The United States was able to define and enforce its right to its EEZ in part because it is a global superpower. Citizens of countries at the other end of the geopolitical spectrum—failed states like Somalia, where central authority collapsed in 1995—have no such options. Taking advantage of Somalia’s lack of a government, foreign fleets descended on the Somali coast, often within the territorial limit, and began overfishing stocks that coastal communities had recently begun to harvest for themselves. With no coast guard to protect their interests and no voice in the international community, local fishermen began seizing and ransoming foreign fishing vessels and their crews. This retributive privateering quickly attracted the interest of local warlords, terrorists, and others who expanded the scope of their operations to seize piratically and indiscriminately anything from container ships and tankers to cruise ships and private yachts regardless of flag. While this has become an obvious criminal problem, the underlying cause, namely illegal fishing, is a more disturbing threat to the global commons.
The World Fleet in the Nuclear Age
The SOLAS provisions on nuclear-powered ships have the narrowest application of any in the convention, but they were drafted in response to one of the most technically sophisticated engineering feats of the postwar era, one achieved almost simultaneously in the United States and the Soviet Union. The driving force in the United States was Hyman G. Rickover, who first considered nuclear propulsion for ships as a naval officer on assignment to the Atomic Energy Commission’s reactor complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1946. As head of both the navy’s Bureau of Ships’ Nuclear Power Division and, concurrently, the Naval Reactors Branch of the Atomic Energy Commission, Rickover went on to develop plans for the world’s first nuclear-powered vessel, the submarine USS Nautilus, commissioned in 1955.
One advantage of nuclear fuel over fossil fuels is that it produces heat to create steam through fission rather than fire. Without the need for oxygen, a nuclear-powered submarine can stay submerged almost indefinitely, and in 1960 the USS Triton completed the first underwater circumnavigation of the globe, covering 27,723 miles in less than sixty-one days. Nuclear power held another attraction for the Soviets, who relied on maritime transportation to reach the resource-rich but almost impassable territories of northern Siberia. Because nuclear fuel can last a decade or more, it obviated the need for regular supplies of fuel to be stockpiled at icebound ports that were nearly as remote by land as they were by sea. Moreover, it allowed for faster, more powerful ships. The first nuclear-powered surface ship, the icebreaker Lenin, was launched two years after the Nautilus, and in 1960 it opened the way for merchant ships to service the ports of Dikson and Dudinka on a regular basis. In time the sailing season along the northern sea route lengthened from two to ten months, and the Arktika became the first surface ship to reach the geographic North Pole in 1977, nineteen years after the Nautilus had crossed it, submerged. With the recession of sea ice due to climate change, Russian shippers hope to exploit the shorter Northeast Passage between Europe and Asia, a distance of about 6,750 miles compared with 11,000 miles via the Suez Canal.
The public has always been leery of nuclear-powered surface ships, and apart from the Russian icebreaker fleet, only four have been built for nonmilitary service, and two of them were experimental vessels. But navies and secretive governments are less inhibited by public sensibilities. In 1966–67, a nuclear accident resulted in the death of thirty of the Lenin’s crew, a fact covered up for decades, which allowed the Soviet Union to continue building nuclear-powered icebreakers with little scrutiny. Over all, in addition to thirty-five nuclear-powered surface ships—including eleven U.S. aircraft carriers—almost five hundred nuclear-powered submarines have been built, nearly all of them by the former Soviet Union and the United States. Despite the operational benefits associated with nuclear power, these fleets are better known not for their propulsion plants but for their nuclear weapons, which enable them to project overwhelming force, in some cases over thousands of miles. Nuclear naval strategy represented an almost complete departure from everything that went before. While the United States and NATO were concerned with safeguarding world trade, in oil above all, and deterring a Soviet attack on western Europe or the United States, focus soon shifted to the deployment of conventional ballistic missiles, which by the 1990s had ranges of more than six thousand miles. In essence, submarines had become mobile missile bases.
This was not their only function, and “attack submarines” were designed for operations against other submarines and surface units. But there have been very few fleet engagements on the high seas since World War II, the most significant being the 1982 Anglo-Argentine war for the Falkland Islands, the deadliest encounter of which involved the sinking of the World War II–era light cruiser General Belgrano by a conventional torpedo fired from the nuclear-powered submarine HMS Conqueror. For the most part, offensive operations at sea have been undertaken in support of land-based operations, notably in the Vietnam War, the United States’ invasions of Iraq in 1990 and 2003, and of Afghanistan in 2001. In all of these wars, ship-and submarine-based missiles and carrier aircraft were launched against inland targets—Afghanistan is landlocked—in support of ground forces. In essence, this is a vindication of the strategy advocated by Francisco de Almeida, Portugal’s first viceroy in India that “All your forces should be on the sea, because if we are not strong there … fortresses on land will be of little use to you.”
