The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  By the 1980s McLean’s operations spanned the world, including South as well as North America. What had begun as a medium-sized trucking company had become an international giant; more than that, its innovations decisively shaped the way in which international trade was conducted. The capacity of modern container ships was at last matched by the capacity of vast container ports such as Rotterdam, Singapore and Hong Kong. Among American beneficiaries of the shift to containers was Oakland, opposite San Francisco – 3,000,000 tons of movements in 1969, excluding what was being sent to American troops across the ocean. This was eight times the container traffic Oakland had handled four years earlier; the downside was that San Francisco saw its own maritime traffic shrink, as did Boston on the other side of the continent. Similarly, in Britain new ports displaced old ones; the London docks closed and only after years of desolation and decay were the Docklands regenerated, but as a financial centre, Olympic arena and even – a sign of how things have changed – an airport. Meanwhile, Felixstowe, previously a small and uninteresting coastal town, became the major British centre of container traffic, with an enormously long quayside and a deep port suitable for the largest cargo ships; by 1969 its annual tonnage was approaching 2,000,000. Its owner, Hutchison Ports, which traces its origins to the nineteenth-century Hong Kong and Whampoa Dock Company, also owns or has interests in a vast number of container ports across the world, including Hong Kong; its market share stands above 8 per cent and it was handling over 33,000,000 TEU (standard container units) in 2005. One beneficiary is Trinity College, Cambridge, which owns some of the land at Felixstowe and has increased its already enormous financial portfolio accordingly.29 The largest container ship in the world in 2017, the CSCL Globe, owned in China, has put in at Felixstowe and can carry an astonishing 19,100 standard-size containers. Meanwhile, Maersk, the largest container shipping company in the world, which is a Danish enterprise, operates 600 ships; added together, its containers have a capacity well over 3,000,000 TEU. This is only the beginning: the future may well lie with a great power in the East which has a new vision of its place in the world. The era of Western dominance that began with Columbus and da Gama, and came to embrace North America as well, is coming to an end.

  Conclusion

  The heading ‘Conclusion’ is normally no more than a way of bringing a book to an end. But the word ‘conclusion’ has additional force when looking at the history of the oceans. Not just this book but ocean history is coming to an end, at least in its traditional form. In today’s world, the nature of contact across the sea has been radically transformed, even allowing for the massive volume of maritime trade, beginning with the laying of telegraph cables, their partial and then total substitution by radio contact, and culminating in the triumph of air travel. Coasts are no longer the defining points in travel between Britain or Italy and the United States: the classic ports of past times have been displaced by container ports, many of which are not centres of trade inhabited by a colourful variety of people from many backgrounds, but processing plants in which machinery, not men, do the heavy work and no one sees the cargoes that have often been brought from far away and are sealed inside their big boxes. Felixstowe is, in effect, a great machine, not the humming hub of commercial give-and-take visible in early Aden or Melaka, or even Boston and Liverpool in more recent times. Cruise liners drop in on places but are not a way of travelling purposefully from place to place; ultimately those on board intend to return to their home after travelling around in a loop.

  Most ships, though, carry cargo. The scale of trade through the container ports is now astonishing. Hong Kong sees a thousand ships pass through its nine container terminals each day; the harbour handles 20,000,000 containers each year, each weighing a maximum of twenty tons. Overall, 300,000,000 tons of goods pass through Hong Kong annually, mainly to and from the People’s Republic of China. But Hong Kong is only one element in a much larger conurbation of 68,000,000 people: as well as Macau, which makes much of its money from gambling, there is the industrial city of Shenzhen, until 1980 a little town of small significance with 30,000 inhabitants and now a massive city of 13,000,000 people dedicated to hi-tech industries that presses right down on the border with the former British colony. All the way to Guangzhou (Canton) industrial development has transformed the countryside. The Pearl River, long China’s main window on the world, has become more important than ever not just to China but to the world economy. The People’s Republic has begun to look out towards the sea with an enthusiasm not seen since the days of the Song Dynasty or Zheng He’s voyages, and has staked its claims in the South China Sea in the face of opposition from the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam and other neighbours. The ‘One Belt, One Road’ project, re-creating the overland silk route by rail, as well as long-distance sea routes between China and Asia, Africa and Europe, will give China increasing control over the movement of the industrial goods it now produces in such vast quantities. This is not just a question of catching up with the West, and with nearby economies in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan; it is now a question of overtaking the West and China’s neighbours.

