Monthly Archives: February 2024

Arts, Books, History, Maritime

Book Review: A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks

LITERARY REVIEW

STARING across the Solent in 1545, Henry VIII was appalled when he witnessed the sinking of his warship, the Mary Rose.

The Holy Roman Emperor’s ambassador of Charles V wrote: “Through misfortune and carelessness… the ship foundered, and all hands-on-board, to the number of about 500, were drowned, with the exception of about five and twenty or thirty servants, sailors and the like.”

More than 400 years later, the Mary Rose was raised from the seas. Its resurrection is one of the most significant achievements of maritime archaeology that is celebrated in this engrossing book by David Gibbins.

Gibbins is the ideal person to tell the story of shipwrecks. He is a distinguished underwater archaeologist, veteran of thousands of dives, and a best-selling novelist whose narrative skills are more harnessed to fact rather than fiction.

His earliest wreck is the Bronze Age boat discovered in 1992, its timbers miraculously preserved in the oxygen-free mud at the bed of the river that ran through Dover in prehistoric times. The Dover Boat was probably constructed some time between 1575 and 1520 BC. It would have been able to cross the Channel and make extended coastal journeys, possibly as far as the Baltic Sea northwards and the Bay of Biscay to the south.

The most recent wreck is the SS Gairsoppa, sunk by a U-boat during the Battle of the Atlantic in 1941. It had been carrying 17 tons of silver bullion. Some of this was recovered and the Royal Mint garnered some 20,000 coins from it.

Between the Dover Boat and the Gairsoppa, Gibbins highlights ten other wrecks. The Bronze Age ship found off the Turkish coast in 1982 was carrying an “astonishing diversity” of goods, from pottery to weaponry. It also had enough metal on board to make 5,000 swords. Another, more unorthodox find, was a folding writing tablet which some history scholars have described as “the world’s oldest book”.

A Greek ship from the 5th century BC, also located off the coast of Turkey, had a cargo that consisted mainly of wine. Letters stamped on the amphoras, huge jars, showed that it came from Erythrae, a place renowned for drink.

A scalpel handle found on a 2nd century AD Roman wreck revealed the probable presence of a skilled eye surgeon on board. It was most likely used in cataract operations.

What wrecks often show are patterns of trade. The discovery of a 9th century ship off an Indonesian island provided evidence of goods passing between Tang dynasty China and Persia. The huge cargo included more than 50,000 bowls, candlesticks, incense burners, and mirrors.  One of the items was already an antique when it sank beneath the waves.

More recently discovered wrecks have shed light on British and global history of the past 300 years. The Royal Anne Galley went down off the Cornish coast in 1721. Only three out of the 210 individuals on board survived.

Among those drowned was Lord Belhaven, sailing to Barbados to serve as the colony’s governor. Reportedly, the day before its departure, he was warned of his fate by “a mysterious woman in a mantle and hood”, but misguidedly chose to ignore her. Had the ship made it to the West Indies, it would have ben used to hunt down the buccaneer “Black Bart Roberts”.

Gibbins is a careful and sensitive narrator; he never loses sight of the reality that wrecks represent the tragic loss of human lives. However, he also knows they can open up “many fascinating byways of history to those willing to be fully immersed”.

– A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks by David Gibbins is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 304pp

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Britain, Europe, Government, NATO, Russia, Society, Ukraine, United States

The West dithers over Ukraine

UKRAINE WAR

AFTER two years of atrocities, pain, grief, and mass bereavement, the focus has turned once again on the Ukraine war, a tragedy which disgraces the modern world.

Not so long ago the civilised nations of Europe and North America could never have believed that a huge region of our continent would once again be turned over to dismal trenches, makeshift hurried graves, and the unending rumble of artillery fire. We thought we had put such horrors behind us in a new order of rules-based diplomacy and civilised negotiation. And yet here we are, with the flag-shaded war cemeteries filling up and the ammunition factories working day and night, as if it was 1917, not 2024.

This is a war, however, that remains strangely limited. The nations which a few years ago were offering Ukraine the warmth and protection of NATO membership now baulk at the idea for fear of a general war that might inflict on them the dire hardships that Ukraine’s people daily endure. In Europe, the air is full of the sound of uncertain trumpets, as the leaders of major nations dither between naked self-interest – cheap gas and a quiet life – and their solemn duty to protect a vulnerable neighbour against a snarling and ruthless threat.

If the democracies cannot stand together against the menace from Vladimir Putin’s increasingly despotic Russia, they will one by one fall under its appalling influence and power.

Since its inception, the whole point of NATO has been to avoid that danger by invoking into its treaty an assault upon its weakest member the trigger for a unified political and military response – “an attack on one is an attack on all”.

Of course, such an alliance has to be careful not to extend its promises so far that it cannot keep them when tested. And it is more or less politically impossible now to fulfil the promises of future membership offered to Ukraine in 2008.

