The Challenges and Rewards of Maritime History

January 2021

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  Sam Willis

  From the Society for Nautical Research, in partnership with Lloyd’s Register Foundation, I’m Sam Willis, and this is the Mariner’s Mirror Podcast, the world’s number one podcast dedicated to all of maritime history. As always, we begin our episode by catching up on those poor sailors of the Whaler Swan stuck in the ice off the west coast of Greenland in the New Year of 1837. Their situation has become incredibly perilous as huge icebergs forced themselves towards their stranded ship.

  Whaler Swan

  Friday 6th of January 1837. Strong breezes from the southwest. At 10 am two large bergs showed themselves on our larboard quarter not five minutes’ walk from the ship, the flow in which we are situated being rent in several directions. Sanderson’s Hope bore south southeast distant 15 or 20 miles. A capstan cut up for the cabin fire. Thermometer 15 degrees below zero. Monday 9th of January 1837. Light breezes from the southward the fore part of this day. The land showing itself very plain about 20 miles distance from the nearest part. At 2 pm, the abovementioned berg’s cut outflow into several pieces. One of the cracks only eight foot from the stern called all hands and got the remainder of the provision on deck. The bergs at the same time searing up the floor with such violence the ship shook like a leaf and the ice roaring with an awful noise that resembled a continued thunderclap. At 5 pm, the press abated, and the ice began to slack, the wind having got round to northeast, the ship drifting to the southwest. A fore-topsail cut up this day to make bread bags, there being no chance of moving the ship thermometer at zero.

  Sam Willis

  For more information about the value of ships logbooks such as these for the study of climate change, do please check out our episode with Dr Matt Ayres, a climate detective at the Arctic Institute of North America. He uses 200-year-old documents, surviving from the Arctic whaling trade, to look back at the Arctic climate.

  Welcome everyone to another episode of the Mariner’s Mirror Podcast. This week, I’m talking to Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto, William P. Reynolds professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and Notre Dame, Indiana. Felipe is an expert in world history. He’s a prize-winning historian, and the author of several best-selling books, his understanding of the forces that move global history, and the challenges of thinking and writing about history on a global scale, means that he can offer unique insights into the value and also the challenges of maritime history. Here he is, the line to America was a little dodgy at times with what he says is particularly fascinating. So do please bear with us.

  Felipe, thank you so much for joining me. I’m really very much looking forward to chatting to you about your interest in global history, your interest in maritime history. I want to start by asking you a little bit about your own personal history and whether you remember first becoming interested in the sea, and in its history.

  Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto

  Well, thank you, Sam, it’s good of you to have me. I am only interested in the sea in a very superficial way. I’m interested in what goes on the surface, almost, sort of people who zoom back and forth across it in craft. In a way, I mean, who can analyze his own madness, but I think I got interested in that because I’ve always feared, and rather hatred, the sea, I mean, even as a child I hated bucket and spade. I didn’t like the smell; I didn’t like the noise. And I’m old enough, you know, to have been of that generation of schoolboys, that when encountering alien cultures began with the Greeks and Romans. And I sympathise, the Romans hated and feared the sea and I remember when I was a little boy reading the poetry of Horace and thinking, yes, you know, that’s the way I feel about the sea as well and it could be in a way that it’s a sort of way of compensating for that kind of revolt from the psychology of those who love the sea and make their lives upon it and risk their lives traversing it often in search of new encounters; new discoveries; new experiences. That just always seemed to me as rather weird. And that I suppose, is why I’ve tried to study it.

  Sam Willis

  It certainly is an alien environment. And I think it was part of the reason that I became interested in the sea. I come from a naval family, my grandfather was in the Navy, his father was in the Navy; so, we had pictures of sailing ships all over the walls. And I love the way that it was protected by its own language, almost, that to be able to write about the sea, you have to be able to talk, fluent spritsail topmast is what I call this. And I love that sense about it, that it was a very difficult thing to actually to get to. So, there was a challenge, which other people I think were less able, or less willing to take, and that’s what I loved about it.

  Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto

  Yes, well, that’s most interesting. I wonder whether you know, you had any sort of family materials, whether your, your nautical ancestors left, you know, memorials, written work, as well as the pictures that adorned your walls. But of course, you know, what you’re talking about a ‘lexicon’ of the sea and that sort of lingo, is a fundamental part of language, it’s a fundamental part of culture and the seagoing life does nourish kinds of relationships, a type of society that is, intriguingly different from the society that would enclose the same individuals if they’re on land, and I guess the culture of some really important part of maritime history that scholars have become increasingly interested in in my lifetime.

  Sam Willis

  I think it’s fascinating as well, if you look back at the past, and the maritime individuals, that it was very clear, they were physically different; they look different; they were weather-beaten; they had curious clothes. You could see a sailor from across a bar, and then know he was a sailor, so there really was a kind of a separation in the world, which is probably less obvious than it is today.

  Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto

  Yes, novelists always, you know, talk about the gait, the rolling gait, of the tar, who’s used to the pitching of the ship. Yes, I suppose that’s right, although, of course, you know, many, I suppose in order to have a great individual impact on maritime history, you’ve also got to be very adjustable, very flexible and adapt well to the landlubber’s world. You know, when you come back from your seaborne adventure, you’ve got to tell the story convincingly. And of course, you know, mariners do have also great reputations as storytellers who hold you with their glittering eyes.

  Sam Willis

  Yes, yeah, their salty language as well. I was thinking about your Spanish heritage, was that sort of something that influenced you in becoming interested in the sea?

  Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto

  Well, of course, as you know, Spaniards are all interested in the sea. It seems paradoxical I think for the English when they look at us Spaniards and find that we share a sort of maritime outlook because relatively speaking, you know, the coastline of Spain isn’t as dominant in the culture as that have of Great Britain migrated. The Iberian Peninsula, our access to the sea is interrupted by France and Portugal. But Spain’s is a deeply maritime culture and my own family although wasn’t on the coast, we do belong to a maritime province, you’ve got Galicia in the north-west corner. And I guess, you know, my ancestors stared out on the Atlantic for 1000s of years, you know, without ever venturing onto it, or certainly not very far onto it. And that’s also something which was always kind of puzzled me: what is it that makes the difference between people who are, who were, kind of pinned to their coasts by onshore winds and those who venture forth to explore it. Obviously, Spain and Britain are two European cultures that have produced disproportionate numbers of long-range seafarers, and that’s one of the many similarities between them. English people and Spaniards often see themselves as kind of opposites and they dwell on the many conflicts that have peppered their pasts. But in many ways, I see Spain and Britain as quite similar countries, you know, both on the fringes of Europe, often, you know, despised or hated by their continental neighbours. Sometimes excluded, you know, from the mainstream of Europe, Pascal’s [lost in connection] of the Pyrenees. And the British themselves, you know, have always been rather equivocal about whether they’re Europeans or not, and they are now crazy enough to be leaving the European Union. And I suppose also both countries are thrust out into the Atlantic and if you look at the map of Europe on conventional projections, this factor is often concealed but Spain is the apex of this sort of European, rough European, triangle that sticks out into the ocean and pointing out westwards from Europe. And so, both countries have a maritime perspective which is profoundly influential in shaping their history and still their current experience. One of the big issues of Britain’s Brexit negotiations is fisheries. And, you know, I think of English obsessions with fishers, ‘the fisherman of England’, the kind of standards representative of the adventurous spirit of the nation. And Spaniards, as you know, Spanish cuisine is dominated by fish. Madrid is as far from the sea, as you can get in Spain, [lost in connection] biggest fish market in Europe. So, one of the many often underappreciated similarities between Britain and Spain is this maritime outlook.

