 So thank you, John, very much for that introduction. I'd like to also thank John Kennedy, who I guess is not here, for arranging this talk, and Admiral Carter for welcoming me here. And if there's Mr. Johnson or Clinton or Obama, I could thank them too. But John has really done an amazing job, I think, more than most of you probably realize from within the Navy, outside of the Navy, bridging the disciplines of naval and maritime history and bringing an awareness of naval culture to the civilian historical project. And also, I think, doing a very valuable job of bringing the civilian historical, maritime historical project to the Navy. And it's really delightful to be here and to be welcomed in particular by John because he's been such a forceful advocate on both sides of the fence. And it's really a dialogue that needs to be established and maintained if we're going to have a civil and civic discourse about the role of the Navy and indeed about the role of maritime business and trade. So I thought today I would start by telling you a little bit about how I came to write the book and then, excuse me, telling you a little bit about what the book is about. I mean, it's a maritime history of the world and it goes from about 50,000 years ago up to the present. And then I think I'd like to talk a little bit about the real struggle now that the book has been written of trying to encourage people that they need to read it and if they can't read it, why people should be interested in maritime history and why people should be interested in world history and the advantage of reading my book is that you can do both in one tome and save yourself a lot of effort. So let me encourage you. So as John said, one of the first books that I wrote, well, actually the first book that I wrote was called Chips of the World in Historical Encyclopedia, which was essentially a collection of 1,000 or so ship biographies. And I included archeological sites, naval warships, the Nina of the Pinta and the Santa Maria and the Lusitania and the Titanic and all the ships that you've probably heard of at one point or another in your careers. And it started because a friend of mine or a series of friends of mine called me up within a couple of weeks of each other and asked me, do I know anything about the PT-109 and did I know anything about the Titanic and did I know anything about some other ship? And I kind of knew I had an encyclopedia of maritime history, but it was very vague. Which is long before John's book. And it occurred to me that this would be a really a good subject to tackle. And at the time I was a reference book editor so I had actually a fairly good idea of how to put one of these things together. So I did that and in the course of doing that book I had the thought that maybe this would be the sort of skeleton of a maritime history of the world. And that in fact a maritime history of the world wouldn't be such a bad thing to try to produce and to write. The problem was that the skeleton was really only half of a skeleton because the majority of ships that are known about are ships from basically west of the Suez Canal. That is to say the Mediterranean, northwest Europe and after 1500. Most ships are obviously not known by name. We have, I don't remember how many ships we have now about 45,000 on the seas at the moment. Obviously not all of them are equally memorable or outstanding. But the peculiar thing is that once you get east of Suez into the Indian Ocean and into literal Asia the interest in writing about ships and writing about trade and commerce differs so substantially from the way Westerners approach the subject. And that combined with the fact that the environmental conditions militate against the preservation of a star shipwreck. So there's really no archaeological record of maritime endeavor in the Indian Ocean or Southeast Asia a little bit better once you get up into China. But the number of ships that are known from antiquity is virtually nil. I think in India they've discovered one ship from before possibly 1500. In the Mediterranean there are probably several hundred ships from antiquity and later. So I thought, okay, so maybe doing a maritime history of the world would be worthwhile. And I wanted to look also at the written record and there are a number of books that have been written about seas in their totality. So we have Atlantic history becoming a big subject of interest. The Indian Ocean has been written about as one ocean. The Pacific has been written about as one ocean. The Baltic and the Mediterranean obviously have been written about. But none of these books really had anything to do with sort of communicating with the adjacent ocean or indeed an ocean half a world away. But as you know, from your experience in the Navy I assume, it's very difficult to draw boundaries on the ocean. And it's always been very difficult to draw boundaries on the ocean. And the idea of doing terrestrial history, you know, you say I'm going to study France or I'm going to study China and we look at the boundaries and we remember instinctively that the borders change but we have a fairly good idea of what China is or what we want it to mean. And likewise we have a fairly good idea of what we want the Atlantic to mean and what we want the Mediterranean to mean. But the problem with studying say Mediterranean history for a very long period is that it's looked at just as the Mediterranean. And so I grew up and I believe a lot of people, maritime historians grew up believing that in fact the Strait of Gibraltar represented the western most reach of mariners in the Mediterranean up until about 1500. And then it was only after that and thanks to the European initiative that people started going out into the wider Atlantic. Well in fact that's absolutely categorically untrue. There were Vikings for instance sailing from Denmark into the Mediterranean in the 800s. There were people going through the Strait of Gibraltar constantly. It was not although it's always or often described as being a barrier to communication between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The Strait of Gibraltar is not. And the proof of