Abstract
Our third issue of this year contains five articles based on original research, one research note and eight book reviews. The articles are ordered more or less chronologically as usual.
In the issue's opening contribution, Yrjö Kaukiainen discusses Baltic shipping in the eighteenth century in what he terms the period of ‘Hanseatic twilight’. To compensate for a lack of primary sources, the author proposes to use newspapers such as the Lübeckische Anzeigen to complement and interrogate the picture that arises from the Sound Toll Registers. By doing so, he establishes that Lübeck shipping was not reduced to a more subdued role in the face of English and Dutch seaborne dominance, but that it continued to be comparatively successful for longer than has traditionally been accepted.
Ankita Singh, in the second essay, focusses on the maritime economy of colonial India in the nineteenth century. She demonstrates that the rise of an administrative body for port management – first in the Port of Calcutta and then quickly adopted in other ports of South Asia – had an immediate effect not only on the way in which maritime trade was managed administratively, but also on how labour was organized in British India. Her findings are based on combining and cross-referencing the archives of the local administrative council in Bengal and the records of Great Britain's India Office, and provide an historical explanation for the set-up of today's port authority structure.
The article by Roger Dence and Julie Papworth, entitled ‘The British brig-sloop pilot’, begins at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when many Royal Navy warships that were constructed in the previous decade were laid up before being demolished or sold into merchant service. The authors follow the lifespan of one such vessel representative of the period, the HMS Pilot, which the Royal Navy sold in 1828. It subsequently experienced a second career in the service of the British Southern Whaling Fishery before being condemned in 1845.
In the fourth article, Hugh Murphy addresses the question how two different Scottish deep-sea tramp ship companies handled the increasingly difficult economic circumstances from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. He focusses on a privately owned company, Hogarth and Sons, and a publicly quoted limited company, Lyle Shipping Company, and examines how both companies attempted to diversity their fleet and their activities to counter the economic downturn. Murphy shows how these attempts only managed to delay the inevitable, and how even a merger between the two companies could not save them from liquidation in the late 1980s.
Rodrigo Perez Fernandez and Francisco González Redondo's article is an attempt to trace the history of the modern catamaran and explain its evolution. The article's main protagonist is the civil engineer and mathematician Leonardo Torres Quevedo, who designed for the first time a multihull steel watercraft powered by two marine engines – a design which was patented in November 1916 and of which the essence has survived until today. The ‘Binave’, as Quevedo called it, was the first step in a gradual change in mentality, moving beyond the classic monohull vessel and towards a ship that could reach higher speeds by minimizing its total resistance.
Lodewijk Petram and Matthias van Rossum, finally, have written a research note on the GLOBALISE project that has just commenced in The Netherlands, and which will radically modernize the digital infrastructure for the archives of the Dutch East India Company. The archives, comprising an estimated 25 million documents from around the globe which have been a treasure trove for maritime historians for more than a century, will be made more accessible through digitization, full open access HTR, and new keyword search interfaces. It is to be expected that scholarship based on these datasets will appear more often in our Journal in the years to come.