One of the joys of sailing out in open water is that there are no roads, no road markings and no road signs. There are written ‘Rules of the Road’ you must know, in case you encounter other vessels and need to avoid an embarrassing collision. But subject to the wind direction, you can sail in whatever direction you fancy; as the bird flies or maybe as the fish swims?
You very rarely come across a fence or a wall in open water causing you to stop or alter course. Nor do you meet a border guard or see a customs checkpoint when you pass into new territorial waters (normally 12 nautical miles (NM) offshore). Natural lines of rocks and reefs exist out there, for sure, but man-made barriers are few and far between.
The one local, man-made nautical obstacle that springs to my mind is the submarine barrier in the eastern Solent. This is a line of huge concrete blocks, just under water at most states of the tide. It links Southsea, on the mainland, to Horse Sands Fort, which sits surrounded by Solent water. Horse Sands Fort is one of four large circular defensive structures built to guard Portsmouth from an attack by sea. They were constructed in the later 19th century, and well after the French Napoleonic threat had gone. The submarine barrier was constructed in 1909, not to obstruct submarines, but to force the new German E-boats (fast, attack boats) away from the shallow coastal water and into the deeper channel and between two of the well-armed forts.
But I digress. Sailing on the open water is generally barrier free and a very liberating experience.
I suspect that travelling over land might have been just as liberating in times past. Most English land away from the towns and villages would have been ‘open’ land, with free access. A long time ago it would also have been free of obstacles, such as the thorn hedgerows set down during the later acts of parliamentary enclosure. Of course, you would get powerful landowners marking their territorial boundaries, often with ditches and dykes, wooden palisades and latterly walls. By ‘dyke’ I refer to the embankment alongside the ditch and formed from the arisings or spoil. And not a drainage ditch, often water filled, which can also be called a dyke. Confusing!
If you came across one of these boundaries, it was basically saying keep out.After Hadrian’s Wall, Offa’s Dyke is probably the most famous British example of a man-made barrier. It was constructed on the orders of King Offa of Mercia from 757 to 796. The ditch is on the Welsh side, with the spoil on the Anglo-Saxon side. This suggests it was built to keep the Welsh out. Alas, Alix, it hasn’t worked! [Alix: Please yourself, I can go home if you want]. King Offa (or rather his serfs or slaves) had to spend all that effort largely because there was no natural barrier between the two peoples to perform the job. There is no high mountain range; and no large river for the whole course [Alix: River deep, mountain high tra la la...]. And certainly, no sea.
I was once asked what are the 20 things that made Britain ‘Great’. Of course, we appreciate that ‘great’ in our country’s name means ‘large’ (Grande Bretagne or Large Brittany), and not ‘superb’. My number one item was the English Channel. For a millennium that natural watery barrier has helped secure our national independence, backed up by a strong navy of course. The channel has been our moat. In 1,000 years neither the Spanish, nor the French, nor the Germans have managed to organise a full assault across the channel carrying land forces. William III (of Orange) - with his 450 ships - was invited, wasn’t he?
The northern boundary of the Roman empire was generally marked by two mighty rivers: the Rhine emptying into the North Sea; and the Danube, flowing eastwards into the Black Sea. And the Danube was instrumental in Austria and Hungary being able to repulse the northwards expansion of the Ottoman Empire.
Until the Genoese ferried the Ottomans across the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, including the Bosporus had always been the defensible limit between Europe and Asia Minor. [I have just read in a book by Owen Rees (thanks Louis) that the Persian leader Xerxes managed to cross it near Gallipoli en route to fighting the Athenians in c.480 BC, by building pontoon bridges of hundreds of triremes.]
Yet breaching a watery barrier is not simply about getting across the first time. The attacker must set up and secure supply lines from back across the other side. If they build a bridge, you can always sneak up and destroy it, and cut them off from their support.
Tim Marshall’s excellent book, ‘Prisoners of Geography’ (2015) explains how much of today’s geopolitics can be explained by geographical barriers. Or lack of them. Poland has flickered in and out of existence and morphed into many different shapes largely because it has no natural barriers to define its edges. Marshall contends that China and India have avoided large-scale conflict, mainly due to the effectively impassable Himalayan range.
At school, I felt that history was taught in a very static way. I assumed country boundaries had always looked the same. What a poor opinion to have been sown.
