Chapter 3 from “Giants Of The Sea”

3. Early Cargo Ships & Trade

Egypt, widely known as the cradle of civilization, was also the cradle of cargo shipping. Based around the Nile River, Egypt was the first to develop sailing ships. The Nile was a perfect highway for waterborne commerce. In vessels first built of papyrus reeds bundled together and then covered with short wood planks, crews would sail south and drift or row north with the current.

The first noteworthy cargo vessels were barges built 5,000 years ago by Egyptian pharaohs to move granite downriver from Aswan for building pyramids. The cargo capacity of these barges was initially up to 50 tons of granite stone. The voyage on the Nile from the quarries in Aswan to the harbor in Giza where the granite was unloaded was 600 miles. While the current provided most of the propulsion, oars were sometimes used for rowing in addition to steering.

Queen Hatsepsut, who ruled Egypt from 1478 BC to 1458 BC, was the only woman pharaoh of Egypt and the world’s first female ruler. Historians often refer to her as the first great woman in history. Under her reign, Egypt built barges 200’ to 300’ long to transport obelisks, the largest of which was 97’ long and weighed 350 tons.

Queen Hatsepsut later introduced Egypt to cargo shipping outside the Nile with a series of vessels for trade with Pont (now Somalia) on the Red Sea. These 85’ vessels with 15 oars on each side were rowed on the Nile to a point where they would be beached, dismantled and moved across land to the Red Sea. The vessels would then be rebuilt and rowed south on the Red Sea and around the Horn of Africa to modern day Somalia. An inscription on a temple in Thebes describes “the loading of the ships very heavily with marvels of the country of Pont” and lists myrrh, ebony, ivory, wood, animals, animal skins and incense as among the cargo carried.

From Egypt, shipping then progressed to the Mediterranean Sea. From 800 BC on, Greece was a dominant maritime power, but with a focus on military vessels. For merchant vessels and trade in the Mediterranean, however, the Greeks were no match for the Phoenicians. Located on the eastern end of the Mediterranean in modern day Lebanon, Phoenicia produced the most notable maritime traders of the time and was the first country whose economic activity was dominated by maritime trade. The Vikings, the Venetians, the Portuguese and the Dutch would later employ this model of building an economy around maritime commerce in different degrees.

The merchant marine dominance of the Phoenicians was rooted in the cedar trees of Phoneica. Ships were built with wood and tall, wide and straight hardwood trees were required for planks and masts. Blessed with this superior timber, the Phoenicians quickly became the most able shipbuilders on the Mediterranean. On their square sailed merchant ships, the Phoenicians traveled throughout the Mediterranean and even into the Atlantic. There is evidence that the Phoenicians may have circumnavigated Africa from east to west while searching for new trading opportunities. Their ships were broad to allow them to export large quantities of wood, linen, dyed cloths, embroidery, metalwork and glasswork and to import papyrus, ivory, ebony, silk, amber, spices, incense and precious metals.

One by-product of active trading throughout the Mediterranean was the spread of the Phoenician alphabet. A phonetic script that enabled understandable written communication was essential to the growth of trade. This script was a significant improvement in the hieroglyphics that were previously used. Following their conquest by the Persians in 540 BC, the Phoenicians gradually lost their identity and were absorbed into the Greek empire when Alexander the Great defeated Persia in 333 BC.

Around 300 BC, the Far East saw the beginning of maritime trade in India and China. Initially focused on trade routes first developed along large rivers, it then expanded to include coastal and regional routes. Around the beginning of the Han dynasty in 202 BC, the Chinese began using ships with a stern mounted rudders and masts and sails. Known as junks, these ships sailed into the South China Sea and established trade routes to India and what is now known as Vietnam, among other destinations. These unique ships and their larger descendants would be the main type of cargo vessel used by the Chinese for the next two thousand years.

The Romans developed the next step up in cargo shipping. At its height around 400 AD, Rome was an enormous city inhabited by approximately one million people. It was the most populous city in the world and was a large market that needed to be fed. This resulted in the building of specialized vessels to ensure adequate food supplies for Rome. Just as all roads led to Rome, in those days most merchant ships delivered their cargo to Rome.

The Roman merchant ship traditionally had a rounded hull to maximize its capacity for grain, the primary product. While the largest of these vessels could move 1,200 tons of cargo, the primary size was a “ten-thousander” able to carry that number of sacks of grain or amphoras of wine (about 400 tons). These Roman ships had square sails on up to three masts. The main trade route was between Alexandria where grain from the Nile Valley was loaded and shipped to Rome. To put into perspective how active this trade route was, each year Rome imported 420,000 tons of grain. That translated into 1,200 shiploads of grain per year or an average of five vessels each with 350 tons of grain per day after excluding the non-navigable winter months.

An early Roman emperor built a large artificial inland harbor on the north bank of the Tiber River that would serve as the main port of ancient Rome for more than 500 years. Called Portus, the Latin word for harbor or haven, it consisted of a 97 acre hexagonal basin connected to the Tiber River and other points through a series of canals. It addition to grain shipments, Portus was the gateway for shipments of glass, ceramics, marble and even wild animals coming from Africa for spectacles in the Colosseum.

The amphora, a wheel thrown terracotta container, was the standard marine shipping container of the Roman era and was used in vast numbers. While primarily used to move wine and olive oil, amphoras were also used for grain, fish, nuts, spices, olives, grapes and other commodities. A typical amphora was tall with a slender neck and two opposing handles on each side of the neck. The most popular size was around 18 inches high, but ranged up to 5 feet in height requiring several handlers. Amphoras had a pointed base allowing upright storage on land by embedding in soft ground. This shape also facilitated marine transport. The ships had wooden racks that allowed the amphoras to be placed upright. Ropes tied to the handles prevented shifting.

Amphorae were cheap and plentiful and typically just used for one voyage and not returned, so they were broken up at their destination. An indication of how widespread the use of this utilitarian container was exists today in the form of a breakage site in Rome close to the Tiber River. At that site, the fragments created a hill now known as Monte Testaccio, which is 150’ high with a diameter of 1,000’.

In a fascinating example of something from the past helping with the present and future, lead recovered from a Roman merchant ship is playing a role in the search by physicists for dark matter that is believed to make up 83% of the universe. The instrumentation used to detect dark matter is extraordinarily sensitive and the background radiation emitted from all objects can affect experiments. To minimize this, physicists shield their measurement devices with lead, which blocks this background radiation. Even lead, however, emits a low level of background radiation that can impact experiments. To mitigate this, lead recovered from ancient Roman shipwrecks is ideal because after two thousand years most of its unstable isotopes have decayed away. In addition, the sea has shielded it from cosmic rays that add to its radioactivity. Recently, lead ingots recovered from a Roman cargo vessel that sunk off the coast of Sardinia have been melted down and recycled for use in protecting instrumentation physicists are now using to better understand the universe.

As the Roman Empire declined, so did a vibrant grain trade between Egypt and Rome. It would be a thousand years later in the sixteenth century before vessels of similar cargo tonnage would ply the Mediterranean waters again. The seven seas (Mediterranean, North, Adriatic, Aegean, Black, Red and Arabian) continued to experience growth in all types of sailing ships but the predominant focus was military or naval vessels rather than cargo vessels.

The names of several of the famous seven seas actually tie with the nomenclature used in maps from antiquity. In those maps, it was customary to include a compass where the directions were shown in different colors. Black represented north, red represented south, white represented west and yellow represented east. Their directional orientation relative to most cartographers is how the Black Sea and the Red Sea got their names. In many early maps, the Mediterranean was actually referred to as the White Sea as most of it lied to the west of the mapmakers. However, it would eventually become known to all as the Mediterranean Sea. That name was derived from the latin terms medius (for middle) and terra (for land, earth). That name fit with the view that much of the civilized world was on the coast of that great sea.

