Re-inventing the Ship

Science, Technology and the Maritime World, 1800-1918

Don Leggett, Richard Dunn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409418498
• eBook ISBN: 9781317068372
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

Ships have histories that are interwoven with the human fabric of the maritime world. In the long nineteenth century these histories revolved around the re-invention of these once familiar objects in a period in which Britain became a major maritime power. This multi-disciplinary volume deploys different historical, geographical, cultural and literary perspectives to examine this transformation and to offer a series of interconnected considerations of maritime technology and culture in a period of significant and lasting change. Its ten authors reveal the processes involved through the eyes and hands of a range of actors, including naval architects, dockyard workers, commercial shipowners and Navy officers. By locating the ship's re-invention within the contexts of builders, owners and users, they illustrate the ways in which material elements, as well as scientific, artisan and seafaring ideas and practices, were bound together in the construction of ships' complex identities.

Chapter 1 Symbolic Ships, Sail and Steam

Christopher Harvie

DOI: 10.4324/9781315604657-2

… and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W.H. Auden, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ (1938)

The Sea and the Region

Both Auden’s 1938 poem and the frontispiece of Fernand Braudel’s 1979 study of eotechnic (pre-steam-engine) Civilisation and Capitalism celebrate Pieter Breughel’s ‘Fall of Icarus’, painted around 1560. The punishment of the pioneer aeronaut – a tiny detail of two bare legs in the sea – is noted by a distracted shepherd but not by the ploughman in the foreground. 1938 was only two years after the bombing of Guernika, and most people believed ‘the bomber will always get through’: the expensive ship wasn’t just plying its trade, but dismissing the threat to its own world.

A ship is a means of transport, and hence a constructed link in a chain or system. Its technical change can fundamentally alter that system. But it’s also a community of men, dependent on their inherited and acquired skills, and a battle-weapon.¹ Winston Churchill’s line about Admiral Jellicoe, that he and his Dreadnoughts ‘could lose the Great War in an afternoon’ was true, though the new enemies (submarines, mines, aircraft) meant he still couldn’t have won it in months. A third factor intrudes itself: language, metaphor and its projection in print. ‘Argosy’, from the port-state of Ragusa (Dubrovnik), meaning wealth gained through peaceable trade, for example, got confused with the Greek heroics of the Odyssey. ‘Capital ship’, a late-nineteenth century coinage, resonant with Alfred Mahan’s ‘fleet in being’ strategy, meant the battleship as costly chessboard queen – if fortunate. But it could easily become a chessboard king: limited, trapped, threatened with checkmate: capital punishment.

¹ Winston Churchill, Maxims and Reflections (London, 1947), p. 68.

This ship system’s chains obviously extend – directly for merchantmen, indirectly for warships – to ports and regions. There was a traditional English marine and naval region from London via the Cinque Ports and Portsmouth to Devon. Another, Atlantic and mercantile, stretched from the Severn to the Mersey, a third combined Belfast and Glasgow. There was a more metaphysical fourth region around Cumbria and the Solway, where factors also treated by Braudel – gunpowder, strategy and printing – contribute a proto-sociology.² This doesn’t have a name, though ‘Debateable Land’ might cover it. It extends from Langholm to Lochmaben in the north, runs southwest to the Isle of Man, thence to Barrow-in-Furness, inland to Penrith, and back to Langholm. Langholm is near the actual ‘debateable land’ between the Scots and the English, determined by Commissioners in James VI and I’s reign, and the region is as close as you can get to ‘Great British’, being of the Pretani, whose Welsh kingdoms in the sixth century extended as far as Edinburgh.

² Fernand Braudel, Civilisation and Capitalism_ Volume I: Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible, (trans. Sian Reynolds, London, 1981), pp. 402–35.

From Ecclefechan (Eglws Fach) just south of Lochmaben came Thomas Carlyle, born 1795, ‘the prophet of the modern’ whose essay ‘Signs of the Times’ (1829) announced the steamship as the herald of carbon-powered change:

The sailor furls his sail, and lays down his oar; and bids a strong unwearied servant, on vapourous wings, bear him through the waters. Men have crossed oceans by steam; the Birmingham Fire-king has visited the fabulous East, and the genius of the Cape, were there any Camoens now to sing it, has been alarmed, and with far stranger thunders than Gama’s.³

³ Thomas Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’ in Edinburgh Review (1829), reprinted in Scottish and other Miscellanies (London, c.1900). See also J T Flexner, Steamboats Come True (New York, 1944). Sir Denis Forman’s family memoir Son of Adam (London, 1991) explores mentalité and region. He was brought up at Craigielands, near Moffat.

Today the region seems ‘inland’, divided only by the shallow Solway Firth, yet its Romano-British saints – Patrick, Ninian, Kentigern – were seafarers. Smuggling was rife before the 1707 Union, and survived long after it. As in Wales or the Scottish islands, labour came cheap from small farms and evicted cottars. Whitehaven was the first port used by Glasgow merchants to grow their post-1707 tobacco trade. At its height a Langholm man William Julius Mickle translated in 1771 Luis de Camoens’ Lusiads (1572), the imperial epic of the Portuguese explorers. Seven years later the American revolution cut the tobacco trade down and a former Solway skipper John Paul Jones, ‘Father of the US Navy’, born near Dumfries, raided his homeland. Eight years after that William Symington’s first experimental ‘catamaran’ steamboat sailed on Dalswinton Loch on Patrick Miller’s estate near Dumfries in 1786, with Robert Burns, Miller’s tenant at Ellisland, said to have been present. Thomas Telford (1757–1832), the polymath ‘great civilian’ who juggled with navigable water, digging out London’s first docks, cutting through hills in tunnels, leaping over valleys on aqueducts, was born at Westerkirk. Dr William Jardine from Lochmaben would provide after 1817 plentiful if morally dubious return freights from the Far East when Jardine Matheson opened up China to the opium trade. Much innovation in boiler design came from Cochranes of Annan, while at Middlebie near Ecclefechan and Glenlair near Castle Douglas lived the scholar-laird James Clerk Maxwell, whose discoveries in electro-magnetic waves would enable radio.