  Global warming is making journeys around the top of Canada and Russia feasible, linking the Pacific to the Atlantic in ways dreamed of in the days of Queen Elizabeth I. Not content with the historic silk routes, the State Council of the People’s Republic announced in January 2018 that it would conduct trial voyages along a ‘Polar Silk Route’, corresponding to the North-East Passage, along which a Russian tanker had managed to sail all the way from Norway to South Korea in 2017. If receding ice permits regular traffic to flow along this route, the time taken to travel from the Far East to Europe could be reduced by 20 per cent. But this and the route over the top of Canada will be routes for container ships, or occasional cruise ships whose passengers prefer ice to heat. Meanwhile humans have inflicted severe environmental damage upon the oceans, threatening marine life by the dumping of plastics, some of which enter the fishy food chain, leading to depletion of fish stocks that are already threatened by overfishing – not to mention the massive decline in the numbers of several species of whale.1 UNESCO rightly nominates World Heritage Sites in most of the countries of the globe. But there is one vast World Heritage Site that also needs to be nominated: the world-encompassing ocean sea, whose history is entering an entirely new phase. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the ocean world of the last four millennia had ceased to exist.

  1. Polynesian boats used several shapes of sail. This boat is equipped with a claw sail, and an outrigger is attached, adding greatly to its stability. Such boats have sailed the Pacific for millennia.

  2. By the ninth century AD Polynesian navigators had settled the Hawai’ian archipelago. This early image of a boat with a claw sail, carved on a rock in Maui, may date back to the early settlements.

  3. Around 1450 BC the female pharaoh Hatshepsut sent a fleet down the Red Sea to collect myrrh, ivory, ebony and exotic animals from the ‘Land of Punt’. Her expedition was commemorated in her funerary temple near Luxor, which contains inscriptions describing her fleet as the first to have been sent out since ‘the olden days’.

  4. The detail, showing men loading two ships with sacks of goods and entire frankincense trees, is clearer in the line drawing.

  5. Four gazelles on a seal of the late third millennium BC from the trading centre of Dilmun (Bahrain).

  6. An Indian seal of the fourth or fifth century AD showing a sewn-plank ship. Similar ships were probably sailing the Indian Ocean two millennia earlier.

  7. A coin of the Roman emperor Victorinus minted in Cologne c.AD 270, found in Thailand.

  8. Head of a Persian or Arab merchant, seventh or eighth century AD, from Thailand.

  9. White porcelain ewer, decorated with the image of a phoenix, that reached Cairo from China c.AD 1000.

  10. Sixth-century intaglios from Oc-èo in southern Vietnam, the meeting point of traders from China and Persia.

  11. Multilingual copper plates f
rom Kollam, in south India, of AD 849 testify to the presence of Zoroastrian, Jewish and Muslim merchants.

  12. Reconstruction of a typical Arab sewn-plank ship based on the ninth-century Belitung wreck from Indonesia. The ship may have been travelling from the Chinese imperial court to an Indonesian ruler carrying gifts in return for tribute.

  13. The Belitung wreck contained 70,000 pots, the largest collection of late Tang pottery ever found, including many pieces from Changsha in central China. It probably carried silk as well, but that has disintegrated.

  14. In 1323 a Chinese junk was wrecked off the coast of Korea, carrying more than 8,000,000 coins to Japan. Tags such as these were attached to bundles of coins, indicating that the voyage was carried out on behalf of the Tōfuku-ji monastery in Kyoto.