A Ukrainian Detour
Marshall explains how the vast and largely featureless North European Plain is behind Putin’s paranoia about another invasion from the west. There is little natural impedance to enemy tanks and Russians have always felt (since Napoleonic times at least) that they require a large territorial buffer zone, to make it difficult for the enemy to establish lines of logistics. And this, in no small way, partly explains Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. (OK, he is a nationalistic and murderous psychopath as well.) NATO has gradually eroded his buffer zone. In other words, the west has approached and ‘poked the bear’ and now the bear has reacted. And because we didn’t slap his paws hard when he annexed Crimea in 2014, he thinks he can annex a lot more of eastern Ukraine. And he may be successful. The EU, meanwhile, has dozed through its winters in cosy lounges heated by Russian gas, which he can always simply threaten to switch off, if they raise a fist.
Ironically, Putin hasn’t done what most warrior leaders have done over the millennia: he did not wait for the ‘campaign season’ to start. The Normans wouldn’t have started a war in early March. Neither would the Ottomans. If it’s cold, wet and muddy underfoot, its not great for the defenders, but its probably worse for the attacker. He waited for the thaw, but that just means that the rich and fertile agricultural fields of the Ukraine become a muddy mess. A tracked tank might traverse the gloop, but what about the wheeled lorries carrying the infantry cover, and the hot tea and sandwiches? So, the Russian columns have tended to stay on the metalled roads to be picked off by NLAWs (often British) fired by brave Ukrainian soldiers (often British-trained, and done many months and years ago). And the Ukrainians are, of course, destroying the bridges to make Russian progress to Kyev even slower.
To stray into the Ukrainian situation is not totally tangential to Missy Bear’s blog. We have touched on Ukraine and Russia twice before in our blogs. The first mention was in ‘Norman Conquest’ (Season 1) where we discussed the Viking Harold Hardrada:
“After a royal power struggle in Denmark and Norway in 1030, Harald was exiled. He travelled to Constantinople, via Kievan Rus (modern Belarus, west Russia and Ukraine), a land then ruled by the Varangians [Vikings]. He joined the Varangian Guard in Constantinople, which was an elite unit of the Byzantine Army, serving as personal bodyguard to the emperor of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire.”
Although it might go against Putin’s narrative, the Kievan Rus federation existed between the 9th and 13th centuries long before Russia, per se, existed. The federal capital was Kiev, and Moscow was just a small, swampy village in the northern margins. The Kievan Rus federation was eventually overrun by the Mongol Tatars of the Golden Horde, and Kiev was sacked. In the 15th century, Russian tsars based in Moscow gradually gained the ascendancy over the Mongol invaders. Russia expanded under the tsars to eventually become an empire and one of the Great Powers, with Austria to its west and the Ottomans to the south.
But the point remains that Ukrainians historically are not Russians, even if some of them speak Russian. Ukraine was not Russia before it got consumed by the empire, and now Ukraine is an independent nation within the UN.
The excellent podcast ‘The Rest is History’ argues that the situation is analogous to the English and Irish relationship. It is like suggesting that the English in 2022 have the right to invade Eire tomorrow and annex parts where the locals speak English as a first language, not Gaelic?
The second mention was in this season’s ‘La Serenissima’ about the Venetian Republic. Two towns were mentioned which were Genoese outposts, Caffa (modern Feodosia in the Crimea) and Tana (modern Tanais, on the Sea of Azov):
“The siege of Caffa [by the Mongol army] went on into 1346. By the 1340s the Black Sea had become the warehouse of the world. The rolling siege of Caffa and the destruction of Tana brought trade to a standstill, like ice freezing the winter sea. The effects were felt throughout the hungry cities of the Mediterranean basin. There was famine in the eastern Mediterranean - lack of wheat, salt, fish in Byzantium; shortage of wheat in Venice and a rocketing of prices in luxury goods: silk and spices doubled throughout Europe. It was these effects that made the Black Sea so crucial and the competition between the maritime republics so fierce.”
So, the fact that the vast, flat, open and fertile plains north of the Black Sea (much of which is modern Ukraine) was and still is the bread basket of the Mediterranean is not really news.
In fact, the control of the sea route from the Black Sea was a critical issue in ancient times. It was a key objective of the Peloponnese allies (Spartans et. al.) in their ongoing wars with the Athenians. Lysander won the naval battle of Aegospotami in 406 BC after which he also look Byzantium and thus helped starve Athens of its grain supply.
