ABSTRACT
On account of the remarkable length of coastline in relation to the land area the British Isles are particularly favourably placed for the development of coastal shipping. The eleventh edition of Baldwin’s London Directory, published in 1768, names 580 places in England and Wales to which goods could be sent by water. Although it was necessary to use canal as well as sea to reach some of the places mentioned, the overwhelming majority were small seaports whose prosperity largely depended on the continuance of the coasting trade. The great economy of coastal shipping over land transport for the carriage of many types of goods was fully understood by Adam Smith, who wrote that ‘it required only six or eight men to bring by water to London the same quantity of goods which would otherwise require fifty broad wheeled waggons, attended by a hundred men, and drawn by four hundred horses’.1
