Did the Beaufort Scale or the Wind Climate Change?

Possible long-term variations of the Beaufort scale of wind speeds are investigated from frequency distributions of about 300 000 ship observations. Records from the western entrance to the English Channel are taken as representative for observing and coding practices of voluntary weather observing ships. There is some indication that a change of either the Beaufort scale or of the wind climate occurred at the turn of the century. There is also a significant bias of the Beaufort estimates from those ships that carry anemometers.