that is the city of Seville and Cadiz, both of which are on the Atlantic side of the Strait of Gibraltar and the city of Cadiz was founded by Phoenicians probably 800 DC, so nearly 3000 years ago. So we have to sort of take the blinders off and take the assumptions off and start talking about these seas as connected unities and not as separate things. So the other point of the book was really to put maritime affairs at the center of the human historical narrative, which it isn't. As I said before, people will talk about France and they will talk about China and they will talk about England and they will talk about all of these different places. But when it gets to sort of describing things like the British Empire, people will sit in London and they will plot and scheme and raise money and then they will sail down the Thames and then boom, they're in the Caribbean or boom, they're in India or boom, they're in Australia and how they got there is not, as you know it takes a fair amount of forethought and preparation to just get the ships off the dock and then it of course takes a fair amount of time to get the ship across those oceans. And traditional historians basically ignore that. They know that ships exist but the ships exist basically just to get you from one coast to the other coast and there's no concept of what roots people took, why they took roots that look longer and unmapped and they are in reality and so on. And so I thought that this was a really fundamental thing that had to be amplified and focused on. The other thing about maritime history is that it's actually one of the oldest things that people have been doing. People like to talk when they talk about world history they talk about the ancient civilizations and the riverine civilizations and of course they forget that the rivers have all of these multiple functions one of which is communication and navigation. They like to think about them in terms of crops but it's really so much more than that. But the, lost my trot. The point is that when we take the land as the sort of the center of the story we're forgetting that people got to Australia 50,000 years ago and they could only have done so by water. And people have been going out on the water to fish, to explore, to travel, to trade, to move for whatever purpose for at least 40,000 years longer than we've had domesticated cats and dogs or crops or certainly much longer than the wheel. So the stuff that you guys are or have been involved in your whole careers is really this, well maybe third oldest profession but it's a very old profession going to sea. So, and who knows which one came first the sailor or the second anyway. So a third thing, I mean there are all sorts of reasons that you come up with to write a book because otherwise people don't believe that you have a good reason so you just keep tossing them out until somebody says oh yeah I like that. A third thing was to take the maritime history of the world and to break it out of this Eurocentric shell that it's lived in and hibernated in for far too long. And people have asked well what do you mean by that? A good example is the invention of the sail. The oldest sail for which we have any sort of evidence and it's kind of inferential but it's pretty substantial is that the sail was invented probably somewhere near Kuwait or Southern Iraq about 7,000 years ago. The sail really came into its own and can be demonstrated to have had a real impact on world history for the first time I think about 5,000 years ago, that is to say 3,000 BC when the sail was developed on the Nile River. And the reason we can trace this relationship between the maritime development and the political development is that at that time there was the upper Egypt which is to the south and upstream and there was lower Egypt which is the delta in that area on the Mediterranean coast and the southern part, the upstream upper Egypt part was much more powerful and much richer than the downstream neighbor. Now the Nile goes from south to north and it's a fairly easy gradient it's about one in 14,000 for the last 1,000 miles or so it's got a fairly predictable current. You can row against it although obviously rowing is much more difficult than sailing. And so about 3,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago we find evidence of sails on the Nile. And at the same time we find evidence of the beginnings of the old kingdom of Egypt when upper Egypt became dominant over lower Egypt and merged the two units into what became the old kingdom and the middle kingdom and the new kingdom and what is still Egypt today. So the sail as a practical matter is really fundamental to the establishment of one of the oldest cultures on earth and certainly one of the best documented and one of the best cultures to investigate if you're interested in the roots of ancient maritime history because the oldest preserved ships in the world all come from Egypt, oddly enough. We think of it as basically a desert with a little strip of river running through the middle of it and in fact that's what it is but the ships which have been found buried in burial chambers next to pyramids and in burial sites for kings and queens and in causeways, the evidence of ships and ship building technology, there are about 20, 25 ships that really tell us an awful lot about the development and evolution of shipbuilding in this culture over the course of about 1,500 years. So, yet another thing I wanted to explore was the nature of globalization and its origins and people seem to think that globalization is the sort of a new thing because people have only started talking about globalization and there's a lot of debate about whether globalization is this or that and whether its roots can be chased to the Portuguese and the Spanish and the 1500s or whether we should think about it as a sort of Pax Britannica phenomenon of the 19th century or whether we should think of it as something of the 21st century but in fact the nature of globalization however we trace it really has to be seen as a maritime phenomenon because in fact people travel farther, further and have greater intermingling with each other