Around the world - why do ships appeal?

I am not person with a great understanding of matters technical and ships are very technical. Would I know how to navigate one? No. Do I know how an engine works? No. But, like many boys of my generation, raised on stories of pirates and war at sea, ships were enormously attractive and I had plenty of opportunity to see them. I was born in Vancouver, home to one of the world’s most magnificent harbours.

From a family photo album, here is a shot from the late 1940’s or early 50’s. It shows an American battleship arriving in Vancouver under Lions Gate Bridge.

This would have been about the time my godmother gave me a copy of The Wind in the Willows. Perhaps its most famous line is Ratty’s comment that,

“ … there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”

Granted, Ratty was talking about sculling on an idyllic English river, but the line stuck; more than half a century later, it still does. Anyway, here I am, eight years old or so, with the Vancouver fireboat.

One of my first full-time jobs was in Liverpool, in its day the so-called ‘Second Port of the Empire’ in terms of the value of goods handled. I occasionally took a ‘ferry ‘cross the Mersey’ to work, watching ships moving up and down the river. The lower building in the centre of the picture is the onetime head office of Cunard.

On days off, I would explore the docks.

This is a traditional ship, the California Star, painted by Cec Jackson, captain of the container ship Melbourne Star, which took me to New Zealand. California Star was built in 1945 at Harland & Wolff in Belfast, just across the Irish Sea from Liverpool.

Click on the picture and look at all the activity. Look at all the different cargoes. Standardized they are not. There are barrels and pallets and crates. It took a lot of men and a lot of time to empty a ship and refill its holds. Consequently, a vessel could spend nearly as much time in port as at sea. And at dockside a ship doesn’t earn money.

By the early 1970s, containerization had arrived. The simple, standardized steel boxes, which could be unloaded and loaded so quickly, needed fewer dockers or, in North America, longshoremen. In Liverpool, hundreds, if not thousands, of dockers were laid off. The older docks were empty and ships were changing.

Next, my time on the ships that protect merchant shipping.