Welsh Journals

CYMRU A'R Mor/Maritime WALES, no. 17 (1995). Gwynedd Archives Service. Pp. 168. £ 12.00. The seventeenth issue of the journal follows the customary format of articles (sixteen in this issue), notes, news and reviews, interspersed with nineteenth-century local newspaper cuttings of maritime interest. Five articles, in Welsh, deal with life at sea on one of the famous iron barques of north Wales, wrecks on the Anglesey coast in the 1890s, recollections of a Nefyn seaman who began his career in sail and ended as a supervisor at Liverpool docks. They are all evidence of a 'living tradition', the authors often being descendants of those whose lives they describe. A lack of similar material from south Wales is partly remedied here by a piece on coal exports between south Wales ports and Yemen, which led to a sizeable Yemeni community in Cardiff. But there must be many such stories from south Wales mariners and their descendants which the editors would be pleased to know of and which would give a more rounded picture of Welsh maritime life. There are the usual excellent illustrations. The cover picture provides the subject of an article about one of the little known boats of the Dee estuary, the Sarah Lathom, and her prosaic trade in bricks to Belfast. The description of her last voyage evokes the dangers seamen face and the personal bond they often feel with their ships as living entities. Basil Greenhill's article on the Porthmadog schooner, M. R. James, is equally poetic. It considers her coastal work and the skills needed to sail her, with his reminiscences, as a boy, of her at Gloucester docks. Her end, through neglect and mismanagement, was also the end of the era of sailing ships, but she lives in this account and its illustrations. The majority of the articles concern the nineteenth century. An earlier period is examined in descriptions of Glamorgan wrecks, illustrating a thriving trade between Spain and East Anglia. There are pieces about eighteenth-century ship letters and the story of an impressed Caernarfonshire sailor of the 1790s, who survived to emigrate to the United States. In an earlier issue, Dr Uoyd considered the shipowners of Aberystwyth in the 1840s. This issue contains a longer study of one of them, Thomas Jones, a pillar of the community, deeply involved in shipping, trade and local government. A detailed list of the ships he owned, many of them wrecked or lost, is a reminder, like the majority of the articles, of the coastal and world-wide trade in which Welsh mariners engaged and the cost in ships and men. There is also an Australian flavour to this issue. Dr Lloyd reports on a visit there in 1994 which yielded much information about the