I read this article in the Daily Express today & want to share it with you.
It is Seafarer’s Awareness Week and the fact that it is 70 years since Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain gives it a special poignancy.
To Shakespeare the kingdom was “this precious stone set in a silver sea, which serves it in the office of a wall, or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier lands”. That is simple fact, if wonderfully put, and not poetic licence.
Our last conqueror William was a Norman or “Northman” with Viking blood enough to get his invasion fleet safely across the Channel to the Sussex coast. But since 1066 the sea has allowed us to remain a free people. Sir Francis Drake and the weather did for Philip of Spain’s Armada.
Napoleon fretted as he built up an invasion force at Boulogne: “Let us be masters of the Channel for six hours and we are masters of the world.” To which Admiral Jervis retorted: “I do not say the French cannot come. I only say they cannot come by sea.” Napoleon’s maritime ambitions foundered at Trafalgar long before he met his Waterloo.
Seafaring goes deeper than defence of the realm. Daniel Defoe described the British as “this ill-bred amphibious mob”, a great seaborne swill of privateers, smugglers, explorers, fishermen and chancers of all sorts, with a brilliance for doing business in great waters. Defoe of course wrote Robinson Crusoe and in reading that we absorb salt water from childhood.
No other place on earth is so rich in tales of the sea. Our literature is alive with them – Long John Silver, Captain Hook, Hornblower RN, the Rime Of The Ancient Mariner – and so is the language. To “know the ropes”, to be “under the weather”, to “pipe down”, to be “groggy” (from naval rum)…The passion for sea air, rock pools, shrimping nets and bathing saw the British invent the seaside holiday.
To Shakespeare the kingdom was “this precious stone set in a silver sea, which serves it in the office of a wall, or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier lands”. That is simple fact, if wonderfully put, and not poetic licence.
Our last conqueror William was a Norman or “Northman” with Viking blood enough to get his invasion fleet safely across the Channel to the Sussex coast. But since 1066 the sea has allowed us to remain a free people. Sir Francis Drake and the weather did for Philip of Spain’s Armada.
Napoleon fretted as he built up an invasion force at Boulogne: “Let us be masters of the Channel for six hours and we are masters of the world.” To which Admiral Jervis retorted: “I do not say the French cannot come. I only say they cannot come by sea.” Napoleon’s maritime ambitions foundered at Trafalgar long before he met his Waterloo.
Seafaring goes deeper than defence of the realm. Daniel Defoe described the British as “this ill-bred amphibious mob”, a great seaborne swill of privateers, smugglers, explorers, fishermen and chancers of all sorts, with a brilliance for doing business in great waters. Defoe of course wrote Robinson Crusoe and in reading that we absorb salt water from childhood.
No other place on earth is so rich in tales of the sea. Our literature is alive with them – Long John Silver, Captain Hook, Hornblower RN, the Rime Of The Ancient Mariner – and so is the language. To “know the ropes”, to be “under the weather”, to “pipe down”, to be “groggy” (from naval rum)…The passion for sea air, rock pools, shrimping nets and bathing saw the British invent the seaside holiday.
Brighton, Blackpol, day trippers, piers and fearsome landladies were pioneers when Florida was a swamp and the Costa Brava a string of sand dunes. By necessity the enterprise of creating the world’s greatest empire was entirely seaborne. Our sailors, foreigners complained, were incapable of passing an islet without planting a flag on it.
The men who drew up the Colonial Office list in the 1890s did not bother to tabulate all they owned, wearily ending the list: “And countless other smaller possessions and nearly all the rocks and isolated islands of the ocean.”
Seafarers reflected national morality. In the early days they were pirates and slavers. The grand Georgian terraces of Liverpool were built with the profits of the “attractive African meteor”, the coy name for the slave trade. When the moral U-turn was made in the 19th century the Royal Navy hunted down slave ships and pirates.
