Galleons, junks, clippers: Hooked on history

Barely a cannon shot from where I sit writing this column lie three concrete reminders of the golden age of maritime history - the World War II warship HMS Belfast, the 19th-century tea clipper Cutty Sark and a working full-size replica of the Golden Hind, the ship that British seafaring hero Sir Francis Drake used to navigate the world in the 16th century.

British maritime history is rich in stories - the exploits and explorations of Elizabethan heroes such as Drake, Sir Martin Frobisher and Sir Walter Raleigh, not to mention the man whose monument dominates central London, the naval legend Admiral Lord Nelson, victor over the French at Trafalgar in 1805.

His flagship, HMS Victory, is preserved and is still on the Royal Navy's books as a functioning warship.

A few years back, while idly looking through a bookshop specializing in maritime history, I stumbled on a remarkable fact: At least two centuries before the Europeans set off on their voyages of discovery, the Chinese had done it using a vast fleet of Chinese junks under the command of Zheng He, an extraordinary mariner, diplomat, explorer and ultimately admiral of the imperial fleet.

In early 1421 four of his fleets were combined into one huge armada that set off on a massive voyage of discovery. The last ships returned home in the summer of 1423.

Where did they go? Unfortunately, in one of those periodic upheavals in Chinese history, all the admiral's logs and reports were destroyed by an emperor who switched China's external focus to an internal one.

But a few precious documents and maps survive. They show that the grand fleet explored Africa, the Americas, the Arctic regions, Europe and the Pacific area, proving that the Chinese had mastered the art of calculating longitude and latitude, mapping the earth and heavens centuries before the Arabs and Europeans did.

Sorry if this column is turning into a history lesson, but it is a fascinating subject, and it helps me focus on what makes China tick today.

For my money, it's worth looking at the ships involved. The most striking are the treasure ships, vast leviathans, some said to have as many as nine masts. Nine masts - that's incredible. Just imagine the crew numbers needed to make sail.

Nelson's HMS Victory, a state-of-the-art (at the time) battleship that carried 104 guns, displaced 3,500 tons and had three main masts capable of carrying 5,440 square meters of sail. It took a crew of 800 men to maintain the sails and fight.

So a treasure ship - some were reportedly 137 meters long and 55 meters wide - must have had massive crews to trim the lateen-style sails and steer the vessel. There are records of up to 1,600 passengers and crew being carried.

Obviously, naval historians and naval architects disagree about the ships, which displaced on average some 2,000 tons.

The particular design of Chinese junks, used to this day, includes a cargo area split into several watertight holds, thus reducing the chances of sinking, unlike British ships of the old days, whose holds were one long space and much more susceptible to flooding.

But that's enough history - it's anecdote time.

I can claim a highly tenuous connection with the world of junks. The word itself is a bit of a mystery, but etymologists believe it stems from an archaic Portuguese word, junc, or the Malay word jong, itself a changed form from a Chinese dialect.

So back in 1990, when I was working for Reuters in Hong Kong, I became by default the sole owner of the Highlight, a pleasure junk registered in Hong Kong. The other members of the original syndicate had moved on, "gifting" their shares to me. Thanks, guys.

About 10 meters long, and powered by a vintage AEC diesel engine out of an old London Routemaster bus, it was commanded by a captain, the versatile HoFuk, who managed everything I asked him to without a common language between us.

Well, I said it was a tenuous connection.

Chris Peterson is managing editor, Europe, for China Daily. Contact him at chris@mail.chinadailyuk.com