IN the 17th Century, it was often no-holds-barred out on the high seas as both the English and Spanish plundered merchant ships for stores and riches - in their ships.
Among these buccaneers was none other than the "exquisite-minded" William Dampier, the first Englishman to set foot on Australian soil, then known as New Holland (the Dutch were in the game too).
This happened at King Sound in 1688, but before Dampier became a privateer, he was leading what could only be described as a sordid life, plundering other people's gold and silver in naval ambushes, taking prisoners, capturing African slaves, and raiding settlements from the Caribbean to the west coast of the Americas.
It was hard keeping a good supply chain going back then as everyone was after everybody else's loot.
Even within his own ship, a crew would split and go their separate ways only to meet up again off Panama to do separate plundering and saying 'what are you doing here too?'. 'Plundering !'
They made their way with basic navigational tools and it was probably a miracle Dampier ever sailed to the Galapagos Islands. His descriptions of the strange wildlife later led to Charles Darwin also visiting, helping him finesse his theories of evolution. Of course the rare Galapagos turtles were ideal food for sailors, as they'd could store them on ship upside down and eat them over the journey.
Dampier also did some amazing things, publishing one of the world's first travel books, outlining the world's major sea currents for the first time and setting out the lay of the continents for many others to follow. He ended up coming to Australia a second time. He deftly distanced himself from some of the piracy he'd witnessed.
Dampier was also the first Englishman to describe avocados. An Aztec fruit, highly desired, it was said to be an aphrodisiac. It's now almost a staple diet on Aussie food tables, smashed or un-smashed, certainly a big fave of mine.
A lot of sailing was done on the back of hemp - the non-THC kind - that sailors in Europe used to make sails and rope. It was cannabis sativa and a recent ABC Science show had an interesting piece by Dr John Higgens on the origins of hemp and its relation to another British explorer/botanist/sailor Sir Joseph Banks. Dr Higgens pushed forward the theory that hemp was so vital to sail, that Australia may have been selected firstly as a possible hemp colony, rather than as a convict colony.
Banks was fooled by the Indians (of India) on one voyage and he was given the other hemp - the THC kind - cannabis indica (ganga). Woooo ! It's said he passed a bit of ganga on to royalty in England, even Coleridge got some to help his creativity. Kubla Khan ?
But cannabis indica was hopeless for fibre and sail making. Anyway, the confusion of varieties led to the eventual banning of hemp generally in many countries because it was seen as a drug rather than as a future piece of rope. That was a big mistake because hemp (sativa) is an excellent carbon storer and it grows quickly ! Higgens said hemp was dethroned by the oil industry and argues for a re-vegetablisation of the world economy in light of climate change.
Anyway I digress, but I will come back to hemp.
Anyway I digress, but I will come back to hemp.
This year, I was largely stuck inside a house, a very unusual thing in my life as I do enjoy travel. But ... I can see out to sea, and what I saw was a lot of ships moored, because they couldn't get into port.
In fact, around the world the sea was alive with ships, so many it was causing rabid congestion. There were more ships bumping into each other than in a kid's bath.
People had turned to online shopping and guess how goods arrived, or didn't arrive, now we have reduced air freight ? Our old friend the ship, that fun one in the bath.
This was happening months ago and is still happening now and well it will happen way into 2022. Just before Christmas, 100 ships were waiting to unload at the massive port in Los Angeles.
For most of the year, getting freight to Australia has been difficult, as shipping lines diverted ships to more profitable sea routes - and mega ships like the Ever Given (above blocking the Suez Canal), huge whopping 220,000 tonne ships, are now the go for the international shipping trade.
(And there was a terrible shortage of shipping containers - not ideal for exporters !)
But guess what ? Not many of the mega ships can berth at Australian ports because of their massive size, and well, we're a little behind in shipping culture according to that rather confronting November report from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), which said Australian ports were some of the worst performing in the world.
During the year The Land with the resources of the Freight Trade Alliance helped expose all the threats to farm goods getting to export destinations. We highlighted how much freight goes up as so many little hands make their way in to the supply chain. You see, there's a lot of change from the 17th Century in terms of how we behave, but sometimes the results are pretty similar - your money ends up in somebody else's pocket.
People get in for their cut all the way from the farmgate to the waterfront. We had meat exporters, canola exporters up in arms at the delays and costs. The cost of shipping leapt threefold in a year, it was a seriously big mess and it does not look like ending soon. Industrial relations went under water, stevedore Patrick hit by numerous bans by the Maritime Union of Australia, we thought we'd all gone back to the bad old days of the 1998 waterfront war.
Australia changed that year. We don't treat workers like that, so the Federal Court said, and well I agree.
But move forward 23 years and you must wonder if anything has changed.
Exporters and Patrick have been hit by more work bans than at a meeting of abolitionists. There was an even a crazy situation where rural freight on a train was unloaded onto trucks and then taken to the port. The MUA's demand it has the right to decide who works on the waterfront, seems so outdated i think I may go and wear a Terry Towelling hat. In fact the state of shipping and the waterfront makes me hunger for the days of sail - and hemp, the sativa one, when things were a bit more predictable.
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