As was true of Portugal in the sixteenth century, the U.S. fleet exists to project power and safeguard trade, not to fight fleets of comparable capabilities because there are none. With eleven aircraft carriers—as many as the rest of the world’s navies combined—and a budget request for 2012 of $176 billion, nearly twice the budget of the world’s second largest military (navy, army, and air force) establishment—the United States Navy is almost incalculably larger and more powerful than any other in the world. Yet for all its seagoing assets, in recent years it has proven stunningly ineffective in exercising the sort of force historically associated with navies, even something as basic as eradicating piracy. This is due partly to the composition of the United States Navy, which is ill-suited to such assignments, and partly because of changes in international law. The post–Cold War world is not beset by the sort of bilateral military tensions between nation-states with global aspirations like those characteristic of the previous 350 years. Working within a new framework of multilateral maritime agreements respecting the environment, safety, and the rights and responsibilities of sovereign nations—a regime that reflects a growing consensus that the sea is a global commons—even superpowers like the United States cannot preserve security save by shared responsibility.
Collaboration within a framework of international law is actively supported by many countries with navies smaller than that of the United States, but this is not a recasting of the debate between Mahan’s “overbearing power on the sea” and the Jeune Ecole’s “strategy of the weak,” for it goes beyond the use of navies in traditional conflict. One of the clearest affirmations of this view was voiced by then chief of naval operations Admiral Michael Mullen. “As we combine our advantages,” he told an International Seapower Symposium in 2005, “I envision a 1,000-ship Navy—a fleet-in-being, if you will, made up of the best capabilities of all freedom-loving navies of the world.… This 1,000-ship Navy would integrate the capabilities of the maritime services to create a fully interoperable force—an international city at sea. So this calls for a new—or maybe a not so new but very different—image of sea power.” This sentiment found further expression in a joint strategy document by the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, and Marines, which focuses on the “global system comprised of interdependent networks of trade, finance, information, law, people and governance” that are vital to the national interest.
That the material composition of the United States Navy resembles, and will for some time, the fleets of a previous age reflects in part the simple fact that the lifespan
of naval ships—and naval doctrines—runs to decades. Even without the inevitable domestic opposition to letting go of these obvious emblems of military, industrial, and national prowess in favor of a fleet more appropriate to the country’s needs, they will be around for a long time. Whether Mullen’s is the phrase that will launch a thousand ships remains to be seen. So long as the United States possesses a fleet that can project American military power around the world with impunity, it will be difficult to convince other powers that they should not compete with the U.S. Navy as it is now rather than as it might be in the future. Nor is it obvious that the United States would accept a more level playing field. But it behooves the United States and other nations to consider the political and diplomatic feasibility of a multinational “thousand-ship navy,” because the greatest threats at sea—among them smuggling, piracy, and overfishing—are stateless and criminal rather than political. Regardless of their source, as Mullen put it, the “challenges are too diverse to tackle alone and require more capability and resources than any single nation can deliver.”
The past half century of world history has been one of incomparable vigor driven by myriad forces, not the least of which has been maritime enterprise in all its forms. If we take economic expansion and mechanical efficiency as the standard, the story offers a straightforward narrative of progress. Over thousands of years, the volume of sea trade grew from nothing to more than 2.6 billion tons per year in 1970. In the four decades since, that figure has more than trebled, to over eight billion tons, while ships became bigger and faster but immeasurably safer than ever. In the process, maritime enterprise has hastened globalization while it has itself been globalized. Most ships and crews have been rendered all but anonymous, stripped of their national identities by flags of convenience and made invisible by their displacement to the industrial wastelands on the margins of the ports they serve.
Some people claim that such changes have robbed the maritime world of its romance and allure, but for many people experience of the sea never held romance—promise, perhaps, of a better life in a new land, good tidings from abroad, or simple profit. Still, the sea held no promise for slaves, coolies, indentured servants, or the dispossessed, and across cultures people have reviled maritime commerce for its noxious cargoes of alien people and ideas, deadly plagues, and ruthless enemies from beyond the sea. At the same time, we have come to know that while the sea is fickle and unforgiving, it is a fragile environment susceptible to human depredation on a scale as unimaginable to our ancestors as the ships and other technologies we have created to make it so.
Seafaring is one of humankind’s oldest collective pursuits, the benefits of which are nicely summarized by the Byzantine historian George Pachymeres:
Sailing is a noble thing, useful beyond all others to mankind. It exports what is superfluous, it provides what is lacking, it makes the impossible possible, it joins together men from different lands, and makes every inhospitable island a part of the mainland, it brings fresh knowledge to those who sail, it refines manners, it brings concord and civilization to men, it consolidates their nature by bringing together all that is most human in them.
The benefits of maritime enterprise are not as evenly distributed as Pachymeres proposes, but the weight of evidence suggests that most people at least tacitly agree with this optimistic assessment. What is new since he wrote eight centuries ago is a global consciousness of the sea and the growing realization that maritime history offers an invaluable perspective on the history of the world and ourselves.
Notes
*
Introduction
1. “ancient ships and boats”: Harding, “Organizational Life Cycles,” 7.
2. “classic age of sail”: The phrase is from the title of a collection of essays edited by John B. Hattendorf, Maritime History, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century and the Classic Age of Sail (Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1997).
