This work, The Rise of an Early Modern Shipping Industry: Whitby's Golden Fleet, 1600–1750, is the distillation of some twenty years of research, much of it undertaken while working in university adult education, an environment which introduces the historian to unexpected elements of history, as he or she responds to the questions raised by students with a wide experience of the communities, both geographical and professional, in which they spend their daily lives.

One may, in the end, decide to specialise in one aspect of history, in this case the history of the merchant sailing fleet of a small but important seaport on the North Sea coast of England. Inevitably, however, all the other aspects of history one has investigated over many years come into play. The study of demography and epidemiology, of urban development and agricultural practice, of religious and sectarian influences, and of fiscal, legal and probate documents, as well as the wider history of British and European history in which the merchant fleet plied its trade, reveal their importance as the links between these aspects become less tenuous, and strengthen with each new examination of apparently insignificant events.

The development of information technology has made possible the systematic collection of historical data, and even more importantly, has enabled the historian to discern connections between apparently trivial, and tiny, scraps of evidence, and produce an informed whole in which all these scraps which have been electronically squirreled away can suddenly play a significant rôle, and help the historian to make sense of long-gone events. It is the small print of local and regional history which in the end illuminates the great narrative of national and international history.

Inter-disciplinary studies are increasingly important in the modern age, when access to the work of scholars in other fields is so readily accessible, both through the traditional library and through the electronic media. Perhaps, as far as this book is concerned, the most germane is the excavation of the wreck of the General Carleton of Whitby, lost near Gdansk in 1785, over the last fifteen years by the marine archaeologists of the Polish National Museum of Gdansk. The artefacts and clothes which have emerged from the wreck are astonishingly well-preserved, and redolent of the lives of the thousands of Whitby and other seamen who sailed through the Sound and into the difficult Baltic Sea over many centuries.