  Sam Willis

  It’s particularly interesting that you mentioned there that Madrid, you know, the capital is the furthest point you can get. I mean, I think it literally is the furthest point you can get from the sea, which is obviously very different from London, which has been brought up as a port town. And that’s, I think, profoundly influenced the way that it was developed. But I suppose you need to understand the changing capital cities of Madrid and how power moved to Madrid in the early 17th century. And actually, it was much more coastal before that.

  Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto

  Well, of course, you know, they did consider making Lisbon the capital, [lost in connection] in the late 16th century, and that is on the sea. But I mean, I think in the case of Madrid, the important thing is that it’s equidistant from, it’s as near as you can get to be equidistant from the whole of the rest of the country. It’s right in the middle. And that’s why it’s furthest from the sea. England is a long thin country. I think I once wrote that in a book and my American editor said it was fascism. But England is a long thin country and Spain is a kind of short squat one. So, the, say the middle of Spain is necessarily a long way from the sea but it has the advantage, for a capital, of being in relatively close touch with everywhere else in the country.

  Sam Willis

  I’d like to ask you a little bit about the challenges of writing a global approach to history, there’s very big themes, which is something that you’ve really made your own in the past with your books, your publications. What sort of tools do you need to be able to grapple with such broad themes; to come up with a kind of a practicable approach to writing a book, whatever it might be, maybe a global history of exploration – there you are – one of your books?

  Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto

  Well, when I started, the only tool I needed was a pen and a notebook. Now, I suppose the critical tool is a computer, alas, because I’m very bad at handling them. But I knew what you mean, I suppose you mean, I don’t know, mental or personality tools. And I

  Sam Willis

  Mental agility to come to grips with big themes, I think.

  Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto

  Well, I think it probably requires a certain you know, recklessness and intellectual in-discipline. Try and be interested on an academic level in so many different things. And I guess I, I have always been very intellectually in-discipline. I mean, I’ve had this, like, I have a great deal of difficulty controlling my own curiosity, which often I think gets, my critics would probably put this less generously, but I think [lost in connection] often get ahead of my capacity to control it. And also, I suppose it’s also, the search for context, you know, because you can understand nothing unless you see it in its context and context is like a Russian doll, there’s always sort of more context outside, beyond the kernel. And you keep adding context until you get [lost] the biosphere, which is pretty much I think, the ‘all context’ that matters. As you know Sam, they are now even more ambitious historians, guys who call themselves ‘big historians’ who think that even the planet isn’t enough, and they demand to see human history in the context of the entire cosmos. They start with the Big Bang, rather as Bede or other medieval historians always started their [lost] historical; they always started with the creation of the world. We’re kind of back in that mood. Now, I didn’t go quite that far. But I do try to encompass the whole world and to see it as a single unit of study. When I started doing this when I was young, my colleagues and superiors and bosses of Oxford didn’t really think much of this enterprise. They thought it was, you know, just more evidence that I was an intellectual flibbertigibbet, but eventually, you know, the world caught up with me and now global history seems almost a normal thing for an historian to do.

  Sam Willis

  What advice would you have then for sort of a young student about to embark on a career in maritime history? Read as widely as you can about the cultures you’re going to write about, I suppose?

  Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto

  Well, I think the only safe advice to anybody who’s thinking of embarking on an academic career nowadays – don’t! – because as Noel Coward said of acting, ‘the profession is overcrowded and the struggles pretty tough’. But of course, you know, every young [lost] or woman must follow his or her vocation wherever it leads. And if you have got a vocation for maritime history, I would say, my big mistake, you know, was not venturing out into the maritime environment myself not handling those ropes and spars. Not actually, you know, being able to shorten a sail. I mean I’ve written a lot about the history of navigation, but I absolute [lost] practical sense. I remember going, when my children were little, we went to Mystic Seaport, and I with hubris, and I hope it’s not always characteristic of me, [lost] to teach my children how to use a sextant. I think [lost] straight conclusively that we were at the North Pole. And I rather regret that I mean, I feel that if I’d started young enough and taken it seriously, I would have been able to sympathise better with the life of the sea if I just, you know, done a little bit more of it than cruising around Auckland harbour or sailing in a major ferry from Ravenna to Constantinople.

