Sail saves the seas

Tres Hombres, a modern sail-driven freighter

In the early days of America, as it was in Europe and Australia -- and any busy settlement -- transport was by sea. Roads were primitive and communication was difficult.  Men, women, and their families loaded the produce of their orchards and farms onto little sloops and bigger schooners, and sailed off to market.  When their own crops had been sold, they bought goods on speculation, hoping to find happy customers back home.

In effect, these sail-driven vessels were sea-going trucks, carrying coal, salt, sugar, barrel staves and steel.  When the loads were bigger and the markets more distant, these sailing ships became bigger, turning into windjammers and clippers.  And, much more glamorous than container ships and tankers, they used a totally renewable natural fuel -- the winds that blow with regularity about the globe.

And muscle-power, of course.  They needed much bigger crews than their modern freighter equivalents, and there was a tough side to the life.  They were casual about what they threw overboard, too -- but they did not burn any oil at all, let alone the dirty bunker oil favored by freighters.  And there is a quiet return to this manner of transport, as reported by The Guardian.

They fan out across the seas like a giant maritime dance, a ballet of tens of thousands of vessels delivering the physical stuff that has become indispensable to our way of life: commodities and cars, white goods and gas and grains, timber and technology.

But shipping – a vast industry that moves trillions of pounds-worth of goods each year – is facing an environmental reckoning. Ships burn the dirtiest oil, known as bunker fuel; a waste product from the refinery process, literally scraping the bottom of the barrel, the crud in crude. It’s so thick that you could walk on it at room temperature.

As a result, shipping is a major polluter – responsible for about 2.5% of global carbon emissions. Not surprisingly, innovators are starting to wonder if there is another way -- and one is Will Templeman, a scientist turned entrepreneur.  As he points out, about 90% of what people eat is carried from another land.

Templeman’s eureka moment came during a visit to the supermarket when he was agonising over the food miles in his trolley. He wondered if it would be possible to transport things such as coffee and chocolate with zero emissions. Then he remembered that this was how goods used to travel. By sailing ship.

A quick online search revealed that a Dutch company was doing exactly that.

The owners of Fairtransport were inspired to revive sail cargo after witnessing at first hand the yellow smog caused by commercial vessels. They restored two ships, a 70-year-old minesweeper renamed the Tres Hombres and a wooden ketch called Nordlys that dates back to 1873.

Templeman arranged to board the Tres Hombres, sailing from the Azores to the Netherlands. “I was watching the ocean and it came like a ghost ship through the dawn mist. It looked like a pirate vessel. I was so excited.”

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He dreamed of launching his own ship but realised that the first step was to make full use of the sailing vessels already in service.

He set up as a broker and together with his business partner, Will Adeney, went in pursuit of products to sell. They found their perfect olive oil in Portugal and arranged to have it shipped to Devon on board the Nordlys. They later sourced coffee beans in Colombia, and shipped them to Europe on the Tres Hombres. Their business, Shipped by Sail, was born.

It joined a growing network of brokers and sailors passionate about transporting goods by wind power. The next step: to boost demand for this kind of transportation.

“Consumers already understand organic produce and fair trade, and the next step is clean transport,” says Cornelius Bockermann, who founded Timbercoast, a German sail cargo company that has restored a schooner from 1920, and is now refitting a second.

Clean transport is the missing link, as many so-called sustainable or ethical goods are currently carried on ships that pollute the air and sea. The perfect example of this is plant-based meat, shipped around the world from California.

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 Will Templeman, left, and Will Adeney on board De Gallant.

British couple Marcus and Freya Pomeroy-Rowden built their ship, Grayhound, as a replica of an 18th-century lugger, and carry cargo between the UK and France, bringing West Country ale to Brittany and French wine to Cornwall. They supply small businesses along the way, for example providing wines to Dibble & Grub on the Isles of Scilly. The couple enjoy the lifestyle of spending months at sea, making a living, while making a difference.

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Marcus says they’re bringing trade back to a human scale. “We’re taking quality products and transporting them direct to a distributor. We can understand and explain the whole chain for our products, from manufacture to the table.”

In France, TransOceanic Wind Transport has developed a labelling system with a voyage number, allowing the customer to see how products reached them.

Broker Alex Geldenhuys launched New Dawn Traders in the UK about six years ago and is still developing her “voyage co-op” model, bringing together farmers, ships and buyers.

Geldenhuys has been inspired by local food communities and vegetable box schemes and wants to extend that movement overseas, building relationships with distant farmers to bring ethically produced, high-quality produce to the UK with a carbon footprint that is close to zero. She is seeking “port allies” to promote the idea in coastal communities, encouraging customers to pre-order products from the ships and turning collection events at the docks into celebrations of the whole process.

A few weeks ago a French schooner, De Gallant, sailed into Bristol laden with produce from Portugal; the first time a tall ship had brought cargo to the city for decades. It was an emotional moment for Geldenhuys and the climax of years of work.“It was beautiful to watch her sailing in under the suspension bridge,” she says. Local people milled around the ship, sampling olive oil, almonds and wines.

Is that a sign of the future?

It looks more and more likely.

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