpedoed and sunk by U-boat.”

I turned all of those pages from 1700 to 2025 into one table. Once I had removed duplicates it held 243,071 wrecks. Then I counted them, year by year, by cause and by flag.

Stacked bar chart of shipwrecks listed on Wikipedia per year from 1700 to 2025, coloured by cause. Counts rise from almost nothing in the early 1700s to a long plateau, mostly between 2,000 and 3,800 a year from the 1840s to 1880, almost all ochre for ships wrecked or driven aground, then drop sharply to a few hundred a year. Two red spikes stand out in the shaded world war bands: 4,083 in 1917 and 4,570 in 1944
Shipwrecks listed on Wikipedia per year, by cause. The shaded bands are the two world wars.

The wars

The two world wars stand out exactly as you would expect. The single worst year is 1944, with 4,570 wrecks listed. Second is 1917, the year Germany turned to unrestricted submarine warfare, with 4,083, and third is 1942, with 4,027. Across the Second World War the lists average 3,044 wrecks a year, 6.9 times the rate between the wars, and 69% of them were lost to war: torpedoes above all, then bombs from aircraft, mines and gunfire.

The age of sail, and Lloyd’s List

The surprise is how close the 1800s come. From 1850 to 1879 the lists average 2,746 wrecks a year, and in 1880 they reach 3,794. 71% of all the entries are from the nineteenth century. These were mostly not dramatic losses: 65% of them were ships that ran aground or were driven ashore in bad weather, and many crews got off safely.

Some of that is real. The sailing coasters and colliers of the 1800s were wrecked in enormous numbers. But a lot of it is the record. The Wikipedia editors who built these pages worked largely from British newspapers, and above all from Lloyd’s List, which reported every British loss it heard about. 66% of the 1800s entries are British ships. When the newspaper runs thin out, so do the lists: from 1890 to 1913 they average just 483 wrecks a year. Shipping did get safer as steam replaced sail, but not that suddenly.

The timeline of shipwrecks is half a history of loss and half a history of the people who wrote the losses down.

Whose ships

Over the whole period 56% of the listed wrecks flew the British flag, then the United States, Germany, France and Norway. In the Second World War the British share falls to 24%, as German, Japanese, Italian and Soviet losses join the lists.

Stacked bar chart of the share of listed wrecks by flag per decade. Blue British ships make up about 60 to 85 percent of entries in most decades from the 1740s to the 1880s, then American red takes over much of the 1890s and 1900s; the 1940s show a wide mix including dark grey Germany and pink Japan, and recent decades are mostly other flags
Share of listed wrecks by flag, per decade.

Over everything, most ships were wrecked rather than sunk: 53% of the entries ran aground or were driven ashore, 15% foundered at sea, and 10% were lost to war.

Two bar charts. Left: causes of listed wrecks, led by wrecked or ran aground at 53 percent, foundered 15 percent, not recorded 12 percent, war 10 percent, collision 4 percent, fire 4 percent and scuttled 2 percent. Right: vessel types of mapped wrecks, led by sailing vessels at 37 percent
Why ships were lost (left, Wikipedia lists) and what kind of vessel (right, mapped wrecks).

The map

Most list entries have no position. The 15,133 that do are mostly war losses, logged at the time, so they spread across the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Pacific. I added every wreck in Wikidata and the United States wreck charts, for 52,124 wrecks with a place. The interactive map has a year slider with a play button, decade buttons, filters by cause and flag, and a sea-depth base map.

A world map of shipwrecks on pale paper, with an enlarged panel of the British Isles. Red Second World War losses are scattered across the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the western Pacific; dense clusters crowd the coasts of Scotland, Wales and the eastern and Gulf coasts of the United States
Every mapped wreck, coloured by era of loss where a year is known (grey: undated).

The map has a bias of its own. 61% of the mapped wrecks lie in UK waters, 45% off Scotland alone, because Wikidata imported the heritage records of Scotland and Wales wholesale. Scotland has 10.6 times as many mapped wrecks as England, which certainly lost more ships.

Two horizontal bars. The first shows where the mapped records come from: 44 percent Scottish records from Canmore, 11 percent Welsh records from Coflein, a thin slice of other Wikidata wrecks, 12 percent NOAA and 29 percent Wikipedia list entries. The second shows where the wrecks lie: 45 percent Scotland, 11 percent Wales, slivers for England and Northern Ireland, 16 percent United States and 23 percent the rest of the world
Where the mapped wrecks come from, and where they lie.
Horizontal bar chart of mapped wrecks in named graveyards. Scottish areas lead, from the Firth of Clyde with 2,676 to Shetland with 1,587, then the US Gulf coast with 1,398, the Welsh coasts and the English Channel with 953; at the bottom Truk Lagoon has 20, Ironbottom Sound 11 and the Torres Strait 1
Mapped wrecks in named graveyards, coloured by the source most come from.

How I did this

The lists come from a table scraped from every English Wikipedia “List of shipwrecks” page for 1700 to 2025, with ship, flag, a cause sorted into buckets and, for a minority, coordinates. I removed repeats of the same ship under the same date on the same page, grouped flags across regimes (the German Empire and Nazi Germany as Germany, for example) and grouped causes. For the map I added Wikidata’s shipwrecks, with extra event dates, and NOAA’s Automated Wreck and Obstruction Information System for US waters, and skipped list entries that matched a mapped wreck. I never guess a year from a launch date or a war. These are counts of recorded wrecks, not of all wrecks: the paper sets out every step and caveat.

Explore the interactive version
Read the paper
Data and code

Notes and sources

  • Wikipedia contributors, Lists of shipwrecks (CC BY-SA 4.0). The structured table derived from them is shared under the same licence with the data.
  • Wikidata (CC0), queried with QLever; many records were imported from Canmore and Coflein.
  • NOAA Office of Coast Survey, Automated Wreck and Obstruction Information System (public domain), via a copy on GitHub.
  • Summary Geodatabase of Shipwrecks 1500 BCE to 1500 CE (Harvard Mapping Past Societies, with the Oxford Roman Economy Project), used as counts only on the interactive page and in the paper.
  • Natural Earth outlines (public domain). Base map tiles on the interactive page © Esri.
  • I wrote the text, with drafting and editing assistance from Claude (Anthropic), which also helped prepare the analysis code. I reviewed and checked all text and results.

Tristan Hotham

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