The Consulado of Bilbao, an offshoot of the Consulado of Burgos, was conceived in principle as a common space for merchants and shipmasters, traders and carriers, in which each group had a more or less important role to play. The Consulado's first ordinances, which included working regulations and which may therefore be considered its deed of foundation, were drafted in the sixteenth century and remained in effect until the mideighteenth century, although not without a number of modifications. These modifications were basically dictated by experience and referred almost exclusively to trade. Indeed, the fact that such modifications affected mercantile issues and not transport suggests the extent to which the interests of shipmasters and carriers lost ground to those of merchants and traders. Throughout the sixteenth century, and particularly in the first half of the seventeenth century, the maritime importance of Bilbao diminished as it gained prominence as a commercial centre.

The increasing influence of the group of merchants in the Consulado, a result of Bilbao's burgeoning economy and, to some extent perhaps, the decline of Burgos, enabled the city on the Nervión river to consolidate its position as a trading centre, and brought with it the typical consequences of such a development. The Consulado found itself dealing increasingly with litigation and disputes between merchants while at the same time having to develop new areas of mercantile activity and to adjust its ordinances to the new situation thus created.

Throughout the seventeenth century, all kinds of measures were introduced to endow Bilbao with the qualities necessary to compete, within its limits, on the same level as the major European trading centres. This meant, essentially, upgrading its commercial tribunal, to deal with the growing number of disputes; developing and regulating the credit market, consisting mostly of bills of exchange and promissory notes; keeping a close watch on the way the merchants as a whole worked, and even inspecting their books; providing the city with resources to tackle insurance and contraband-related problems; and, finally, strengthening its competitiveness on the international market by offering a tax situation as good as, if not better than, other places and consolidating its export offer, as a guarantee for the growing import activity.

Over the 300 years covered by this survey, the Danish realm went from being a major power in the northern Europe to a new status as one of the smallest countries in Europe. In the late sixteenth century the Danish king ruled present-day Denmark, Norway, southern and western Sweden, Germany north of Hamburg and Lübeck, and the islands in the northern Atlantic - Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroes. A series of political disasters led to the loss of the Swedish provinces in the mid-seventeenth century, Norway in 1814, and the German provinces in 1864.

These changes had a deep impact on Danish maritime history and in some cases make it difficult to analyze long-run tendencies, especially when dealing with the navy, which always has had its main base in Copenhagen despite having to protect the whole realm; its tasks in the early period obviously differed decisively from those of the nineteenth century. Moreover, the maritime traditions of the various provinces have been very different: some have a coastal population, while others have almost no connection to the sea.

To get as homogeneous an area as possible for the entire period, we will deal only with Denmark proper, i.e., the area north of the Kongeâ, which was Danish after 1864. This gives a natural delimitation as far as the merchant marine and the fishing fleet are concerned, whereas there is a break regarding the navy in 1813, because the loss of Norway meant that it was reduced to a much smaller size.

Danish Maritime History: A Research Review

The only comprehensive Danish maritime history which also covers deep-sea fishing and whaling was published in 1919. It was rather heterogeneous with regard to topics treated: while some chapters were based on new research, others were more popular and impressionistic. The main emphasis was on maritime trades, but some chapters dealt with ship construction, navigation, lights and buoys services, and marine insurance. The labour market for sailors, their lives at sea, and their careers were on the other hand only treated cursorily.

Later books dealing with longer periods of Danish maritime history are mainly short surveys and do not add much to our understanding of shipping, trades, or recruitment of crews.

There is a large and diverse literature on the employment conditions and shorebased activities of the merchant seaman. One view, now rather out of favour, saw the mariner ashore as dissolute, easily led astray and a breed apart from civilized society. This view has been challenged, and seamen have been seen simply as “working men who got wet” with similar problems and experiences as any other group of wage labourers. Marxist and other writers have debated degrees of exploitation and how changes in technology, organization and capital intensity affected maritime labour. Recentiy there have been discussions about wage rates and the efficiency of labour markets, and Williams has shown the high level of concern, in government and outside, with the quality, skills and supply of merchant seamen in the mid-Victorian period. To review and criticize this body of literature adequately would require a whole essay in its own right, so this article cannot attempt that.

