The Great Windships

The Great Windships is a knowledgeable work of maritime history that shows how seafaring shaped the modern world.

Epic in scope, Brian Stafford’s history book The Great Windships shows how sailing ships evolved over time, drove commerce, and led to globalization.

Stafford says that merchant ships turned the oceans into marine highways on which boats could ferry all manner of goods for trade, connecting the East and the West and filling in the “remaining blank spaces on the map of the world.” His book follows the chronology of these changes, covering advances in technology and the rise and fall of nations’seafaring fortunes. Historical tidbits, as of a Portuguese monarch having Vasco da Gama disinterred and reburied in Lisbon a decade after he died (“even after death, his bones again travelled the route he pioneered”) embellish this work. From this perspective, wind-powered ships spread culture, ideas, and religion as well as more pernicious cargoes like colonialism, the slave trade, and diseases, all of which directed history into the twentieth century, after which “the possibility of a return to merchant sail, other than in an auxiliary role, [became] remote.”

The book’s short, self-contained chapters cover topics like different types of ships and naval powers, making them handy for later reference. They include relevant details, as of major players like the British East India Company, but also some minutiae regarding nitrate trade, French subsidies, and England’s industrialization of the steel ship–making process. And there’s some technical focus too: the book shows how wind sails were designed, how masted ships are carried along ocean currents, and how vessels navigate the seas.

The inclusion of photographs, paintings, and other illustrations of ships and those who impacted the industry further clarify the book’s varied discussions, while charts elucidate factors like the production of different types of ships and their building materials across the centuries. Nautical terminology is incorporated and contextualized, too, making these explorations convincing and accessible to all. Still, though its language is precise and includes memorable flourishes, the text is often dense with specialty jargon. And the book breaks from its historical work to wax nostalgic near its ending, lamenting that windjammers, which it calls elegantly crafted, were supplanted by steel and diesel engines—“monsters that relentlessly plough the oceans of the world today.”

Analytical but wistful in discussing bygone eras, The Great Windships is a knowledgeable work of maritime history that shows how seafaring shaped the modern world.

- Clarion Review

A ringing 21-gun salute to the heyday of sailing ships, Brian Stafford’s narrative history, The Great Windships: How Sailing Ships Made the Modern World, displays an old-fashioned relish for the daring of nautical adventurers and innovators of yore.

The book begins by carefully defining relevant terminology, explaining how a sailing ship is built, with its rigging, sails and masts, and how it’s operated, in concert with known ocean currents and wind patterns. Striking a contemporary ecological note, Stafford emphasizes that wind is the ultimate renewable (if unpredictable) resource.

Moving onto history, he gives imperial China credit for launching the “first great voyages of exploration” with sailing ships, in the 15th century. However, it was Western Europe, beginning with Portugal, that truly tapped into sail’s potential. In this section, readers will encounter familiar classroom names—Columbus, Magellan, Sir Francis Drake— but discussed with an added focus on the nautical innovations and knowledge that lay behind their achievements. One key resource, he notes, consisted of the “rutters,” or roteiros: detailed navigational records initially compiled by Portuguese navigators but later stolen by other European powers.

As the narrative moves closer to the present, skillfully covering first America’s and then Britain’s domination of 19th century commercial shipping, the names and incidents become less familiar, and perhaps for many readers, more revelatory, as an origin story for contemporary globalization. Stafford covers, with palpable enthusiasm and in granular detail, the elegant design and still-impressive feats of speed displayed by the era’s sleek “clippers” and “windjammers.” To his credit, he also acknowledges the era’s darker side, with opium and laborers—both enslaved and indentured—frequent cargo.

On non-nautical points, Stafford sometimes notably errs, as by conflating the Holy Catholic Church and Holy Roman Empire, and also falls at times into repetition, making a number of identical points throughout.

Nonetheless, for avid sailors and learned nautical history buffs, this wide-ranging book will be a useful and a deeply pleasurable source of reference.

- BlueInk Review