Category: Ships and the Sea

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An Adriatic Anecdote – Venice, 1994

Piazza San Marco

I can never quite decide whether it’s endearing or annoying when Canadians ”punch above their weight” in world affairs and then passively allow our collective memory to fade away. Case in point: while today’s clash of hard-line ideologues rips lives apart in the Middle East, few people these days remember that that thirty years ago Canadians were assisting Israelis and Arabs from across the Middle East and North Africa to build confidence and cooperation, including at sea among navies, coast guards and, in the case of Palestinians, coastal police.
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Of Kremlins and Camaraderie – Russia, 2005

Astrakhan Kremlin

Mention “the Kremlin” and most of us will picture the brooding fortress-palace in Moscow, and perhaps use it as a shorthand title for authoritarian Russian regimes, from medieval tsars to Vladimir Putin. But although it’s customary to refer to it as “The” Kremlin it is, in fact, just one of about twenty such fortified complexes still standing in Russia – ornate monuments to its vibrant culture and stormy history.

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Musical Diplomacy in the Middle East: 1993-1995

Rabin and Arafat shake hands

Thirty years ago this month the world watched as Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Yasser Arafat joined US President Clinton on the White House lawn to sign what became known as the Oslo Accord. Nowhere was that being more closely watched than at the Canadian Coast Guard College, where wary naval, coast guard and other maritime professionals from Israel, the PLO and a number of neighbouring Arab countries were meeting for the first time.

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Aircraft Carrier vs. Submarine – Exercise RIMPAC 1972

This weekend’s visit to Halifax by the latest and greatest United States Navy aircraft carrier, Gerald R. Ford, has put me in mind of a lesson from fifty years ago. Impressive as these great ships are, and while we can be justifiably awed by the technology, we shouldn’t get over-awed. Let me take you back to 1972 for an example.

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Rhyming Conflicts II – South Atlantic to Black Sea

HMS Coventry sinking

When Russia’s flagship, Moskva, went to the bottom of the Black Sea on 14 April, it became the first major naval combattant sunk in war since a British submarine fired torpedoes into Argentina’s General Belgrano in the battle for the Falkland Islands, exactly forty years ago today. For me, though, the more pertinent memory of the South Atlantic war is the sinking of the British destroyer Coventry a little over three weeks later (pictured above). Someone I knew was among the dead, and some of the lessons still resonate.

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Portents of Putin’s Ukraine War – Halifax, 1993

In preparation for his invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin deployed the flagship of Russia’s Northern Fleet to the Mediterranean. Now, the powerful cruiser Marshal Ustinov stands between NATO’s naval forces (including Canada’s HMCS Montreal) and the Dardanelles, which link the Mediterranean to the Black Sea coast of Ukraine. Twenty-nine years ago the relationship had been very different. Ustinov made a memorably visit to Halifax and conducted friendly exercises with the Canadian Navy before heading on to the U.S. Looking back, there were warning signs even then that if the collapse of the Soviet Union were not handled prudently, sooner or later Russia would become an adversary again. And so it has proved.

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Remembrance Day – Kiel 1989

Each year, thousands of Canadians gather at cenotaphs on November 11th – Remembrance Day – to reflect on the futility of war, and to honour those who have paid a heavy price for their service. I have many personal reasons for standing silently at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month; the anniversary of guns falling silent in 1918, ending what had been optimistically dubbed “The War to End all Wars”. But from a lifetime of Remembrance Day memories the one that still stands out is observing the day in Germany in 1989.

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A James Bond Moment in Pakistan

Some stories are so improbable that you just couldn’t make them up. This is one of them.

A decade ago there was much speculation about the newly-built port at Gwadar on the bleak coast of Pakistan’s underdeveloped and restive Balochistan province, better known for independently-minded tribes and a Taliban refuge than for maritime trade and commerce. Yet China had paid to transform this obscure fishing town, strategically located at the approaches to the Gulf of Hormuz through which about a third of the world’s seaborne oil passes. I’d been hearing much theorizing among China’s rivals, but never met anyone who’d actually been there. So I went.

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Ship Strikes – A Whale’s Eye View

The last few years have been rough for the 400-odd remaining Atlantic Right Whales; a once-abundant species that’s never recovered from being hunted almost to extinction. A habitat close enough to shore to coincide with fishing zones and ship traffic lanes means that some die a slow death from tangling in fishing gear while others are wounded by ships’ propellers slicing into their backs, sometimes dying from direct blows. Some people may wonder how a species so finely evolved to detect underwater sound can be so vulnerable, but not me. I learned the hard way during a few adrenaline-filled moments on a Cold War submarine patrol.

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Nautical Royalty and the Migrant Experience

Queens departing Halifax

It’s not often you get to see two of the Cunard Line’s great passenger ships in port at the same time. It’s particularly significant in Halifax, where Samuel Cunard founded the company. Last week crowds lined the shores in brilliant late afternoon sunshine to watch the spectacle of Queen Elizabeth 3 and Queen Mary 2 leave their berths, steam in line up the Dartmouth side of the harbour, then turn seaward along the Halifax piers; Queen Elizabeth bound for St. John’s and Queen Mary for New York. Surely a more stately sight than Britannia, Cunard’s first tiny hybrid paddlewheel steamer with its full suit of sails furled away as backup, chuntering seaward along the same course 180 years ago.

I have a special fondness for Queen Mary 2, having immigrated to Canada (via New York) aboard her predecessor, back in the day when crossing the Atlantic by air was still a new but unaffordable luxury to us common folk. Dad had gone ahead to find a job, then Mum and I followed.

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