A Short History of the World's Shipping Industry

C. Ernest Fayle

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136606380
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Commerce
• Categoría: Commerce Général

First Published in 2005. This book arose in conversation with some very good friends of the British merchant seaman who were regretting their inability to put into his hands any comprehensive one-volume history of the shipping industry.

CHAPTER I

“SHIPS OF TARSHISH”

THE SEA-TRADERS OF ANTIQUITY

And say unto Tyrus, O thou that art situate at the entry of the sea, which art a merchant of the people for many isles ... all the ships of the sea with their mariners were in thee to occupy thy merchandise.... The ships of Tarshish did sing of thee in thy market.

EZEKIEL xxvii. 3, 9, 25

So many are the merchant vessels that arrive here that Rome has practically become a common workshop for the whole world.... There are always ships putting into or sailing out of the harbour.

ARISTIDES

IT is a very good rule, in telling a story, to begin at the beginning; but it is not at all an easy rule to follow in telling the story of any of the main branches of human activity. Primitive man had taken the most important steps on his progress to civilization long before he was able to leave any permanent, connected record of his doings: he had found out, for instance, how to make fire, to sow grain and to reap it, to shape tools, and to weave fabrics. We can learn a great deal about the way he went to work from the implements and fragments of pottery dug up by archeologists and from a study of the backward races of to-day, but our knowledge is far too scrappy for the writing of a detailed, consecutive narrative. The earliest peoples of whom we have any clear, connected account, were already civilized peoples, living in settled, orderly communities, and skilful in arts and industries.

Shipping is no exception to the general rule. We can, if we like, make a picture in our minds of our remote ancestors being carried down stream in flood-time on a fallen tree-trunk or a mass of floating brushwood, and we can go on to imagine the stages by which, in the course of centuries, they learned how to hollow out the tree trunk so as to form a clumsy canoe or to tie a bundle of reeds together to serve as a raft. We can guess how the punt pole or paddle developed from a mere aimless splashing in the water with a bit of wood, and the sail from a piece of bark held up to catch the wind. There is a great fascination in all this, but it is not history, and it belongs to the story of the ship rather than to the story of shipping as a business.

At first, no doubt, the dug-out and reed-raft were used only for crossing rivers, for moving from one hunting ground to another, for fishing close inshore along the coast, or perhaps for carrying the warriors of the tribe on a raid. At a later stage, the members of little settlements, strung out along the banks of a great river or dotted along the seashore, would find room in their canoes for a few skins, or weapons, or earthen pots, to be bartered for similar primitive products with the people of other tiny communities. This stage, too, was prehistoric. Long before the point is reached at which we can begin to base our knowledge of the past on written, painted, or sculptured records, the dug-out and reed-raft had developed into the sea-going ship, capable of carrying passengers and an appreciable quantity of cargo between port and port with a reasonable degree of certainty. The shipping industry goes much further back than any history we can write of it.

Some great scholars believe that there is evidence of direct intercourse by sea between Babylonia and India three thousand years before the birth of Christ, and this would imply previous centuries of trading and exploration along the coasts of Asia. It is practically certain that a people living in Crete had sufficiently regular communication with Greece and Egypt to exchange goods and ideas some time between 4000 and 3000 B.C. All this, however, rests on inferences from such scraps of evidence as the finding in one place of a type of pottery known to have been produced in another. Our first definite record of seaborne trade on a large scale comes, as might be expected, from Egypt.

From the earliest times the Nile was the highway of Egypt, and by 3500 B.C., if not before, the original reed-rafts used on the great river had developed into ships, propelled by oars and sails, of substantial carrying capacity. Once possessed of such ships, it could be only a question of time before the Egyptians used them for voyages beyond the Nile Delta, especially for the purpose of avoiding the difficult overland route through Palestine and Syria. Egypt itself produced almost all that was required, in those early days, for the needs of its inhabitants; but there was always a shortage of big timber, and we learn from the Egyptian records that somewhere about 3000 B.C. King Snefru sent out a fleet of forty ships to Phoenicia, to bring back great baulks of cedar, cut in the forests of Lebanon. This is really the starting point of our history; for the number of the ships, the length of the voyage, and the bulky nature of the return cargo, all go to prove that this was no pioneering expedition, but an indication of steady, established trade between Egypt and the Phoenician ports.