by sea than they do by land and I think that one of the hallmarks of globalization is the fact that things that happen in a distant place can have ripple effects thousands and thousands of miles and those things, those ripple effects will be transmitted by water far faster than by land and so in the 9th and 10th centuries you find disturbances in China having a direct impact on things happening in the Abbasid Caliphate in Iraq and Persia, Iran because there was a very rich and deeply ingrained sea trade between the Persian Gulf and the South China Sea Likewise, if you fast forward a couple of hundred years if you look at the effects of say disease transmission from Africa and Eurasia to the New World and the decimation of 90% of the native population of the Americas in the 16th century that also is a phenomenon of maritime transmission an even earlier instance of disease traveling and being globalized very quickly is the black death that hit Europe in the 14th century when it took decades to go from China where it probably started with Korea and it migrated very slowly overland across Central Asia and then it landed in a Genoese ship which brought it to the middle of Italy and voila, in the next year or two a third of the population of Europe had been exterminated. So if there had not been the Genoese and the Venetians trading slaves and other things in the Black Sea the Black Death probably would not have happened in Europe and certainly it wouldn't have happened in the way that it did. Now I think I'm on pretty safe ground to suggest that most of you probably don't need to be told or given a primer in what maritime history is but just in case there is somebody who doesn't know that we're on an island at the moment it involves the technology of ships and navigation and it involves things like trade, the spread of religion, language, laws, all of these things that are carried in addition to physical cargos and that affect the way people do business between each other or among each other. The importance of the transmission of non-physical goods and religion for instance and language is extremely important and one of the things that I find most fascinating about the research that I did for this book is the absolute lockstep conjunction between religion and trade and you can find this again and again and again. You find it in the reinforcement of Buddhism in China as mariners began opening up the sea lanes between India and the South China Sea in the third century. You find it again in the transmission of Islam to East Africa, to India, to Southeast Asia and to China in the eighth century and on. You find it in the transmission of Christianity from the Eastern Mediterranean down the Red Sea to what's now Eritrea and Ethiopia in the third century which is about 500 years before it was transmitted from Europe into Scandinavia and Denmark in the 800s and when you find it being transmitted to Denmark and Scandinavia, you find that there are people saying, well, you know, this Christianity thing isn't such a bad idea, maybe we should buy a church because or build a church because if we build the church, well, then it will be easier to trade with these people coming up from the South and that is how this proselytization happened under the aegis of a guy named Ansgar, Saint Ansgar who is the apostle of the Scandinavians and again, we, of course, find the wholesale introduction of Christianity into North and South America in the 16th century is absolutely the result of trade and conquest. So another thing that is I think very important to take away from the book that began to be sort of apparent very early on is that the idea that we have been encouraged to believe that there are maritime people and that there are non-maritime people, that is to say that there are maritime people like the English and there are non-maritime people like the Chinese or there are maritime people like the Greeks and there are non-maritime people like the Romans, this is just not true, the evidence doesn't support it and in fact sometimes the evidence supports quite the reverse and for a good example, we could take the Greeks, lots of people, the other night I was giving a talk and somebody introduced me and was talking about the importance of the Battle of Salamis and how it was the world changing event of all time and I don't subscribe to the idea of individual battles being able to reshape history in Toto and I certainly don't think that the mysticlies was when he built the Athenian fleet, I don't think he was trying to make the world safe for 27% unemployment and the Greek idea is they had some wonderful ideas in the fifth century after the Persian invasion had been thwarted but really if you look at Aristotle and you look at Plato the condemnation of maritime trade is so striking, both Aristotle and Plato recommended that cities be built 10 miles from the sea so that the people wouldn't be contaminated by alien ideas and alien thoughts and alien religions. These were not things, these were not people who thought that maritime trade was a good thing and it's not just Plato and Aristotle, if you look at the evidence of the written evidence there are only two merchants known by name from ancient Greece from the third century, that's it and this is supposed to be a culture that supports trade well of course it is a culture that supports trade today but traditionally it's not and it wasn't ancient Greece that was making way for modern Greece, it's a whole different set of processes. Another good example is the Romans, now the Romans didn't actually take to the sea until the third century, they didn't have any reason to they lived on the Tiber River, they were good 10 or 15 miles from the sea, they were a very small tribe, one of many in Italy the Etruscans were much more important, the Carthaginians who had been in Carthage having fled Phoenicia in the ninth and eighth centuries BC had the biggest merchant community spread across all of the western and central Mediterranean for hundreds and hundreds of years and the Romans didn't really sort of get into the whole idea of this ship stuff until they went to war with the Carthaginians and