It was by sea that British emigrants populated Australia, Canada, New Zealand, a fair part of the US and South Africa. Millions had a last, longing glimpse of home on a boat outbound on the Clyde or the Mersey. A hundred thousand orphans sailed to Canada alone. Indians were taken by ship to Malaya, East Africa, the West Indies and Pacific islands.
More than half the world’s ships flew the Red Duster, the flag of British merchantmen. All used British Admiralty charts and calculated their longitude from Greenwich. Many were insured by Lloyd’s of London. They steamed on Welsh coal from British coaling stations.
The high days of Masefield’s “dirty British coaster with a salt-cakedsmokestack” are done. Seafarers are not. Only five per cent of cargoes imported into Britain and exported from it come by air or through the Channel Tunnel. The rest comes by sea. Less, though, in British flagged and crewed ships.
Our merchant fleet is 15th in the world rankings it dominated for so long, no more than 645 ships, half of them registered abroad. In the great ports of London and Liverpool smart apartment dwellers have replaced the swarming dockers.
Modern ports are still hugely important to the economy. They handle more than 600million tonnes of cargo a year.
Ferries and cruise ships tot up 67million passengers. Volcanic ash does not intimidate a ship. There are 12,000 fishermen at sea in UK waters. And for every fisherman at sea a further 10 jobs are created ashore. We should not forget our seafarers. In 1941 Winston Churchill spoke of the Battle of the Atlantic. Hitler’s U-boats almost starved us into submission by cutting the sea lanes and 30,000 men of the merchant navy gave their lives to stop him.
We needed to bring in a million tons of cargo a week to survive then. We need almost that much a day now. The sea and its seafarers are with us always. l Many local communities and companies are taking part in fundraising activities during Seafarers Awareness Week. Go to www.seafarers-uk.org for details.
The men who drew up the Colonial Office list in the 1890s did not bother to tabulate all they owned, wearily ending the list: “And countless other smaller possessions and nearly all the rocks and isolated islands of the ocean.”
Seafarers reflected national morality. In the early days they were pirates and slavers. The grand Georgian terraces of Liverpool were built with the profits of the “attractive African meteor”, the coy name for the slave trade. When the moral U-turn was made in the 19th century the Royal Navy hunted down slave ships and pirates.
It was by sea that British emigrants populated Australia, Canada, New Zealand, a fair part of the US and South Africa. Millions had a last, longing glimpse of home on a boat outbound on the Clyde or the Mersey. A hundred thousand orphans sailed to Canada alone. Indians were taken by ship to Malaya, East Africa, the West Indies and Pacific islands.
More than half the world’s ships flew the Red Duster, the flag of British merchantmen. All used British Admiralty charts and calculated their longitude from Greenwich. Many were insured by Lloyd’s of London. They steamed on Welsh coal from British coaling stations.
The high days of Masefield’s “dirty British coaster with a salt-cakedsmokestack” are done. Seafarers are not. Only five per cent of cargoes imported into Britain and exported from it come by air or through the Channel Tunnel. The rest comes by sea. Less, though, in British flagged and crewed ships.
Our merchant fleet is 15th in the world rankings it dominated for so long, no more than 645 ships, half of them registered abroad. In the great ports of London and Liverpool smart apartment dwellers have replaced the swarming dockers.
Modern ports are still hugely important to the economy. They handle more than 600million tonnes of cargo a year.
Ferries and cruise ships tot up 67million passengers. Volcanic ash does not intimidate a ship. There are 12,000 fishermen at sea in UK waters. And for every fisherman at sea a further 10 jobs are created ashore. We should not forget our seafarers. In 1941 Winston Churchill spoke of the Battle of the Atlantic. Hitler’s U-boats almost starved us into submission by cutting the sea lanes and 30,000 men of the merchant navy gave their lives to stop him.
We needed to bring in a million tons of cargo a week to survive then. We need almost that much a day now. The sea and its seafarers are with us always. l Many local communities and companies are taking part in fundraising activities during Seafarers Awareness Week. Go to www.seafarers-uk.org for details.