The Viking Age began around 800 AD and lasted some 300 years. While most known for voyages of exploration and plunder, the Vikings were also very astute traders. In fact, it was in Scandinavia that the first towns focused on trading were developed. With their distinctive longships often over 100’ long, the Vikings traded all over Europe and the Mediterranean. These graceful shallow draft vessels were designed for speed, going 6 knots with oars and up to 15 knots with sail under favorable conditions. The longships had symmetrical bows and sterns, allowing them to reverse direction quickly without turning. They had large rectangular sails on a single mast coming up from the middle of the ship. Longships typically had dragonheads at the top of their upsweeping bows and sterns. These ships represented the epitome of naval power at the time and they came to be known as dragonships throughout Europe. It must have been a terrifying sight when 600 dragonships attacked Hamburg in 845.

The broad influence of the Vikings in trade and commerce across the entire European continent is not as well known, perhaps in large part due to the brutal raids so associated with them. With more than one hundred recorded raids across Europe, the pillaging and plummeting by Vikings is what stands out in history. Less known is that the Vikings also developed trade routes that extended throughout the continent and that the influence of the Viking culture for centuries was significant. The Viking influence on Russia was great. Sailing as far as the Black Sea and Caspian Sea, a group of Swedish Vikings known as the Rus entered the area today known as Russia. At the time, disorganized Slavic tribes occupied the area. The Rus brought order to the region and under a Rus chieftain all the tribes became unified and eventually fully assimilated. The Rus lended their name to what would become a major empire.

As with the Phoenicians before them, a key reason for the dominance of the Vikings on the sea was their shipbuilding skill, which was in large part a consequence of the region’s natural resources. For many centuries, the Vikings were the preeminent shipbuilders in the world, in no small part due to the plentiful large oak and other hardwood trees in Scandinavia. They were particularly adept at metalworking and they developed iron tools that assisted in their shipbuilding. Their early vessels were multi-purpose, but as their shipbuilding skills improved, the Vikings developed specialized ship designs. Short wide hull designs were developed to transport cargo while long narrow hull designs were used to carry armed raiding parties.

Another key maritime related reason for the spread of the Vikings was their expertise in refining their vessels and sails to get the most speed from wind power. While sails had been used for centuries, the Vikings revolutionized sail technology resulting in the fastest ships the world had ever known. Their longships were light and flexible and built from the keel up, only later adding internal framework and support. The rectangular sails used by the Vikings were larger, relative to the size of the ship, than any sails used before. When these light ships were combined with large sails, the Viking longships were the fastest vessels on the water by a large margin.

The Vikings developed several major trading centers at ports on the Scandinavian coast that linked with shipping routes extending throughout all parts of Europe. Viking traders sold fur, wood, leather, wool and iron and bought goods such as spices, silk, wine, wheat, pottery and glass. They established a bullion economy where weighed silver was used as the means of exchange. Everywhere they went, the Vikings also bought and sold slaves.

Viking settlements in Greenland became an important source on some of the goods and materials traders sold. Historians have recently discovered that a key aspect of this trade with Europe related to walrus tusks. Because these tusks could be carved into elegant figures, it was a luxury item sought after by churches and wealthy individuals. From statues to chess pieces, items carved from walrus tusks were treasured for centuries across Europe. These tusks originated from Scandinavian countries around 500 AD and, until recently, historians believed that remained the primary source. Based on detailed research confirmed by DNA tests of various figures, historians have now concluded that after the Vikings settled Greenland, almost all of the walrus tusks came from Greenland. The Vikings must have determined that the supply of walruses in Greenland and the related cost to harvest the tusks was lower than the similar factors in the Scandinavian countries. In that respect, the transition of the walrus tusk trade to Greenland is arguably the first tangible example of globalization.

Around 1000 AD, Leif Erikson landed in a place he called Vinland because he said it had grapevines and self-sown wheat fields. Vinland is what is now known as Newfoundland, making Erikson the first European to set foot in North America, almost five hundred years before Columbus. The Vikings elected not to return to Vinland, presumably because they believed it offered nothing more than what they could obtain to trade from other closer settlements. That epic voyage, however, is testimony to the Vikings skill as both traders and shipbuilders.

For almost three hundred years starting in the 13th century, maritime commerce throughout all of the seven seas was dominated by the Venetians. Venice built a large national shipyard in the late 1100’s and the warships it produced allowed it to take control of the Eastern Mediterranean and eventually gain additional territories with the partitioning of the Byzantine Empire in 1204.

The success of the Venetian empire was fundamentally really built on a foundation of salt. The lagoons surrounding Venice were key sources of salt and in 1200 there were 119 local salt works providing this preservative and seasoning. As demand for salt increased, Venice augmented its local production by importing salt from areas where its merchant ships traded. At one point, a rule was put in place requiring that all ships returning to Venice must return with salt onboard as ballast. Large warehouses were developed to store salt in Venice. As a result of these efforts, Venice developed a virtual monopoly on the salt trade, which served it well in extending and expanding its trade activities. Salt became a store of value and Venice’s control of the production and sale of this “white gold” throughout the Mediterranean was powerful. It is interesting to note that the word “salary” comes from the Latin word for salt.

With salt acting as the figurative and literal base cargo of its growing fleet, Venice became the merchant capital of Europe. The state recognized how central its own ships were to that role. Initially these merchant vessels were built at Venice’s flourishing private shipyards. They were referred to as round ships because the beams were a third of the length. With a capacity of up to 600 tons, these broad merchant ships brought back to Venice wine from Crete, sugar, cotton and grain from Europe and silver, copper and woolen cloth from as far away as England.

Various spices became a natural progression of Venice’s monopoly of the salt trade. The spice trade was the first meaningful intercontinental trade and it would grow to involve large parts of Europe, Africa and Asia. Spices like pepper, cinnamon, ginger and cumin initially moved completely overland and Muslin traders in the Middle East were secretive about the true sources of spices they obtained mainly in Asia that became treasured in Europe. These spices had no underlying nutritional value, but did improve the taste and enjoyment of a wide variety of foods.

The Venetians opened maritime routes for the spice trade from the Eastern Mediterranean to multiple European destinations that resulted in tremendous growth. The spice trade was in fact another early example of what today is referred to as globalization. To improve the speed of their merchant fleet, the Venetians developed a new vessel that was as long as their war galleys but wider and deeper in order to carry cargo. These vessels, known as great galleys, were all built at the national shipyard and were 132’ long with a beam of 23’. The Venetians were quick to appreciate what a merchant ship that was as fast as a warship could do for their trade networks. From their introduction in the early 14th century and for the next two hundred years, these great galleys dominated Venetian trade, carrying the merchandise that was the most valuable part of Venice’s growing commerce.

The Venetian maritime trade routes were divided into seven major routes from Venice that were covered by an annual voyage comprised of a convoy of standard sized ships. The most important was the Alexandria route, which sometimes had two voyages annually. On the Alexandria route, great galleys carrying silver bullion and gold coins exchanged them for spices, silks and dyes from the East that had made their way to Egypt. This route was bringing back 2,500 tons of spices annually, most of which would then be redistributed across Venice’s trade network. The second convoy moving eastward was the Beirut route, which traded for spices that reached the coasts of Syria and Palestine from inland points. The Romanian route sailed into the Black Sea where it traded for furs, silks and slaves. The Barbary route traded in ports along the pirate infested shores of North Africa and then traveled north to the Moorish Coast of Spain. The convoy of the Northeast African route first sailed to Tripoli and then split into two. One unit travelled to Alexandria and the other unit to Beirut. The convoy of the Southern France route sailed along the coasts of Italy and Southern France, primarily selling merchandise from the Far East that had flowed into Venice’s trade network. Finally, the most difficult convoy was the Flanders route, where ships sailed outside of the Mediterranean and on to England and what is now Belgium, with an en-route port call in Lisbon. In all, these seven trade routes formed a web of some three dozens ports that were regularly connected with Venice by these merchant ships.

Initially, trade between China and Italy moved over land on the route first taken by Venetian Marco Polo that became known as the Silk Road. Some 135 years after his journey, much of that trade transitioned to a maritime Silk Road established in 1405 by Chinese Admiral Zheng He. Born in what is now Mongolia, Zheng He was captured by the Chinese as a boy and placed in servitude with a ruling family. He eventually gained the confidence of leaders within the Ming dynasty. Trade via the Silk Road had expanded Chinese knowledge of the world and resulted in the Ming dynasty sponsoring a series of ocean voyages to increase both knowledge and trade. Zheng He was in charge of these multi-year voyages, seven of which occurred between 1405 and 1433.

