This contribution represents an attempt at a first outline of an art history of late medieval ship models and their contexts of use. Focusing on the mid-thirteenth through early sixteenth centuries, an age of rapidly expanding horizons, this study examines the design and role of miniature vessels at the intersection between devotional practices, courtly culture, modes of patronage and technological

Materials that were born digital, and printed materials that have been digitized, have aided an updated examination of nineteenth-century US whaling voyages’ financial returns. Items included the American Offshore Whaling Voyages dataset from whalinghistory.org, The Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchant’s Transcript, a congressman’s speech and a state’s census reports. These works and others, with

Using vessels and sailors from the South Funen Archipelago as a case study, this article examines the relationship between smuggling and sailors in Danish maritime culture between 1950 and 1990. Throughout the period, small-scale smuggling was considered a legitimate activity for sailors if done according to certain rules. Smuggling was largely portrayed as a sport grounded in tradition, not as an

Henry Eccles, in classic studies on logistics, describes the dynamics of strategic procurement in the supply chain stretching from home countries to military theatres of operations. Naval authorities and industrialists concerned with Japanese aggression before and after Pearl Harbor looked towards developing shipbuilding capacity on North America’s Pacific Coast. The region turned into a volume producer

This paper presents the first comprehensive history of Felis catus, the domestic cat, on Pitcairn Island. It includes detailed documentation of the cats and their status on the island, from settlement by H.M.A.V. Bounty mutineers in 1790 through the present time. The domestic cats of Pitcairn Island are worthy of study because they are inextricably linked to the island’s natural, cultural and maritime

The Napoleonic years in Holland, 1806–1813, were a time of trouble and turmoil. The Dutch republican polity was ended when Napoleon proclaimed his younger brother Louis King of Holland in June 1806. In 1810, Holland even ceased to exist as an independent state, when it was incorporated in the French Empire. The Dutch also suffered a severe economic crisis after 1806, as a result of the Continental

Using unpublished documentation collected from Spanish archives located in Seville, this article establishes the Basque origin of the Victoria, protagonist of the first circumnavigation of the globe. The article also assesses the suitability for transoceanic voyages of a Basque vessel of the early sixteenth century through a comparative analysis of the five ships that participated in the expedition

The Jan Maria was a Dutch schooner that, in 1883, en route from the Baltic to its home port, was forced to jettison cargo during a fierce storm, which resulted in a General Average (GA) procedure. GA refers to a method that redistributes damages that were deliberately inflicted by the master, in order to save the ship and its cargo, among all those parties that benefited from the action. The report

A key ingredient in New England’s shipping successes was the speed with which its vessels completed their voyages. The principle research on this subject was completed by Gary Walton and published in its first form in 1967. Walton was ahead of his time in identifying the importance of a detailed study of colonial shipping and linking it to a broader Atlantic World. He draws several conclusions. First

Oil pollution damage caused by oil spills at sea generally occurs on a large scale across numerous regions and countries, causing significant harm to marine ecosystems as well as worldwide economic loss. The costs are so severe in many instances that the owner of the ship responsible for the pollution cannot afford to pay compensation to those who have suffered loss. As a consequence, the need to cover

The Great War had a major impact on port activity at Dakar in Senegal. It increased bunkering and pushed up demand for daily labourers to provide an adequate service to the allied navies. This article analyses the changes in labour organization in the port during World War I. Based on archival sources held in the National Archives of Senegal, this study explores the ways in which the colonial administration

Debates between advocates of micro-history and global history often revolve around the level of detail and the scale of the unit of analysis—pointillism in a small frame as against the broad brush across a large canvas. But, of course, the two approaches are not incompatible, for a forensic analysis of an event, individual or source material can illustrate much broader issues and yield insight into

In January 2019, Koreans controlled 1,647 vessels and 76,701,517 deadweight, placing Korea as the world’s seventh largest shipowning country. In this article, the author reviews the contribution of the education of upper-class marine officers to the development of Korean shipping industry during the period 1948–1982. This study is organized into four main parts. In the first section, the role of human

Controversy over the expansion of pound netting in the largest US fisheries of the late nineteenth century marked an early conflict between those who considered fisheries a commons and those who sought to establish property rights in a fishery. Pound-netters physically staked out a specific part of the sea for their exclusive use, and their conception of their property rights resulted in significant

Sailing Master Philip Brum executed the decisive manoeuvre that won the Battle of Plattburgh. He would later die of wounds he received in the battle. His widow Susan Brum undertook a public campaign for a widow’s pension, but never mentioned her role in nearly destroying her husband’s naval career and getting him dismissed from his post with the New York gunboat flotilla and reassigned to the campaign

