From hearts of oak to hulls of steel: centuries of the British at sea

An ocean of clichés surrounds Britain’s maritime history, from Chaucer’s Shipman to the ‘little ships’ at Dunkirk. Tom Nancollas, whose 2019 Seashaken Houses treated lambently of lighthouses, now navigates debris-strewn territorial waters, sounding their depths.

He examines 11 craft, from Bronze Age boats to ironclads, that epitomise Britain’s complex compact with the sea. Ships, so sturdily island nation-shaping, are themselves evanescent, exposed to danger and decay, and discarded once defunct. But their traces can be found almost anywhere. Even those that are now only names (the Conqueror’s flagship Mora, Cabot’s Matthew or Grenville’s Revenge) are ‘ensouled’ to this author – ‘lost characters of British history’, as worthy of salvage as the Mary Rose.

The sunken cargoes he seeks are not necessarily treasure. He emphasises the uses of British ships in oppressions, from imperial conquests to slavery. Lloyds’ Lutine Bell, rung to warn that a vessel was missing, should sound out now, he says, to signify national complicity in old cruelties.

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He begins in Dover, England’s entrepôt from prehistory to today’s immigrant dinghies, with a 3,500-year-old prow, found in 1992, from one of the earliest vessels known in northern Europe. Prows have always been talismanic: Romans capturing an enemy ship would destroy everything except its prow, then stand at this rostrum to give orations.

We hear about the Billingsgate Trumpet – a two metre-long flaring brass tube used by 14th-century captains to send signals to crews or fleets. This ‘buisine’ looks landlubberly – but then the medieval British were not quite at home on the sea, something suggested by the castle-like superstructures of their craft. Nancollas notes that rare representations of buisines being blown afloat have ‘a simple, dream-like quality’, as archetypal tars haul eternally aboard ships of state beneath a panoply of stars.