The Chinese had developed a maritime tradition focused around its two large rivers and coastal areas well before the major exploratory voyages of Zheng He. One proof of that was the invention of the compass by the Chinese in 200 BC. The compass allowed ships to navigate away from the coast for the first time. The Chinese were also the first to invent dry-docks which they did in 1000 AD, some 500 years before dry-docks were used in Europe. During the Ming dynasty, the Chinese were the first to build ships with watertight compartments. They were also the first to build ships with a stern post and a balanced rudder positioned before the stern post, innovations that allowed the Chinese to build much larger ships.

The pioneering shipbuilding processes that China developed made Zheng He’s voyages possible. Between 1403 and 1407, the Chinese built 1,681 ocean-going vessels, primarily at shipyards in Suzhou, near modern day Shanghai, and Longjiang, in the southern province of Guangdong. An estimated 30,000 people were living and working in these shipyards as carpenters, ironsmiths, caulkers and rope and sail makers. The scope of this project, even by today’s standards, was massive. It was by far the largest shipbuilding project ever at the time and it would really be more than 500 years before that record was broken.

Admiral Zheng He’s fleets visited ports throughout Southeast Asia, India, much of the east coast of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, dispersing and receiving goods along the way. On the horn of Africa, he connected with traders bringing goods from Europe. There is even a group of scholars who point to a Chinese 1418 world map that presents all the major continents with a precision that wouldn’t be seen in European maps for more than a century. Those scholars see that as evidence that Zheng He may have even traveled to parts of North and South America.

In exchange for gold, silver, porcelain, silk and horses, Zheng He received spices, ivory, exotic animals and numerous goods new to China. The size of the fleets and his largest ships suggest that the volume of trade and cargo moved must have been significant. Records show that his first expedition consisted of 27,800 men on 62 large treasure ships supported by 190 smaller ships.

The treasure ships were large nine-masted square rigged ships with four decks that could carry a massive amount of cargo and accommodate up to 500 people in what would be considered luxurious style at the time. The ships had dragon eyes on the prow and brightly painted hulls. Vessel dimensions were “44 zhang 4 chi long and 18 zhang wide’. The 444 was considered symbolic and lucky, with four being the symbol of the earth and its four corners. There were also four seas, four cardinal directions, four seasons and, according to Confucianism, four bonds or virtues: propriety, integrity, righteousness and modesty. Given the conversion factor of 10.5 feet per zhang, if those dimensions for the treasure ships are accurate, they would have been 466 feet long and 189 feet wide. That would make these the largest wooden ships in history and their cargo carrying capacity would not be eclipsed until iron hulls hundreds of years later.

Accompanying Zheng He’s flagship treasure ships were horse ships, supply ships and troop transport ships. The horse ships were eight-masted, 339 feet long and carried horses which were a key trading currency. The supply ships were seven-masted, 257 feet long and carried most of the food and provisions for these multi-year expeditions. The troop transport ships were six-masted, 220 feet long and carried soldiers. The treasure ships and some of the other ships had cannons, but there is no record of any military activity on any of Zheng He’s voyages. Of course, just the sight of such a massive fleet and potential fighting force would have dissuaded any country visited from aggression. Zheng He’s fleets developed an elaborate system of sight and sound signals in order to communicate at sea. When they were in port, they relied on hundreds of translators who sailed with them to facilitate communications with local people.

In addition to increasing trade, Admiral Zheng He’s expeditions were intended to show to others the greatness of China’s civilization. It must have been a staggering sight in any port when a fleet of 300 ships holding some 30,000 men dropped anchor. This outward projection of power by China came to an end with Zheng He’s death at sea during his seventh expedition in 1433.

The logistics of supporting such massive expeditions, with hundreds of ships and thousands of men, and the related costs and planning required must have been extraordinary. Not having confidence in anyone else to lead such expeditions, and increasingly preoccupied with problems along its northern borders, China turned inward. Given the clear superiority of Chinese shipbuilding and the size and scale of an ocean-going fleet that was far ahead of European vessels, history undoubtedly would have unfolded very differently if China had not withdrawn and turned inward at that time.

It would be almost six centuries before China turned again to outward directed initiatives such as the Zheng He expeditions. Perhaps because of this, Chinese leaders highlight the history of Zheng He today. In China’s current global infrastructure program known as One Belt, One Road, the Road refers to the maritime route stretching from Southeast Asia across the Indian Ocean to the Middle East, Africa and Europe, almost the same maritime route Zheng He pioneered six hundred years ago.

The European sailing ships that crossed the oceans of the world at the start of the Age of Discovery in the late 1400’s initially transported men and information. These vessels, the subject of countless books and movies that cemented their legacy in world maritime history, initially were voyages of exploration and adventure. That exploration was rooted in the desire to discover new trading partners and products. Like the Viking five centuries earlier, the Venetians two centuries earlier and the Chinese a century earlier, these were voyages with clear commercial objectives. Based on what was learned on these voyages along with the exotic items that were brought back to Europe, these expeditions were the catalysts for what would later become meaningful cargo movements by ship.

In 1488, a Portuguese expedition led by Vasca da Gama sailed around Africa via the Cape of Good Hope and proceeded to Asia. Da Gama’s circumnavigation of Africa was the beginning of meaningful intercontinental trade by vessel. With this and later voyages that continued on to India and parts of Asia, an active maritime spice trade with Europe opened up. Spices such as cinnamon, cassia, cardamom, ginger and pepper became prized in Europe. While a limited amount of spices had previously reached Europe either completely overland or via Venice where it moved by ship from the Eastern Mediterranean, the establishment of a much more cost efficient all-water marine alternative sharply increased the spice trade to Europe.

Portugal initially dominated the trade and the wealth resulting from the spice trade underpinned much of that country’s growth. As the search for new spices such as nutmeg which existed only in the Banda Islands heated up, the spice trade continued to expand. The discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the first circumnavigation of the globe occurred as a result of Ferdinand Magellan’s epic expedition. Like many other voyages of discovery, this was driven by the search for new marine routes to obtain spices.

It is interesting to note that the discovery of the Americas was a direct result of the maritime spice trade. The sole reason that Spain underwrote Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage was to find a new route in order to break Portugal’s dominance of the maritime spice trade. The discovery of the Americas was really a subset of the first transatlantic commercial voyage. The movement of spices by ship from Asia to Europe created the first major maritime cargo lane. Volumes shipped would soon be eclipsed by another commodity cargo.

By the mid-1500’s voyages of discovery were increasingly supplanted by voyages of trade. Spanish and Portuguese galleons were the dominant participants in trade routes between those countries and their newly established colonies in the Americas. When it was learned that the Japanese could make firearms on a large scale, the spice trade was augmented by new trade routes to Asia. Portuguese and Dutch merchants began direct trade by sea of fine porcelain from China to Europe during the Ming dynasty, dominating the movement of a popular product that had previously moved overland. Porcelain originated in China over a thousand years earlier and as such variations of the dinnerware used across the world are still referred to as china. However, the Asian trade by sea was nowhere near the first meaningful intercontinental trade brought about by the discovery of the Americas. For the first couple of hundred years, that trade could be reduced down to one word: sugar.

Europe quickly realized that the climates in Brazil and the islands in the Caribbean were well suited to grow sugar cane. Large plantations developed to satisfy the demand for sugar in Europe, whether it was for tea in England, cakes in Amsterdam, molasses for rum or numerous other products that could utilize this sweet ingredient. Other outbound products such as tobacco and cotton would eventually supplement the sugar shipments that dominated the early commerce between the Americas and Europe. These shipments and the areas in which they could be grown were given such priority that the area that now includes the U.S. was relatively ignored by much of Europe.