This article concerns the maritime dimension of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It presents an analysis of NATO’s past naval experience and key maritime achievements to gauge the extent to which they have contributed to the organization’s longevity, and to question whether strengthening its maritime dimension would affect the organization’s durability. The main findings of the research

This article examines naval surveying voyages undertaken between 1815 and 1860 by Phillip Parker King, Francis Price Blackwood, Owen Stanley and Henry Mangles Denham to discuss the improvements to the navigation of the Inner and Outer shipping routes along the Great Barrier Reef. The Inner Route lay between Australia’s east coast and the western edge of the reefs while the Outer Route was situated

This article reassesses the sailing Royal Navy’s treatment of homoerotic crimes. Historians have argued that same-gender sexual contact was rare and loathed on naval vessels, and that trials were consequently uncommon but produced exceedingly harsh outcomes. Drawing on new archival research, this paper reveals that naval actors had more varied and complex attitudes towards the homoerotic and that courts

The composition of this issue of the International Journal of Maritime History differs from its 77 predecessors in two respects. First, the reviews section is much shorter than normal due to the constraints imposed on the process of receiving and despatching review copies by the lockdown, and other measures deployed in the UK to limit the spread of Covid-19. Whereas our Reviews Editor, Martin Wilcox

1. Lisa Norling, ‘Sister Sailors’ and Sexuality on American Ships, 1820–80, AHA Sessions paper presented at the 124th Meeting of the American Historical Association, held 7 January 2010 in San Diego, USA. Retrieved from: https://aha.confex.com/aha/2010/webprogram/Paper4534. html (accessed 21 May 2020). sexual tensions mount on ships where men in authority have privileged access to a sex partner, by

projection and sea denial. Any 'brief guide to maritime strategy' ought to make a point of paying attention to and analysing these key concepts. A Brief Guide is more an interesting and stimulating commentary on classical maritime strategic thinkers than a true primer for beginners. It has some interesting things to say, for example developing Mahan's 'Fortress Fleet' idea to describe modern long-range

By the mid-eighteenth century, a distinctive maritime commerce in turtle and manatee products existed in the Caribbean. It was especially prevalent amongst English-speaking inhabitants, from the Cayman Islands and Jamaica to the outposts of Costa Rica, Nicaragua and the Colombian islands. Consumption patterns led to a variety of encounters between indigenous Indians, Europeans, Africans and Creoles

In late 1827, the crew of a Brazilian slaver, the Defensor de Pedro, mutinied and became pirates. The article follows the narrative of their attacks on ships, including the British Morning Star off Ascension Island in February 1828 and the American merchant Topaz. The Spanish authorities in Cádiz captured most of the crew and tried and executed them. Their captain, Benito de Soto, was tried and hanged

In 1903, the shipbuilder Yarrow & Company launched two experimental vessels of torpedo-boat design. During the Russo-Japanese War 1904–1905, Britain’s shipyards were directed not to accept foreign warship orders without authority. Yarrow was approached in mid-1904 by a prospective purchaser for a ‘fast yacht’, ostensibly on behalf of an American client but actually intended for Russian interests. An

This paper presents the first findings of a research investigation into understudied aspects of the touristic use of St. Petersburg’s cultural heritage, notably the development of the ‘Maritime Capital of Russia’ as a tourist brand. We argue that the effectiveness of this imaginary ‘Maritime City’ entails a complex approach based on the concept of ‘Maritimity’. Through this perspective we consider

This article re-appraises Liverpool’s involvement in the northern whaling trade c.1750-1823. It shows that the town ranked second amongst England’s whaling ports at different times during the 1750s, 1760s, 1770s, and again in 1794. This is much earlier and frequent than previously thought, and therefore has implications for our understanding of the geography of the nation’s whaling industry. Gordon

To make their business profitable, oil multinationals have to include in their strategies the transport of crude oil from production sites to markets. This article focuses on Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (Eni), the Italian state-owned oil company – a significant firm in the oil industry in the second half of the twentieth century – to show how oil businesses have overcome trading limitations by establishing

This article reappraises the experience of the civilian crews aboard Manx personnel vessels engaged in Operation Dynamo, and the contested aftermath. More than 20,000 troops were retrieved by nine ships of the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company, three of which were sunk in and off Dunkirk. There is more than enough material for a heroic narrative to emerge, yet a sense of scandal seems to cling to these

From the early decades of the twentieth century the distant-water fishing fleets relied more or less completely on the use of artificially manufactured ice for the preservation of their catches. Large-scale fossil-fuel powered ice factories in the main European fishing ports provided the ice taken onboard trawlers before they left port for the fishing trip. When the fishing grounds of the Barents Sea

This research note identifies the precursors for development of shipborne radar for commercial and military applications. It comprises three main sections: first, the evolution of radar starting from the first practical demonstrations provided by Russian professor Aleksandar Stepanovich Popov in 1897; second, the invention of radar in eight nations; and third, early experiments with shipborne radars

This research note outlines advances in the development of shipborne radar in Britain, Germany, the US and the Soviet Union. It focuses on the inventions and innovations in electronic and radars techniques for military and commercial applications on the eve of the Second World War, during the war and in the post-war period.

