Offshore whaling

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/whaling-interview-dr-tim-d-smith/
As part of the decade long Census of Marine Life project, Dr. Tim D. Smith assembled a team of scientists and historians to determine the effect that 19th century American offshore whaling had on whales. In 2010, the team finished up a 10-year project of assembling and analyzing two sets of data, one detailing the specifics of each of 15,000 American whaling voyage, and the other obtaining daily data from logbooks from more than 1,300 of those voyages.

https://whalinghistory.org/av/voyages/
The American Offshore Whaling Voyage (AOWV) database includes information about all known American offshore (or “pelagic”) whaling voyages from the 1700s to the 1920s, it does not include the modern factory ship voyages of the mid-20th century. Information is most complete for the 19th century. The voyages included in the database sailed from, or were under the registry of, what is now the United States. A voyage was defined to be complete when the vessel returned to its port of departure or registry.