at which point they realized they needed to get from Italy to Sicily and to do that you really needed to build a fleet. Now they were very innovative and there were all sorts of ways you could do that and one of my favorite stories which isn't actually in the book but one of my favorite stories is that there was a general, Roman general who captured a collection of Carthaginian elephants which had of course been brought to Sicily from Africa by ship and he wanted to get them back across the Strait of Messina to Italy so he could parade them in Rome and the way he did that was to build rafts supported by enormous ceramic jars of air and that's what he did and that's probably not the most efficient way to do it but it can be done and if you look at a zodiac for instance that is an animal bladder in a sort of synthetic form and I was amazed in October of 2001 to look at the New York Times and see a picture I think on the cover page of Northern Alliance fighters crossing the Cochka River in Northern Afghanistan on rafts supported by inflated animal bladders but anyway to get back to the Romans so the Romans didn't have a fleet because they didn't need a fleet and then they needed a fleet and they didn't really know how to build ships because they for some reason they weren't talking to the Etruscans who were very good maritime people but what they did was they captured a Carthaginians ship and the Carthaginians ships were put together in the sort of very early industrial style they had sort of marked all of the different pieces and so you could sort of take it apart and figure out how to put it back together again so the Romans just took it apart and made copies and then put it back together again and they built an enormous fleet and they had a couple of hundred ships in a very very short order and they weren't very good at it and they made mistakes but eventually they just kept building fleets and building fleets and building fleets and finally they just wiped out the Carthaginian Navy and that was sort of a that was their introduction to this sort of Mediterranean dalliance that they had which led them later time to call the sea Mare Nostrum, our sea and that wasn't sort of a sort of a claim of something they would like to do that was just a fact they ran the whole sea the whole literal of the Mediterranean was Roman now other people will say well you know the Romans didn't say that you know they didn't really like the sea and are all sorts of testimony about them not liking the sea but if you look at what speeches were given in the Senate that have been preserved if you look at the reality of the say the Anona which was this annual grain trade or fleet of ships that came from Alexandria and Egypt to feed the Romans the Anona was sort of basically a welfare system you realize that Rome really depended heavily on the sea and if you look at the naval force at the naval history if you look at the civil wars Ptolemy proclaims just before he dies that he basically blew it with the fleet and if he'd paid more attention to his fleet he actually would have beaten Caesar so these are the Romans were very maritime minded and we can't sort of dismiss people like let's say the Chinese because they didn't have a fleet in the 19th century to beat the British or the Japanese or anybody else who came along doesn't mean that they're not maritime minded people or that they don't know what to do once the salt water hits them they actually do now in China it's a much more complicated system because you had all sorts of geopolitical questions that they had to wrestle with like the entire Northwest border which was sort of people by people who didn't really like the Chinese and vice versa and they didn't really have to worry terribly much about their coasts because there weren't any naval powers that were really out to get them and the thing that they were most concerned about was in the very sort of Greek way that Aristotle and Plato would have approved is alien ideas they didn't want alien ideas to come up through the coasts so they periodically shut down traffic on the coasts now we can say well that's proof that they didn't like it well the Chinese have a history that's about 3000, 4000 years old and chances are pretty good that in the course of 3000 or 4000 years you're gonna come up with some pretty wacky ideas about how to defend yourself and let me just suggest that the Jeffersonian embargo of 1807 is a very good example of that and I don't think that you can take that as evidence of Americans not being very seaminded there's lots of other evidence at the political level of Americans not being very seaminded but that is not one of them so in organizing the book I start in antiquity and I start with the settlement of Oceania and I start with the use of maritime networks in the Americas such as they were before Columbus and his gang started settling here and exploring and generally mucking things up for the people who lived here before them and then I talk about Egypt as I said and that's the only chapter to which I it's the only country to which I devote a single chapter is ancient Egypt and then I go to the Indian Ocean East Asia and then back to the Mediterranean and then do that sort of rotation a couple of times and it's not until the middle of the book or about a third of the way through the book that I actually get to Northwest Europe which is disappointed some people who think that that's where maritime history begins and you know it's difficult to tell people well you know the Vikings are very important but 200 years before the Vikings expanded they didn't use sales they didn't have sales on the Baltic and people go well that's not possible well it's not only possible it's true they just didn't have sales and it's not because they couldn't have known about them because the Romans had been up and across the Rhine with sailing vessels since the first century BC so there was five or six centuries of exposure to this technology that they just decided they didn't really need and in fact the Anglo-Saxon and Jute migrations from Denmark and Germany to England and the British Isles probably took place under ores so you