The Mercantile Marine

It is curious to observe how thoroughly most of us are the slaves of habit, how limited we are in our imagination and sympathies until something surprising, far-reaching and ine...

In our own age so many amazing developments have taken place during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that we must not be misled. These are the exceptions and not the rule...

It is fortunately possible to obtain from various sources an insight into life as it was endured in a mediæval Mediterranean merchant ship, and this will assist us considerably...

We can desire hardly any better evidence of the existence of a Mercantile Marine than the fact that a body of laws had to be created in order to regulate that industry. We have...

Chaucer, who flourished in the fourteenth century, has left us a description of a merchant “shipman” of his time. He refers to him as being a West-countryman living, “for aught...

By the middle of the fourteenth century the merchant ships had begun to outgrow mediævalism; by the sixteenth they were able to go to windward and to keep the sea for months on...

Up to the end of the sixteenth century we have seen the progress of the Mercantile Marine influenced by the pilgrim and cargo trade in the south of Europe, and in the Iberian pe...

Few people realise that the trade routes of the world are the lanes along which history is constrained to flow. It is a fascinating study, but we have little enough room to deve...

The end of the seventeenth century saw the British Mercantile Fleet as the world’s leading traders. The disappearance of their Spanish and then Dutch rivals in sea commerce was...

Most of the vessels in this fleet of East Indiamen had been built at the Blackwall yard, or at least refitted there. In the year 1789 the East India Docks were brought into bein...

As far back as the reign of Elizabeth a State post-office was instituted for foreign letters, for the reason that the merchants now required it. Owing to England’s geographical...

If you set aside the forty years from 1837 to 1877 you cover the period which is unsurpassed for the glories of the sea. It is a period when the Mercantile Marine in every ocean...

We have seen in the development of our subject that it was only after many centuries that the accommodation of the passenger aboard ship was ever considered. We have noticed how...

The speed of life, the rate of progress, and the development of new ideas have since the beginning of the nineteenth century been so rapid that all the previous history of the M...

In a very few years, then, the increasing success of the steamer, together with the opening of the Suez Canal and firm establishment of several steamship companies carrying mail...

The dominating factors which now influenced the development of the Atlantic liner were speed and comfort. Owing to the rapid increase of commerce between the United States and G...

For about seventy years the German Mercantile Marine had an interesting career. It began in quite a small way, it was conducted with courage, enterprise, far-sightedness and, ev...

Throughout the course of this story the reader will have observed many references to the American Mercantile Marine. Let us now consider how it began, developed, waned and again...

One important result of the war was to readjust the respective positions of the nations of the world in regard to their merchant fleets. Considering only steel and iron steam to...

If the attention of the reader has been thus far secured, he will have appreciated the fact that to any nation owning a seaboard the possession of a Mercantile Marine is as impo...