Two points emerge from a perusal of the extant literature. Firstiy, the vast majority of it deals with maritime labour conditions on sailing ships, and very little is devoted to exploring this topic on steamships. Even Sager, who sees the iron steamship as equivalent to an industrial factory bringing deskilling and alienation, devotes only one brief final chapter to employment circumstances in steam. The second point to emerge from the literature is that virtually all of it is about sailors in deep-water trades and almost none of it on coastal employment. Kaukiainen devotes some space to “peasant shipping,” by which he means essentially small sailing ships in the coastal trade. In this segment he believes working conditions were more egalitarian and democratic than in long, deep-water voyages because the crews were small, often related to one another or from the same village. Sager, too, believes small coastal craft were run on pre-industrial lines which minimized social distinctions and ensured close, informal working relationships. He, like Kaukiainen, is talking about small sailing craft in the coastal trade. No study has been made of the coastal steam sector of the market.

Terry R. Gourvish has argued that the railway companies in Britain were “never the exemplars of Victorian private enterprise,” as some now choose to characterize them. Indeed, from the outset they were fairly tightiy controlled in terms of maximum rates, service provisions, routes and other fundamental matters. He also explained why the railways needed to be involved with government from the outset: their capitalization was so large that no family or group of partners was likely to be able to raise such sums. Hence, the companies had to draw upon a large number of “professional” investors or rentiers. Most of these played no part in the management or direction of the business, and they therefore needed some protection for their capital from the possible profligacy of the executives and directors. To ensure that the maximum loss they were likely to incur was restricted to the capital they had invested, they needed limited-liability status for the firm. These two requirements, jointstock form and limited liability, required the enterprise to obtain either a royal charter or a private act of Parliament before 1844 when the law on joint-stock companies became much more liberal. Even then it was not until the late 1850s that limited liability was granted as simply and cheaply as corporate form. Hence, railway companies needed to approach Parliament for this protective legislation, as well as for compulsory purchase powers to obtain the land they needed. From then on, the railways continued to be tightiy constrained and regulated. Parliamentary trains; threats of nationalization; constraints on merger activity; rules regarding safety; constraints on pricing, especially from the 1870s; requirements for cheap, early workmen's trains; total government control during the First World War; and a complete restructuring by parliamentary edict just after the war were just some of the government's actions.

At first sight there appears to be no commonality between this experience and that of the British coastal shipping industry. The latter seems to be a fine example of private enterprise untrammelled by government intervention - competitive, technologically dynamic, low cost and evolving new services and types of vessel to cater for emerging trades, commodities and needs.

When launching a scholarly book, it is not unreasonable to ask why the academic community should have thrust upon it yet another fat volume. Surely there already is a sufficiency of tomes on maritime history? Quite obviously, the appearance of this publication suggests little sympathy with the latter view. It is not so much the absolute number of maritime histories as the topics they address. It is my contention that little has been written on the British coastal trade, especially on the crucial period of industrialization and urbanization between about 1750 and 1914. The coastal trade was called “the Cinderella trade” a few years ago because it was a neglected area of study despite the fact that it was the largest segment of nineteenth-century British maritime commerce. It remains a relatively underresearched area of maritime history, and not just in the UK: there is relatively little written on the cabotage of any country. There are, of course, some honourable exceptions, but these are relatively rare.

The aim of this volume is two-fold. First, it endeavours to show the current state of knowledge on the British coastal trade. In so doing it indicates those areas which have not been addressed or where there is an on-going debate which could benefit from fresh research. This is the second aim: to encourage new research. In this regard the volume offers a shopping list of possible research topics which would carry the subject forward. This is based upon my belief that there may be some benefits in having these articles together in one volume. Some, it must be admitted, first appeared in rather obscure journals and thus may be difficult to access, and others saw their initial light of day in collections which are not always easy to trace. Thus, bringing them together in a single volume may ease access. It may also show that there is a critical mass of research on the British coastal trade.

A further question which might fairly be put is why has this particular set of essays been chosen? Not all of my work has been included, even on the coastal trade. So what criteria have been used for inclusion or exclusion? Obviously, the economics of producing this volume and its structural integrity dictate a maximum, especially when printing and postal charges are taken into account.

Jens Jacob Eschels had a varied life at sea. His children, grandchildren and friends were interested in it, and in his old age he wrote his memoirs. Is Eschels’ life also of interest to maritime historians who want to study labour patterns in the age of sail? The question will be answered in the affirmative in this essay.

Born in 1757 on the Northern Frisian island of Föhr — near Schleswig and ruled by the king of Denmark - Eschels went to sea at the age of eleven. Under the guidance of a seafaring uncle he was enroled in Amsterdam for the Dutch whaling fleet. Starting as a junior cabin boy, after seven consecutive whaling voyages Eschels in 1776 switched in Copenhagen to a Danish whaler, where the financial rewards were greater. Meanwhile he had become an able seaman who spent winters at home supporting his family. In 1778 he stopped whaling and turned to the mercantile marine, not returning home for more than a decade. He sailed from Amsterdam, and later from Hamburg and Altona. At the age of twenty-four he became a captain, when his own superior died during the voyage. Eschels sailed in European, Mediterranean and Caribbean waters. He married in 1784 and six years later, as a widower, he remarried and settled in Altona. In 1797 he left the sea and became a shopkeeper, a tobacco manufacturer and a consultant on shipping. He died in 1842, seven years after his memoirs were published.

Eschels’ life contains all the elements usually ascribed to a successful seaman: maritime background, early entry, promotion, various sorts of voyages, marriage and a further life ashore. But not every young lad met the same Dame Fortune. Still, Jens Jacob was not exceptional. Many seamen could have told similar stories, and several did.

In a quantitative sense it is impossible to gauge how typical Eschels was. There were tens of thousands of them. In the other chapters of this book one can find rough estimates for different countries. But figures about the seafaring labour force do not provide insight into the labour pattern of the individual seaman. The vast majority of these men remain anonymous for the maritime historian and remain obscured within the totality of a crew.

The study of maritime freight rates has a substantial and honourable ancestry. Indeed, its honour was recently much enhanced by the award of the Nobel Prize in Economics to one of the subject's progenitors. As long ago as 1914 C.K. Hobson drew up “a freight index number” from 1870 to 1912 to calculate the contribution of shipping earnings to Britain's balance of payments. Isserlis in 1938 developed an index of tramp shipping freights from 1869 to 1914. In the early 1950s Alec Cairncross drew on the work of both Hobson and Isserlis to calculate three indices of freight rates - inward, outward and composite. The early interest in freights arose from a wish to calculate foreign exchange earnings from shipping as one component of Britain's invisibles, but later work has laid emphasis upon the theoretical benefits a reduction in ocean freight rates is likely to have had on international trade and hence regional specialization and economic growth. A lowering of freight rates is a social saving and could be calculated as a proportion of national income, as another Nobel Laureate, Robert Fogel, did with railway rates in America. In addition, assuming reasonably competitive markets, if freight rates fell they would likely have caused a commensurate drop in the delivered price of the commodity carried, which in turn should have spurred demand (assuming a degree of price elasticity). Hence, output would be expanded, perhaps extracting economies of scale, adopting new technology or improving methods of organization - and thus reducing unit cost. This may then have led to another beneficial spiral.

Similarly, a reduction in transport costs may have opened some markets previously closed to a particular good because the final price, including the freight charge, was too high to compete. These new markets would have created additional demand, again perhaps stimulating improved methods of production or extraction and hence lowering unit costs, and thus into the same beneficent loop. In addition, reductions in transport costs might have allowed local monopolies to be breached, bringing competition to rigid markets and hence reducing prices. It has been postulated that one important contributory factor in opening the American west to grain production was the relatively inexpensive transport provided by railways and steamships which enabled Midwest wheat to penetrate European, and especially English, markets. This was a classic effect of a long-term reduction in transport costs, part of which was transatiantic freights.

