How to calm rough seas with oil, the first time anyone from Britain had seen a cigarette being rolled, and Captain Scott's first impressions of the Antarctic – these are some of the stories revealed in documents digitised and published by the Royal Society on Friday.

The release includes travel journals, diaries and letters from a collection started more than three centuries ago. "Since 1660 the Royal Society has been collecting documents sent to it from all over the world," said Keith Moore, head of library and archives at the Royal Society's Centre for History of Science.

"People were sending scientific information from China, from the new world colonies, from all over the place. This is our attempt to give a little bit of it back to the world."

Among the documents released on Friday is a letter from the scientist and American founding father, Benjamin Franklin, containing a curious observation he made during a voyage. "He sees oil being slung overboard by the ship's cook and he observes it stilling the waters," said Moore.

"He goes on to talk about demonstrating it on ponds around London. Franklin was a great one for thinking about how scientific discoveries might be applied ... One of the areas it might be applied is in rescuing people. If you have choppy seas quite close to shore then by pouring oil on the water you could possibly save lives."

Franklin was always dreaming how new inventions might be put to use. "When he later talks about the Montgolfiers' ballooning experiments, he thinks about how to apply this – he thinks you might put ice in a balloon and raise it up into the skies and the ice would keep cool. He thinks of balloons as an early type of refrigerator," said Moore. "Often he was wrong."

The documents also contain accounts from Robert Falcon Scott on the explorer's first trip to the Antarctic during the earliest British attempt to survey the frozen continent between 1901 and 1904. As commander of the expedition, Scott talks of balloon flights over the unexplored continent and an account of a sledge journey to the furthest point south then reached, a journey that almost killed his companion Ernest Shackleton.

From the other side of the world and a century earlier, there is an account by the 19th century scientist Edward Sabine of an expedition to the Arctic: an attempt to find the North West passage. The trip in 1818 was cut short when the ship's commander, John Ross, claimed to have seen a mountain range blocking the way.

"We know about the great derring-do adventures in both poles and people risking their lives to do crazy things," said Moore. "Here's an instance where, although they had the opportunity to find the Northwest passage, and they were on the threshold of doing just that – John Ross turned back."

It turned out that Ross was the only one who could see the "Croker's mountains". In his diary, Sabine recorded doubts about the claims being made by Ross. "It's quite possible that it was some sort of optical illusion," said Moore. "They'd seen optical illusions before in northern climes. Sabine describes them in his diary so they were quite familiar with that kind of thing.

"Ross was the only one who claimed to have seen it and none of the other crew had. They had prepared to overwinter, they had whale-oil supplies, seal meat. And then Ross decides he's not going to go in that direction."

Pages from the diary of the astronomer John Herschel from 1839 give some insight into his role as the co-inventor of photography. "William Henry Fox Talbot has this great idea to use a camera to take an image, but he couldn't fix the image and make it permanent on paper. It was John Herschel who did that," said Moore.

"Herschel was effectively the co-inventor of photography and that's evident from the diaries in 1839 where he's talking about his photographic experiments."

Meanwhile, British soldier Samuel Holmes recorded some curious details during the first British diplomatic trip to China in the early 1790s. He noticed some Malays who had a habit of "a kind of weed or thin paper which they rowl the tobacco up in and Smoaks as we would a Pipe ..."

Clearly they were rolling cigarettes. Holmes called them "segars".

So far, the Royal Society has digitised and released fewer than 20 documents from its archive of more than 250,000. "We've scratched the surface. We have really wonderful collections of manuscripts and historical documents, we want to release as many of them as we can," said Moore.