Christopher Grieve, ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’, Carlyle’s successor as one-man Scottish cultural revolution, was born in the library Telford gifted, read his way through it, served as a ship’s engineer on the Clyde, and was properly enthusiastic when in 1972 the burgh honoured Neil Armstrong of the local clan as first Langholm man on the Moon. But by then he was drawing not only on Mickle, Burns and Carlyle, but to the south, in Cumbria, on the demotic muse of the Lyrical Ballads (1797–98). These added the maritime exoticism of the Devonian Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ to William Wordsworth’s demotic (albeit latterly conservative) realism. The ‘Laker’ tradition would in time include the history-writing of Thomas Arnold, the literary criticism of his son Matthew, and John Ruskin’s art criticism, at the root of which was a fundamental concern with economics and society, casting forward to the moderate ‘new liberalism’ or ‘ethical socialism’ of the industrial north.⁴

⁴ See Keith Hanley, ‘In Wordsworth’s Shadow: Ruskin and Neo-Romantic Ecologies’ in Kim Blank and Margot Louis (eds), Romantic/Victorian: Influence and Resistance in 19th-century Poetry (London, 1993), pp. 203–33.

At the region’s centre, right on the Border at Gretna, would be erected the world’s greatest explosives work (with 30,000 employees), built in 1915 by David Lloyd George to supply the Western Front. This underwrote Britain’s defeat of the ‘Central Powers’ but was largely rail-served. U-boats had made the coastal trade too vulnerable, and apart from some specialised routes and cargoes, its decline set in. The Solway estuary, despite its contribution to the marine element of British industrialisation, proved typical. Just as in munitions unskilled women evicted unco-operative skilled men, the coaster soon seemed as time-expired as the railway looked in the 1960s.

Such environments, natural, technical and intellectual, defined the nature of the ship in what Sir Patrick Geddes, Carlyle’s disciple and MacDiarmid’s teacher, called the ‘palaeotechnic’ epoch: when the power of carbon had been released, symbolically by the first commercial steamers of the 1800s, but had yet to be controlled.⁵ Between 1815 and 1914, technical innovation through iron and steam was constant. The subject of this essay resembled one of Braudel’s mentalités in his marine-based history of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, but was only partially based on technical practice. Naval wars were infrequent but were affected by such innovation, so analogies with, possibilities of, and myths about the ship, were derived from history and social theory as much as praxis.

⁵ The background to this can be found in Christopher Harvie, Floating Commonwealth: Politics, Technology and Culture on Britain’s Atlantic Coast, 1860–1930 (Oxford, 2008). For biographical references throughout see the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), except where otherwise stated.

In a paper on war and technology given to the International Institute of Strategic Studies in 1977, I argued that these, and the society of the naval elite, could deflect technical determinism.⁶ Put it thus, the ship during industrialisation was a frame for a continuing ‘in-group’ (to use the early sociologist Adam Ferguson’s coinage) which had to cohere. Its crew and the technology they handled were altered and integrated to combat nature and enemies, in ways that could suspend normal civil rights. The ship also found itself in a linear system governed by natural forces (wind and current) and civil society (trade, ports, finance, obligations, alliances). As well as technology, these continually altered its nature and capabilities. This framework was land- as well as sea-based, consonant with civil society’s evolutionary and developmental paradigms. It incrementally derived elements from the sociologists: from Saint-Simon and Comte and their ‘organic and critical periods of development’, from Karl Marx’s analysis of the dominance of capital in driving innovation and in creating the response of a militant labour movement, from Max Weber’s ‘imperative command’, and Emile Durkheim’s ‘integration and anomie’. After 1900 the metatheory of Thorstein Veblen’s ‘technology’ was elaborated into Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford’s evolutionary ‘eotechnology, palaeotechnology, neotechnology, geotechnology’ sequence. Throughout, these were transmitted by cultural symbols and narratives, their roots in art and literature; and practically by the communications systems – posts, cables, radio – of the ‘mechanical age’. Descriptions overlapped. New developments grew up with, and inflected, older languages.⁷

⁶ Christopher Harvie, ‘Military Power and Technological Change’ read Bruges Conference August 1977, published in an Adelphi Paper, New Conventional Weapons and East–West Security (London, 1978), pp. 5–13. ⁷ Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World at the time of Philip II, 1949 (London, 1966). For a brief guide to the nineteenth-century social sciences see Timothy Raison (ed.), The Founding Fathers of Social Science: a Series from New Society (Harmondsworth, 1969) and H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: the Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (London, 1974).

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Re-inventing the Ship in the Long Nineteenth Century
• 1 Symbolic Ships, Sail and Steam
• 2 ‘This great national undertaking’: John Scott Russell, the Master Shipwrights and the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company
• 3 ‘The Robinson Line of Boats’: Networks of Trust in a Nineteenth-century Shipping Company
• 4 Neptune’s New Clothes: Actors, Iron and the Identity of the Mid-Victorian Warship
• 5 The Health of Workers in the Royal Dockyard, Portsmouth
• 6 Where is Bathybius haeckelii? The Ship as a Scientific Instrument and a Space of Science
• 7 ‘Their brains over-taxed’: Ships, Instruments and Users
• 8 Naval Culture and the Fleet Submarine, 1910–1917
• 9 Nineteenth-Century American Warships: The Pursuit of Exceptionalist Design
• 10 Epilogue: ‘A Force to be Reckoned With’
• Index