ABSTRACT
There is nothing particularly new about bulk shipping. Cutting transport costs by carrying cargo in shiploads is a strategy that has been around for millennia. The grain fleet of ancient Rome,1 the Dutch ‘fly boats’ of the sixteenth century, and the nineteenth-century tea clippers are all examples. However the bulk shipping industry which has such an important place in the shipping industry of the twenty-first century has its roots in the eighteenth-century coal trade between the North of England and London. At first the standard ‘collier’ was a wooden sailing collier brig, but between 1840 and 1887 the coal trade grew from 1.4 mt to 49.3 mt and better ships were needed.2