  Sam Willis

  I think you’ll be forgiven for not being able to use a sextant I actually was taught by a professional navigator how to use a sextant over a series of weeks several years back and at the end of it I still couldn’t do it. So actually, the assumption that anyone can do this tricky art of navigating and all they’ve got to do is be taught it doesn’t quite work. It takes a real natural ability to be able to do it at all. So, I think that says something about those people in the past, the great navigators, they had some natural talent.

  Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto

  Yes, I think that’s a really important point for scholars to grasp and in the great age of exploration, in the early 16th century when Spanish initiatives in this area were so world transforming the pilots of the Casa de Contractacion, the organisation in Spain that organise Atlantic sailings, were referred to as there was ‘piloto practicas’; so, you had to be a practised pilot. They had a sort of school of navigation, but you can’t feel your way around the sky and the sea, you know, two forces of data that navigators in pre-industrial times relied upon unless you spend a lot of time doing it and acquire a lot of experience. And even then, you know, you probably also need certain gifts, a certain intuition, that’s what of course Columbus, I think his reputation as a navigator actually greatly exaggerated, but he did say that navigating was like having a mystical vision.

  Sam Willis

  That’s a lovely way of saying it isn’t. What struck me is the quantity and the detail of arithmetic and long division and all sorts of complex maths that you’ve had to do as well, I didn’t think you really had to do that. But you have to take your reading and then apply all sorts of tables to it before you get to this multipart system to actually tell you where you are, and then it’s probably going to be a bit wrong.

  Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto

  Yes, that is so. Of course, you’re talking about a level of accuracy, which we’ve become very used to today, and which became increasingly important in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the amount of shipping in narrows seas increased; when the sheer cost of the shipwreck skyrocketed with the increasing sophistication of craft, the increasing size, the amount of cargo, a [lost] they carried. In the early modern period and before that, it wasn’t so important to be accurate, it was very much, I think navigation is very much sort of hit and miss fires. If I cite the example of Columbus again, of course, he did use tables, he consulted tables of latitude, according to the duration of daylight. That was his main kind of written table that he [lost]. And really all he had to do was to reckon the hours of daylight, which isn’t [lost] difficulty, requires fairly elementary astronomical skill, and then read his latitude off his printed tables. And of course, as you rightly say, even that very simple, straightforward method led, least because in Columbus’s day, there are a lot of printers’ errors in the tables he didn’t know how to compensate for

  Sam Willis

  That really doesn’t help very much if the tables you’re working from are inaccurate.

  Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto

  No, that did lead him into some rather bizarre mistakes. But the point was, it didn’t matter so much because people didn’t expect the level of acc [lost] in later centuries.

  Sam Willis

  It’s fascinating, isn’t it? Quite interesting, you saying that you’ve not been to sea, apart from puttering around in a Harbour, or you’ve not spent as much time at sea as you’d like. That raised a thought in my head. I’ve always been interested in the sea as an agent of change, as in the length of a voyage as well, being sufficient to fundamentally change people. So, I was thinking about this in relation to the SS Great Britain, and people going out to Australia from England in the late 19th century, and the journey was so long, but if you read their diaries, it’s fascinating to see how much has happened to them in that process. And it was quite clear that the people who were arriving in Australia were fundamentally changed, they were completely different people to those who had got on.

  Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto

  Yes, you don’t have to go full fathom five to suffer a sea change. Yes, I’m very interested Sam that you cite the example of the SS Great Britain because I had exactly the same insight, I suppose, when once when I was in all places, San Diego in California where [lost] craft alongside the jetty and one of those, ‘The Star of India’ was a ship that used to take immigrants to New Zealand and that going aboard that ship and even without making a voyage, it’s very instructive; it’s a very vivid experience of what life was [lost] as diaries, they actually printed newspapers, they had a daily newspaper which they printed on board the ship, which records all of these activities, all their leisure activities, all their concert parties. And in a strange way, they would try [lost] these very cramped and strange and dangerous conditions to keep going the sort of life which the migrants would have led in their homes in urban and provincial England and [lost] New Zealand they again tried to recreate [lost] back home. But you can see what a struggle it all was because the experiences and the changes of environment made those continuities impossible to realize with fidelity in practice. And in a way, my impression is that those journeys were kind of, you know, long spells of tension between these two tendencies, one to try and cling to a familiar way of life, the other the necessity of embracing what was new and unexperienced previously.

  Sam Willis

  I get a real sense that they were going they knew they were going through a kind of metamorphosis, they knew they were going through a change. And you can see that I think particularly in the graffiti, which is carved in the great beams of the hull of the SS Great Britain. It’s a bit like people making marks on the wall of a prison. They were kind of they were ticking off time, but they were also wanting to say, ‘I have been here, part of my life and my soul has changed whilst I was on this ship’, I thought it was really moving.

  Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto

  Well, that’s fascinating. I suppose they weren’t just trying to dig their way out!

  Sam Willis

  That would be a bad idea in the middle of the Atlantic. Yeah. Yeah, really, really good. So, what we’re talking about here, I suppose, is the value of the sea itself as a location for history to happen to people, but at the same time, you write particularly about how maritime history is such a powerful tool for studying encounters between cultures. So that’s you know, a different aspect of it when you’ve got one culture from one side of an ocean coming into contact with another side and it is particularly powerful wouldn’t you say?

  Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto

  Yes, of course, that usually only happens when they reach land. Although of course, you can have cultural encounters at sea particularly in the course of the history of piracy, when one ship captures another and takes the crew on board as prisoners; or when ships are rescued and people from one culture come into contact with another by that method; or in slave trade on slave trade ships, where people from a lot of different cultures often in the case of the slave trade ships are thrust together in the holds of these stinking vessels and also, of course, come into contact with the traders and transporters who become responsible for them. So, yes, there are moments when ships at sea become either clusters of cultural exchange, but most of the encounters that happen don’t happen until the guys reach some alien shore and find themselves in the company of characters whom they are hard-pressed to understand and of course often hard-pressed to communicate with because normally they don’t have a common language.

  Sam Willis

  It’s the challenge which historians then face as well, isn’t it? To be able to recreate that meeting of cultures from both perspectives, because it’s so heavily dominant from that which might have a written tradition which has survived as opposed to an oral tradition, which may have lost or become harder to recover?

  Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto

  Yeah, so I think that’s a very great danger that we are often misled about the nature of these encounters. Because we naturally rely on such sources as survive and sometimes when a literate culture encounters a pre-literate culture or illiterate culture whose writings we cannot read, we tend to go along with what the literate guys have left us. And I think that’s a terrible mistake, what you’ve got to try and do is read between the lines of their accounts to see what they were really, really up to. And obviously, you know, one of the big distorting influences is prejudice. I got Columbus’s rather on my mind at the moment because as we are having this conversation, Sam, there are people producing him in tweets and toppling his statues all over the world. And at my own university we have these murals, painted in the 1880s, showing Columbus arriving in the Americas and we used to be very, very proud of these, but we are now rather ashamed of them. We’ve actually covered them up in order to protect them from possible insult and ignominy and oblique. But Columbus is a great example because when he made the first record of any European person’s perceptions of indigenous people on the far side of the Atlantic, he wrote of course in an idiom and with illusions which are entirely familiar to him, but which are evidently unrecognisable, to most of the people who read them nowadays, and therefore they didn’t read them the way they were intended. And they don’t see that Columbus was extremely conflicted about his perceptions of the people he encountered, and on the whole, you know, his perceptions, all of them were very positive. He was favourably impressed to some extent, by their nakedness, he thought that might resemble the nakedness of St. Francis and be evidence of the kind of dependence on God, which for his contemporaries back in Europe was an ideal, which they strove for and could very rarely attain, they could only attain it by tremendous sacrifice and a doctrine of a religious life. And he also thought, you know, that these people might be living in a golden age resembling that from which classical poets saying almost, you know, prelapsarian state of innocence. But of course, he also thought that maybe their nakedness, and their rudimentary material culture, were evidence of savagery, and he was genuinely conflicted. And it’s almost impossible to get my contemporaries, even my students, have difficulty understanding this because the language and imagery Columbus was using is so unfamiliar to them. So, there are all kinds of traps which we need to illude when we study the sources for these now remote encounters, and the hardest thing in any humanistic discipline is traversing those chasms of culture, which lie between us and the text documents and material evidence with which we are struggling

