Ship lists to crete

[British Kiwi]

Hi

Hoping for some direction of where to look. My great x 2 grandfather David West Leighton worked for Eastern Telegraph Company and seems to have been based in Crete, and Greece. He was in Dundee for the 1861 census. Is there anywhere to track how and when he travelled to Crete?

Thanks

[AdrianB38]

If you look at the TNA Guide to passenger lists on http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/looking-for-person/passengers.htm you will see several caveats.

There's a risk the surviving lists might not cover your dates: "The majority of inward passenger lists from 1878 to 1960 and outward passenger lists from 1890 to 1960 have survived"

But the major issue is that the incoming lists only cover "ports outside Europe and the Mediterranean" and the outgoing lists (logically) seem to have similar coverage for passengers, i.e. only those "travelling to places such as America, Canada, India, New Zealand and Australia".

So the starting position is that no shipping lists survive for traffic to the Med. I think there is a caveat here - if a ship from India were to pass through the Suez Canal and pick up / drop off passengers in the Med, then I have an idea that the passenger lists would cover those changes - it would be impractical not to. 

Shipping lists, therefore, don't look too helpful. Sorry!