Seafaring and History in the English Channel

▪ 1995

Introduction

by Nigel Calder

      Queen Victoria welcomed an early proposal for a tunnel under the English Channel "in the name of all the ladies in England." Nearly 140 years later the tunnel is open, and its top selling point is still the gratifying lack of motion in the seabed rocks that envelop it. Off the coast of Normandy, on D-Day 1944, the roll and pitch of the landing craft in the Channel waters reduced many young heroes to green jelly. No wonder they hurried ashore to liberate Europe.

      The English Channel's waves are not imposing. Surfers scorn them. They shrink in height by 50% from the wide Atlantic aperture to the narrow Strait of Dover, where most people cross the Channel. But tidal currents, shallow banks, and wave reflections from the cliffs all contribute to a disagreeable choppiness whenever the wind rises above 10 knots. That is why this most important strip of shallow water in the world belongs strictly to sailors. In Victoria's time women were always passengers, which explains her apparently sexist remark about the tunnel.

      The sailors observe with good-humoured disdain those who cross the Channel by unorthodox means. It has been an inviting proving ground, from the first balloon crossing in 1785, through the first powered flight in 1909, to the pedal-powered aircraft of more recent times. Matthew Webb in 1875 was the first to swim the Channel, and now to do so is almost routine. People also cross by sailboard, canoe, water skis, and almost anything that floats.

The Island Mentality.

      Those who have written about the Channel must be mostly landlubbers. Otherwise, popular perceptions of the Channel, shared throughout the English-speaking world, could not be so wrongheaded. For example, landlubber Shakespeare had John of Gaunt describing England as "This precious stone set in the silver sea, / Which serves it in the office of a wall, / Or as a moat defensive to a house, / Against the envy of less happier lands." Many people believe that this moat has kept England safe from invasion since 1066, when the Normans landed.

      Glorious isolation supposedly allowed English culture to diverge from mainland Europe's, with well-known consequences for Protestantism, science, and parliamentary democracy. Colonizers braving seasickness sailed off down-Channel to carry the English language and English ways to the ends of the Earth. But their libertarian ideals made their imperialism self-destruct. Retreating home, they had to find new partners, and the Channel Tunnel (Eurotunnel) symbolizes the islanders' reunion with mainland Europe.

 The island mentality and its historical effects are not in dispute, and neither is the English Channel's contribution to this mentality. But to a sailor, any idea that such a narrow strip of water created the isolation is sheer nonsense. The Channel was no more than a conspicuous line chalked on the sidewalk to separate rival gangs. It was never a barrier to sailors. On the contrary, it was a convenient bridge linking the two shorelines. (See Map—>.) Except in long spells of adverse weather, travel by water was much quicker and easier than going the same distance overland. That did not change until the invention of steam trains in the 19th century.

Waves of Immigrants.

      People moved freely across the sea, and England was populated by wave after wave of peaceful settlers and warlike invaders. "From this amphibious ill-born mob began / That vain ill-natur'd thing, an Englishman." In saying so, Daniel Defoe showed a shrewder sense of maritime history than Shakespeare.

      Hunter-gatherers strolled across the still-dry seabed as the last ice age ended, but the first farmers reached England 6,000 years ago on boats or rafts that had to accommodate cattle and sheep as well as people. Later immigrants came with plows and horses. Discoveries of Bronze Age shipwrecks by archaeologists reveal that traders were voyaging routinely across the wider parts of the English Channel more than 3,000 years ago.

      During the century before Christ, Celtic ironworking people possessed both shores. Sturdy sailing vessels carried cargoes of Italian wine to England. They departed from Brittany, the tide-swept granite promontory of France that nurtured, then as now, some of the world's finest seamen. By rights they should have expunged Julius Caesar from the history books when he came to conquer them. Sadly, a rare calm left the Celts' battle fleet helpless while the Roman rowing galleys cut down their masts.

      The written history of the Channel starts with Caesar, and a hundred years later the Roman legions were conquering England. The Celtic cousins in Gallia and Britannia then shared Roman rulers, in the first of three Channel-straddling empires. It lasted for four centuries, and no one ever complained about the lack of a tunnel.

      A Roman fleet, the Classis Britannica, was based at Boulogne on the Gallic side of the Strait of Dover. It protected the Channel shores and the busy shipping routes against German pirates. They came from the sandy eastern shores of the North Sea with a variety of tribal names. The Angles gave theirs to England even though Saxons predominated on the island's Channel shore. The newcomers merged and modified their German dialects to produce Anglo-Saxon, the linguistic ancestor of English.