An early determinant of where settlements in the New World were established was what areas and islands offered the best natural harbors. Trade could only occur when sailing ships could first be safely moored and safely loaded. The ideal places were inlets near the ocean with narrow passages that opened up to larger bodies of water protected by natural breakwaters. These inlets often were found in or near rivers that flowed into larger bodies of water. Ports at the mouths of rivers were among the more common New World ports. They were protected from turbulent ocean waves and, due to the self-dredging action of the flowing river, had deep water near land.

Geological formations in the form of natural harbors played significant roles in the actual discovery and development of the Americas. Where a ship could find a safe harbor was a key catalyst for much of the civilization that would follow. Early on, Havana, Cuba became the epicenter of Spain’s New World empire because it offered unparallel protection in its natural harbor. So did the harbor San Juan, Puerto Rico. This important center of Spanish trade was so highly regarded as a rich port that it was given that Spanish name. The island itself was called San Juan in memory of the catholic saint. Through a mistaken reading of an early map, the names for the city and the island were inverted and to this day the city is called San Juan while the entire island is called Puerto Rico.

The wealth accumulated by Portugal from its early dominance of the maritime spice trade with Asia made it the envy of all countries in Europe, especially its archrival Spain. In its quest to develop a western maritime route, Spain claimed many new lands where it established commercial and trading activities. In the Americas, those activities would expand into areas beyond sugar and related products. Spain’s conquest of Mexico and Peru resulted in tremendous wealth. Spain plundered the gold and silver holdings of the indigenous people and then forced them to mine additional precious metals. The gold and silver that moved into the Spanish treasury in the mid-1500’s made it not only the richest country on the Iberian Peninsuala, but the richest country in Europe. The treasure ships that moved that cargo to Spain also became the favorite targets of pirates operating in the Caribbean.

Mexico, which was known as New Spain at the time, played a key role in another important maritime trade route developed by Spain. Among the other settlements by Spain during its voyages to establish a western trade route was the Phillipines. By the mid-1500’s, Manilla had a large Spanish presence and commerce with China and other parts of the Far East had begun. To fund increasing amounts of trade, ships loaded with silver sailed from the West Coast of Mexico to the Phillipines. Spain established a mint in Mexico where silver coins with serrated edges were produced. These edges prevented a common practice of chipping off portions of a coin by making the chipping obvious. These coins, known as Pieces of Eight, were the first verifiable currency. They were well received and resulted in an increase in trade between the Spanish in the Phillipines and China. The coins were used to buy porcelain, silk, ivory, spices and an assortment of exotic goods from China.

The Chinese products that Spain purchased sailed from the Phillipines to Mexico on the return leg of the merchant ships that brought the Pieces of Eight. This Manilla to Acapulco voyage took advantage of Pacific tradewinds in a clockwise loop, the eastbound leg more northernly and the westbound leg more southernly. From Acapulco, the Chinese goods moved overland to the East Coast of Mexico for shipment to Spain aboard a treasure ship also moving precious metals. The Phillipines to Mexico trade route grew to such importance that a special class of merchant ships called Manilla galleons was developed to serve the route.

The Manilla galleons sailed the Pacific for 250 years. They were built in Manilla using Phillippine hardwoods, another example of the key role of local trees in early shipping. The galleons were the largest of the day with an average capacity from 1,700 to 2,000 tons and lengths approaching 175’. The vessels carried up to 300 passengers and crew in addition to cargo. The eastbound leg had the most cargo, but in addition to the silver coins on the westbound leg, tobacco, cocoa and various other food products from the Americas made its way to the Far East. The westbound leg even included some goods transhipped from Europe such as wine and olive oil. From 1565 to 1815, Spain, which controlled the Phillipines, built 108 galleons to serve this important trade route. It is estimated that at least one-third of the silver that was mined in Mexico and Peru made its way to China on the Manilla galleons. Not until the advent of steamships and the development of the Suez Canal did the long run of the Manilla galleons came to an end.

Prior to that, for over four hundred years, Spain developed a trade network connecting the Far East, the Americas and Europe with its Manilla galleons. In a similarity to modern cargo networks, Spain’s network included overland movements and transhipments. With the maritime and overland route, Spain had the ability to move much sought after goods from the Far East to Europe, although hardly as efficiently and timely as Portugal with its all water trade route around Africa.

Spain’s motivation for explorations that resulted in these and other trade routes was driven by and rooted in its mercantile interests. The Treaty of Tordesillas that Spain entered into with Portugal in 1494 also necessitated those explorations. Terms of the treaty prohibited Spain from sailing from Europe to the Far East via Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. Spain effectively gave Portugal exclusive access to the most efficient route over which to conduct trade between Europe and the Far East.

Spain continued efforts to find a better maritime route to the Far East, but never succeeded. Those efforts, however, achieved even greater discoveries than finding a new maritime route to the Far East. It’s a tangible reminder that the journey is often more important than the destination. The subsidiary benefits from Spain’s expeditions of discovery are simply incalculable. Beyond the significant wealth accumulation, they literally opened up a New World. There were even subsidiary benefits within the trade routes that developed as a result of the voyages of discovery. For example, the first exploration by Spain of modern day California was to scout out possible stopoff points for weary Manilla galleons prior to reaching Acapulco.

A vivid reminder of the early trade irrelevance of the North American mainland can be seen in old maps. A 1762 print of the West Indies by Thomas Kitchin, a London-based cartographer to King George III, shows the islands of the Caribbean accurately as they exist today, while Florida and portions of the southeast U.S. are inaccurate and almost unrecognizable. At that point in time, the Caribbean was vastly more important to Europe than the rest of North America. As part of an international treaty at the same time, France and England effectively swapped Canada for Grenada. Today nobody could comprehend such a trade as involving comparable values, but at the time the prominence of the sugar trade made it so.

World history can be traced, in part, through trade involving various commodities. That is certainly the case with the sugar trade. This trade originated in Brazil and it spread out across many of the Caribbean islands. A triangular shipping trade developed among the Americas, Europe and Africa. Ships would move sugar, rum and other commodities from the Americas to Europe, textiles and manufactured goods from Europe to Africa and slaves from Africa to the Americas. It was the need for labor to plant and harvest sugar cane in the Americas that drove the demand for slaves.

The actual volumes of sugar shipments to Europe during this period were large for the time, but inconsequential relative to modern drybulk movements. Brazil’s sugar production was concentrated in the Pernambuco region in the northeast where shipments between its port city of Recife and Amsterdam, the main sugar refining center, peaked in the 1640’s at 24,000 tons per year. An entire year’s export could readily fit within just one hold of thousands of modern bulk carriers that exist today. Because Brazil was not able to keep up with the demand from Amsterdam refiners for raw sugar, more sugar plantations were established throughout the islands of the Caribbean. Even with this expansion, the available production data from various islands suggests that total sugar exports from the Americas to Europe never exceeded 50,000 tons per year.

None of the Caribbean islands was a busier shipping center than the Dutch possesion of St. Eustatius, a small island in the northern portion of the Leeward Islands. In the mid-1700’s, St. Eustatius was effectively the economic hub of the Americas. By 1760, St. Eustatius was recording almost 3,000 ship arrivals each year at its port. Almost 20,000 merchants, sailors and slaves were crowded on a small island that acted as a relay point to many other Dutch controlled islands in the Caribbean. Plantations on St. Eustatius produced just 300 tons of sugar annually. Because its warehouses collected sugar produced on other islands, it exported 10,000 tons annually to Europe. The island also acted as a transshipment hub for tobacco, cotton and manufactured goods that came and left by ship. St. Eustatius was the foremost conduit through which the American colonists obtained guns and gunpowder from Europe required for the revolution. Nearly half of the wartime supplies used by the colonists came via this route. At the time, the British viewed St. Eustatius as one of the main reasons they were unable to achieve a quick victory.

Of interest is the historical footnote that St. Eustatius was the site of the first formal recognition by a foreign government of what would become the U.S. On November 16, 1776, a merchant ship flying the flag of the Continental Congress entered the port. On the orders of the governor, the guns of the local garrison fired a welcoming salvo, becoming the “first salute”. The Dutch governor desired to trade and engage in commerce with that merchant ship.

