Whitby is famous for St Hilda, Dracula and Captain Cook. Cook learnt his craft at Whitby. In 1747/8 he was one of no fewer than 1,256 apprentices, or as we might say today cadets, indentured with masters in the town. It was here he learnt navigation and it was here he learnt the importance of the Whitby diet of fresh vegetables, especially the wild plants growing on the cliffs to north and south containing vitamin C to ward off scurvy. Whitby in the eighteenth century was the nursery of English seamanship.

What has not been fully understood until the publication of this eye-opening work is that in the middle of the eighteenth century Whitby was the base of one of the largest merchant fleets in England. This is all the more remarkable when one considers that Whitby was a cramped harbour at the mouth of a small river with an isolated hinterland on a largely inhospitable coast. Rosalin Barker uses for the first time a remarkable collection of documents held in the town to demonstrate the importance of the fleet in England's maritime history. Starting with just two vessels in the early seventeenth century it rose to 318, with a total carrying capacity of 78,000 tons in the late eighteenth. It all began with alum, produced from the deposits of alum shale in the cliffs of northern Yorkshire. Whitby ships brought coal from Newcastle and urine from London, both vital in the production process. But the business soon expanded into a large slice of the carrying trade of the North Sea based on the transport of coals from Newcastle to London and timber from the Baltic to English ports. It extended into the Atlantic and in the eighteenth century into commissions from the navy to carry stores and troops world wide as well as into Greenland whaling. The vessels themselves were unadorned working boats, the eighteenth-century equivalent of Masefield's dirty British coasters, complete with cargoes of Tyne coal. But it was black gold to Whitby's ship owners.

Whitby was never a great port in itself. It was the home of a fleet owned by Whitby men. And until the vessels got too many and too big it was where they were built, where they wintered and were refitted.