Nourse Line
shipping company 1861-1917
The Nourse Line was a shipping company formed by Captain James Nourse in 1861. After taking delivery of his first ship, the Ganges, in 1861, Nourse went on to build up one of the last great fleets of sailing ships.
Early life of James Nourse
James Nourse was born in County Dublin in 1828 and after serving the required time at sea obtained his Master’s Certificate in London in 1851 and was hired as captain on a ship owned by WN Lindsay of London. A year later, he joined Foley, Aikman & Company of Glasgow as Master aboard the Aberfoyle. Nourse served in the ship for three years before it caught fire. He then became the captain of the Tasmania until 1861.
Establishing the fleet
Nourse bought his first ship, the 839 ton iron hulled sailing vessel, Ganges in 1861, by buying 75% share in the ship bought ship builders Pile, Hay & Company of Sunderland. The Ganges sailed to India to trade between Calcutta and Australia where James Nourse made acquaintance with the owners of Sandbach, Tinne & Company who were importers and exporters, mainly concerned with sugar, coffee, rum, molasses and also trafficking in Melanesian labour. Nourse saw a future in these trades and relinquished his command of Ganges to concentrate on management. He went set up an office in London in 1864 and acquired full ownership of Ganges.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Nourse Line” as shipping company 1861-1917. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as shipping company 1861-1917. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7063922. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1861, 1828, 1851 and 1864.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Nourse Line”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Nourse Line primary sources, Nourse Line archive and Nourse research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Nourse Line”?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Nourse Line” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.