From the 1500’s through the early 1900’s, the wooden barrel was the standard marine shipping container for transporting cargo. Typically made of wooden staves bound by wooden or metal hoops, the traditional barrel had a liquid capacity of 42 gallons. Barrels were ubiquitous and moved almost everything. Liquids such as rum and wine as well as a large array of dry goods and commodities moved in barrels. The major reason barrels were effective containers was that the round shape allowed it to be rolled by one man. This could be done when it was upright by rolling along the bottom edge or when it was on its side where only the small midsection touched the ground. The barrel shape made for efficient loading and unloading on a ship via a plank. While the weight of a loaded barrel would vary based on what it held, on average seven barrels would typically hold one ton of cargo.

This same wooden barrel also became the first container that was frequently interchanged between transport modes with the advent of the steam age. The barrel put on a steam train or Erie Canal barge would then be put on one of Fulton’s steam powered paddlewheel ships. Hundreds of millions of wooden barrels were made. Coopers, the term for the craftsmen who constructed barrels with wooden staves and metal loops, made up one of the largest occupations from the 1500’s through the 1800’s. The wooden barrel would remain the main method of moving a wide assortment of goods on ships through the early 1900’s before they were replaced with cardboard boxes.

The industrial revolution in the early 1800’s triggered an increase in trade, first via sail and then via the revolutionary technology of steam power. Both the fast clipper ships and the faster steamships, combined with an explosion in migration and communal living, which in effect made the world smaller, made trade more viable. These advances in transport technology eroded what some historians have referred to as the tyranny of distance. It is interesting to note that steam powered cargo ships did not immediately replace sail powered cargo ships. Initially, early steamships focused on passengers. Their primary cargo was mail. A series of progressive improvements in steamship technology changed that, in time for an outside event to usher in the larger transition of cargo from sail to steam.

The industrial revolution began in England. With England’s resulting economic dominance, it is not surprising that the largest trading lane in what has been referred to as the first age of globalization was between England and Asia. Trade between Asia and both Europe and the Americas quickly followed. Even after steamships were used on other routes, the Far Eastern trade was still dominated by fast sailing ships. Few steamships could carry enough coal to go around Africa enroute to Asia. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 immediately changed that dynamic. Steamships could readily handle that significantly shorter voyage. As a result, the canal opening was the death knell for moving cargo via sail.

The apex of trade via sailing ships with Asia would occur in the 1800’s in the form of Clipper ships. There has never been ships so directly and completely associated with cargo movements as the Clipper ships. They were so named based on their ability to “clip along” and get as much speed as possible from available wind. This usually translated into speeds of 12 knots or better for ships that typically carried 800 to 1,000 tons of cargo.

The number of Clipper ships crested in 1852 when there were some 200 in service. American and British shipyards were the dominant builders of Clipper ships. Trade routes to and from China involved celebrated clippers like the Cutty Sark, Sea Witch, Thernopylae and Pride of Baltimore. Clipper races were key news items of the day and captivated the public. It was the Clipper ships of the Americans that ruled the seas.

In 1849, the Sea Witch sailed from Hong Kong to New York in just 74 days. That record would stand for over 150 years until it was surpassed recently by only a slight margin by a modern sailboat with obvious navigational and communications advantages. The skipper of that modern sailboat is a friend. His accomplishment in beating the long standing sailing record is significant, but he also has complete respect for the sailing abilities of the captain and crew of the Sea Witch for what they accomplished.

A granular insight into the actual cargo moved on these grand cargo sailing ships came from research inspired by a beautiful print I have in my study of the City of Mobile, an American clipper ship named after my hometown. When that ship arrived in London in 1845, an article on it appeared in the Illustrated London News. The article said that it arrived at the East India Docks with the largest cargo of wheat to ever leave America or enter London, or ever enter any port in the world, as well as a significant quantity of barreled flour and stores. The quantity of wheat was described as equal to 9800 quarters. That imperial measure is equivalent to 28 pounds, which means that this world-record wheat cargo shipment was equivalent to some 137 tons. While the article didn’t say what the wheat was stored in, it was most likely either in burlap bags or in the barrels a diverse range of other cargo was stored in. We know it must have been a wide range of cargoes as the ship was described as being equal to 1,734 net registered tons with three decks for cargo and passenger accommodations on the top deck. The article said the ship would sail next for Liverpool in what was no doubt the first of many additional ports of call in Europe. While the ship was in London, it was inspected by the most respected captains in the port and pronounced to be the best-built and fastened ship ever to enter the port of London. Given that London was then the maritime capital of the world, that pronouncement underscores the allure of the fast clipper ships.

The most important port in the U.S. during the clipper ship era in the early to mid 1800’s was Baltimore, which had a well-protected natural harbor. Second to Baltimore was Boston, another city with a great harbor whose commerce also benefited from its proximity to Nantucket Island, the whaling capital of the world at that time. The shipping and commerce in both Baltimore and Boston at that time handily eclipsed the shipping and commerce of New York City.

While New York City also had an extraordinary natural harbor that was the bedrock of its own development, it would take another maritime event to propel it well ahead of all its rivals. With the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, New York City became the port with a direct and cost efficient water link to much of the Midwestern states. The Erie Canal provided an all-water route from the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, which then flowed down to New York City. The commerce that new route directly produced and the multiplier effect it had on the development of New York City was significant. The canal allowed the transport of goods for one-tenth the previous cost and less than half the previous time. The Erie Canal is an excellent example of the economic prime mover effect of shipping. With the beneficial effects of the Erie Canal, New York City quickly eclipsed both Baltimore and Boston as the center of shipping and was transformed into the commercial capital of the country.

Shortly after the peak of the clipper ship era, faster, more reliable steamships increasingly displaced sailing ships. Robert Fulton had in 1807 developed a commercially successful steamboat that moved passengers from New York City to Albany and back, a round trip of 300 miles, in 62 hours. Fulton would go on to improve designs for steamboats that changed the transportation landscape of the U.S. It was Fulton’s initial innovation that played a key role in the industrial revolution that swept the U.S. and Europe as manufacturing processes transitioned from hand to machine. While Fulton wasn’t the inventor of the steam engine or even steamboats, which were first used in England, his high profile adaption of both captured the attention of the public. Steam engines like the one Fulton used to power steamboats were soon being adapted for industrial uses to manufacture products. As steam engines became larger, they were put on ships that would venture across the oceans.

The Savannah, an American built and owned hybrid sailing ship and sidewheel steamer, was the first steamship to make a transatlantic crossing in 1819. The Savannah was a small ship with a 98’ length and gross registered tons of 320. The steam engine that turned the sidewheels was rated at 90 horsepower. President James Monroe was in Savannah, Georgia and the vessel owner made him aware of his plans and invited him to tour the ship. President Monroe took a short excursion aboard the Savannah and later dined aboard the ship, expressing enthusiasm for the prospect of an American steamship being the first to cross the Atlantic. The vessel departed Savannah the next day and arrived in Liverpool just under 30 days later. Upon leaving port and at several key points along the way, it passed other ships. Those who saw volumes of smoke coming from the vessel assumed they were witnessing an historic crossing. The Savannah was, in fact, the first ship with sidewheels to cross the Altantic. However, her steam engine had operated for a total of only 80 hours during the crossing, or only 11% of the time. The large majority of the power for the Savannah to make her historic crossing had been provided by the wind. It would be almost twenty years before another ship would make a transatlantic crossing using steam power alone.

Even after the appearance of steamships, clipper ships grew in relative importance. The peak of the clipper ship era was more than 30 years after the historic transatlantic voyage of the Savannah.

The transition from sail to primarily steam took more than five decades. A key leader in that transition was the British Royal Navy. With the advent of steam propulsion technology, the British Navy recognized the operational benefits steam power offered. Steam powered warships were faster with more consistent speeds. They were also less subjected to the weather in transiting the seas and less dependant on wind conditions. Of great importance, they had better access to inland waterways.

Employing this new technology required that the British Navy had sufficient access to coal to fuel its steam engines. England’s vast coal resources made getting coal in its homeports easy. To ensure that its ships would have access to coal around the globe, the British Navy systematically supported the establishment of coal bunkering facilities at strategic ports around the world. The catalytic role of establishing this infrastructure would, in turn, play a role in the transition from sail power to steam power among cargo ships.

