Dan Snow's History Hit - The Boundless Sea

Episode Date: February 19, 2020

We are a land animal. But millions of us have taken to the sea to live, fight, travel, eat, escape and seek fame and fortune. I am obsessed with the sea. On how humans have built ever more efficient and capable ships to exploit its riches and opportunities. This is an conversation I’ve been longing to have. David Abulafia has written massive, beautiful, scholarly books about the oceans and his most recent, The Boundless Sea, is a masterpiece.He and I chatted about why and how humans have taken to the sea in ships and why what happens on the water affects politics, economics and societies on the land.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Now those of you who have listened to these, those veterans of this podcast, you traumatised Stockholm Syndrome sufferers, will know that I love maritime history. I love it more than life itself. I'm never happier than when I'm in the teeth of an icy cold South Wesley breeze making my way up the channel. The green fields of Devon, Cornwall, Dorset, Sussex, on my port bow. Never happier. And well, the only thing that can make me happy in doing that is while I was doing it, is if I was reading a book about maritime, about naval history. There have been many maritime historians on this podcast, but none of them, none of them have had the ambition and the grandeur of vision of this guest that I've got today.

I've been trying to get him on for ages. It's incredibly exciting. It is David Abelafia. He is an emeritus professor of history at Cambridge University. He has written a ginormous book called The Boundless Sea about our human relationship with the oceans, trading, fighting, travelling on the oceans. It's such a gigantic book, it's impossible to know where to steer this conversation, but it was a huge honour sitting

down with him and chatting about it. We've got some maritime history on History Hit TV, obviously. It's like Netflix for history, it's our new history channel. If you go to historyhit.tv for a small subscription, you get access to the world's best history channel. It's kind of exciting. Growing bigger and bigger every month. There are hundreds of films on there. If you use the code POD6, P-O-D-6, you will not pay a penny for six weeks. Not one penny. For six weeks. Enough time for you to sail down to St. Helena in an old square-rigged ship. That's a lot of time when you're not paying anything at all. So go and check that out.

Historyhit.tv, use the code POD6. In the meantime, here is David Aboulafia. Thank you very much for coming on the show. I would just like to say that I am green with... If I had my dream, it would be to write the book that you've just written. So well done you. Thank you. But isn't that just the most extraordinary subject? It's a subject that actually needed to be written about because when you actually think about it, I mean, you don't find histories of the oceans in the bookshops. What you'll find is histories of the world, which concentrate on the landmass.

So the first thing that I really wanted to do, and that comes right at the beginning of the book, is to have a map of the world in which the continents were just completely blank. And the maritime area was sort of dark grey. So it would really sort of attract your attention. And looking at the world that way and seeing that, you know, 70% of the surface is actually oceans, and getting some sense of the proportion between the different oceans and how some of the seas we always talk about, like the Mediterranean, which I've also written about, but it's less than 1% of the total maritime surface. So you really begin to see the world in different proportions. Human beings, land, animal, discuss.

That is absolutely right. And that's part of the fascination of the topic, because if you're going to write what I've subtitled a human history of the oceans, so where do the human beings come into it? And of course, the human beings are always on the move. They're on their ships going from port to port. And obviously, the ports around the coasts are absolutely crucial in any discussion of the oceans. But beyond that, you've got some people who are able to settle in the middle of the sea. So you've got islands. You think of the Polynesian islands, very small islands.

One or two very large ones like Madagascar, which was only colonized in the Middle Ages, in fact, by people from Indonesia. So you've got these human societies that develop in the middle of the sea, sometimes in touch with the world around, sometimes not so much. So that's also part of the fascination. There are people who live sort of in the sea, but mainly it's people crossing the sea. So it's the connections between the continents that are made by, well, particularly merchants, actually. that are made by, well, particularly merchants, actually. Although we live on land, we are kind of a littoral and a riverine species, aren't we?

If you go back to before railways, before planes and cars, most of us needed the water, did we, in some way? The water was the way to move about efficiently, actually. I mean, if you take, for instance, the famous Silk Road, which, according to a lot of historians, linked Europe right across the vast mass of Asia to China in the Middle Ages, you actually look at it and you realise that it was a tremendous challenge. It only really functioned intermittently, and it was really a collection of little routes that sort of joined together. A lot depended on the political conditions at various points on the routes across Eurasia.

