There are about a dozen communities left on earth where people in traditional craft still rely on their sails to carry out meaningful work. They don’t do this for romantic reasons, but because they can’t afford a cheap diesel engine or the fuel to drive it. These working sailing fleets, that were originally responsible for binding humanity into a single ecological and historical system, have, almost by accident, become the last bastion of a disappearing tradition that globalised the human story.

So far this year, 116,000 individual people have visited the SWS website and they have read 187,000 pages. I point this out not to be self congratulatory, but indicate the strength and size of the community that sees the value in promoting traditional maritime culture.

The ship swung to her moorings, and the light from the port, diffused and golden, swung across the gloom, reaching to the girl. Poor child, even in life she had never belonged down there in that dreadful place, among that crowd of older women who huddled from her, suspicious, almost animal-like, watching not her but us. She should never have been in that frightful travelling prison, delivering her to a harem in Zanzibar, to a husband she had never seen, in an island far from her home.