In 1838, the British vessel Great Western became the first purpose-built steamship to regularly cross the Atlantic. Isambard Brunel, who also played a key role in developing England’s railroads as well as its bridge and tunnel infrastructure, designed the ship. Brunel’s designs revolutionized public transport and modern engineering earning him recognition as one of the most ingenious engineers in history. The Great Western was an iron strapped, wooden, side-wheel paddle steamer that was 252’ long and documented at 1,700 gross registered tons. She had four masts to hold sails that were not just used for auxiliary power, but also used in rough weather to reduce rolling in order to ensure that both paddles remained in the water.

As she was being built, critics claimed that the Great Western was simply too big. However, Brunel, who also headed up the investor group that owned the Great Western, was both an extraordinary naval architect and an astute businessman. Brunel knew that the carrying capacity of a ship increases as the cube of its dimensions, while the water resistance only increases as the square of its dimensions. Larger ships, therefore, were much more cost efficient per unit of cargo carried.

These simple principles, embraced first by Brunel, become the key catalyst in the development of modern cargo ships. The Great Western met and exceeded expectations in its transatlantic service. That success quickly resulted in the development of additional paddle steamers. In its initial two years of service, the Great Western’s average westbound crossing to New York took 16 days for an average speed of 7.9 nautical miles per hour, or knots. The eastbound crossing to Bristol took 13 days for a 9.6-knot average speed.

Based on the initial success of the Great Western, Brunel and his investor group sought growth. Keenly aware of the scale economics of larger ships, Brunel designed what would be the world’s largest vessel. He first determined that this ship would have an iron hull rather than the traditional wooden hull. The industrial revolution made iron more cost effective. Iron hulls were not subject to dry rot, were less bulkly, and had greater structural strength. The practical limit on the length of a wooden hull ship was some 300’, but that was not the case with iron hulled ships. Brunel embraced iron-hulled technology and each draft design of his new vessel was bigger than the draft design before. When construction of the new ship, which was to be named the Great Britain, began, Brunel’s plans called for it to be 320’ long with a capacity of 3,400 tons, making it 42% larger than any ship in existence.

As the Great Britain was being built, Brunel made a major design change. He abandoned the side-wheel paddle engines, already half constructed, for new engines built around a propeller propulsion system. Only months earlier the first screw propelled ship had gone into service. Brunel focused on ways of improving the efficiency of Great Britain’s paddle wheels and immediately became interested in the new propeller technology. After making arrangements to conduct tests with the propeller ship using different propeller designs, he became convinced of its superiority as a propulsion system. To his investor group Brunel argued that, even with the increase in cost and construction time, the design change was well worth it.

Brunel reasoned that a screw propeller offered six distinct advantages over side-wheel paddles. Screw propulsion machinery was lighter, thereby improving fuel economy. The machinery could be placed lower in the hull, which lowered the ship’s center of gravity and kept the vessel stable. Because they required less room, propeller engines allowed more cargo to be carried. By eliminating the bulky side-wheel paddles, the ship met with less water resistance and was more maneuverable. Unlike paddle wheels whose water depth was changing constantly depending on waves at sea and cargo onboard, a propeller was always completely submerged and operating at full efficiency. Finally, screw propulsion machinery was actually less expensive than side-wheel paddle machinery in comparisons involving both as original alternatives. Brunel’s arguments were persuasive and the Great Britain was built with the new propeller technology. The building of the Great Britain by Brunel, the man who was effectively the first naval architect focused on cargo ships, would have far reaching consequences. Wood was replaced by iron and propellers allowed the real power of steam engines to be harnessed.

In 1843, the Great Britain, the longest and largest capacity ship in the world, was launched amid much fanfare. The biggest steam engines ever built provided it with power. Due to all of its superlatives and because it embraced new technology and many engineering firsts, some of which had yet to be actually tried, the Great Britain was viewed with a combination of both awe and skepticism. One leading British newspaper referred to it as “the greatest experiment since Creation”. The ship was christened before thousands of spectators by Prince Albert, who arrived on a royal train from London conducted by Brunel, and the launching of the Great Britain was covered by newspapers around the world.

After further refinements by Brunel on the size and shape of the propeller, the Great Britain generally achieved speeds in the 10 to 11 knot range in transatlantic service. The large iron hull proved more than satisfactory. Brunel had designed it with massive redundant strength by including ten longitudinal iron girders installed along the keel. This technique paved the way for the larger iron vessels to come. The Great Britain embodied the replacement of both wood by iron and paddle wheels by propellers. The 1846 grounding would curtail the transatlantic service of the Great Britain but not the type of ship that it had ushered in. Today, the Great Britain floats alongside the dock in Bristol as a museum ship. In a 2002 poll of the one hundred greatest Britons in history, Isambard Brunel was ranked second after Winston Churchill and ahead of Charles Darwin, William Shakespeare and Sir Isaac Newton.

The difference in how power is translated into propulsion as ships transitioned from paddle wheels to propellers is highlighted by the prefix that comes before a vessel’s name. Most people assume that the prefix SS before a vessel’s name refers to steam ship. That is only partially correct as SS actually refers to screw steamer. The initial steamships had the prefix of PS for paddle steamer

Recreational sailing remains to this day an activity enjoyed by millions of people around the world. While technology has resulted in enhancements, the basic mechanics of using wind power to propel a sailboat are largely unchanged for thousands of years. To be on a small sailboat offshore is one of the most intensive interactions one can have with nature with the energy of the water below you and the power of the wind above you. Its interesting to note that recreational sailing was a passion of Albert Einstein’s throughout his life. He craved sailing in his spare time and it is easy to believe he sorted out some of his groundbreaking thoughts while sailing. After all, the elemental natural forces that make sailing possible are directly linked to the elemental forces that Einstein’s genius recognized as binding the universe together. He once told a reporter that “atomic power is no more unnatural than when I sail my boat on Saranac Lake.”

The advent of steam engines displaces sailing vessels, initially at a slow pace via paddle wheels and later at an accelerated pace as propeller based propulsion systems were developed and refined. The steel hull, screw propeller driven prototype general cargo ship that was introduced by the Great Britain would effectively be the preferred model for the next one hundred years. Similar vessels consistently got a little bigger, eventually growing to about four times the capacity of the Great Britain based on the simple principle that Brunel had realized, namely that vessel capacity was a cube function while vessel construction and operating costs were a square function. This principle resulted in larger ships that reduced overall costs per cargo unit. That same principle later moved into overdrive during the post-World War II period as specialization gave birth to the modern cargo vessel age and ships exponentially bigger than Brunel could ever have imagined were built.

Moving a diverse range of cargoes from and to dozens of ports was how cargo was transported, whether by clipper ships or by steamships. Despite the difference in size of the vessels, how cargo moved in them and how they were loaded and unloaded was fundamentally the same — unspecialized and inefficient. A picture in my study is a constant reminder of this. It shows a Waterman Steamship vessel in the 1930’s with dozens of large wooden barrels on the pier waiting to be loaded one by one on the vessel. This operation was fundamentally not too different than the loading operation of smaller vessels four hundred years earlier.

One of the first commercial shipments of oil was from the U.S. to Europe in 1861 aboard a conventional sailing ship when kerosene was moved in wooden barrels. Oil and related products continued to move in barrels and cans. As trade in oil expanded, the cost of moving it in barrels and cans promoted the development of bulk transport of oil, which occurred in the early part of the twentieth century. With that development, tankers became the first example of a special purpose ship.

Much of the oil trade towards the end of the 1800’s involved moving Russian crude oil on small early tankers from the Black Sea to the Far East. Initially these vessels were not allowed to transit the Suez Canal as they were deemed to be a fire or explosion risk. However, an enterprising importer asked the Suez Canal Company for the specifications of a tanker it would allow through the canal. Three early tankers with separate compartments for moving oil and a deadweight capacity of 5,010 tons were constructed. These were the first tankers of the Tank Syndicate, a startup company that eventually morphed into the Royal Dutch Shell Company, the giant integrated oil company that is currently the largest corporation in the world in terms of revenues. In 1892, one of those vessels became the first tanker to transit the Suez Canal.