know that's a good crew race right there and that's probably why they're so good at Henley but so in later chapters I sort of build out to larger and larger regions because it is a global history and yes indeed the world does become globalized it becomes more and more difficult to sort of segregate the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic and those things from each other and so in the sort of 15th, 16th, 17th centuries I start devoting chapters to individual centuries and trying to find the themes that I find the most compelling and so for instance in the 17th century I find and I haven't discussed this with John at length and I probably got a lot of the details wrong but I find that there's a very deep and rich connection between the expansion of global trade coming out of Northern Europe and these joint stock companies like the Dutch East India Company and the English East India Company and so on and the development of naval power at a state level now prior to that navies had been very sort of ad hoc things you know if you were the king and you needed some ships you would just sort of send out notice that we need some ships and there was sort of a pre-arrangement very feudal organization you owe me 10 ships and you owe me 10 ships and you owe me 10 ships and you would sort of cobble that together and then when their sort of term was over or they felt their term was over they would just go home this is what happened to during the Norman conquest of England in 1066 that the Normans William sort of kept threatening to come across the English Channel and Harold had to go deal with the Norse up at Stanford Bridge and in the meantime his fleet said hey look we've been waiting for these Norman guys to show up for months and we're going home and so the Normans came and they were completely unopposed at sea and then of course Harold came down and he was exhausted and we all know what happened next an interesting thing again just to go back while we're on the subject of 1066 in the 11th century if you want to sort of de-center the naval history of the world a good example is to look at what was happening in the Indian Ocean in 1025 40 years before William the Conqueror sailed 25 miles across the English Channel there was a king in the Chola Kingdom in southeast India in the Coromandel coast and he decided that he didn't like the lip that he was getting from the people of Southeast Asia so he sailed a thousand miles across the mouth of the Bay of Bengal and sacked 12 cities along the Strait of Malacca on the Mele Peninsula and the island of Sumatra and then he went home I think that that's probably a more ambitious undertaking than crossing the English Channel but I leave it to others to decide so the 17th century I think becomes the time when you can sort of identify this relationship between the state and the navy and in the way we kind of know it today but at that time the state was very, very conscious of the fact that it was protecting the trade and the trade was the trade in the ships that they owned and that or that their countrymen owned and that their countrymen maned and that relationship I think has defined the way people think about navies for ever since then although the structure of world trade has changed such that in the United States we actually own very few of our own ships and we have a navy that is predicated on protecting our trade although our trade is really the trade between individuals and corporations using middlemen who are not Americans which so I think that that's something that I feel needs to be addressed and considered and thought about in terms of what naval strategy is so the reason as I said one of the things I find difficult now is trying to sort of address the challenge of reading a 700, 699 page book and one of the problems is that it's long and people think it's sort of tedious and I can't help that we were all crippled by having to read history in high school and college and I think it really did, it wasn't served up terribly well, certainly not for me I took maybe four courses in history in college and high school. I was actually trained as a classicist which was a great training for something I'm not exactly sure what but having come sort of to maturity at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st I think that to get back to this question of globalization it's something that we find being talked about in newspapers and journals and around the water cooler and strategic discussions and so on and it's a very important issue that we can't escape and we shouldn't try to escape it but if we are going to talk about globalization if we're going to talk about things that happen around the globe it actually behooves us I believe to know something about the rest of the globe other than what we think about what happened to ourselves because just as everybody in this room has a completely different background and brings a whole variety of experience and conceits and religions and names and family languages to the table if you explode that a billion times or however many people that are on the planet now you find that if you're going to approach somebody you should really know not only what they're doing now but maybe why they're doing it and what has led them to the place they are just as we know we need to know what leads us to the place we are and why we do things because I think we have a tendency to sort of stumble through and continue to do things the way we've always done them without stepping back and questioning whether that's in fact a good idea the other difficulty of reading a book like this is it's very long and there are a lot of somebody wrote a review on Amazon and said well you know there's so many names and dates and places in the book I felt like I was you know it was all going in one eye and out the other and you know I had suggested to my publisher that we sell the book with an eye patch to solve that problem but they wouldn't do it I'm not sure exactly what somebody who picks up a world history expects I mean it's not sort of you can't do it in a couple of words or a couple of sentences and really get to the meat of things but