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

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.

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

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. The second section explores the maritime world of Jewish fishermen in Ottoman Thessaloniki between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. We will

The article provides a new version of Frank Broeze’s definition of maritime history by putting it in a framework of a sea. It gives a critical approach to the various histories of the seas and oceans that use the sea as a setting and not as a dynamic agent of change. It argues that the true history of the sea is a maritime history that entails maritime activities: on the sea (seamen, ships, navigation

A birch-bark canoe often conjures up images of French and British fur traders but its most important context comes from an association with the Native communities that invented the craft. This article describes Ojibwa birch-bark canoes’ place in a culture that was influenced by the lakes, ponds, rivers and streams that made up their environment throughout the Great Lakes region and Canada. Just as

What is maritime history? The answer for maritime historians is simple: maritime history is the study of the relationship of humankind with the sea. But the answer is not so simple for everyone, as maritime history means different things to different scholars. And then why maritime history? What difference does this sub-discipline of history bring to History? And something else that can be confusing:

Prof. Francesco Contente Domingues are noticeably absent. I would like to have seen the contribution ‘Tapestries of D. João de Castro’ (vol. 1, §16) acknowledge Sérgio Mascarenhas’s work as well as the recent museological project The Emperor’s Flowers. From Bulb to Carpet’, curated by Clara Serra and Teresa Nobre de Carvalho, which was held at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon between February

From the 1870s until roughly the outbreak of the First World War, cargoes of Norwegian ice were shipped to numerous French ports. The ice was crucial for the smooth operation of many industries, especially those in the alimentation sector. The Northern French port of Boulogne-sur-Mer, with its thriving fishing industry, became one of the main entry points for imported Norwegian natural ice blocks.

non-recovery of notes left in the Arctic with the success of an informal post office on Charles (now Floreana) Island in the Pacific. Yet, contrary to the impression she gives, news could be circulated between northern expeditions. For example, during the Franklin search Richard Collinson found notes from Robert McClure and John Rae, and a message left by Collinson himself was retrieved by an officer

The aim of this paper is to review the state of the International Maritime History Association (IMHA) and to consider its future directions. First, it outlines the history of the organisation; second, it considers the challenges facing the IMHA today; and finally it offers some preliminary ideas about planning for the future.

All museums do research into their collections. Some maritime museums, however, have started co-operations with adjacent universities and formed research bodies that initiated multidisciplinary research projects, as well as inaugurating PhD programmes and joining the transnational academic discourse. These initiatives are dependent on active promotion by research directors. Once these directors retire

people making a living by doing a stigmatised job, like sewerage workers? Such characterisations affect the way smuggled and trafficked women at sea are seen by legislators and campaigners. I would have preferred far more insightful indexing, interventionist editing, and some images. But even so these 366 pages are dense with crucial data. Most contributions are invaluably clear-sighted about gender’s

This research note explores the specifics of the Sound Toll Registers as a historical source. It accounts for the shipmasters who sailed into the Baltic but are largely absent from the Sound Toll Registers because they were not attributed to a port. A method of detecting these shipmasters is proposed, together with an explanation as to why this administrative practice developed.

A simplified production function framework is used to identify and analyze the international aspect of the maritime industries. The article focusses on four parameters – the market, the ship, the labour force and the shipowner – to discuss the development of the shipping industry. It is suggested that with the current technology, around 170 ships and less than 600 seafarers would have been needed to

Pius Malekanathil, Lotika Varadarajan and Amar Farooqui (eds), India, the Portuguese and Maritime Interactions, volume I: Science, Economy and Urbanity; volume II: Religion, Language and Cultural Expressions. New Delhi: Primus Books, 2019. (I), xxx + 626 pp.; (II), xxvi + 584 pp., maps, illustrations, notes, contributor biographies, index. Vol. I: ISBN 9789352906598, Rs 1,550 (hbk). Vol. II: ISBN 9789352906604

This article explores port typography and historiography. It reviews the expansion of port history as a field over the last 50 years, with increasing focus on the Early Modern, Medieval and Classical periods. Concentration on leading players has been replaced by interest in a range of ports, and comparisons at a local and regional level, although regrettably usually not at international or global level

The Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1905 was a watershed moment for the presence of the Royal Navy in the Pacific. Although it allowed the Royal Navy to concentrate its fleets in European waters, this strategy caused resentment due to the underlying fear of the ‘Yellow Peril’, especially in the British dominions of Australia and New Zealand. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance presented some challenges to the received