For the next fifteen hundred or two thousand years our knowledge of what was happening on the sea is very scanty. There are abundant traces of intercourse between Egypt, Syria, Crete, Cyprus, and Greece, but we cannot speak confidently as to its character. In the absence of decipherable written records it is often impossible to say whether goods of foreign origin, found when excavating some lost city, were acquired by trade, or carried there by emigrants, or sent as tribute by conquered peoples, or simply brought back as loot by pirates. We know that Crete was the centre not merely of a highly cultured civilization but of a great sea-power, with colonies or trading stations on the mainland of Greece and the islands of the Aegean; but it is extremely doubtful how far the goods which filled the storehouses of Knossos were the fruits of commerce, piracy, or conquest.

The Egyptians, at least, were definitely a trading people. Under the great kings Thutmose III and Ramses II (roughly from 1300 to 1225 B.C.), Egypt became a great naval power, with a fleet which exercised some measure of control over the whole of the Levant and the Aegean; but this fleet was used not merely for conquest but for the protection of an extensive sea-borne commerce. An efficient marine police patrolled the Delta, to give security against pirates. Custom Houses at all the ports provided for the supervision of the trade and the collection of dues. The King himself kept a large part of the traffic in his own hands; but the importance attached to the Customs shows that much of it was carried on by private merchants, and it was quite a common thing for a wealthy landowner to keep his own ship for the import of Asiatic luxuries from the Palestinian and Syrian ports.

From Phoenicia and Syria the Egyptians imported timber, dyed fabrics woven on Phoenician looms, gold and silver vessels chased by Phoenician craftsmen, and spices and aromatic woods brought by the caravans from Arabia and the East. Weapons, gold-mounted chariots, furniture of carved ivory or ebony, rare plants and animals, and delicacies for the table flowed in from Syria, Asia Minor, Cyprus, and the Aegean. Gold and silver, made up for commercial purposes in rings of fixed weight, were received mainly as tribute from vassal states.

Another route ran down the Red Sea to Punt (Somali-land). It was used for warlike and trading expeditions at least as early as 2500 B.C., and long before the time of Thutmose III, its superiority to the overland route had led to the creation of trading and victualling stations at intervals along the African coast. A ship canal led from the most easterly branch of the Nile, through the Bitter Lakes, to the Red Sea, thus enabling the vessels from Punt to bring their cargoes to the Nile ports, and anticipating by at least three thousand years one of the landmarks in the history of modern transport.

The principal imports from Punt were gold, ivory, ebony, and other woods valuable to the cabinet-maker, incense, cinammon, skins, and eye-cosmetic—this last a very modern touch! Small cattle were also imported, and wild animals, such as baboons and monkeys for the amusement of the kings, priests, and nobles.

A considerable proportion of the imports, both by the Mediterranean and the Red Sea routes, were probably paid for in gold and silver, originally received as tribute; but Egypt had also her own products to export; grain, fine linen, papyrus, cordage, pottery, glazed tiles, and oxhides. Probably, too, some of the imported products of Asia and Africa were exchanged against each other. Altogether, we get from the records the picture of an extensive and varied sea-borne commerce, quite apart from the trade carried on by the land routes.

The goods which poured down the Nile into Egypt were not all carried in Egyptian ships. Arabs, Cretans, and various peoples of Asia Minor took a share of the traffic; but of all the foreign merchants and shipowners who thronged the foreign quarter at Memphis, the most numerous and the most enterprising were the Phoenicians, and as the might of Egypt decayed, her trade fell largely into Phoenician hands.

The Phoenicians—the men of Tyre and Sidon, Berytus (Beyrut), and half a dozen other towns on what is now the Syrian coast—were undoubtedly the greatest seafarers and greatest merchants of remote antiquity. They were not merely traders but manufacturers, celebrated for the excellence of their textiles and embroideries, their metal-work, and their glassware. From a shellfish called the murex they obtained a very beautiful dye, and garments or hangings dipped in Tyrian purple were amongst the most treasured possessions of kings and rich men in every land. Nevertheless it was as traders and shipowners that the Phoenicians left their deepest mark.