3. “the inequality”: Toynbee, “My View of History,” 10, in Manning, Navigating World History, 41. In the same vein, Nicholas Rodger notes that “Naval history is certainly one of the few historical subjects in which there are authors who still think that success or failure can be explained by references, overt or implied, to the innate superiority of national character” (“Considerations,” 118).
4. nationalist maritime histories: These include Mookerji, Indian Shipping (1912); G. A. Ballard, Rulers of the Indian Ocean (London: Duckworth, 1927); Hadi Hasan, A History of Persian Navigation (1928); K. M. Panikkar, India and the Indian Ocean: An Essay on the Influence of Sea Power on Indian History (London: Allen & Unwin, 1945); Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times (1951); and Needham, et al., Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4, pt. 3, Civil Engineering and Nautics (1971).
5. works examining individual oceans and seas include Neal Ascherson, Black Sea (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995); Braudel, The Mediterranean; Paul Butel, The Atlantic, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Routledge, 1999); Nigel Calder, The English Channel (New York: Viking, 1986); K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Charles H. Cotter, The Atlantic Ocean (Glasgow: Brown & Ferguson, 1974); Richard Hall, Empires of the Monsoon: A History of the Indian Ocean and Its Invaders (London: HarperCollins, 1996); Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (London: Blackwell, 2000); Paul Jordan, North Sea Saga (New York: Pearson-Longman, 2004); Milo Kearney, The Indian Ocean in World History (London: Routledge, 2003); Charles King, The Black Sea: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Kirby and Hinkkanen, The Baltic and North Seas; Matti Klinge, The Baltic World, trans. Timothy Binham (Helsinki: Otava, 1995); Predrag Matvejevic, Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Walter A. McDougall, Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur (New York: Basic Books, 1993); McPherson, The Indian Ocean; Palmer, The Baltic; Pearson, The Indian Ocean; Pryor, Geography, Technology and War; Himanshu Prabha Ray, Archaeology of Seafaring: The Indian Ocean in the Ancient Period (New Delhi: Pragati, 1999); Auguste Toussaint, History of the Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 1966); and Villiers, Monsoon Seas.
6. “All sea is sea”: In Jay, Greek Anthology, 7.639 (p. 195).
7. “Do you not see”: Quran 32:31.
8. “maritime technology”: Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 78, and 241, 313, 341–42, 359.
9. “the story of the processes”: Roberts, History of the World, xiv.
10. “A general naval history”: Rodger, “Considerations,” 128.
1. Taking to the Water
1. Norwegian rock carvings: Ellmers, “Beginning of Boatbuilding in Central Europe,” 11–12.
2. “Who the devil”: Jean-Louis Caro, Journal, in Bougainville, Pacific Journal, 200.
3. from the East Indies: Cook, Journals, vol. 1, Voyage of the Endeavour, 154; Irwin, Prehistoric Exploration, 13–16.
4. “accidental drift”: Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 238; Lewis, We, the Navigators, 16–17; and Irwin, Prehistoric Exploration, 13–16.
5. Sundaland to Sahul: Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 68.
6. oldest stone tools: Horridge, “Story of Pacific Sailing Canoes,” 541.
7. intervisible islands: Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 68–69; Irwin, Prehistoric Exploration, 18–23.
8. Mount Witori: Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 88.
9. Lapita culture: Ibid., 93–95, 209–10.
10. A number of sequences: Ibid., 231, and an alternative scenario, 245.
11. Micronesia’s settlement: Ibid., 170; Irwin, Prehistoric Exploration, 126–27.
12. What prompted the Lapita people: Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 97; Irwin, Prehistoric Exploration, 42.
13. “splendid recklessness”: Hornell, Water Transport, 253.
14. fisherman named Kupe: I have followed the outline in Buck’s
Coming of the Maori, 5–7; for another interpretation of this and associated traditions, see Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou, 34–43.
15. Although New Zealand is closer: Irwin, Prehistoric Exploration, 104–10.
16. average size: By way of example, the average size of the forty-eight islands in the Federated States of Micronesia is 14.4 square kilometers, but the median size is only 1.5 square kilometers; only six are more than 10 square kilometers and only three more than 100 square kilometers.
17. navigational practices: McGrail, Boats of the World, 342–45.
18. trade winds: In Robinson Crusoe (1719), Daniel Defoe writes “The winds [in the China Sea] seemed to be more steadily against us, blowing almost Trade, as we call it, from the East, and E.N.E.”
19. “expand” the size: Lewis, We, the Navigators, 196.
20. ocean swells: Ibid., 224–61; Genz, “Oceania,” 146.
21. “the direction of every known island”: Lewis, We, the Navigators, 174.
22. etak, or reference island: Ibid., 173–79
23. Hokule’a: Ibid., 312–26. Literally “star of gladness,” Hokule’a is otherwise known as Arcturus. The Polynesian Voyaging Society is an excellent resource for information about traditional Pacific navigation and boatbuilding generally. The most complete introduction to Pacific boatbuilding remains Haddon and Hornell, Canoes of Oceania. McGrail, Boats of the World, 311–45, is more accessible and up-to-date.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 83
