Holiday Musings on the History of Maritime Trade
Jock O’Connell
I’m writing this month’s commentary in a coffeehouse in Genoa, a city with rather a lot of maritime history. The explorers Christopher Columbus and Giovanni Caboto (better known to us as John Cabot), were both born here around 1450. The current iteration of the Lanterna di Genova, the port’s iconic lighthouse, was built about ninety years later, replacing one that had been there for five centuries. Columbus’s uncle had been one of its keepers. Today, according to Lloyd’s List, Genoa is, after the fast-growing transshipment terminal at Gioia Tauro down in Calabria, Italy’s second busiest container port. In that sense and at least for the time being, it’s Italy’s Port of Los Angeles. Its annual container volume is about equivalent to that of the Port of Oakland.
Although containerization is now popularly associated with the innovations of the American trucking executive Malcom McLean in 1956, it’s had plenty of antecedents. During the early 20th century, railroads in Europe and the United States experimented with the use of containers to facilitate shipments of freight and mail. In 1932, the Pennsylvania Railroad even established a container terminal at its railyard in Enola, a town on the Susquehanna River opposite the state capital at Harrisburg. Following the Second World War, the U.S. Army developed what it called a Transporter, a rigid, corrugated steel container with a 9,000-pound carrying capacity to ship officers’ household goods to their increasing number of new assignments worldwide. But the use of containers in shipping by sea goes back much, much further.
About 450 miles south of Genoa is Lipari, one of the volcanic Aeolian islands off Sicily’s northern shore. Among Lipari’s attractions is an archeological museum showcasing a remarkable collection of ancient amphorae harvested from shipwrecks in the nearby waters. These ceramic vessels testify to a rich heritage of the Mediterranean’s early version of containerized trade in olive oils and wine, although I suspect a display of recovered TEUs in some future museum would be much less visually appealing than the magnificent display housed in Lipari’s museum.
Unfortunately but predictably, there’s no word on the fates of those who crewed the wrecks from which these treasures have been recovered.
Further to the south, off Sicily’s southern coast, lies Malta. Valletta, its capital, is just a half-hour flight from Sicily’s Catania airport. St. Paul was shipwrecked here on his way to Rome. Valletta features a strategic harbor, control of which has been fiercely contested for millennia by nearly everyone who dared sail the Mediterranean from the Phoenicians to the Romans to the Arabs to Napoleon, and ultimately to the British, from whom Malta finally gained its independence in 1964. Valetta, understandably, is a city of imposing but now obsolete fortresses…and several fine restaurants.
Among those who found Malta of vital importance in the late 18th century were traders from a newly founded nation in North America. It’s perhaps a bit hard to grasp how relatively fast international trade took off following the voyages of discovery of the Genovese explorers, but American merchant shipping was plying the Mediterranean from the time of independence.
There was a problem, though. Their ships were being seized and their crews held for ransom by what were essentially state-sponsored pirates sailing from the Barbary coast of North Africa. And there was no one to protect them.
Following the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended the revolution and saw the United States recognized as an independent nation, the fledgling naval force the colonists had assembled to fight the Royal Navy was disbanded. Neither the British nor the French (who were annoyed that the United States had stopped repaying French loans incurred during the revolution) had much reason to come to the aid of American shipping. So, in 1794, Congress authorized the building of six large frigates, the foundation of the United States Navy.
Rather than continue to pay the bounties demanded by the Barbary states, American warships were soon dispatched to the Mediterranean, including a squadron under the command of Commodore Edward Preble, to take the fight “to the shores of Tripoli”. The ships sent to safeguard America’s foreign trade included the USS Enterprise and the USS Constitution.
The latter (“Old Ironsides”) is still a commissioned member of the fleet, although its operations are limited to an annual turnaround cruise in Boston harbor. The Enterprise, the third of eight navy ships and one space shuttle so named, was built in 1799 and remained afloat until 1823, when it ran aground and sank in the Caribbean. But in one notable encounter off Malta’s Dwerja Bay on August 1, 1801, Enterprise engaged and captured a much larger Tripolitan war ship in one of America’s first naval victories against a foreign power.
While far less renown than the Constitution, the Enterprise would re-enter history during the War of 1812, when it successfully took on a British brig just off Maine’s Portland Head Light on September 5, 1813. There were two notable aspects of the battle. Both captains were killed in the encounter and are buried in graves next to each other in Portland’s Eastern Cemetery, not far from the grave of Commodore Preble, who had died six year earlier. The other point of interest is that the sounds of the clash were recorded by an aspiring local poet named Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
I remember the sea-fight far away,
How it thundered o’re the tide!
And the dead captains as they lay,
In their graves, o’erlooking the tranquil bay,
Where they in battle died.
Longfellow, though now largely forgotten to contemporary Americans, was a big deal in his time and for many years after, both here and abroad. Paul Revere largely owes his lasting fame to a Longfellow poem about a certain midnight ride. One evening while I was a graduate student in London, I was sitting in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey listening to a choral recital when I was startled to notice Longfellow’s bust on display among such greats of English literature as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Dickens, Jane Austen, and the Bronte sisters. Sic transit.
His recording of a sea battle was not Longfellow’s only link to maritime lore. Portland, for whom that port city on the Columbia River was named in 1845 on the basis of a coin toss, prospered as a seaport during the 19th century in part because it served as Montreal’s winter port. In those days, the St. Lawrence River froze up, denying shipping a water route to Canada’s largest city. So a railway connection was established linking the two cities by 1853, with Canada’s Grand Trunk Railway purchasing land for a new terminal and grain elevator on Portland’s waterfront from none other than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poet and real estate mogul.
Today, tens of billions of dollars in U.S. trade still crosses the Mediterranean, albeit on vessels owned by European and Asian shipping lines. But the United States Navy remains on station there, as it has for more than two centuries. The U.S. Sixth Fleet is headquartered down in Naples and has been continuously engaged in naval operations throughout the Mediterranean since its formal establishment in 1950.
There are no U.S. Navy ships in Genoa at the moment. But they are not far away. One day last fall, I was enjoying a morning coffee in Marathi, a fishing village on Crete’s Souda Bay, when I glanced up to see the ominous black shape of one of our nuclear-powered attack submarines glide by on its way to a nearby NATO naval base. And, if you were with me on Corfu early last month, you might have caught sight of the George H.W. Bush steaming north to a port call at Split on the Croatian coast. Reportedly, the less than ostensible reason for the formidable carrier’s visit was to impress upon an increasingly obstreperous leadership in Belgrade that the United States was fully capable of again inflicting great harm on any Serbian forces attempting to seize neighboring land.
Still, it’s Christmas time, and very large numbers of American seafarers, both civilian and military, are on lonely duty throughout the Mediterranean and around the globe. So, to them and to all of you back home, best wishes for a merry and peaceful holiday season.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in Jock’s commentaries are his own and may not reflect the positions of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association.