It was their good fortune to be seated at the central focal point of the trade routes of the ancient world. Their cities were the western terminals of great caravan routes, bringing down to them the merchandise of Armenia, and Assyria, and Babylonia, and Persia, and even of the more remote East. Other routes led up from ports in Southern Arabia or on the Persian Gulf. The Phoenicians themselves were dwellers in seaports, with natural harbours, carefully improved by art. The forests of Lebanon provided them with abundant shipbuilding material. The sea gave them access to Egypt, Cyprus, Crete, and the shores of Asia Minor, and to the newer Mediterranean civilizations which were springing up in Greece and Italy, and they sent to Egypt not only timber and their own manufactures, but re-exports of Eastern produce, bronze vessels from Asia Minor, and works of art from Greece. In return they imported sail-cloth and cordage, papyrus, ivory and ebony, for all of which they could find a ready market not only at home but amongst the peoples of the Levant and Aegean. They shipped Egyptian grain also, not so much for their own use as to make good the shortage of corn in Southern Greece, and erected great storehouses on the island of Cythera (Cerigo) as a centre for its distribution.

At a very early date they began to establish trading stations and settlements for working local mines and exploiting local produce in the Levant and Aegean. As their skill in navigation increased and their population expanded, they pushed steadily westward, establishing a chain of colonies along the North African coast, in Sicily, and in Spain. The first of the African colonies seems to have been Utica on the Gulf of Tunis (about 1100 B.C.); Carthage, a few miles south-west of Utica, was incomparably the most famous. Not long after the founding of Utica they even ventured to pass beyond the “Pillars of Hercules” (Gibraltar) into the unknown ocean, the boundary of the world, where the sun every night plunged into the sea with a hissing terrible to hear, on its journey through the underworld to the East. Here, outside the straits, they planted their colony of Gades, the modern Cadiz, long the farthest outpost of civilization.

Each of these colonies, with its “sphere of influence” in the hinterland, represented an enlargement of the borders of the civilized world, and a new market not only for Phoenician wares but for the rich hangings, and carpets, and garments of Mesopotamia, and the gems and spices of Arabia and India. Each could send in return raw materials for the Phoenician manufactures and products readily saleable in the East or the Levant. From Carthage and the other African colonies came gold, ebony, ivory, leather, and all manner of animal products; from Spain, silver, iron, tin, lead, salt-fish, and sword-blades.

Thus the Phoenicians developed more and more into the middlemen and general carriers of the ancient world, and their cities into entrepôts and markets where the products of all lands were gathered together, and from which they were distributed. Ezekiel’s description of Tyre, allowing for the poetical language, gives an astonishingly clear and vivid picture of a state whose greatness and prosperity depended mainly on the carrying trade, “situate at the entry of the sea ... a merchant of the people for many isles.”

Nobody, in a world organized on a basis of slave labour, would have made it a reproach to the Phoenician merchants that a large part of their profits came from the traffic in war-captives, insolvent debtors, and other raw material of the slave-market. Nor need any modern ideas on the morality of the slave-trade prevent us from recognizing, as Ezekiel recognized, even in his denunciation of Tyrian pride and luxury, that in covering the known world with their network of trade routes, the Phoenicians were doing more than any of their contemporaries to raise the general level of material prosperity.

When thy wares went forth out of the seas, thou filledst many people; thou didst enrich the kings of the earth with the multitude of thy riches and of thy merchandise.

As the chief shipowners and most skilful navigators of their day, the Phoenicians were freely employed by the rulers of other nations when they required tonnage. It was not only that they had the cleverest shipbuilders and caulkers, and crews expert in handling oar and sail. Even more important were their jealously guarded navigational secrets, the knowledge they had picked up of ports and landfalls, stars and winds and tides and currents; for in days when there were no charts or navigational instruments, the observations handed down from one generation to another by experienced mariners were the foundation of all navigational science. (“Thy wise men, O Tyrus, that were in thee, were thy pilots!”) We cannot, perhaps, rely on all the details of the story which tells how Solomon hired Phoenician pilots and sailors, and chartered Phoenician ships to tow rafts of timber from Lebanon for the temple, and to bring him gold from Ophir (probably in Arabia) and gold and silver, ivory and apes and peacocks, from Tarshish (Tartessus in Spain); but there is little doubt that it is true in essence. Later, it is said that a company of Phoenician seamen in the service of Necho of Egypt actually circumnavigated Africa, starting from a Red Sea port and returning by way of the Mediterranean.

