Conclusion

The heading ‘Conclusion’ is normally no more than a way of bringing a book to an end. But the word ‘conclusion’ has additional force when look­ing at the history of the oceans. Not just this book but ocean history is coming to an end, at least in its traditional form.

Most ships, though, carry cargo. The scale of trade through the container ports is now astonishing. Hong Kong sees a thousand ships pass through its nine container terminals each day; the harbour handles 20,000,000 containers each year, each weighing a maximum of twenty tons. Overall, 300,000,000 tons of goods pass through Hong Kong annually, mainly to and from the People’s Republic of China. But Hong Kong is only one element in a much larger conurbation of 68,000,000 people: as well as Macau, which makes much of its money from gambling, there is the indus­trial city of Shenzhen, until 1980 a little town of small significance with 30,000 inhabitants and now a massive city of 13,000,000 people dedicated to hi-tech industries that presses right down on the border with the former British colony.

Global warming is making journeys around the top of Canada and Russia feasible, linking the Pacific to the Atlantic in ways dreamed of in the days of Queen Elizabeth I. Not content with the historic silk routes, the State Council of the People’s Republic announced in January 2018 that it would conduct trial voyages along a ‘Polar Silk Route’, correspond­ing to the North-East Passage, along which a Russian tanker had managed to sail all the way from Norway to South Korea in 2017. If receding ice permits regular traffic to flow along this route, the time taken to travel from the Far East to Europe could be reduced by 20 per cent. But this and the route over the top of Canada will be routes for container ships, or occasional cruise ships whose passengers prefer ice to heat. Meanwhile humans have inflicted severe environmental damage upon the oceans, threatening marine life by the dumping of plastics, some of which enter the fishy food chain, leading to depletion of fish stocks that are already threatened by overfishing - not to mention the massive decline in the numbers of several species of whale.¹ UNESCO rightly nominates World Heritage Sites in most of the countries of the globe. But there is one vast World Heritage Site that also needs to be nominated: the world­encompassing ocean sea, whose history is entering an entirely new phase. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the ocean world of the last four millennia had ceased to exist.