This article examines the Allied blockade around the Canary Islands as a response to the German cruiser war, since the crossroads of trade routes from the South Atlantic that took place in the Canary Islands allowed the German commerce-raiders to ensure, on the one hand, the encounter with numerous enemy merchant ships, objectives of this economic war and, on the other hand, the aid of the numerous

formulations’ (pp. 333, 335): the Tamil, Andhra, Odisha and Bengal coasts on the eastern seaboard of South Asia; the Thai, Malay, and Cham subregions in maritime Southeast Asia; and the Champa and Dai Viet realms along the eastern littoral of Mainland Southeast Asia. It would have been helpful to identify the Braudelian deep structures or elements of commonality of this internally diverse region (see

succeeds in building an integrated narrative rather than a repetitive one. Africa occupies an essential place in the book. After all, ‘one major achievement of Atlantic history is that it brings African history into the historiographical mainstream’ (p. 32). Another of its most salient features, repeatedly emphasised by its practitioners, is that Atlantic history goes beyond national and imperial boundaries

This article examines the migration trajectories of seafarers who worked on Belgian merchant vessels departing from the port of Antwerp during the second half of the nineteenth century. Based on the Antwerp seamen’s registry, which recorded information on voyages of seafarers on Belgian merchant vessels departing from Belgium’s main commercial port, this article shows that Antwerp’s maritime recruitment

The cooper, or barrel maker, on an American nineteenth-century commercial whaling voyage occupied such a valuable position that his life was not risked hunting whales. The cooper was both part of the action and distanced from it, enabling him to create, through his collection of casks of whale oil, the archive of the whaling voyage. A close reading of one cooper’s logbook from the 1850s allows us to

networks with their new neighbours too? And might not a similar mercantile intentionality be seen in Phoenician civic weight standards and coinage, reflecting perhaps each city’s different predominant trading partners or other commercial realities, as well as an effort to stand out from their commercial rivals? Cultic malleability also would have served these artisans and traders well. Whether the

Horatio Nelson is one of the greatest English heroes. His key exploits at the battles of the Nile and Trafalgar, which led to Britain’s maritime supremacy, are well known and celebrated in the 5.5m statue at the summit of Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square, London. The statue also showcases his most famous injuries, the injury to his right eye and arm amputation. However, as well as these he had a

certain images needing improvement (especially figures 0.1 and 4.4), and Chapter 4 would have benefitted from an annotated site plan, these are but minor issues in a work that is a valuable addition to the study of our underwater cultural heritage and a wreck directly linked to one of the most famous pirates in history – a rare discovery indeed in the shipwreck record. As Hanselmann rightly concludes:

In 1759, the VOC perpetrated a spectacular blunder. The Company’s management in Batavia took the decision to send an expedition to Bengal in order to hinder the EIC. The result was disastrous: the expeditionary force was defeated and the VOC could henceforth only continue its operations in Bengal at the sufferance of the British. Most historians have interpreted the expedition as ill-conceived. The

future magnetometer searches would be helpful and hand drawn site maps indicate that there is more work to complete the project of specific site identification. Results of the investigation suggest that the wreck site of the Convert is known based upon a cannon scatter, while the identity of the lost merchantmen remains more of a mystery. The limitations encountered in precisely identifying sites from

In November 1490, Bernardino Rizo da Novara issued the earliest printed anonymous portolano. Several months later, a print privilege was issued at the request of Andrea Badoer, a merchant. With the support of a newly published database of Venetian privileges, it is contended that Badoer sponsored the print and possibly provided the text of the portolano.

During the second half of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century, the most important European monarchies carried out reforms of their navies. Naval officers, who underwent a thorough process of professionalisation – training, education, functions, missions, promotions – were the best exponent of the new idea of the navy being put forward. Portugal was an eminently maritime

campaign to extend the US territorial limit to 200 nautical miles offshore. These women not only lobbied politically – with Edward Kennedy as an important ally – but organised to highlight and develop fish as a valuable and healthy part of the national diet. However, Davis’ book does not follow this women-centred trajectory. Instead, he provides a solid and detailed account of the so-called ‘cod wars’

Banditry was a recurring problem on the mountainous, island-dotted south coast of the Ming Empire (1368–1644). Scholars mainly discuss banditry on the south coast in the context of growing international trade and focus on the sixteenth century while largely ignoring endemic forms of banditry. This article studies the interaction of bandit groups, coastal communities and Ming officials during the fifteenth

