Business
2. Early Patterns Under Sail
Chapter 3
Patterns of International Ocean Trade
Douglas K. Fleming*
1. Introduction
In 2007, before the impacts of a global economic recession had been fully realised, nearly 7.5 billion metric tonnes of goods were shipped in commercial oceanborne trade. The ocean transport task for this movement translated to more than 31 trillion tonne-miles.1 Roughly 59% of the total cargo volume moved in bulk. These impressive dimensions of world seaborne trade leave unrecorded a huge amount of empty space and deadweight lifting capacity of merchant ships steaming in ballast towards their next loading range or leaving their loading range only partly full of revenue cargo. Empty cargo space, like empty seats on passenger airplanes, reflects something lost forever, while vessel operating costs continue inexorably. This lost potential, to an extent inevitable because of basic global patterns and geographic separation of commodity production and commodity consumption, will be a recurring theme in this chapter.
The opening section of this study contains a few reflections on centuries-old trading patterns for ships under sail. Today’s bulk commodity trades, which generate many millions of miles of ballast steaming, each year will then be examined. Possibilities for combining different bulk trades in some sort of logical geographic sequence will be considered. The general cargo trades, with particular focus on container line service, will be investigated. The directional imbalances of cargo flow on the main liner routes will be noted and possible network adjustments and service scenarios to cope with the empty space problem will be presented for consideration. Finally, prospects for the twenty- first century will be briefly outlined.
there is a thought-provoking map entitled “World Wind Systems (January) and ocean routes of European sailing vessels”. It is drawn to a cylindrical projection, stretching apart meridians of longitude, as does Mercator’s projection. It covers a
“world and a quarter” so that the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans can be seen in uninterrupted form. On it are depicted, with sweeping arrows, the major wind systems encountered at sea in January, and five historic trade routes in the sailing ship era – the Guinea trade triangle, the Dutch East India Co route between Amsterdam and the East Indies, the clipper ship route between Europe and Australia, the transatlantic Anglo-American colonial route and the transpacific Acapulco-Manila Spanish galleon route.2
The correlation between the favouring winds and the chosen tracks for the trading vessels stands out clearly on Couper’s map. One knows that the chosen tracks shift seasonally as the prevailing winds shift. By summertime, for example, southwest monsoons replace northeast monsoons in the Indian Ocean.
Basically this is a pre-industrialisation, pre-liner service picture. To it one might add many other Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch and British “imperial routes” connecting mother countries with their colonies. And many of the routes were controlled by state-franchised trading companies. To be sure, most of these old transoceanic paths of commerce have been displayed in historical atlases,3 usually in the form of simple lines curving around continents and across oceans, joining points of origin and points of destination with no attention to precise tracks, much less to seasonal variations in ocean tracks. Couper’s map suggests much more. Removing his Guinea trade triangle and simplifying his winds to include only the voyage-speeding westerlies and the trades, we have the graphic image reflected in Figure 1. One might add to this image the patterns of favouring ocean currents which all mariners seek.
These old trading patterns were “round voyages”, with outbound and homeward legs of the voyage quite often following very different paths, not only because of prevailing winds, ocean currents and weather but also, in the case of the Anglo-American colonial route, to pick up and deposit cargo en route, e.g. in the Caribbean and heading north along the American east coast. Generally, two- way cargo flows were available on the Spanish-controlled Acapulco-Manila route, the Dutch-controlled East Indies route and, later on, the British-controlled Australian route. However, in cargo volume terms, there could be large
directional imbalances and seasonal variations. The ships engaged in these trades were, by modern standards, very small and often the cargoes were valuable goods – silver, gold, silks, spices, for instance – that took up little cargo space but generated high freight revenues when rates were ad valorem-based. And the
“organised” nature of the trade routes mentioned above, since they were controlled by the imperial state or by a powerful state-franchised trading company, meant that the ships serving the trades had fair assurance of onward or homeward cargoes. Empty space on long ballast voyages was not the important consideration it was to become in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It should be noted that these were, by modern definition, at least, tramp trades, however well organised, served by relatively small, multipurpose sailing vessels adaptable to various cargo types, not excluding human cargoes, slaves or emigrants.
Unfortunately the mercantilist philosophy that was fashionable in Europe in the seventeenth, eighteenth and part of the nineteenth centuries led to highly protected trades in which mother countries paired off with their own colonies, enacted navigation laws which favoured ships of their own flag and often used high tariffs against imports from rival empires. Merchant fleets were really armed merchant navies, commanded to serve the state. When one views these mercantilist systems in global perspective, it is clear that they led to geographically inefficient networks in the form of many shuttle
Figure 1: World wind systems (January) and ocean routes of European sailing vessels
services within imperial frames and relatively little “cross-trading” that could have reduced the amount of empty cargo space sailing unproductively across the oceans. Ironically these shuttle service patterns between imperial home ports and distant overseas colonies were somewhat analogous to the much more recent UNCTAD 40–40–20 scheme for splitting cargo allotments and ocean transport privileges 40–40 between trade partners (e.g. a developed and a developing nation) and leaving only 20% for “cross-traders”. Of course the political, social and general economic motivations for the two sets of shuttle service patterns were vastly different. Yet the fact remains that the general back-and-forth route configurations were quite alike and there was a consequent accentuation of the empty cargo space problem when there were striking differences in the volumes of cargo flowing in either direction, as there almost always were.
Figure 1 reveals the remarkable clipper ship route in the Australian trade in the 1850s, outbound from Britain via Cape of Good Hope and homeward via Cape Horn. From a point in the South Atlantic, usually closer to South America than Africa, these very fast, fine-lined sailing ships swooped south of Cape of Good Hope into the “roaring forties” zone of westerlies and along a looping approximation of the great circle route to the southern coast of Australia.
Homeward bound in an easterly direction, the ships again dipped far into the Southern Ocean, again with following westerly winds, and again approximating a great circle track past Cape Horn. These were ships, both American and British-owned, at the dawn of the free trade era in the 1850s, that took maximum advantage of the winds, currents, navigational aids of the time, and the cargo potentials, to turn profits for their owners.