Nonetheless, there remains an inviolate obligation to help, outside the direct provisions of the NATO treaty but within the bonds of mutual friendship and support that hold the free countries of Europe together. It is not as if the danger from the East is growing any smaller, or that the regime in the Kremlin is showing any signs of civility. The upcoming fraudulent election, which is grotesquely rigged to confirm Putin in his presidency, will only serve to strengthen him at home. From what can be garnered and gleaned from public opinion in the Russian Federation, the current course of the war is boosting his popularity, and it would be unwise to assume that he will face any serious internal challenge in the near future.

The deeply sinister and suspicious circumstances of the recent death in an Arctic prison of the Russian freedom campaigner Alexei Navalny is a gruesome warning of just how totally Moscow has forsaken the democracy and the rule of law it seemed to embrace after the fall of communism in 1991.

The state of the conflict today is also a warning that the Russian army, which performed so badly in the original invasion, has learned from its previous mistakes to become a growing and more formidable fighting force. Britain, for its part, accustomed over centuries to defy continental tyrants, has done better than most other nations in Europe in trying to deal with this confrontation.

The Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron, has expressed clear and unambiguous support of Ukraine’s desperate struggle. So, too, has ex-prime minister, Boris Johnson. But as the spectre of Donald Trump falls ever more over America, and as US Congress fiddles while Kiev burns, the West still has miles to go and much to do.

President Zelensky should be given the tools to defend his country.

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Britain, Government, Politics, Society

Disaffection is threatening our free and stable society

BRITAIN

FOR WHOM really was the winner in last week’s by-elections? “None of The Above” Party seems a more appropriate declaration given that 60 per cent of the electorate did not bother to exercise a right to vote in either of the seats being contested for. That’s a democratic crying shame. We elect our MPs about a dozen times during our adult lives.

Some will not try to diminish the Tory failure, but it was considerable. Nor should we assume that Labour is too weakly supported that it cannot win a General Election, for it is not. Or that the Reform Party is not a major threat to Rishi Sunak, because it is. Disaffected Tories are moving in their droves to Reform, unsettling for the Conservative Party if they have ambitions of holding on to power. More than ten per cent of Conservatives have already migrated. Yet, these simple truths are mere squalls on the surface of British politics.

Troubled depths lie beneath, which are full of potential dangers for our stable and free society.

Politics in the UK has fractured over the past quarter of a century. Until the eras of Thatcher and Blair, this country was still divided politically on much the same lines that had divided it in 1950. One big party stood for the industrial working class, the inhabitants of council estates and 19th Century terraces, and also for a small layer of city-dwelling radical intellectuals. The other stood for tree-lined suburbs and the countryside, white-collar workers, for small businessmen and professionals.

But by the time Mrs Thatcher had finished, and Mr Blair had begun his swinging social revolution, we were a different country.

All the old frontiers had melted away, just as the Iron Curtain bulldozed down made headway for a new Europe. Vast new problems grew and overshadowed the old ones: the replacement of industrial jobs with high-tech work or with call-centre drudgery, the flood of women into the workforce and away from the home, the astonishing expansion of universities, the transformation of family life, the computer revolution, and, perhaps above all, large-scale immigration.

Loyalties shifted and blurred, as the Brexit referendum showed beyond doubt. Politics had become troubling and deeply divisive.

In spite of that, Tory and Labour politicians still sought to win votes by using the old spells and incantations, which no longer worked – more police officers on the beat on one side, ever-expanding promises to fix the NHS on the other. The wider public, unfooled, look on with increasing dismay.

How is it so many pledges and promises are never fulfilled? Why is a rich country, full of skills and talent, now so lacking in good government that we navigate our lives amid a maze of potholes and crumbling roads, unprotected by an absent police force, and the many who are stuck in queues for everything from a dental appointment to hospital admission for a medical procedure or major operation? Public angst is growing.

We should not, however, despise our politicians; of whatever affiliation they may be. We live in an ancient and free democracy, and it should be allowed to thrive. Most people will understand that politicians bear a heavy responsibility and in many cases are personally devoted to serving their constituents. The great majority of parliamentarians are honest and well-intentioned.

But something has gone badly amiss in their relationship with those they represent. If left uncorrected, and the widespread discontent and disengagement now rife among us are not assuaged, a portal will open through which dangerous extremists can enter mainstream politics.

Such extremism is personified in the worrying figure of George Galloway, who appears now to have a real chance in the chaotic Rochdale by-election. As a lone maverick, Mr Galloway can do little harm. But what if other, similar figures, begin to profit from discontent and disaffection? A gateway certainly exists for trumping exploitation.

Our mainstream politicians should stop trying to placate voters with mere slogans and instead recognise that their concerns are real and pressing. The whole point of democracy is that such discontents be addressed.

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