For the successful conduct of a world-wide carrying trade, however, something more was required than daring and skilful seamanship, and in the pages of Xenophon we get a glimpse of the Phoenicians’ ability in the technique of ship-owning, which shows, incidentally, that the qualities which made them great as sea-traders survived for centuries the fall of Tyre and Sidon as independent states. “I think,” says one of his characters, “that the best and most perfect arrangement of things which I ever saw was when I went to look at the great Phoenician sailing vessel”; and he goes on to describe the excellence of the stowage, how the tackle, and the weapons and utensils of the crew, and the “merchandise, which the owner carried with him for his own profit,” were all stowed in the smallest possible space, and in such a way that everything could be got at the moment it was wanted. He tells, too, how he found the captain’s assistant going over the ship, as she lay in port, to see that everything was ship-shape and properly arranged, so that there should be no defect in gear or stowage to hamper her working when she put to sea.

It will be noted that this big Phoenician merchantman was a sailing vessel. In days when ramming was the chief method of attack in naval warfare, it was necessary that a warship should be, above everything else, fast and handy. The long, narrow galley, crowded with rowers, very fast for a short burst, and easily manoeuvred, could make rings round any sailing vessel of the time, or of many hundred years later. She used her sails whenever possible for cruising, so as to conserve the energy of her rowers for battle or chase; but she was fundamentally an oared vessel. For the merchant, on the contrary, carrying capacity was more important than speed, and carrying capacity implied a deep, broad, heavy ship. Moreover, a big crew of rowers, with their food and kit, would occupy space needed for cargo, and their food and pay (or their cost if they were slaves) would soon eat up the profits of a voyage. Hence the merchantman gradually developed into a tub-shaped sailing vessel, carrying big oars or sweeps for use in calms or in working against the wind, but dependent mainly on her single big sail for her motive power. Details of the types and of their subsequent development must be looked for elsewhere; but for many centuries—so long indeed as the Mediterranean was the chief theatre of maritime activity—this fundamental distinction between the “long ship” used in war and the “round ship” of commerce continued. Commercially, this very sharp distinction between the types had important effects. It compelled every state aiming at naval power to build a fleet solely for war; merchant ships could not be used, as they were in later times, to take a place in the line. This was all to the good, for it avoided the necessity of taking up merchantmen to form scratch fleets whenever hostilities were expected; but another effect of the distinction was that the slow, clumsy, trading vessel was quite unable either to resist or to fly from the nimble war galley or pirate. In such conditions the development of trade was inevitably limited, in ages when wars were almost incessant, and piracy was a popular and respectable profession.

So firmly was the commercial greatness of the Phoenicians based upon their geographical position and natural aptitude for the sea that it survived centuries of destructive conflict and of successive domination by Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and Macedonians. To each successive conqueror they furnished powerful fleets of warships; under each successive conqueror they continued to carry a great part of the trade of the civilized world.

They had to reckon, however, from about 450 B.C. onwards, with the competition of the Greeks. Living on groups of tiny islands and a mainland that was nearly all coastline, the Greeks were drawn instinctively to the sea; but for some hundreds of years they had launched their ships for the purposes of piracy, conquest, or emigration, more often than for commerce. The little City States, each with its strip of agricultural land, were largely self-sufficing in the simple necessities of their life, and were too poor to afford many luxuries. Their natural resources gave them little to export beyond wine and olive oil, and no well-trodden caravan routes brought down to them, as to Tyre and Sidon, the wealth of great inland Empires; nor was trade encouraged by political conditions in which every ship not belonging to your own city was assumed to be “good prize,” unless prote...