Nor is it news, therefore, that any war in this region - with disruption to planting, harvests and trade - will lead to an increase in food prices more widely. We might be able to source gas, oil and wheat from elsewhere. But it will be a sellers’ market.
A full 195 litre tank of diesel from Greece for Missy Bear will now be a chunky expense!
The Coastal Ionian Sea
Another example of a watery barrier becoming a ‘national‘ boundary is the coastal Ionian Sea off the Balkan shore. This is where Missy Bear is awaiting relaunch.
The Ottomans’ attempts to conquer the string of seven Ionian islands were largely unsuccessful. The islands were the only part of the modern Greek-speaking world to escape Ottoman rule. It goes without saying that any sea boundary is only effective if you can back it up with a strong naval presence. And the Venetians, then French (briefly) and British each in turn had a strong naval presence in the Ionian.
My main reference for much of the detail is “The Ionian Islands and Epirus: 2 (Landscapes of the Imagination)” by Jim Potts (4th Edition, 2010). It’s not a story nor a great read. But it contains a smorgasbord of lovely titbits extracted from many authors, especially of the early 19th century, including the ubiquitous Byron, and the Reverend Thomas Smart Hughes.
We mentioned the Ottoman Ali Pasha (1740 – 1822) when we visited his home at Ioannina last season. Just as all Romans were not born in Rome, this Ottoman was an Albanian native. He was a brigand, but he was eventually recruited into the occupying Ottoman military, and he rose up to become a high-ranking office, or ‘pasha’. Latterly he had designs to create a land independent from the Sultan and the Sublime Porte back in Constantinople. Ali Pasha’s first intention was to crush the independent Greek mainland community of Souli. And then he aimed to acquire control of the Ionian Islands and their mainland dependencies, including Parga, Butrinto and Preveza. His aim was to turn Parga into the “Portsmouth of Albania”.
Ali Pasha did persecute horribly and subdue the Souliots, some of who escaped to the islands. But it was the British, not the Ottomans, who took the Islands from the Napoleonic French, who had taken them as war spoils after conquering Venice. The British Royal Navy defeated the French fleet at Zakynthos in October 1809! We captured Kefallonia, Kythera, Zakynthos and then Lefkada in the following year. Although the French held out in Corfu, the Treaty of Paris in 1815 established the ‘United States of the Ionian Islands’ under British protection.
As you would expect, the British maintained diplomatic relations with their nearest neighbour across the water. And I will relate one infamous transaction with Ali Pasha, simply because there is a connection to my home town of Cirencester.
The British had ceded (sold) Parga to Ali Pasha in 1817, and this decision was highly unpopular with the Greeks. Parga had been the last refuge for the much-persecuted Souliots, who Pasha had cleared mercilessly from their mountain homes and chased to the coast. The Souliots emigrated across the water to British security on the islands, often carrying their ancestors’ interred bones and a few clods of earth as mementos.
Potts’ book quotes a private letter from Sir Thomas Maitland (Governor), in a private letter of April 1817 to Henry Bathurst, 3rd Earl Bathurst (Colonial Minister):
“There was no measure more detrimental to our character than this cession... Whatever may have been the diplomatic justice or policy of the cession of Parga, it is certain that the shock given by that lamentable transaction to every Christian in the East, lessened the influence of England far more seriously than could be compensated for by any gratitude on the part of the Turks… At all events, no Englishman can wander among the ruined houses and deserted gardens of the beautiful spot [Parga], without a feeling of shame and regret that his country should have abandoned to the infidels a gallant Christian community, which had defended against them for four hundred years its liberty and its religion.”
My connection is that Henry Bathurst is the predecessor of the incumbent 9th Earl Bathurst (Allen), who lives at Cirencester House (‘The Big House’) in town. We bump into him and Lady B. (Sara) around Cirencester, such as at the wonderful Barn Theatre. (Allen tried to push in front of us at Jesse Smith’s butchers last Christmas, but this peasant was having none of it!) [Alix: I have to say Richard bristled, when Earl B asked if we were in a queue. To which my revolutionary husband replied an emphatic, “Yes!”].
Anyway, my gut feeling is that it was not just “gratitude” on the part the Turks, but Britain got Ali Pasha’s word to leave the Ionian islands to the British, and relinquish his desire to invade and control them. Maybe the British actually saved the lives of the last remaining Souliots, by helping them across that watery divide, before Ali Pasha had chance to snuff them out?