      Romans had always regarded Britannia as the back of beyond, and their imperial relics were more impressive on the other side of the Channel. There the Franks from the Rhine River delta were the most successful invaders and so gave their name to France. They began to imitate Roman ways and to speak a form of Latin that would evolve into French. But cross-Channel linguistic divergence was interrupted by another wave of piratical cousins. The longships of the Vikings of Scandinavia became a fearsome sight on all the coasts and rivers of northwestern Europe. Danish Vikings subdued England but fumbled their grip on it. Vikings from Norway made inroads into France and cruised far up the Seine River, where they razed the Franks' stronghold of Paris. Taking possession of France's central Channel shore, these Northmen named it Normandy. In 1066 their longships took them to England, which became a colony in a Norman empire that spanned the Channel. The conquerors spoke French by that time, and their hearts remained rooted on the French side of the Channel. Nevertheless, they thought nothing of crossing over for an occasional binge or a murder.

      A Channel shipwreck during a drunken onboard party drowned a Norman prince at Cap Barfleur. The ensuing war of succession produced a larger cross-Channel entity, the Angevin empire. This extended from the Spanish border in the south of France to the Scottish border in the north of England. Scotland and Ireland became satellites.

      The Angevin empire appreciated its sailors and sea links. Its rôles d'Oléron codified maritime law for western Europe. It was not any difficulty with the cross-Channel shipping that caused the empire to crumble. The children of Queen Eleanor squabbled over their inheritance, and the chief beneficiaries were the Franks, whose enclave had been reduced to only one-tenth of the area of France.

England Versus France.

      The modern nations of France and England came into being in a 200-year struggle for territory and taxes between the heirs of the pirates from the Rhine and Norway. Early in the contest the Franks recaptured the Norman heartlands in France. Forced to regard England as their base, the Normans adopted the English language and sought to befriend their Anglo-Saxon subjects, whom they had treated severely at first.

      So it was as the king of England—crying "God for Harry! England and Saint George!"—that Henry V invaded France. He compelled the French king, Charles VI, to name him as his heir instead of Charles' son, the dauphin. However, because Henry V died young, the fourth cross-Channel empire uniting England and France was not to be. The peasant girl Joan of Arc inspired the dispossessed dauphin to recover his kingdom and boot the Anglo-Normans out of France.

      From that time onward, English identity was established through hatred of the French across the water. And vice versa. Did not Joan of Arc offer divine authority for killing Englishmen? France and England became the prototypes for the present division of the world into nation-states. Nationalism was invented in the laboratory of the English Channel.

A Symbolic Role.

      The water's role was symbolic only. All through the medieval struggles, invading armies crossed in both directions and pounced on undefended beaches. Long after the Anglo-French sort-out was complete, Henry Tudor of Wales gathered French and Breton troops at the mouth of the Seine and sailed them to Wales. The invaders killed King Richard III of England in battle and gave his crown to Henry. As recently as 1688 the Dutchman William of Orange stepped ashore with a Dutch and German army in Devon, forced King James II to flee, and took the crown. This latter-day William the Conqueror had a wind from the east that carried his invasion fleet down-Channel while pinning the English navy in harbour.

      With fighting men and favourable weather, the moat was defendable. Drake's long-cannoned squadrons defeated the Spanish Armada. A dogged British blockade kept Napoleon's invasion fleet at bay until he lost patience and gave up. And when the army of Adolf Hitler was preparing to cross the Channel in 1940, fighter aircraft denied him the prerequisite mastery of the sky.

      Although 564 years have elapsed since the English caught Joan of Arc and burned her alive, the mutual scorn of the French and English remains ingrained in both populations. That a century of military, political, and economic cooperation has brought neither side to its senses astonishes their partners in the European Union and the Western alliance. Perhaps the myth of the English Channel as a formidable barrier is meant to excuse this gross irrationality, but the maritime history exposes it as a purely sociopsychological dividing line. When millions already cross the water by ferry or by air, why should anyone imagine that a slender tunnel under the seabed will change cross-Channel attitudes?

Nigel Calder is an amateur sailor, an independent writer, and the author of many books about science and technology, including Spaceship Earth (1991) and Giotto to the Comets (1992).

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