You had the Gobi Desert, you had the mountains, and you had to pack everything onto the backs of camels and so on, which was, you know, it limited the amount you could carry. Compare that to the sea and what historians and archaeologists are now talking about, the Silk Route of the sea, linking Southeast Asia through the Indian Ocean up the Red Sea towards Egypt from antiquity right through, well, I mean, in a sense, you could say to the present day to Chinese ambitions, the Belt and Road and so on. That was a very efficient way of making contact. You could carry enormous quantities of goods. So some of these Chinese ships setting out across the South China Sea carried half a million pieces of porcelain in the late Middle

Ages. I don't think you could put half a million pieces of porcelain on the back of however many camels. I mean, you just think logistically it's not going to work. So these maritime routes were really the way in which places very far apart from one another maintained contact. And what's the earliest culture you identify as? Do you talk about riverine culture as well, or do you talk about proper ocean-going culture? Ocean-going. This is very much a history of the oceans, and it actually leaves out the Mediterranean, partly because I've written a book about that already, but also because we know so much

about the Mediterranean, it throws things off balance. It's a different type of sea. It's narrow. There's very intensive contact between the north and south shores, the east and west shores. The oceans are a different sort of problem. These are wide open spaces, which have always been a challenge to navigators. So simply opening them up, right? So that takes one right back. When do I begin? Well, with the Polynesians, and this takes one really into the years around, well, effectively, let's say 12,000 BC, but you could go further back. Of course, you've got people somehow managing to get to Australia, but the Polynesians, those people who managed to colonize the islands in the

Pacific, which are an extraordinary phenomenon because you've got to think in a way of that area, Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, which are all sort of collections of very small islands, as a sort of continent in itself, but a continent made up of water with all these little points on the map which were actually inhabited by human beings and over a process over many thousands of years culminating in the colonization of New Zealand which is now thought only to have taken place around AD 1300, so really very late. And Hawaii, probably in the early Middle Ages, so again, quite late. For many thousands of years, that spread of humanity across this vast area,

with a sort of common culture as well. So Hawaiians could understand Maori speech. You know, it is extraordinary in terms of its geographical spread, the largest language group in the world, Polynesian, and it also includes Madagascar. It's just unimaginable. What interests you particularly about maritime cultures? Is it the technology? Is it the leaps forward that allow ships to sail upwind, the navigation? Or is it the human stories, just the tenacity? wind the navigation or is it or is it the human stories just the tenacity the it's the human stories um i'm not so strong on you know the exact details of how ships were built and so on

inevitably publishers like to hear a little bit about you know the differences between cogs and caracks and all these other types of medieval ship i tend to gloss over that or rather deal with it by presenting the reader with some nice pictures. But it's the human beings crossing the sea who have to be the focus of this. What are they carrying with them? They're carrying goods with them. So I've mentioned the so-called silk route of the sea. So they're carrying silk and they're carrying porcelain from China and later on, phenomenal quantities of tea. But they're not just carrying goods, they're also carrying cultural influences,

which take all sorts of forms. I mean, from west to east, you've got the spread of Buddhism and Islam, eastwards into Southeast Asia, from China to Japan and so on across the sea. You've got also influences on what you might call sort of fashions within Europe. So I mentioned tea. You've got the Swedes, for instance, drinking their tea out of Chinese cups with Chinese teapots and redistributing all this tea from Gothenburg to London and New York and all sorts of other places in the 18th century. So the culture that we're familiar with becomes moulded by influences which have travelled right across the world in that particular case. What's the main reason people are taken to the sea, do you think? Is it imperialism, colonisation, warfare, or do you see trade and cultural exchange being paramount? Well, I wouldn't underestimate the importance of curiosity.

I think that is an important element in the history of exploration. But to me, actually, trade, well, let's put it a bit more broadly, is sort of gain, financial gain. So if you took Christopher Columbus, the great dream of establishing a route to China and Japan across the Atlantic, because he didn't know the existence of the Americas, didn't know the existence of the Pacific. So he thought that roughly where he arrived in the Bahamas, that's where Japan ought to have been. And why Japan? Because he'd read Marco Polo. Marco Polo didn't say very much about Japan.

But what he did say was that the streets were paved with gold. So, all right, so there's that. And then underneath that, very often you'll find other motivations. I mean, coming back to Columbus, what was the gold to be used for? Not just to enrich the king and queen of Spain, but to pay for a great crusade for the recovery of Jerusalem. Exactly. So there's a sort of messianic side to Columbus. That wasn't true of all these explorers by any means. But the commercial gain aspect, I think, that explains why people were able, were willing to take the sort of risks that they took. I mean, you know, we nowadays wouldn't,

you know, we don't want to get on board a Boeing 737 MAX, because we know it has this terrible record. But actually, by comparison with the sorts of ships that were going across the Indian Ocean or later on the Atlantic, it's actually rather a good record. So people took these risks. But if the outcome might be as much as a sort of 500% profit, then they were willing to do so. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to

conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week there's a you know there's a there's a technological reason for going to places that the technology allows you to. There are political reasons. But do you think there are certain cultures that have fostered that openness to embracing the oceans? There are certainly cultures which, I mean, inevitably they tend to be cultures developed by the shores of the sea. So if you were to take a city like Venice, where looking out towards the sea, really being a city built in the sea, dependent upon the sea for its very first

sources of food, fish and salt and so on, and then gradually developing a deeper relationship that took it deeper into the Adriatic and then beyond the Adriatic into the wider Mediterranean and so on. So that's the sort of maritime culture, which also developed, I think, in England, in 18th century England, the world of Nelson and so on. So I think there are those places. The best example of this actually is along the shores of the Baltic and some extent the North Sea, the medieval

league of German cities, the Hanseatic League, which dominated the trade of Northern Europe in the late Middle Ages and even after that, and this sort of common sense of purpose. But beyond that, a common culture. So that if you go to Tallinn in Estonia, you go to Bruges, you look at the buildings, you think, my goodness, you know, they're all very similar to one another. If you look at the documents, they're written in a language which is sort of between modern German and modern Dutch, so it's Low German, as it's called, which again was used as the common language all the way from Flanders right up to what's now Estonia.