Introduction

Of late there has been a revival of interest in the role of coastal shipping in the British economy and a preliminary attempt at cross-European comparisons. Nonetheless, there are still large gaps in our knowledge; indeed, it would be fair to say that it is a largely blank slate on which a few words have been written faintly. One thing which seems to be established is that the idea of a single coastal trade is misleading, for there were a range of coastal shipping services catering for a number of different types of customers. In other words, the coaster segmented the market by offering different sorts of services varying in speed, price, regularity, reliability and frequency. At the top end in terms of reliability and speed were the coastal liners. These were large, modern ships running to a regular timetable on a specified route, taking mixed cargoes, some of them small consignments, and charging premium prices. The ships were not merely modern but also well appointed, since they usually carried passengers as well as cargo. For those shippers with regular consignments of bulky goods in large enough volume to fill an entire vessel, there were the regular traders, ships dedicated to a limited range of routes or commodities. These craft frequently returned in ballast and relied on speed and frequency to deliver large cargoes efficientiy. The best examples of this segment of the market were the screw colliers which plied between the coal fields of the North East and the consuming regions of the South East. For large consignments which could fill a ship but which required movement less frequently and regularly, there was the steam tramp. They were much less predictable than regular traders, as cargoes had to wait until a ship of suitable size became available in the vicinity of the despatching port. Even less reliable was the sailing coaster, since not only was there no guarantee of a vessel being available when the cargo needed to be moved but also even when safely stowed the ship might be delayed by contrary, insufficient or dangerous winds.

Among Philip Bagwell's many publications, one of the earliest was on the Railway Clearing House (RCH). This was the first definitive history of the establishment, functions and mechanisms of the RCH. One of the functions which Philip highlighted was its role as an impartial administrator of the various pooling agreements, conferences and grouping arrangements that the independent railway companies concluded to ensure through working and to reduce inter-company competition, especially on long-distance hauls. This work predated Philip's interest in coastal shipping and, as befits a book on a railway institution, there is relatively little about competing modes of transport. Yet the railway companies did not confine their attempts to regulate long-distance traffic to their own transport mode. For long hauls their chief rival was the coastal steamboat, which remained surprisingly competitive until the Great War. Hence, many railway conferences were only too keen to bring their seaborne rivals into an agreement in order to restrict competition, raise freight rates and allocate traffic on a “reasonable” basis. Bagwell noted that the Dundee, Perth and London Shipping Company was brought into the English and Scotch Traffic Agreement in 1856, as did Channon in his thesis, and that in 1867 “a similar kind of agreement” was concluded on the Clyde-Mersey route by railways and steamboat firms, but neither he nor Channon pursued the analysis to show what these agreements implied about coaster-railway competition.

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that there was a range of methods of restricting inter-modal competition which have previously been ignored. The use of pools and conferences by the railway companies is now well known, as is the adoption in the later nineteenth century of conferences among shipping companies in some foreign liner trades. Recently it has been shown that agreements, analogous to conferences in all but name, existed from a much earlier date among firms plying the coastal trade using steam liners and that these were widespread geographically and continued in existence at least until the First World War. In other words, the coastal liner companies endeavoured to minimize competition and regulate trade among themselves just as the railways did. This essay will show that there was also inter-modal collaboration over freight rates and levels of service, both formally through written agreements between railway conferences and coastal liner companies and by more informal understandings.

Introduction

Seafaring, sailors and ships - in particular in the age of sail - have been stimuli for man's taste for adventure, imagination and longing for the creation of myths. Indeed, many books have been written on seafaring and the romance of the sea - and many will still be written. Yet sailors and seafaring life still seem to remain in a dimly-lit category of history.

“The ‘people,’ as the ship's company came to be called, remain an anonymous mass, too often neglected…Of all sections of the community, seafaring men and agricultural labourers have been the most ignored and therefore the worst treated, ” wrote Christopher Lloyd in his study of British seamen. “Only occasionally it is possible to discern… the identity of an individual seaman, to say what he looked like, who was his father, where he came from, because (like the farm labourer) he was usually illiterate and inarticulate.”

Evidently, seafaring people in history have left few traces, and those that remain appear to be so vague that historians examining topics like the functioning of a maritime labour market, use of migratory labour aboard, level of wages, or career patterns of individual seamen sometimes get the impression they are dealing with quantum physics or Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty. Reliable information on sailors and seafaring life is scarce and often contradictory. Precise data are even harder to find, let alone to explain and interpret plausibly. This sort of “source vacuum” has led to fascinating but often unrealistic - because seldom backed by reliable proof - stories of the sea. There is a world of difference between Marcus Rediker's Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and Nicolas Rodger's The Wooden World, or between K. Allard Coles’ Heavy Weather Sailing and Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands? To get away from the romantic picture of Jack Tar blurred by myths and tales one has at least to attempt to bring together the available knowledge and information thus far gathered on the “people of the sea. ”

Sailors and Toneladas

If we use the concept of the maritime labour market in the sense of the entity of variables, like demand and supply, that determine wages, then several problems arise. First, we hardly know how the maritime labour market functioned. Second, we know very little about supply and demand. And third, data on wages are very scarce.

