Abstract
In terms of their subject matter, the articles and research notes that comprise this issue of the International Journal of Maritime History fall neatly into three groups, each of which broadly concerns the conception, preparation or ramifications of maritime ventures, rather than the execution of the ventures themselves. Two articles deal with the factors that influence decisions as to whether or not to initiate a sea-going enterprise. Sheryllynne Haggerty’s article focuses on privateering in the port of Liverpool (UK) during the Seven Years’ War to assess how merchants sought to manage the extraordinary financial risks that were intrinsic to the business of commerce raiding. That investors adopted ownership structures based on larger than average groups of shareholders, who were drawn from well-established mercantile networks, infers that privateering was essentially conducted according to a rational evaluation of the prospects and hazards at the core of this particular form of maritime business venture. Such investment in high-risk activity – which in some respects mirrored the port’s rapidly growing interests in the slave trade – indicates that eighteenth-century Liverpool was marked by a positive business culture. In contrast, as Yvette Santos demonstrates, Portugal’s maritime entrepreneurial culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tended to be risk averse, despite the nation’s long tradition of sea-going enterprise, and the opportunity to exploit propitious demand conditions, especially in the carriage of migrants from southern Europe to Brazil. Accordingly, northern European shipping companies dominated this route, while the Portuguese business class, for various, complex reasons, did not seize the opportunity to engage in this market, even when the shipping of rival nations was otherwise deployed during the First World War.
Generating the resources required to sustain maritime activity is the concern of four contributors to this volume. The establishment of trading bases and colonial outposts in the Indian sub-continent by the Dutch East India Company is the context in which Sachin Pendse’s case study of the Dutch factory at Vengurla sits. Jay Martin discusses the proliferation of the sailing scow, a somewhat ‘boxy’ vessel of European origin that was deployed extensively in North America, especially in the Great Lakes, and diffused as far as New Zealand when its deep-water capability developed. At its peak during the second half of the nineteenth century, the scow provided shipowners with an optimal balance – in the technological context of the era – between bulk cargo-carrying capacity and speed. Human resource lies at the heart of Nicholas Rogers’s article on the contentious issue – then and, in scholarly circles, now – of the use of impressment to raise enough seafarers to serve in the British Navy during the wars of the eighteenth century. Responding to recent studies that tend to downplay the contemporary significance of this form of labour recruitment, Rogers restates the case that impressment precipitated controversy, resistance and litigation, as well as coercing merchant seamen into the navy, especially in the difficult years of the 1790s. Whatever the era, and however recruited, seafarers require food while at sea. The supply and calorific value of the food provided for the 3000 seamen who served for five months in the Catalan-Aragonese fleet during the War of the Sicilian Vespers (1282–1302) is explored in Lawrence V. Mott’s research note. Given that most of these men were oarsmen who propelled the fleet in battle, it is not surprising that the records of the Office of the Admiral indicate that the food it supplied was adequate to sustain hard manual labour.
The ramifications of very different maritime activities are examined in the three remaining articles in this issue. Henry Morgan was not impressed by a published account of the tactics employed to extract information from prisoners by his buccaneering force in Panama in 1671. Morgan therefore claimed he had been libelled and took the publishers – not Alexander Exquemelin, the author – to court, generating legal records that underpin Joseph Gibbs’s analysis of the case. The status of France’s naval fleet in the wake of the defeat of her land forces in 1940 is discussed by Niall MacGalloway. Dormant in Toulon, the fleet nevertheless played an important role in Franco–Axis diplomacy before it was scuttled in November 1942. A more constructive response to adverse circumstances was evident in Britain in the 1970s, when a group of young managers caught up in the swift contraction of British shipbuilding decided to set up a consultancy business. As related by Hugh Murphy and two of the consultants, John Craggs and Roger Vaughn, this proved to be a remarkably successful adaptation, with their firm, A&P Appledore, emerging as one of the few bright spots in the tortuous decline of Britain’s heavy industry sector in the late twentieth century.
As well as confirming that there is a good deal more to maritime history than voyages, ports, ships and seafarers, the contents of this first issue of Volume 30 of the IJMH indicate that much maritime activity takes place in meeting rooms, conference halls and court rooms far from the sea. The significance of that activity, moreover, permeates deep into the economic, political and cultural fabric of human societies.