In 1914, the New South Wales (NSW) Government decided to alter its fisheries policy, with the development of an offshore trawling industry supplanting support for inshore fishing as its key development objective. Accordingly, between 1915 and 1923 the NSW Government operated a commercial trawling industry designed to fish previously unexploited fish stocks on the state’s continental shelf. The State

The pirate, privateer and smuggler Jean Laffite dominated the mercantile life of New Orleans from 1809 to 1815 by exploiting the limited reach of a weak US government in its attempts to control over the frontier of the Louisiana Gulf Coast. Laffite’s status as a cultural anti-hero to the majority-French population, who disdained the American government and the war it initiated in 1812, saw much public

Before the Tudors, England had no standing navy, and relied heavily on its urban corporations for shipping and coastal defence. Despite their significant naval contribution to medieval England, eminent maritime communities such as the Cinque Ports were notorious for indiscriminate piratical activities, especially at a time when the sea was largely a lawless area, and crime could hardly be differentiated

This review essay appraises the first online exhibition in the world on gendered maritime labour. The 23-panel exhibition addresses the subject from a UK perspective and deals specifically with P&O’s women seafarers from the company’s earliest times to today. Initially the essay outlines the contents of each panel and its accompanying ‘treasure chests’, making wider points about P&O’s position compared

This paper is about Seafaring Lives in Transition, Mediterranean Maritime Labour and Shipping, 1850s–1920s (SeaLiT), an international research project funded by the ERC Starting Grant 2016. SeaLiT started in February 2017 and has a duration of five years. The project explores the transition from sail to steam navigation and its effects on seafaring populations in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea

This short paper considers ‘maritime history’ as a sub-discipline of history. It examines its origins and defines maritime history as the study of humankind’s relationship with the sea. It reviews that relationship and stresses the economic dimension and the need for an understanding of the business of shipping. The relevance of maritime history is examined in the contexts of the world today and historiography

prime-time weekly television magazine programme on the subject. On the day I am writing this editorial, a report in a normally reliable newspaper claims there are already more than 35 million users with the figure growing at the rate of 20 per cent per month (Rosen, 1994). This means that there is likely to be 75 million users by the time the editorial is published, and well over 250 million within

at its centre and its surroundings made up by the sea. Within this latter cosmology, one finds countless examples of this type of instantiations within Japanese maritime mythology. A good example of this, as argued by Rambelli in The Sea and the Sacred is whaling. ‘Whaling communities often understood whales as avatars of the god Ebisu, who arrived from across the sea to offer themselves in sacrifice

Over the last decades, maritime history has evolved into one of the most dynamic, self-standing disciplines among Greek historical studies. The production of books and papers that probe the multilevel human interaction with the sea has been prolific, while Greek maritime historians exhibit an ever-growing presence in the international fora. This paper argues that the roots of this unprecedented boom

In the first half of the nineteenth century, industrialization increased the demand for sponges extracted by the sponge fishermen of the Dodecanese Archipelago in the Aegean Sea. This had widespread repercussions, leading to increasing numbers of sponge fishermen, the geographical expansion of fishing zones and the evolution and diversification of fishing techniques. In this context, foreign sponge

After outlining the ways in which the parameters of the sub-discipline of maritime history changed during the 1980s and 1990s, the article focuses on why maritime history is a significant field of enquiry. Case studies of the Wilson Line, and the career of trawler skipper William Oliver, both based in Hull, exemplify the extraordinary and extreme extents to which human interaction with the marine environment

Following an ongoing debate, this paper argues that the future of the encompassing field of maritime history might proceed in three main directions: (1) convergence with the debates and the societal challenges for 2020–2030 and beyond, as defined by the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals; (2) merger with a broad field of maritime studies, multidisciplinary by nature; and (3) dialogue with different

illustrate the latter problem and to select a few examples that can be cited succinctly. The ‘heading’ is the direction in which the vessel is pointing, not the direction of sailing (31); a Gunter sector is not logarithmic (202) though his ‘rule’ is; the maximum altitude of the sun, even with an adjustment for declination, is not the latitude of the observer (39–40). Some problems might have been noticed

This paper is an introduction to the Black Sea Historical Statistics (BSHS), a database system which includes data on the commerce and shipping of the Black Sea from 1812 to 1914. BSHS is one of the main products of a larger interdisciplinary project that brought together researchers from several universities, research centres and institutes in order to examine the social and economic development of

This essay discusses the maritime Jews and their changing role in the fishing occupation in the Mediterranean sea. The first part presents the trends in historiography regarding the Thessalonikian Jewish fishermen in Ottoman and Post Ottoman periods. T