The period 1870-1930 saw the continued rise and precipitous decline of the British coastal trade. Coastal shipping had been a crucial component in industrialization, transporting low-value, high-bulk goods such as coal, corn, bricks and slates which were essential to the growth of towns and industry. In the early nineteenth century its volume increased steadily as the economy expanded, and specialization led to an increased movement of goods from lowcost areas to centres of consumption. The coastal trade continued to expand until the First World War and in many ways was at its zenith just before that conflict. However, the Great War brought an abrupt end to this long period of expansion. In the 1920s, although there was growth from the very low wartime levels, the prewar volume of activity was never achieved, and the interwar period saw the British coastal trade stagnate. This chapter will oudine and explain the trends in each of these three sub-periods. In so doing the role and economics of the coastal ship will become apparent.

Apogee, 1870-1914

The period 1870-1914 saw the British coastal trade at an apogee. This high point can be demonstrated in a variety of ways. The number and tonnage of ships with cargoes entering the harbours of the UK in the coasting trade rose continuously between 1870 and 1913. A dense network of coastal lines had developed which linked virtually all major ports with regular, fast and scheduled services. The coastal collier was moving an increasing quantity of coal from the producing regions, especially the North East of England and South Wales, to the consuming areas, particularly London and the South East. In addition, the screw collier took on die competition offered by the railways and from the 1890s regained the lion's share of the coal trade to London, carrying more than the railway companies each year save two from then until the First World War. In the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, the coaster was performing about as much work as the railway system as a whole if measured in ton-miles. Finally, the coaster was extensively used for passenger traffic, both as a means of business and pleasure travel, and increasingly in the last decade or so of the nineteenth century as part of the nascent mass leisure industry.

The coastal trade of individual ports has been little researched. Where ports have been studied it is often with reference to their technical development, engineering works or role in the more exotic overseas trades. Coasters called at ports more frequendy than deep-water ships because their voyages were shorter compared to the longer overseas journeys and thus had a greater impact on harbour activity. With a few honourable exceptions there has been little research on the trade or fortunes of individual ports and even less on small ports. This is probably as much due to a dearth of records as a lack of interest. By good fortune one source has survived which records the trade of Connah's Quay from 1905 to the First World War, ironically among the records of a railway company. Connah's Quay was a small port on the Dee Estuary about eight miles downstream from Chester. It no longer operates as a port. The Wrexham, Mold and Connah's Quay Railway (WMCQR) was approved by Parliament in 1862 and was built by 1865. The railway company developed the wharves at Connah's Quay. It was absorbed by the Manchester Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway (MSL) in 1890, and by 1897 the MSL was part of the Great Central (GC). In 1904 the GC formally took over the WMCQR. It required the port of Connah's Quay to keep a register of all ships entering and clearing the port, including their registered tonnage, the type and quantity of cargoes they were carrying, their captain's name and their port of despatch or destination. This source can be used to shed light on the nature of the trade of this tiny port.

The port register was kept from 1904 to 1922 and appears to have recorded all ships which used the wharves in chronological order. Ships calling at the other small ports of the Dee Estuary were not included, and the temptation is to see the register as a record from which invoices for port charges were compiled. Given the number of pieces of data and the long time period, an initial project was formulated to extract all the information for four years: 1905, 1906, 1912 and 1913. This was entered on a computer database which could then be analyzed using SPSS. All statements which follow based on this source were determined in this way.

Strange as it may seem for an island nation, the sailor's profession is a relatively new occupation in Iceland. To be sure, Icelanders have been a seagoing people from the country's settlement in the late ninth century, but mostly as fishermen. An Icelandic merchant navy, in the traditional meaning of that term, was not born until the early twentieth century. Until then Icelanders who wanted to be sailors all sailed in vessels operating out of foreign ports and flying foreign colours.

