Spanish Ladies: three versions of an old naval song
The women of Spain have such captivating beauty that the great Joaquín Sorolla featured them in many of his paintings, including his 1889 Los Guitarristas, Costumbres Valencianas (pictured above). They also inspired Spanish Ladies, a traditional British naval song...
Reflections on old salts and a 99-year-old photograph
Lewis Wickes Hine (1874–1940) was an American photographer and sociologist who documented the lives of immigrants and workers in early 20th-century America. His 1920 photograph of an old sailor (shown above) is part of the vast Hine collection in the Library of...
14 great quotes about growing old for sailors
Old age is too remote for young sailors to think about. It is a distant shore that lies beyond the horizon, invisible to the eyes of youth in love with life. The time comes, however, when strands of white hair begin to surface like little islands in the sea. They...
Sea, sky and the sublime: Caspar David Friedrich’s art
The art world has not run out of praise for the 19th-century German painter, Caspar David Friedrich (shown in the above inset, a portrait by fellow German artist Gerhard von Kügelgen). Perhaps it never will. Peter Schjeldahl, art critic of The New Yorker magazine, had...
Five things the maritime industry should have less of
Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. ~from the Tao-te Ching (translation by Stephen Mitchell) The shipping industry is trying hard to reduce emissions from ships. Well and good. Global warming is bad enough...
Greta Thunberg: ‘I want you to listen to the scientists’
It took only 55 seconds for Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg to make her opening statement before a US Congress hearing on September the 18th. The message from the 16-year-old was short and crisp. In lieu of a prepared testimony, she said she was...
The paradox in the EU threat to ban Filipino ship officers
The EU threat to derecognise the certificates of Filipino officers serving on board EU-registered vessels has not gone away. By all indications, the proposal is still on the table at the European Commission. It may well stay there for some time given Manila's failure...
Behold the pirates seafarers are helpless against
Pirates have always been a part of the shipping world. They may be nasty characters but they fascinate the public. Their exploits are commemorated in films such as the Pirates of the Caribbean series and in pirate festivals in North America. But there is a class of...
Power of the small: tributes in art to tugboats
“Power can be held in the smallest of things,” declared a 2001 movie poster for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The maxim applies to magical rings as well as to tugboats. What would the shipping world be without the latter? Tugboats were on hand to...
IMOcafe: imagining a new coffeehouse on the block
Imagine for a moment that the International Maritime Organization is a coffeehouse. The name is too long, so it will have to be called IMOcafe, IMOcha or something similar, a short and catchy name. Enter, and you immediately realise that this is no ordinary...
How PR firms are quietly subverting the maritime press
Marine Café Blog stopped using maritime press releases long ago. There is just too much of them. They come rushing like the waves in Winslow Homer's 1891 painting Watching the Breakers (pictured above), flooding the in-box of journalists to subsequently see the light...
Exploitation of seafarers in the grand scheme of things
With so much talk about seafarers' rights, one might miss the bigger picture and overlook other cases of human exploitation. Not the least is child labour, which French painter Fernand Pelez (1843–1913) poignantly depicted in A Martyr – The Violet Vendor, 1885...
