The importance of shipping

Relief on the shipping of cedars, Sargon II Palace at Khorsabad, Persia 8th Century BC. Louvre Museum

The first water transport was probably nothing more than a log used to cross a stream.  That journey may have taken place during the Ice Age or much earlier when our ancestral hominids spread from Africa.

During the historic period dating back to 5,000 BC, sails were already in use, the first illustrations of sailing ships are from Egypt, and seafarers began to venture into the sea.  Some of them went in search of new lands and different peoples with whom they could trade.  At first they must have kept to the coastline, moving along it slowly and fearfully, for by then they would have learnt that the sea was dangerous and capricious and can turn from calm to storm within a few hours.  According to one story, in 609 BC a Phoenician ship left Suez, intending to keep the coast to starboard, and four years later arrived back in Egypt, having sailed right round Africa.  But eventually curiosity triumphed over timidity and at some point seafarers set out for the horizon and kept going until, the familiar coast had disappeared.

Despite the uncertainties and dangers involved, it soon became apparent that trading by sea had advantages over trading by land.  Land traders had mountains ranges and deserts to contend with and had to go miles out of their way to avoid them: ships could go more or less in straight lines.  And ships could carry more goods more cheaply than horses and camels.

Move forward a few thousand years, and ships and seafarers had made the world grow smaller and less mysterious.  The Polynesians had explored the Pacific, Norsemen had taken advantage of a change in climate to cross the Atlantic and discover Greenland and Labrador.  Later, the Portuguese rounded the tip of Africa and found a new route to the Spice Islands of Asia and Christopher Columbus tried to do the same by going in the opposite direction and found America instead.

Yet the technology of the ships themselves evolved only slowly.  One of Vasco da Gama's mariners in 1498 would have adapted very quickly to life on a clipper ship in the 1860s.  Columbus and other explorers of the period used square-rigged ships, which experience showed to be the best arrangement for long ocean voyages.  The large sailing ships built at the end of the 19th century, more than 500 years later, still used the same rig.  The sailing ships still used in the Indian Ocean and Asia are built to designs established centuries ago and retained ever since, because they work.

Even the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries took a long time to affect shipping.  By the end of the 19th century, steel was being used instead of wood for some ships, but the change was gradual.  Steam was used at sea for the first time in the early 19th century, but did not become widespread for several decades. Coal costs money, while the wind is free. And coal also took up space that could otherwise be used for cargo.

Other changes were equally slow.  The sun and stars remained the keys to maritime navigation for thousands of years.  The compass was first used in European ships in the 12th century and is still essential to navigation today.  Nautical charts are still based on the projection developed by Gerard Mercator in 1569.  It was not until the invention of radar that the shipping industry discovered a better way of detecting danger ahead than the human eye: it was a lookout, in the crow's nest on top of a mast who told Columbus that land was in sight - and another lookout on a mast who saw, too late, the iceberg that sank the Titanic.

Although shipping was slow to change, the changes brought about by shipping were enormous.  By the end of the 19th century vast areas of the North American plains had been turned into wheat fields: ships could carry cargoes so cheaply that it was possible to take wheat from Saskatchewan or Nebraska to Europe and sell it for less than it cost the local farmers to grow it.  In Australia and New Zealand sheep were reared and their meat and wool was shipped north.  Phosphates and nitrates from the deserts of northern Chile found markets in Europe.  Tea was supplied by China and India. South Wales exported coal.  The need for kerosene to light the lamps of city dwellers led to the growth of a new trade in oil.  And the cities of the world, which bought all these goods, paid for them in manufactured goods, the bulk of which were sent to their foreign buyers in ships.

Despite the political upheavals of the 20^th century, world trade continued not only to grow but also to accelerate.  By the beginning of the 21^st century, the prosperity of millions of people - entire countries, in fact - depends on markets that lie thousands of miles away, often on the other side of the world.  Their ability to supply these markets depends primarily on ships and the sea.

The growth of shipping

The changing face of shipping

 Shipping has changed enormously over the last fifty years and one of the biggest changes has been in the ownership of the world’s ships.  The graphic (Left) shows the ownership of the fleet in 1960. The fleet consisted of nearly 130 million gross tons of ships, with the biggest fleet being that of the United Kingdom at 21 million gross tons.














The second biggest fleet belonged to the United States, although the American fleet was still inflated as a result of the tonnage built during World War II. European nations feature strongly in the list, although the Japanese fleet was also growing rapidly. The biggest open register fleet was that of Liberia.

By 1999 the situation had changed considerably. The largest fleets on the list are all open registers. The fleets of most of the traditional maritime countries have declined in size, although the growth of the Greek fleet has continued.