  15. The same wreck contained a large cargo of top-quality celadon decorated with animal motifs.

  16. Medieval Chinese currency consisted of low-value copper coins strung together. Drainage of bullion out of China led the Song and Yuan emperors to create a paper currency.

  17. An early fourteenth-century scroll commemorating the heroism of the warrior Takezaki Suenaga in the wars against the Mongols. Here a Mongol ship is under attack from Japanese warriors in 1281.

  18. A seventeenth-century printed map of the voyages of Admiral Zheng He at the start of the fifteenth century. His ships reached east Africa and the Red Sea.

  19. A late medieval image of a sewn-plank ship bound from Basra in Iraq. Black slaves bail out water and work on deck, while Arab, Persian and Indian passengers sit below.

  20. Irish legend told of the intrepid navigator St Brendan, who sailed into the Atlantic with his monks looking for remote islands where they could live far from ordinary human company.

  21. A golden model of a boat, twenty centimetres long, from Broighter in Northern Ireland dating from the first century BC or AD. Early Irish ships were made of wicker frames covered in skins.

  22. Overlooking the Atlantic, this Iron Age settlement at Viana do Castelo in northern Portugal contained dozens of roundhouses and was ringed by walls with watchtowers.

  23. A bronze hoard from the Bay of Huelva in south-western Spain contained several ‘Carp’s Tongue’ swords fashionable along the Atlantic coasts around 800 BC.

  24. The Oseberg ship from Norway, of c.AD 820, was superbly carved out of oak. It was used for the burial of a queen or high priestess and carried an array of grave goods.

  25. Viking sails were made of plaited strips of cloth, producing a lozenge effect. Viking picture stones often portray the journey to the next world aboard a ship.

  26. A coin from Haithabu in southern Denmark found in Birka in central Sweden provides evidence for trade between these early Viking towns.

  27. Inuit carvings from Greenland, thought to show the Norse inhabitants with whom they made contact.

  28. The crozier of Bishop Olafur of Gardar (d. 1280), brought to Greenland from Scandinavia.

  29. Fifteenth-century clothing from Greenland, reflecting current European fashions.

  30. In the thirteenth century or later two Norse Greenlanders sailed as far north as 72°55′N. and left this record of their visit in runes.

  31. Wealthy Lübeck merchants built fine houses along the waterfront, containing offices, storerooms and accommodation.

  32. Jonah and the Whale from an early fifteenth-century Dutch manuscript. The ship closely resembles the Hanseatic cogs of this period.

  33. The Catalan World Atlas of 1375 commemorated the voyage in 1346, in search of gold, of Jaume Ferrer of Majorca, past the Canaries, which are shown, and down the coast of Africa, from which he never returned.

  34. A late sixteenth-century image of a noblewoman from La Gomera in the Canaries. The pagan islanders, mostly naked and ignorant of metal, were a surprise to explorers.

  35. A magnificent glazed bowl from fifteenth-century Málaga, in the Muslim kingdom of Granada, showing a Portuguese caravel under sail.

  36. A Venetian atlas of the early fifteenth century shows a scattering of Atlantic islands, including Madeira (south-west of the central compass), the Canaries and several imaginary ones.

  37. The Portuguese fort at Elmina in Ghana was a centre of trade in gold and slaves, founded in 1482 and built out of stones brought from Portugal.

  38. In 1894, following the German colonization of Namibia, this padrão marking the arrival of the Portuguese at Cape Cross in 1486 was carried off to Berlin. In May 2019 Germany agreed to return it to Namibia.

  39. Portuguese padrões also appear on Martin Waldseemüller’s massive world map of 1507, along the coasts of southern Africa.

  40. Martin Waldseemüller celebrated Amerigo Vespucci’s voyages by labelling part of the New World ‘AMERICA’.

  41. A globe of c.1510 in the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, mistakenly labels an imaginary continent south of Ceylon ‘Newly Discovered America’.