The relative smallness of the early tanker sector in 1907 was evident by the fleets of the two largest oil companies in the world. Royal Dutch Shell had 24 steam driven oil tankers and Standard Oil, the forerunner of Exxon and many other oil companies, had 20 tankers, 16 of which were sail powered. Most of these early tankers were small and involved mainly in coastal trade. The international oil trade remained fairly insignificant until World War II.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, most cargo ships were steam powered. Few vessels traveled at more than 10 knots. The British Empire had been built largely on the strength of the British Navy, which still ruled the seas. Great Britain was also the world leader in terms of both its merchant marine fleet and shipbuilding industry. In 1915, the worldwide merchant marine fleet totaled 49 million tons. With an average of around 6,000 tons per vessel, the world’s merchant fleet was comprised of slightly more than 8,000 vessels. Of this tonnage, 44% were British flag, 12% were American flag, 10% were German flag and 5% were French flag. All of the other registries combined totaled only 29% of the world’s merchant marine fleet.

The breakout of World War I was a catalyst for shipbuilding activity by the Allies, particularly in the U.S. By early 1917, over 200 Allied merchant marine ships per month were being destroyed by Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare. The U.S. built over one thousand cargo ships, providing as much tonnage for the war effort as the British shipyards. Large parts of the hulls of many of those ships were built with wood. An estimated 40% of the ships were sunk. At the end of the war, many of the ships in better condition were laid-up as a ready reserve fleet to be used should another crisis develop. As a consequence, the impact that cargo ships built during World War I had on the world’s merchant marine fleets after the end of the war was fairly minimal.

No ships were more directly and completely associated with cargo movements and world trade prior to the post World War II period than the Clipper ships. Throughout much of the nineteenth century they dominated the economic activity of many coastal cities in the U.S. The southern tip of Manhattan was full of clipper ships unloading their goods onto horse drawn wagons. Boston and Baltimore and San Francisco were similar hubs of marine commerce and activity. Local newspapers would report on their front page what ships were expected and from where they were coming from. Almost everyone was aware of the comings and goings of these magnificent sailing vessels. The public would turn out in large numbers to see them.

During the clipper ship era, shipping and everything related to it was America’s largest industry other than agriculture by millions of small farmers. Shipping was the first industry with large scale within a sole enterprise. Many large companies that exist in America today can and do translate their heritage back to a shipping company in early America. The key point is that cargo shipping two centuries ago had a significantly higher profile with the American public than it does today.

Yesterday’s much celebrated clipper ships are dwarfed in any comparisons with their much lesser know modern day counterparts. The capacities of those famous cargo ships do not move the needle compared to the capacity of today’s cargo ships. Even at the top of the Clipper ship era, the collective cargo capacity of those ships was just .01% of the cargo capacity of today’s cargo ships.

The reason for this dichotomy is simple and complex at the same time. Relative to today’s trade levels, there was not much world trade prior to World War II. This dearth of trade was not for lack of a large number of steam powered cargo ships. In 1936, there were almost five thousand general cargo vessels. But with an average of just 1/13th of the cargo capacity of a typical vessel today and geometrically less efficient processes for loading and unloading vessels, this much smaller merchant fleet could handle only a small fraction of the volume of cargo that can be moved with today’s fleet. Changes in vessel size and productivity of moving cargo revolutionized shipping efficiency in the post World War II period.

The term revolution is often overused, but is an appropriate description of what occurred in cargo shipping post World War II. The changes that took place following World War II was more far reaching than anything since cargo first moved by ship 5,000 years ago in Egypt. The men profiled in this book were at the forefront of technological advances in building ships, process advances in loading and unloading ships and business practice advances in how those ships were deployed and operated. Collectively, the advances spawned by these entrepreneurs resulted in the development of the modern cargo shipping industry that would be the major driver in the sharp growth of world trade.

In 1936 the U.S.’s total total trade was $4.2 billion. By 2017 the U.S.’s total total trade had grown to $5.2 trillion. This extraordinary growth in postwar trade, equivalent to a 9.1% annual rate over the entire 81-year period, is well known. What is broadly unappreciated is the direct role modern cargo vessels played as a catalyst for the explosion in world trade by exponentially improving on the cost efficiency of moving cargo.

World War II was the catalyst that laid the groundwork for the modern cargo shipping era. Economists know that war is a great economic prime mover. It was that and more with regard to cargo shipping. The war initiated a staggering increase in the metrics of cargo shipping.

This revolution in cargo shipping started in the U.S. with the building of the Liberty ships. In the 10 years prior to 1940, the U.S. built a total of 23 cargo ships. In the next 5 years, that number increased by a factor of more than 200 times as the U.S. built over 4,600 cargo ships. Those ships and the techniques developed in building them, and the refinements inspired by them, gave birth to the modern cargo shipping era.

The world’s pre-war merchant marine fleet was dominated by British, American, French, Italian and Japanese vessels. These vessels were typically in the 6,000 deadweight ton range. Today’s largest vessels carry more than 60 times as much cargo as those vessels. As a result of giant leaps in cargo handling productivity as a function of specialized design, today’s ships are also typically in and out of port in less than a day compared to days or even weeks required by previous vessels.

The marine cargo that moved pre-war was prosaic. It had little to do with relative costs and more to do with products that were not available otherwise. Key exports by the U.S. were grain, cars and tractors while key imports were wine from France, marble from Italy and coffee from Brazil. The products that were shipped were typically viewed as unique and differentiated. Marble from Italy arrived in the U.S. with a hefty freight charge. The concept of outsourcing and transferring production to another location to take advantage of labor or other input costs simply did not exist at that time.

Early cargo ships differed in two fundamentally important ways from modern cargo ships. Early vessels were small and generally lacked specialization. Their smallness and their design as general cargo vessels translated into much higher cargo costs. Marine transportation results in significant cost economies of scale as vessels get larger. Specialization by cargo type results in better utilization of available vessel space and also sharply reduces the time and cost involved in loading and unloading vessels, both of which contribute to better cost economics. Containerization was where specialization would have the most pronounced impact. It was the great equalizer, allowing a wide variety of cargo to move in the most efficient manner.

These early cargo vessels would spend weeks in port loading a broad array of cargo. Liquids in barrels, a variety of other types of cargo in barrels, cargo in an endless variety of boxes and crates and grain in bags would all be manhandled aboard in a time consuming and costly loading operation involving cargo boons and shipboard winches. Nothing was unitized and there was very little similarity from winching aboard one net of cargo to the next. Each presented its own issues and challenges. Carpenters were needed constantly to construct wooden bulkheads to both separate cargo and prevent dangerous shifting while the vessel was at sea.

Dozens of men engaged in backbreaking manual labor would be swarming all over the vessel. Muscle power alone was involved in the tedious job of stowing and securing cargo. Large gangs of longshoremen were needed throughout a ships time in port. In many respects, up until the 1950’s vessels were loaded and unloaded in ways similar to how they had been fifteen hundred years earlier by the Romans. Each barrel or box or crate or bag would be moved from a warehouse and placed in cargo nets or on pallets or cargo trays to be winched aboard. An equally time consuming process of moving the crate or bag or barrel to where it would be stowed on the ship occurred when it was onboard.

Besides vessel size, the main difference between the 1950’s and earlier times, even going back to the Roman era, was how those barrels, boxes, crates or bags got on and off vessels. For hundreds of years, a man walking up a plank carried each item. The limit to what could be loaded each time was what a man could carry. This was basically the limit for thousands of years. Various rigging was developed that allowed multiple items to be swung on a vessel in a cargo net, but the items still had to be individually put in the net and stowed on the vessel. With the advent of steamships, that rigging took the form of derricks on the deck that could be adjusted to winch cargo onboard. When these derricks were combined with wire cable and powered winches, the weight of cargo that could be swung onboard was increased. However, it still remained an intensely laborious task with each individual item generally handled multiple times as the vessel was being loaded. Manual labor and muscle power were still the primary ingredients to loading and unloading cargo vessels.

