Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of maps
- Preface: Geography and the sea
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: Britain's island idea
- 1 Community of water
- 2 Queen of Sparta
- 3 The discipline of the sea
- 4 Ark of war
- 5 Blowing a dead coal
- 6 The British empire in Europe
- 7 The world in an island
- 8 Anti-continentalism
- 9 What continent?
- Conclusion: floating islands
- Appendix: Duck Language (1724)
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Queen of Sparta
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of maps
- Preface: Geography and the sea
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: Britain's island idea
- 1 Community of water
- 2 Queen of Sparta
- 3 The discipline of the sea
- 4 Ark of war
- 5 Blowing a dead coal
- 6 The British empire in Europe
- 7 The world in an island
- 8 Anti-continentalism
- 9 What continent?
- Conclusion: floating islands
- Appendix: Duck Language (1724)
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Ne was it Iland then, ne was it paisde
Amid the Ocean waves, ne was it sought
Of Merchants far, for profits therein praised,
But was all desolate, & of some thought … brought
By Sea to have bin from the Celtick Mainland.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie QueeneIf nations are culture, then the inhabitants of an island, particularly one with a significant land area within sight of a continent, may still constitute a nation of landlubbers by whom the sea has barely been noticed. This would help to explain the embarrassment recorded by Richard Hakluyt in1589, reading a French ‘commendation of the Rhodians, who being (as we are) Islanders, were excellent in navigation … woondereth much that the English should not surpasse in that qualitie’.
How maritime was a sixteenth-century England with an agricultural economy, a rural society, a crown which still claimed to be the legitimate governor of France, outnavigated by the Portuguese and Spaniards, outfished and outtraded by the Dutch? In the mid-seventeenth century the last drew the following taunt from Andrew Marvell:
Holland, that scarce deserves the name of Land,
As but th'off-scowring of the British sand;
And so much Earth as was contributed
By English Pilots; when they heav'd the Lead;
Or what by th'Oceans slow alluvion fell,
Of Shipwrackt-Cockle and the Muscle-Shell;
This indigested Vomit of the Sea,
Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- When the Waves Ruled BritanniaGeography and Political Identities, 1500–1800, pp. 31 - 53Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011