  42. Martin Behaim’s globe of 1492 assumes that Japan, China and the Spice Islands can be reached by sailing westwards from Europe, a view shared by Columbus.

  43. In 1503, on da Gama’s second Indian voyage, the Esmeralda was torn from its moorings during a violent storm and foundered off the coast of Oman. The wreck was discovered in 1998.

  44. The Spanish seat of government in early sixteenth-century Santo Domingo forms part of the oldest, largest and best-preserved colonial quarter in the Americas.

  45. Seville c.1600. Atlantic shipping worked its way up the Guadalquivir River to the wharves of Seville. The Moorish Giralda Tower looms over the city.

  46. An early seventeenth-century Indian portrait of the ruthless Portuguese commander Afonso de Albuquerque (d. 1515).

  47. Portuguese watchtower at Badiya on the Gulf of Oman, overlooking a fifteenth-century mosque.

  48. The first map by the Turkish corsair Piri Reis, of 1513, reveals detailed knowledge of Iberian voyages to the New World, partly acquired from a Spanish captive.

  49. In 1642 Abel Tasman’s fleet reached the South Island of New Zealand and was met by hostile Māoris who killed four Dutch sailors.

  50. Founded in 1350, Ayutthaya in Thailand was an important trading centre linking the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea, from which the Dutch acquired enormous quantities of elephant ivory and rhinoceros horn.

  51. Map of Macau showing the imposing façade of St Paul’s Church a little to the left, with the fort and Jesuit College behind it. The main port, at the bottom, lay on the western side.

  52. In 1597–8 the great Korean admiral Yi Sun-sin successfully deployed ‘turtle ships’ against a much larger Japanese navy.

  53. The regent Toyotomi Hideyoshi blew hot and cold towards Jesuit missionaries and Japanese Christians.

  54. Mercator’s world map imagined that the North Pole was surrounded by four large islands, and that a route to China through the Arctic Ocean was impossible. This version dates from 1595.

  55. In 1596–7 Willem Barentsz and his crew endured a freezing winter in the Arctic, leaving behind pewter candlesticks and merchandise rediscovered by a Norwegian skipper in 1871.

  56. A Japanese bowl of c.1800 portrays Dutch ships and merchants, at that time the only foreign traders permitted to visit Japan. They are still shown as they would have dressed 150 years earlier.

  57. The Dutch settlement at Deshima, off Nagasaki, resembled a miniature Dutch town, with a flower garden but no church, as that was banned by the Japanese.

  58. At midday on 7 June 1692 a huge earthquake and tsunami demolished the capital of English Jamaica, Port Royal, resulting in 4,000 deaths.

  59. In the early seventeenth century the Danish East India Company acquired Fort Tranquebar from a south Indian ruler. Much of its business consisted of ‘country trade’ within the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

  60. The Polynesian navigator Tupaia accompanied Captain Cook around the Pacific islands. His very detailed map was drawn from memory, but he had no knowledge of Hawai’i and New Zealand.

  61. In 179
1, King Kamehameha of Hawai’i, who had acquired a fleet of European-style ships, defeated his rivals at the Battle of the Red Mouthed Gun. Most Hawai’ians used traditional boats – note the similarity of the claw-shaped sails of Kamehameha’s adversaries to that in Plate 1.

  62. In 1658 Oliver Cromwell’s son and momentary successor, Richard Cromwell, granted the English East India Company the right to settle St Helena, which became a resupply station for English operations across the oceans.

  63. The warehouses of the European merchants trading in Canton proudly displayed their flags. In this image of c.1820 the flags of Britain, Sweden, the United States and other countries are visible.

  64. Even if Commander Perry’s visit to Japan in 1853 only opened the door to foreign traders by a crack, the sight of his ironclad steam paddleboat fascinated the Japanese.