Sarah Murray: A Rich Shipping Ancestry
April 19, 2007
A Rich Shipping Ancestry
Behind today’s steel containers and 11,000 TEU vessels lies a rich and colourful history. Sarah Murray looks at the Roman pots, racing clippers and wooden barrels that are among the forerunners of the modern shipping industry
In a leafy district just outside the centre of Rome is an unassuming hill. Monte Testaccio is not very large, nor is it much to look at. But what most passers by fail to realise is that the entire hill is made up of ancient transport containers – shipping amphorae, the roughly made pots the size of a small barrel that carried everything from wine to fish sauce around the Roman Empire. The amphora is among the ingenious devices, systems and machines developed by shippers throughout the centuries to convey their goods around the world.
In some ways, however, little has changed in the business of global exports. Take the ancient amphora. The pots here at Monte Testaccio once transported olive oil from southern Spain to Rome, where they were emptied of their contents, broken up and left on what is in fact a giant rubbish dump. But when you start to examine some of the fragments lying just beneath the topsoil, some striking parallels with modern container shipping emerge.
A wide variety of markings on the pottery shards make the hill rather like a giant accounts book detailing the export and import of olive oil. Stamps, scratches and painted inscriptions tell us of the estates producing the oil, the companies that shipped it and the customs officials in Spain and Rome who checked the goods. The month a particular pot left Spain can be pinned down as well as the exact date it arrived in Italy. It is not so different, after all, from the information posted on the doors of a shipping container.
And the volumes were impressive. Historians have estimated that the amphorae at Monte Testaccio – accumulated over the course of the first and second centuries – would have transported an estimated 1.6 billion gallons of olive oil to Rome, the same amount of liquid that would be generated by flushing a toilet once a second for 32 years.
The amphora was an astonishingly efficient shipping container. With a shape that is a cross between an egg and a torpedo, it was very strong and easy to pack into a vessel’s hold. The curve of its side fitted snugly against the curve of the ship. Its pointed base allowed the jar to fit neatly in between the shoulders of the amphorae in the row below, preventing the cargo from rolling around during transit. The base also served as a third grip – supplementing its two handles – for dockworkers to grasp during the unloading process and when decanting the contents.
If ancient containers were surprisingly well designed, so were ships. Today, the launch of a giant vessel such as the Emma Maersk generates considerable interest, but in nineteenth-century Britain, the public was captivated by the journeys of another type of ship – the racing clipper.
Clippers such as Cutty Sark, Fiery Cross, Thermopylae and Ariel were the fastest cargo sailing ships the world has ever known. In a brief but glorious couple of decades between the 1850s and the 1870s, these magnificent vessels would set off from the east coast of China, their holds packed with chests of the new season’s crop of tea, and race back to England – all hoping to be the first to arrive home.
These crack sailing ships were daring feats of marine engineering. They literally “clipped” the top of the waves as they sped across the oceans. But while above water all was a glamorous flourish of sails and seaborne swagger, below the surface of the ocean were deep holds where neat ranks of wooden chests sat stuffed with tea. Shipbuilders and engineers honed the designs of these vessels so that their cargo could be moved thousands of miles across the oceans at ever-faster speeds.
And those speeds were impressive, Today the Emma Maersk slices her way efficiently through the water at about 26 knots with the assistance of a propeller drive shaft that is fitted with two electric motors and a horsepower equal to that of 1,156 family cars. But back in the nineteenth century, the clippers managed a remarkable 17 or 18 knots, powered only by the wind.
And the genius of the clippers was not just their bursts of speed in a fair wind. Their real brilliance lay in the ability to continue sailing with only the tiniest breath of wind, “ghosting” gracefully along the ocean in the calmest of conditions.
A great welcome awaited the clipper crews back home. In London, messenger boys raced down to Mincing Lane to announce the imminent arrival of a vessel to fat-bellied tea traders. Crowds gathered by the docks to see the elegant creature arrive. In Liverpool, where the ships could make their final passage up the Mersey under full sail and in clear view of the general public, noise and commotion would greet the sight of these masters of speed.
Perhaps the most impressive of the shipping containers to have travelled the high seas over the centuries is the barrel. Its design has proved so successful that its construction today differs little from that of the Bronze Age craftsmen thought to have invented the device.
For Britain, as it built up its immense empire, the barrel was an essential cargo container. Barrels brought sugar to London from the West Indies, and sent it out again to be sold in continental Europe. Rice came from South Carolina in barrels, which also carried cod from New England. In New England, molasses arriving from West India were distilled into rum and sent to Africa in barrels where the liquor was traded for slaves.
The British created a commercially interconnected world that stretched from the Caribbean to Asia – and the barrel was at the heart of the action. For if the shipping container has become modern globalisation’s pre-eminent transport tool, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the barrel occupied a similar position.
Constructed without nails or glue, this watertight container is extremely tough. Moreover, its bulging shape means that, on its side, less than a square inch of surface area touches the ground, making it easy to roll with one hand, even when it contains up to 100 gallons.
The barrel’s sturdy form is actually based on architectural principles. In barrel-vaulted buildings, buttressing contains the outward thrust of the stones in each of the vault’s semi-circular arches. When used on a barrel, the circle is completed. Hoops contain the outward energy of its components, the staves, and each stave serves the same function as the keystone in an arch (something that becomes clear when looking at a barrel from above).
But as well as strength and durability, the barrel also possesses creativity, changing the taste of what it holds. For winemakers, oak has become a powerful aid, generating an astonishing range of tastes and textures. Everything from the climate in which the forest has grown and the grain of the tree to the way the wood is seasoned, aged and toasted contributes to the complex palette of flavours from which the winemaker chooses when designing a wine’s bouquet.
Analysing these bouquets has become a high art that, to the uninitiated, sometimes seems to border on the ridiculous. “Flowery peaches,” “black cherries,” and “redcurrants” are comparisons that seem sensible enough. Then there are the more unlikely “pencil shavings,” “tar,” and “party balloons.” Perhaps the most bizarre descriptions to have entered the lexicon of the wine aficionado are “petrol” and “rubber.”
Yet the comparison of wine with transport fuel and something used in car tires is strangely appropriate, given the barrel’s role in winemaking. After all, the taste of many vintages could not have come about without the assistance of a simple, moveable wooden transport container.
Over the centuries, shipping technologies such as these have changed the world. The amphora was at the heart of an ancient, lucrative global trade – and supply and demand was what kept the Roman Empire together. The races of the nineteenth-century clippers had a darker side – the opium with which the British paid for their tea led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Chinese and sparked the Opium Wars, forcing the Chinese to open ports such as Shanghai to foreign trade and to hand over Hong Kong, which was to remain in British hands until 1997.
But if seaborne cargo transport has shaped the world’s economies and influenced global politics, a more sensory effect was brought about by the barrel – a change in the taste and texture of the goods conveyed by this simple vessel of hoops and staves.
For more on the history of transporting food, read Sarah Murray’s book, Moveable Feasts: the incredible journeys of the things we eat, Aurum Press, available on amazon.co.uk from May, 2007: