Mapped : British, Spanish and Dutch Shipping 1750-1800 | Spatial Analysis
►http://spatialanalysis.co.uk/2012/03/mapped-british-shipping-1750-1800
I recently stumbled upon a fascinating dataset which contains digitised information from the log books of ships (mostly from Britain, France, Spain and The Netherlands) sailing between 1750 and 1850.
These maps were produced with the latest version of R‘s ggplot2, maptools, geosphere and png packages.