the way we write books in case there are anybody here who doesn't write books the secret is we don't write them starting at the first word and ending at the last word if we did we'd all be very wealthy and productive or completely unproductive but we write them in bits and pieces we write outlines and then we write outlines of outlines and then we write outlines of chapters so the way I would recommend people read this book or any world history or indeed any really long history like maybe the Johnson biography is to start at the introduction and then read the last chapter because that kind of gives you the brackets of what's going on and chances are pretty good that in the last chapter the author will have sort of talked about what else was going on in the intervening pages and then do that with this individual chapter read the opening of the chapter and the end of the chapter and then when you've done that you'll have sort of a sense of the arc of the book and what the author is trying to bring to the table and why but the third and the most important reason that people need to read world history and why I want people to read world history is because authors of world history are not writing their history this is not some sort of parochial project that I sort of came up with because I think it's kind of important to me this is your history this is our history this is not my history it's not a Chinese person's history or an Indians or an aboriginals or a Native Americans it's our history this is where we came from this is the planet that we live on and if we don't understand what that planet is about and what we are all doing here and what our purpose is and what it has been then I think we're really in a sort of sorry state and we need to sort of we need to take stock of who we all are so with that I think I will conclude and let you all get about your day but if there are any questions I'm happy to try to answer them thank you yes no trick questions I've had a talk over that I've only crossed in other universities over the years there's always been about land history and land-based history and great wars World War I, World War II for second power and what have you and going back even to the Peloponnesian Wars it was heavy what you've done in your book is point out that the history of the world is really a maritime history of the world and the interconnection between maritime has never been to emphasize as much as you've brought it out and it really made it clear those of us that have been in the military and have been working in the military when we read books on recent military projection of power there's been World War I, World War II it's been land-based and so even though there's a quite often it's disregarded that tremendous maritime role in this play in projecting power moving forces to where the land mass can take place the land force can take place to project power if the 19th century can be called the military projection of power land mass can't the 20th century be called the maritime history of projection of power this is the maritime age the reason for that is that as we look and discuss and the Admiral and I are just talking about the projection of power capabilities of the Chinese for example and ourselves which are the last two great forces that we might say this stage of the world makes 10 or 20 years anyway and when we talk about projection of power we talk about capabilities the potential capabilities of a potential adversary and how we have to match that 10 years out because a lot of the time required to build a weapon system it's always 10 years or 15 years look at tribes and look at ages and look at all of the great weapons systems that are front and center today they all had the Genesis 20, 30, 40 years ago so could one really look at since now the capabilities of really destroying nations almost overnight come from maritime projection of power could we consider at least the first half of this century of moving into the maritime century? Yes I do I think absolutely we're in a maritime century if you look at the history of containerization in 1970 between 50,000 years ago in 1970 we had ramped up to move about 2 billion tons of cargo a year worldwide since containerization really took hold 40 years ago we're now moving closer to 9 billion tons a year so maritime trade is clearly a major thing yes I agree that the strategic component of maritime force projection has changed out of all proportion but I would say that we're in a very precarious situation and again this is the sort of thing I think we need to really address yes it's fine to take 10 or 20 years to develop a weapon system but you know the next war is not going to give us 10 or 20 years to to actually build them it's you know if we get to a war on the scale of the one that started 100 years ago or World War II everybody's goose is going to be cooked long before we can ramp up and do anything like we did during World War II in terms of ship production aviation and so on so we have to think long and hard about what it is we're building and why we're building it and how we actually might use it because if we use it the wrong way the chips you know were done so yes it's a maritime it is a maritime century I think that there was there were earlier maritime centuries as well I think the 19th century was an anomaly because the British really did rule the roost one of the things I like about the 19th century though in terms of a of maritime non-maritime shift is the American Civil War where river trade and river transportation and river warfare were so absolutely crucial to not the southern but to the northern military project and Ridley, I mean not Ridley Scott, what's the name, Winfield Scott an army man seized this immediately at the very start of the war and came up with what's called the Anaconda plan and people sort of say well the Anaconda plan to strangle you know the Mississippi and the Ohio and the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic Coast but what's really fascinating about the Civil Wars if you look at the names of the armies all virtually all of the northern armies in the Civil War are named after