So these were people, again, who were sort of wedded to the sea. So these were people, again, who were sort of wedded to the sea. Why, when we talk about the great wars of the, the great power wars of the sort of 18th, 19th, 20th centuries, why is supremacy at sea often decisive? Well, that's a question that historians have been discussing lately in a rather more critical vein, and some people arguing that actually wars are never really won at sea. And on top of that, going further back in time, how do you actually control maritime space? It's not easy to do. It's not obviously like, you know, building castles, controlling roads and river routes and so on, which you can do on land. It's an enormous challenge. So maybe, actually, maybe the truth of the matter is that wars tend to be won on land but the sea is obviously absolutely essential within that context in making the

imperial connections which you find of course in the 18th 19th century in you know in the British presence in Africa or Portuguese in India earlier on or whatever. You mentioned the Polynesians does most of your work focus is it hard to look beyond the sort of extraordinary explosion of maritime activity in Western Europe in the late Middle Ages? Or are there other particular cultures you identify that are sea-focused? It's important to try and get away from a sort of Eurocentric view of maritime history, in particular, and writing the history of the oceans forces one to do that, of course. There are parts of the world, I mean, getting to the land masses now, if you look along the shores of West Africa, you don't find much in the way of real seagoing activity before the arrival of the Europeans. of real seagoing activity before the arrival of the Europeans. You'd find boats going along doing fishing expeditions down the coasts of West Africa and so on. But those are not really

maritime people in the way that the Europeans became maritime people. So I think if we're looking at other cultures that had a very strong maritime focus, one would particularly want to look at Southeast Asia. One would come up with some surprising examples. The Malays, for instance. What we know is there were long periods when the Chinese government in, say, the late Middle Ages, discouraged maritime activity, trading activity across the South China Sea. There wasn't a significant Chinese navy except along the river routes. And so who steps in to deal with that? That's the question.

And it's always struck me that historians have never really come up with a satisfactory answer. But there are answers which archaeological evidence is bringing to light. Excavations in places like Singapore, which turns out to have been a very important commercial centre in the 14th century. So really sort of understanding that maritime history, the maritime history of those regions beyond Europe, a vibrant maritime history already existed well before the arrival of the Portuguese and the Spaniards and the English and the French and so on in the rest of the world. We always think of the expedition

Vasco da Gama, 1497 to 8, opening up the route between Europe and India and beyond. But there's a much richer history that goes much further back with a great deal of maritime activity going on. When you look at today, is what strikes you the kind of continuity, the fact the oceans are still being used to ply trade and carry the majority of our goods, or does the technology set us apart from the past? There's enormous continuity in the sense that maritime trade still accounts for, by far and away, the greatest part of world trade as normally measured. I mean, there are all sorts

of ways, of course, of measuring it. But recent developments, technological developments, have actually, if anything, boosted the role of maritime trade. The fact that you could have a ship carrying as many as 15,000 containers, I mean, it's extraordinary because, you know, you look at a single container, you think that's a pretty large object. And now the Chinese are building on a most astonishing scale. So there's that side of things, which it represents a sort of forward leap, if you like, in the scale of maritime trade. On the other side of the coin, there's the fact that one of the reasons people tended to cross the sea, which was to travel from place to place, whether, you know, to visit their relatives or to migrate to another land or

whatever it might be, has vanished. I mean, we no longer have passenger traffic across the Atlantic. We no longer have passenger ships setting out from the port of London to go all the way to Australia. That's all done. We now travel by air, of course. Who knows how that will develop with all the questions being asked about the problems of air travel vis-a-vis climate change. But even so, there's been a shift there to a different type of passenger experience. So we now have the cruise industry, which actually goes back a very long way. It goes back to Thomas Cook, 19th century, but it really only took off in the 1950s and 60s. And we now have cruise ships that can, if you include the crew, they would be carrying some of the largest,

carrying more than 10,000 people on board. I have to say, to me, that's hell on earth or hell on water. I wouldn't want to be on such a ship. But, you know, the whole nature of the modern engagement with the sea has changed in that respect. Well, thank you so much. The book is called The Boundless Sea, A Human History of the Oceans. It's a wonderful thing. Thank you very much for coming on. You're welcome. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders.

All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished and liquidated. One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world. He tells us what is possible, not just in the pages of history books, but in our own lives as well. I have faith in you. funny makes sense but if you could just do me a favour it's for free go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast if you give it a five star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review purge yourself give it a glowing review I'd really appreciate that it's tough weather that law of the jungle out there and I need all the fire support I can get so that will boost it up the charts it's so tiresome but if you could do it I'd be very very grateful. Thank you.