Determining where and when to load each ports unique mix of cargo to avoid damage from the effect of either other cargo or the occasional ingress of sea water required great care amd skill. For instance, before the development of modern fertilizers, one of the larger cargoes was dried manure shipped to farmers. Most workers tasked with loading and unloading vessels, known as longshoreman or dockers, knew that water degraded that cargo and created a bad smell. To avoid this problem, bundles of dried manure were marked “Stow High In Transit”. The resulting acronym found its way into popular language as an expression of something unpleasant.

A cargo vessel earns its revenue at sea by moving something from the origin port to the destination port. Port time is an inefficient use of vessel time. Despite loading only a very small fraction of the amount of cargo in today’s modern vessels, early cargo vessels always took much longer to load and unload. Cargo handling practices of the time and their lack of specialization resulted in inefficient use of the vessel, expensive stevedoring operations and high shipping costs.

As large as the difference from stevedoring and other inefficiencies was, an even larger cost disadvantage, compared to modern vessels, resulted from the small shipment sizes and the lack of scale economies evident in today’s vessels. Like Brunel recognized, as ships and cargo sizes get larger, costs do not rise much, resulting in ever decreasing shipping costs per equivalent unit. Those scale economies are significant and their absence burdened early cargo vessels.

The overall cost of shipping anything from one country to another is a built-in barrier to trade between those countries. Even if something can be produced in one country for less cost, shipping costs can make it non-competitive in another country. Prior to the modern era of large, specialized cargo vessels, total shipping costs were often equal to 50% or more of the value of the product being shipped. This large additional cost acted as a tangible barrier to trade between countries. Where shipping costs relative to product value was most important involved substitutable products that could be made in multiple locations. In those cases, relatively low shipping costs could energize trade.

In addition to the high direct cost of shipping, early cargo vessels also suffered cargo losses due to damage and pilferage. More damage resulted from the multiple times the cargo was handled as well as the lack of vessel specialization. Early cargo vessels also typically experienced more water damage at sea. Because of the large number of people involved in loading and unloading operations along with warehousing activities, pilferage and cargo theft was difficult to police.

Depending on the cargo, theft losses could be significant. Food and alcohol shipments were particularly tempting targets. It was not unusual for dockworkers to engage in on-board consumption of fruitcakes, candy or whiskey, which was particularly hard to prevent. Elaborate methods to steal scotch and other whiskey products existed. In New Jersey, for example, women were known to sew special pockets into the inside of their husbands jackets sized to allow a whiskey bottle to be concealed and not detected when they exited the vessel. The incidence of such theft almost always increased around Christmas and other holidays. Another indirect cost of cargo vessels was imprecise schedules, owing to inefficient cargo operations, which made it difficult to plan a precise timetable for exports and imports.

Between the high relative direct cost of shipping and the vagaries that resulted from damage, pilferage and imprecise schedules, prior to the modern vessel era moving cargo by sea was just for the intrepid. The vision of the nine individual pioneers chronicled in later pages would change that forever.

The September, 1937 edition of Fortune Magazine, the pre-eminent business periodical, was dedicated entirely to reviewing the U.S. flag shipping industry. It included specific shipping cost data that put the issue of relative costs then versus now into sharp perspective. That issue stated that the total cost to ship copper wire from New York to Brazil was $20.75 per ton in 1936. According to an inflation calculator available at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, that amount would be equivalent to $353.40 per ton in 2014. Today copper wire would be moved in a 20’ container where 38,000 pounds of wire, equal to 19 tons, could be loaded. That same 20’ container could be moved to Brazil today for $1,135, or the equivalent of $59.74 per ton. In other words, the relative cost of shipping today is just 1/6th of what it was. This random example is typical of the exponential advances in shipping cost efficiency across a myriad of cargoes.

That geometric reduction in the relative cost of shipping has rippled through the economies of the world and made trade possible now that was not possible in the past. Where that is most important is in the thousands of products that flow from one country to another seeking out the lowest costs in labor and other inputs. In those cases, shipping efficiency has resulted in countless arbitrages that have been a primary catalyst in increasing world trade. Today marine shipping has become so efficient that a product can be moved halfway around the world for less than it would cost to move that same product domestically. For example, a 40’ container of electronics can be moved from Shanghai to New York for $2,000 or approximately 1% of the value of the shipment. To move those same products domestically from Austin, Texas to New York would cost approximately $3,000. In that example, the international shipping costs are almost inconsequential. Shipping efficiency has made the manufacturing world smaller. Transport costs that were a barrier to world trade are now an enabler of world trade. The modern cargo shipping industry has energized David Ricardo’s two centuries old Theory of Comparative Advantage by significantly reducing trade friction in the form of shipping costs.

Paradoxically, the shipping industry was better known and a larger industry in relative terms prior to the efficiency of the modern vessel era. The September, 1937 edition of Fortune had a cover emblazoned with the smokestack logos of some 40 U.S. flag shipping companies. The 200-page issue noted that the annual revenue of the U.S. shipping companies was approximately $210 million, an amount that was similar to the entire soft-drink industry at the time. At that time, the U.S. flag shipping companies engaged in both domestic and foreign trade with the 953 cargo vessels they operated. Those vessels represented one-fifth of the world’s merchant marine fleet. However, those vessels were miniscule in size relative to today’s cargo ships. Today, the shipping industry is a more important cog in the world’s econony than it has ever been but ironically its profile and relative fortunes have diminished considerably.

Another aspect of shipping that increased its profile in the past was passenger shipping as a means of actual transport. In 1936, an estimated 679,000 people made transatlantic passages and an equal number went to other destinations. Passenger shipping as a means of transport has all but disappeared today, having been displaced by the speedier and more efficient airplane.

Despite this increase in efficiency, or in part because of it, in times past the shipping industry was better known to the public than it is today. The increased efficiency of the industry has resulted in its fading from the public view as ships spent less time in port and more time at sea where they were out of sight.

World War II was the line of demarcation for both world trade and the modern cargo vessel era. It all started with Henry Kaiser’s Liberty vessels and their transition to merchant marine use. The immediate availability of thousands of breakbulk ships at relatively low prices energized shipping and started the industry on the path of bigger and better ships. The construction techniques that were developed in building Liberty ships, as well as the use and conversion of the vessels themselves, were the catalysts that spurred the development of specialized and larger vessels. Breakbulk vessels that moved most types of cargo on their multiple decks gave way to specialized vessels, the most important ones of which were container ships, bulkers and tankers. As vessel designs and shipyard capabilities became more refined, ships grew larger and delivered economies of scale. The lower overall costs of those vessels made trade possible where it was not possible before due to shipping costs. The vessels were the chicken and world trade was the egg, not vice versa. Shipping costs went from 50% or more to 1% or less of the value for some products, and products that were not even moved before are now moved in great quantities.

Ships were trending up in average size prior to and during World War II, but the shipping pioneers profiled in this book drove the real increase in size during the postwar period. While there are now 17,554 cargo ships longer than 600’, there was not even a single cargo ship in that category at the end of the war. That was not for lack of engineering capability. After all, what are still some of the tallest buildings and biggest dams had been built by then. The limitation was on the demand side and the ships were right sized for the trade occurring at the time. The lack of specialization resulted in significant port time and that was also a constraint on size. As specialization took hold with the new container and bulk carrier categories and became broader within the tanker category, that constraint was reduced. The transition from an industrial shipping model driven by long term contracts to a supply driven model would also play a role. It was, however, the insight and actions of these extraordinary men that set in motion a relentless climb in ship sizes across categories. As vessels got bigger, owners would often chose to match that size with new orders just to stay competitive. More often than not, this led to an over supply of vessel capacity that would push down rates. Chronic excess supply is certainly bad for the economic results of the shipping industry, but the rates that result from it are a further positive catalyst for trade volume.

There is a void in the historical account of the role played in world affairs by these giant ships and the individual giants who created them. These efficient leviathans have been the greatest prime mover of world trade. Without them, world trade would be a small fraction of what it is today and the achievement of world peace would be eminently more challenging. The revolution that has occurred quietly and over decades in the postwar period has benefited mankind immensely.