  Sam Willis

  It’s fascinating this, we’ve talked about the sea as a location for history in its own right, and then about things happening to people and then changing and then we’ve talked about different cultures meeting and clashing brought together by the sea, and there’s one aspect of this, which we haven’t talked about, which is it’s actually linked to what I’m fascinated at the moment in the way that maritime history is helping us understand climate change. And they’re doing that by historians are studying ships logs going back through the years, across the years, where ships logs are fantastic because they’re full of the most wonderfully accurate climatic observations. So, we know where there was sea ice, we know what the temperature was, like. We know what the sky was like all over the world for many, many years. But there you’ve got a lot of ships who were sailing in complete isolation, up around the poles particularly. And so, you’ve got these ships operating in total isolation. And I think their relationship, their understanding of the natural world they’re sailing through is also a fascinating aspect of maritime history.

  Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto

  Yes, I mean, I suppose what strikes one most is that even that sort of relatively banal and I don’t know, sort of factual type of record that you find in ships logs in the modern era is it is in a sense literature. And it is shaped by the exchange between mind and environment. And there sometimes are sort of rather romantic sallies and sometimes reflections, which I think do capture that loneliness of which you speak and that sense of being in an environment which challenges and stimulates the imagination. And I guess that’s one of the ways in which the effect of, you were speaking of earlier, the trans-mutative effects that long and lonely, certainly lonely, voyages, have on the personality of the person experiencing one, I think that does come through occasionally. Of course, if you go back the evidence is much sparser and obviously, from the point of view of tracing the history of climate change, I don’t think the maritime records are enormously helpful beyond the 18th century, although there are occasional observations which can be illuminating. But that tendency, you know, to mix different types of data and mix very commonplace, observations of the state of the sea and the weather, the lie of the land, if you’re offshore, and above all, of course, the most important thing always is the direction, and if you can calculate it, the pace of the wind. I mean, those things are, you know, they’re always there, but the further you get back, the more you find them interspersed with more input from the imagination and character of the writer. And I mean, there is some very interesting work which most specialists dismiss, but which I’m rather attracted by, on ancient sailing directions, some fragments of which survive from Greek and Roman times. And some of which are echoed in literature, especially in poetry which deals with maritime subjects. So, you know, you can read the Odyssey, and you can see how sort of all of the imagery kind of echoes the language with which the ancient Greek astronomers wrote about the sky. And I think that interplay, it’s very worth following that kind of insight up because I think it’ll teach us if it’s true, and I suspect it is, I think it will teach us a lot about the way that people who drew up these [lost] and these sailing directions interacted with the sea and with the culture that they were carrying with them on shipboard.

  Sam Willis

  I suppose the one final aspect of this, and then I promise I’ll let you go – it’s always interesting though – is, you just hinted at it there, it’s the changing relationship between humankind and the sea. It might have started off as being very simple as a source for food and then it might have moved on to an ability to travel overseas. And what’s your view on the changing relationship between humans and the sea over time?

  Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto

  Well, of course, one of the things I’m rather notorious for is having suggested that the first farmed food was molluscs because on the seashore you can actually select and hybridize amongst shellfish in rock pools, with various elementary technology, all you need is a rock pool. You don’t need a lead snail, or you didn’t need to create a corral or anything like that. And of course, they’re very small creatures. And I think there is a great deal of evidence for that. But even that’s quite late by date evidence, it goes back maybe about 10,000 years, it’s rather late evidence by the standards of the antiquity of human interactions with the sea. And I think it really goes back, this is not just a question about Homo-sapiens, this is a question about how our hominid ancestors related to the sea. How did Homo floresiensis gets to the island of Florence, which even a million years ago was already an island? How did Homo Erectus get to Java at a time when it was cut off by sea from the land-based migratory route, which those guys might have been following 800,000 or so years ago? And I think really that the problem that I started with from my own ancestors, why didn’t they venture onto the sea? Why did other human creatures do so, is as relevant to the remoteness prehistory of which we can speak coherently, as it is for the rest of maritime history and to the differences of tastes that separate a tar and a yachtsman, like you from a landlubber, like me, there’s something, there’s a problem of human psychology here. And I think it’s humbling and fascinating to know that those problems of human psychology embrace us and other species ancestral to our congnient with our own.

  Sam Willis

  Well, that’s the kind of broad theme I was very much hoping we’d be able to discuss; Felipe thank you so much indeed for your time.

  Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto

  On the contrary, it’s been a very great privilege to take part in what I hope will be a very successful project. Sam, good luck with it.

  Sam Willis

  Thank you.

  As always, we’ve had some fascinating contributions on the forum of the Society for Nautical Research. Many thanks for getting in touch everyone who has. Here’s one from Paul Martinovich: ‘Under what circumstances would a lieutenant sign the Captain’s log for a warship? I was under the impression that the captain signing the log was a pretty serious matter, given that it could be cited as evidence in a court-martial or other legal proceeding. The example I have in mind is that of Lt Charles Malcolm, first Lieutenant of the Suffolk in 1801, who signed the log, both on the title page and at the end for the ship, which was commanded by his brother, Captain Poultney Malcolm. Does this suggest that the older Malcolm was sick or otherwise unable when the log was being made up in October 1801, or might there be some other explanation? I have no other information that Poultney Malcolm was hors de combat at this time, in fact, he was about to transfer to another ship’. Hmm, interesting question there Paul, thank you very much for getting in touch. There is several answers online for you to check out there.

  We’ve had a question from @HoldTony on Twitter, with a photograph, he attaches a photograph: ‘This ship is carved into the gatepost of the Chateau at Ranville, in Normandy. Any suggestions as to its identity and date?’ Some answers have also been posted there, it’s a wonderful little image, I’d urge you all to check that out. Another query on Twitter from @SarahWardAU: ‘Here’s a question for #AcademicTwitter’, she writes, ‘Who is working (or knows someone who is working) on the archaeology, cultural heritage or material culture of the Canton trade with China? I’m particularly keen to talk to anyone who is investigating sites in China, or looking at the material culture of the Swedish, English, Dutch, French or other companies in the region. There may be a book in it for you! Please retweet. Share the love and get in touch if this is you or your beloved colleague.’ Thank you very much, Sarah, for getting in touch with us. I’d urge you all to follow her, she does some fascinating stuff.

  But that’s it for the end of this week. I very much hope that you’ve enjoyed yourselves. Please do follow us on social media. You can follow the Society for Nautical Research @nauticalhistory on Twitter. You can find us on Facebook, the Mariner’s Mirror has got its own Instagram page and YouTube channel and there’s going to be some fascinating material being posted on both in the coming weeks. What else can you do? Well, please do join the Society for Nautical Research you can find us @snr.org.uk and your subscription fee will go towards publishing the most important naval and maritime history and to preserving the world’s maritime heritage. Thank you very much indeed for listening.

Category: Research