rivers the army of the Potomac, the army of the Ohio, the army of the Mississippi in the southern army and I don't think this is just coincidence none of their armies were named after rivers so they had the army of Mississippi but it was the army of Mississippi department not the army of the Mississippi River and I think that it was that sort of identification of naval power and water and trade and the ability to move people and goods that really gave Americans a huge edge and I think that that's something that worked its way somehow into the American conscience about how to how to deploy naval power and John may know more about this than I do but it would be fascinating to know if there have been people who've looked into this Was there any great significance to the great Chinese general Chen Kuo and his great fleet across the ocean and maybe into the Atlantic? Maybe not into the Atlantic but was there a great significance? Well, I mean it depends on how you look at it in the 15th century the great significance was that it was the project was discontinued this has this question has to do with Zhong He and the Chinese Admiral who led seven treasure fleets so-called treasure fleets from China into the Indian Ocean as far as East Africa and the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf and the Bay of Bengal and they you know they certainly had great significance and a great impact on Southeast Asia particularly they helped monetize the region and it was the monetization of Southeast Asia's economy that made it that much more of a draw for people from the west and that to that extent I think it did help catalyze European interest in getting to the Indian Ocean one way or the other certainly now the the efforts that the Chinese are undertaking now and the efforts they're making to sort of celebrate Zhong He it's giving them a great rallying cry much the way we rally around Drake and John Paul Jones and other naval heroes I think that's perfectly natural and you know John Paul Jones didn't change the tide of war with the Bonhomme Richard and the Serapis but he certainly gave us something to think about and to that extent I think Zhong He's had a sort of six hundred year hibernation but he's back Didn't the pretendry come along and teach the world it wasn't flat? No, no people near the world was not flat there were there were pockets of resistance to the idea that the world was round my favorite is a guy named Cosmos Indigo Plustis who's an historian Christian who traded in Indigo Plustis means India sailor and he came from the eastern Mediterranean and he traded across the Indian Ocean and he wrote this book that spends an inordinate amount of time explaining why the world is in fact flat because that's part of the divine plan and it just tedious and amazingly convoluted of course I could have read it and if I'd understood it I probably would have believed him because I have just as much trouble with physics the way it's taught today but in fact Henry the navigator was if we were going to classify Henry the navigator it would not be as a navigator because he probably only took one or two boat trips in his life of any of any length and the second is he was really an entrepreneur and his big interest was in finding new sources of gold and spices and when he found Madeira and basically Madeira is the Portuguese word for wood and as they did the pine tree shopping plaza in Portland where I live they named it after the all the pine trees they chopped down Madeira was named for all the trees they found there which they promptly chopped down and put in sugar plantations and that's how he made all of his money and that's what financed continued Portuguese expansion but he didn't found a school of navigation in Sagres and he didn't discover that the world was round and he was he was he's sort of a genre of Portugal if you want I mean he's sort of a rallying cry but he's not he's important but for not the reasons that we think he was important yes Do you think the maritime history may well morph into the history of air exploration? Do I think naval history will morph off into the history of world aerial exploration? I don't know that's um I mean exploration is a very discreet part of maritime history and I think that um I guess well so far aerial exploration is just exploration there's not not a lot else in terms of commercial benefit or um thank god there's no military component to it yet um in terms of what's happening outside of the stratosphere so I it's possible I don't know um it could be I it's not on my bucket list of things to do Is the hull design of the Indian Pado very similar to that of the Viking vessels? No they didn't copy each other um they're sort of similar but there are lots of vessels that are kind of similar you're talking about the dugout and the lap straight boat I mean they're totally different configurations um and I don't think that there's absolutely any evidence whatever of Viking or Scandinavian influence on any aspect of pre-Columbian maritime endeavor in in the new world Yes? Well that's an interesting question and it's um the question is who decides where one body of water begins and one ends uh a lot of that has to do with who's who's doing the talking I got a very interesting email a couple of years ago from somebody at the State Department who was writing as a civilian and not because I'd caused a huge diplomatic uproar but uh he was wondering about my use of the term East Sea instead of the Sea of Japan the East Sea is what the Koreans called the Sea to their East the Sea of Japan is what the Japanese called the Sea to their West um you know the Pacific Ocean was originally called the South Sea because the Spanish got there by going south across the isthmus of Panama and then faced it and they said oh well the sea is to the south well that little nip of the Pacific is to the south but most of the rest of the world thinks it's to the you know it should be the Western Ocean um but the Western Ocean is what the English called the Atlantic so there all of these different bodies of water get named by different people and who have different reasons for calling the same thing