The present paper is divided into three sections. The first starts with a brief survey of the few ocean-going Icelandic vessels in the Middle Ages and the country's commercial links with Europe before 1800. Then the diaries of two seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Icelandic sailors will be discussed as well as the fragmentary evidence of Icelanders sailing in Dutch vessels between 1600 and 1800. The second section deals with Icelandic fishermen from the thirteenth through the eighteenth century, while the third section covers the nineteenth century, where it will be argued that the period up to 1870 was transitional in that a “new” class of Icelandic fishermen and sailors emerged.

Icelandic Sailors, 900-1800

Scanty - and often unclear - sources describe merchant vessels owned by Icelanders between the late ninth century and about 1100. From 1100 to 1170, we know with certainty of five ocean-going vessels owned by Icelanders, but from about 1200 until the nineteenth century Iceland's population was entirely dependent on foreigners for all trade and communication with other lands. The importance of the link with Europe can be seen from the fact that when Iceland recognized the supremacy of the king of Norway in 1262, he promised to ensure that six vessels would sail from Norway to Iceland in the next two years. After that the king and the “best Icelanders” would come to an agreement on the annual number of vessels to ply the seas between the two countries.

For the next 350 years the commercial link between Iceland and Europe was served by Norwegian/Danish merchants as well as by English and Hanseatic fishermen/merchants. During this era we know of ocean-going vessels owned by bishops of Iceland but the continuity of their operation is unclear and nothing is known of their crews.

The outbreak of war in Europe in 1793 provided a notoriously unique opportunity to the shipping and trade of the United States, which benefited greatly from American neutrality. Exports increased from $17 million dollars in 1791 to $93 million in 1801 and $108 million in 1807﹜ Scholars have been interested primarily in the short and long-term impact of this growth on the economy of the United States. Historians have also paid attention to the impressive development of shipping activities in major port cities and the ventures of captains and seamen across the world oceans. However, little interest has been paid to the rapid establishment and consolidation of new trade networks. This paper will analyze the extension and the organization of American shipping and trade to Bordeaux which, on the eve of the French Revolution, was the major French port.

Franco-American relations in these years have been studied essentially within the framework of diplomatic history. Insofar as trade between the two countries is concerned, only certain specific aspects, such as the license trade or privateering, have received comprehensive study. Scholars who analyzed the growth of American trade were understandably not particularly interested in commerce to France, since it played only a limited role in the expansion of the foreign trade of the United States. One could expect that French scholars would show more interest in these matters. However, even if Paul Butel and Jeanne Chase have underlined the American presence in the trade of Bordeaux, we still lack a detailed analysis of the role played by the Americans during the French Wars. In particular, while French and American merchants did establish some commercial relations before 1793, the rapidity with which the trade and shipping network between the United States and Bordeaux was organized after the outbreak of the war is intriguing, and calls for explanation.

It is relatively easy to understand why this trade grew: the opportunities for profit in war time were appealing enough to motivate merchants, and the increasing difficulties of European neutral carriers gave North American merchants a strong comparative advantage. It is of course possible to delineate the evolution of trade during this period and even to identify the irregularities in its patterns, thus analyzing when and how much this trade grew.

How many sailors were there in Scotland? The simplest questions are always the most difficult to answer. We do not know for most of the period of sail how many men were involved. Naturally the number varied from season to season, week to week, and was seriously disrupted by trade fluctuations and wars, while the total desiring employment, including those between jobs and those lost in the Baltic, was doubtless greater than the number actually employed. This grand total of men who might call themselves sailors was never assessed and cannot now be estimated with any degree of confidence. The easiest and probably the most sensible way of envisaging changes in the mercantile marine is to count ships, or tons, employed; and by this imperfect measure there was only a handful of Scottish sailors until the early eighteenth century. A government-inspired survey in 1656 revealed only eighty vessels of more than twenty-five tons in the whole of Scotland. The number was probably depressed by the Civil War, and T.C. Smout has estimated the number of active Scottish ships at between 200 and 300 for the two decades preceding the Union with England in 1707. In the latter year there were 14,485 tons of Scottish shipping: less, Smout points out, than that possessed by the English port of Whitby. Moreover, the Scottish ships were still very small, reflecting the poor quality of many harbours, the relative poverty of shipowners, and the difficulty of filling ships trading from diminutive ports with fragile hinterlands of self-sufficient crofters. Indeed, before the Union many of the larger foreign-going vessels were Dutch-owned. Nor were Scottish vessels - commonly Dutch-built - kept in the best of condition, as one crew found when they sank off Heligoland in 1680: “the ship is lost,” it was said, “for being keepen so long at sea; the ship grew so leaky that it was impossible for the seamen to keep her any longer above water.”

