The general subject of maritime history, as the editors of this remarkable work explain, cuts across the boundaries of several disciplines: history, geography, politics, economics, art, science, sociology and law. Previous reference books have usually concentrated on one of these aspects. It is only in recent years, they declare, that scholars have attempted to view the subject as a whole, thus allowing the compilation of a comprehensive encyclopaedia by 500 contributors, running to about a thousand entries in two‐and‐a‐half million words. It is stated to be aimed at general readers, students and scholars. Despite the title, the subject coverage extends up to 2006.
A classified list of entries provides an overview of the broad scope of the work. The index, occupying over 200 pages, is on a suitably extensive scale. There is no general bibliography, but each article has a list of references and in the main text will be found articles on the leading maritime journals, libraries and archives, with their web addresses. The maps are informative, the illustrations less so; there are numerous cases where a picture really would have been worth the proverbial thousand words, but none was provided. When they are, the choice sometimes appears eccentric; thus an article on Lord Cochrane is illustrated by a photograph of his epaulettes.
The entries include seas, ports (both particular and by type), voyages, battles, organizations, treaties, navigational instruments, maritime techniques, personalities of every kind from admirals to artists, and many general topics in all the fields listed above. The large variety of contributors inevitably means that some subjects (for instance the development of wooden ships) are covered in different places, sometimes widely separated. Nor is it surprising if contributors sometimes contradict each other; thus in the space of a few dozen pages appear three different views on the arrangement of oars in a trireme, and even under the same general heading can be found two widely differing estimates of the size of the Chinese exploration ships of Zheng He.
Where a reference book aspires to comprehensive coverage of such a broad range of subjects, it will always be possible to question the choice of entries. Each reviewer would see different omissions. I may point, for instance, to the lack of separate articles for the Battle of Tsushima (the most decisive naval battle of the ironclad era) or the Falklands War (the only large‐scale maritime conflict fought with the weapons of the present generation). The coverage of individual articles is sometimes inconsistent. Thus the article on Hospitals is restricted to US naval hospitals; that on Ship Disasters leaves out the loss of the Wilhelm Gustloff, which brought about far more deaths than that of any other vessel; the article on the Japanese Navy from 1867 to 1945 has practically nothing to say after 1941; and that on Kronstadt does not mention the mutiny of the Soviet Baltic Fleet in 1921. The distribution of space between subjects might have deserved a greater degree of editorial intervention. Four pages are devoted to Surfing and only one to Submarines; which was really the more important topic? Occasionally, the odd error has crept in; the supposed Orkney island of “Pomona” is in fact a cartographer's misunderstanding, and the galleys of the Highlands of Scotland were not called “birnies” (an old word for coats of mail) but “birlinns”.
It must be emphasised, however, that all the inconsistencies referred to in the previous paragraph affect only a small proportion of an otherwise very comprehensive work, filled with a great amount of detail. One can find out, for example, the location of the world's only memorial to ballast (New York), or the quantity of books carried on the liner Queen Elizabeth 2 (six tons). It is also instructive to discover what was not thought worthy of mention. Which reader who remembers the British Merchant Navy of 50 years ago could imagine that an extensive article on the history of merchant shipping would comprise subsections on the world's leading countries, not including Britain; or that a list if the ten most famous shipyards in history would include none on the Clyde? Sic transit Gloria! One can only speculate how different the picture will be when a second edition appears of this significant encyclopaedia; the present one will surely not be superseded for many years to come.