you know different same body of water gets called different things by different people so there is a um I guess a board of geographical names that tries to adjudicate really big disputes but um it's really discretionary Alex Vitor always felt the Vinland map was authentic at Yale and uh and also there's always been this question whether the Chinese actually reached here uh in centuries back where do we stand on those issues? Um the question is where do I stand on the Vinland map and its authenticity and I will just say I have no opinion um the second question is whether people think and people do think that or somebody wrote a book positing that idea that the Chinese came to the Americas under Zhonghe in the 15th century I will um give my answer thus uh there is a professor of history at the national university in Singapore who brought suit in the United Kingdom uh saying that the book should not be allowed to be sold as history but should be only sold as fiction and apparently that is some sort of there is a legal precedent for that in British law uh he did not win his case but I know of no not one single historian practicing historian who actually thinks that that book has any merit whatever and I don't think that the Chinese came to America they came later in fact there were Chinese in Latin America before there were English in North America because the Spanish were bringing chinos from the Philippines and China the Chinese were in Manila and the Spanish were in Manila and there were chinos coming to Mexico in the 16th century long before Cartier and and Jamestown and all of those places so the Chinese were here before the English how's that yes first of all thanks for coming here and talking to us thank you for having me so based on the breadth of your work who would you consider to be the greatest maritime power of their time for what was known at their time and why well the Romans can definitely qualify for their period the British for the 19th and part of the 20th century the Americans for the better part of the 20th century um but uh and the Vikings were not really a naval power um one of the another sort of counterfactual not counterfactual at all but another sort of a sort of de demathologizing of uh that I sort of work into the book is you know we think of the Vikings as the sort of bellicose nasty people with horns on their head and so on and um actually the the chapter that I talk about the Vikings in the most I start with the story of two Norse seafarer merchants and it's a very lovely set of stories one sails up around the north cape to the Kola Peninsula and the white sea another one sails into the Baltic and they both wind up in King Arthur's court where they're asked to contribute their stories to Arthur's translation of a fourth century history of the world which was written before anybody in Spain knew about northern Europe so they kind of just depended this thing you know textbook publishing back then was much easier than it is now and um what's fascinating is he talks about all these two these two traders talk about all of this voyaging and trading and there's not a mention of bloodshed there's not a mention of of warfare or violence it was just this is what they did some of them were not so nice but lots of them were really organized in in sort of in naval forces but of a different type than we're accustomed to thinking of today but those I'd say and the Athenians certainly in in their heyday in the fifth century where but only for a couple of decades we're certainly a leading power but for the most part it's very hard to look at any period of history and say this was the outstanding power worldwide or globally um you know the Japanese had a phenomenally good run in the late 16th century when they attacked Korea and they were beat by this guy Yi Sun-sin who had you know five turtle ships in the whole country and really really good local knowledge and he beat the Japanese many times and the Japanese finally gave up and went home so um the Japanese probably had a better fleet overall but the Koreans were better when it counted significant natural resources and yet they revived their centuries as an isolated land map basically and they just buried any communications with the world around them how would they do that without becoming known as traitors? Well they they allowed some trade I mean even in the closed country system from the 16th to the 19th centuries they did they had four ports to the outside world one was for the Dutch first it was for the Portuguese and then they got tired of the Portuguese proselytizing and um and the Portuguese were very good in fact much better than the than the Catholics were in China Catholics in China made it all the way to court and they converted you know a couple of hundred people the Portuguese made it to sort of just a toehold in Japan and they converted to 300 000 people um but then the Buddhist it gets complicated but they shut down that project and they threw the Portuguese out and they said the Dutch could come and settle on this little island of Dishima in Nagasaki Bay so that was their sort of world their view their window on the west um and south and basically everything that was in China or Korea and then they had another port uh in the north to Hokkaido so they had they didn't have any industrial resources but they weren't in industrial countries so they didn't need them but they did trade with the rest of the war they did trade with their neighbors um but they didn't you know they they were pretty self-sufficient it's only really in the industrialized period that they began to have a real need for um stuff that they don't have like um they had silver too which everybody wanted so the the Chinese, the Dutch, the Portuguese were all very interested in Japanese silver um but in terms of you know self-sufficiency for food and that kind of thing they were they were okay you should note that they just bought Jim's being his silvery I did note that I it's a very terrible thing it is as long as no but but it's still by law it still has to be made in Kentucky otherwise it's not whiskey so they're very very shrewd about that thank you very much