By far the largest part of Scottish foreign trade in 1707 was with northern Europe, and most was consequently pursued from long-established ports on the east coast.

In 1884 Thomas Wilson and Son ran the steamship Humber between Hull and Liverpool carrying a mixed cargo of goods. Wilsons has long been recognized as Hull's largest shipowner, involved in many overseas trades, although no full-scale history of its business has been published. Passing reference has also been made to its occasional engagement in the coastal trade between Hull and Newcastie but not to its participation in the coastal trade between Hull and Liverpool. Yet by the 1880s the railway network was at its peak, and the distance by rail between the two cities was about 120 miles, whereas the distance by sea was nearly 1000 miles. On the face of it, this seems an absurd situation and a misallocation of resources. Why send the goods nearly eight times as far by a mode with a lower maximum speed, especially when the steamer took the northern route around the United Kingdom via the choppy and perilous passage to the north of Scodand, which included the Pentland Firth where “navigation is rendered difficult and dangerous by the rate of the tidal current – six to ten knots - and the existence of eddies and whirlpools“? The length and peril of the journey could be abated if the ships went through the Caledonian Canal, which was opened in the early nineteenth century and properly navigable by the mid-1840s. Such a route reduced the distance by over 150 miles, making the journey about 820 miles. However, the maximum length of the locks on the Caledonian was 160 feet; the vast majority of the ships employed by Wilson in this trade were too big to traverse the canal and had to use the longer and less safe voyage around the north of Scotland. Only the Torpedo at 151-feet-long was small enough to fit the Caledonian's locks. This article outlines the dimensions of this problem and then seeks to provide an explanation for this apparently perverse use of transport modes.

First, let us stress that this was no flash in the pan or one-off speculation to ascertain if there was demand for the service. Wilsons ran steamers between Hull and Liverpool from March 1884 to the First World War, i.e., over thirty years, very much the long term. In addition, this was a liner service with posted dates and times of departure and anticipated times of arrival.

Introduction

Shipping in the Holy Roman Empire and later in the German states was largely regional. Up to 1871 there was no such thing as a German merchant marine - and only recently was there a German navy. But Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck, and a number of small cities, such as Emden, Papenburg, Husum and Tönning had merchant fleets. That is why national statistics and research on the social history of sailors before 1870 has to focus on regional developments. Indeed, before unification we are forced to use mainly data on Hamburg ships and sailors. Although this represents only a segment of the history of German sailors, it was an important one due to Hamburg's role as the most important German harbour, a position it gained after the Thirty Years’ War when, unlike most of the Holy Roman Empire, it managed to stay at peace by making frequent loans to the neighbouring states. Hamburg's rise as a port was bolstered by two factors: first by its location on the Elbe, which gave it access to the interior of Germany and central Europe; and second by its consistent neutrality during the wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when it became an alternative to Amsterdam.

The data on Hamburg shipping in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suggests limited maritime development (tables 1 and 2). And the trends were negative: there was a 40.9% decline in tonnage between 1674 and 1765, although average tonnage did rise from 77.1 to 104 lasts. Not until the 1790s did Hamburg's tonnage reach 1674 levels and again provide sufficient capacity for the buoyant grain trade. This growth in the last third of the eighteenth century was stimulated by a decline in whaling, as Hamburg's Greenland whale fishery ceased to be profitable due to a decline in stocks. Hamburg shipowners thus had an incentive to concentrate on the carrying trades. Although the city's merchant fleet was expanding, it could handle no more than twenty percent of Hamburg's total trade.

Hamburg's merchant fleet declined again from 1806 due to the continental blockade and the consequent British blockade of the Elbe. After 1815 it stagnated; recovered somewhat in the 1830s and 1840s; and grew rapidly between 1850 and the end of the century. Before 1800 Hamburg merchantmen were mainly confined to European waters; only a few crossed the Atlantic.