The sea - ships and sailors

The coastline of the Southwest of England stretches for 650 miles (over 1,000 km.), and has many different features: cliffs, sand, sheltered harbours, estuaries and marshes. It is not surprising that much of the activity in this region has been inspired by the sea.

Side by side on the south coast of Hampshire are the two ports of Portsmouth and Southampton. Portsmouth is the home of the Royal Navy, and its dockyard has a lot of interesting buildings and monuments. There is also the Royal Naval museum, where the main attraction is Horatio Nelson's flagship, the 'Victory'. Southampton, on the other hand, is a civilian port for continental ferries, big liners, and oil and general cargo.

Many great sailors had associations with the West Country, for example Sir Walter Raleigh, the Elizabethan explorer, and Horatio Nelson, who lived in Bath in Somerset. The most famous sailor of recent times, was Sir Francis Chichester, who returned to Plymouth after sailing round the world alone in 'Gypsy Moth'.

In Bristol, to the north, one of the largest Victorian steamships, the 'Great Britain', has been restored. It was the first iron ocean-going steamship in the world and was designed by a civil and mechanical engineer with the unusual name of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806 - 1859). He not only designed three ships (including the first transatlantic steamer, the 'Great Western'), but also several docks and a new type of railway that enabled trains to travel at greater speeds. He also designed the first ever tunnel underneath the Thames and the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

Unfortunately, this coastline, in particular that of Cornwall, is famous - or infamous - in another way too. The 'foot' of Cornwall has the worst of the winter gales, and in recorded history there have been more than fifteen shipwrecks for every mile of coastline. There is even a shipwreck centre and museum near St Austell where you can see an amazing collection of items that have been taken from wrecks over the years. There are a lot of stories about Cornish 'wreckers' who, it is said, tied lanterns to the tails of cows on cliff-tops or put them on lonely beaches when the weather was bad, so that ships would sail towards the lights and break up on the dangerous rocks near the coast. The wreckers would then be able to steal anything valuable that was washed up on to the shore.

A famous shipwreck

A shipwreck that has received a lot of attention recently is the 'Mary Rose', which was built at Portsmouth over 400 years ago on the orders of Henry VIII. He was watching the ship sailing out with 60 others, when suddenly she sank for no apparent reason. Perhaps she was overloaded. Whatever the reason, she sank within minutes, and almost all of the 700 crew were drowned.

The ship lay undisturbed in soft mud until the 1970s, when marine archaeologists and a team of divers began exploring the wreck. They discovered that the hull was complete and that there was a huge variety of artefacts, for example clothes and shoes as well as pottery and metal and wooden objects.

Susan Sheerin, Jonathan Seath, Gillian White: Spotlight on Britain; Oxford University Press, 1985, page 76 f.