To give you a flavour of his type of justice, you need to know that if he accused a woman of adultery, she was tied up alive in a weighted sack and dropped overboard in the Ioannina Lake. I won’t repeat here what he (or his men) did to his captured enemies…
Another liberating factor of sailing on the open seas is that you feel as if you are sharing it with nature and your fellow human beings. Within 12 NM of shore, you are in territorial waters, but you don’t sense the ownership - or that you are trespassing - like you would on dry land, with its numerous visual cues. Outside marinas and private anchorages, you don’t really sense who owns the sea, especially offshore out of sight of land and other vessels. You also avoid the tensions that arise from ownership. You just share the water, try to follow the basic courtesies, and act sensitively to the environment.
On land, and at a smaller scale, the potential for conflict seems much greater. Pott’s relates that many contemporary Greek disputes (e.g., about buildings) have been determined by past feudal, sharecropping, legal inheritance and dowry arrangements. Individual olive trees often formed part of dowry arrangements! Even when Greece took possession of the Ionian islands in 1864, it was still a feudal regime. Greek peasants have never liked their lords - no matter what nationality - and feudalism was only abolished after a series of tumultuous rural revolts. Potts relates that:
“There have always been arguments about inheritances and borders. From disputes over ownership of individual olive trees to the ownership of access tracks and even individual boulders, there has been plenty of litigation and business for the lawyers, in the absence of a comprehensive national land registry…especially when there are so many overlapping and contested topographic maps and political scandals”.
In contrast, it's so lovely that we can drop Missy Bear’s anchor in a bay for a day or two and avoid such petty conflict. That is provided you leave your neighbours with a bit of space to swing on their hook and leave them in peace. Most of the time, this is the case.
Today in Greece, there are only two emerging territorial sea 'battles' of which I am aware. The first is the increasing number of fish farms (and the resulting waste) that are popping up [Alix: and pooping up – geddit?] in lovely anchorages, and next to favourite beaches. Once a new farm has taken ‘ownership’ of that bit of space, there’s no easy sharing with anyone else.
The second is the long-running territorial tensions between Turkey and Greece, known as the ‘Aegean Dispute’. This has made sailing from Greece to Turkey and vice-versa very problematic recently, especially in the eastern Aegean. Here, there are very many Greek islands within spitting distance of the Turkish mainland. It’s very complicated, but I’ll simplify it as follows:
The normal convention is that your territorial waters extend 12 NM offshore, but in the western Aegean the agreement is 6 NM for those geographical reasons. And where a Greek island is less than 12NM off the Turkish coast (which is many of them), you split the difference and draw a border on the chart right down the midway. The Turks don’t think that these territorial norms should apply to islands. And the Greeks want to the normal convention of 12 NM to apply. This would effectively hem in the entire east of Turkey by Greek-owned waters. You can see where the Turkish unease arises.
We hope the tensions will be low when we sail Missy Bear into Turkish waters from some Greek island later in the year!
So what?
In conclusion, what can we take from all this?
If you feel that you need security, then a natural defensible barrier - like the Channel - is your friend.
If a natural barrier doesn’t exist, make sure that your neighbours – such as in Eastern Europe – will keep your enemy at arms’ length for you. That works for Germany as well, note! (You can send less money to NATO, safe in the knowledge that all the countries between you and Russia have joined and now paying into the pot.)
You could try and build a barrier. But the days of being able to assign your hordes of serfs or slaves to your ‘grands projects’ are probably long gone. And you need to make sure that the enemy can’t simply drive around the side - remember Belgium in 1939.
You can always draw a line on a map or a chart. In fact, being able to draw precise lines on accurate maps and charts – as the British were able to – helps the legal element of your territorial claims. British geographers have been asked to draw national boundaries for many countries - such as between the southern extents of Argentina and Chile. But although an agreed line on a map can give you legal recourse, it won’t stop a tank. Your big iron fist inside your velvet glove might…
This awful invasion - and latest humanitarian crisis - is all very depressing. We sailors must thank our lucky stars that we can soon step aboard our yachts, leave the land behind, get a good few lungs-full of fresh sea air, hoist the sails, heel over [Alix: only slightly; I don't want to spill my wine…] and then head off where the wind takes us, cutting through the boundless blue...
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