Sailors, indeed anyone interested in the development of sailing craft, will be for ever indebted to Joseph Needham. Today they will find with ease literature that describes the origins, characteristics, and development of sailing craft in the various regions of the world; the inter-relationships between natural products, and native hull stuctures and forms, sails' fabrics, shapes, and performance. They can learn, too, that the closestowing anchor, the water-tight bulkhead, the balanced rudder (and other features of the modern efficiency-conscious ship constructor) have all been adapted from the millenniaold, so-long-despised by Westerners, Chinese junk, just as has, late in this twentieth century, the stiffened sail of the modern high-performance yacht.

The September 1996 issue of the Journal has an article by J. C. Hines which, as a RYA instructor and former maritime lawyer, I found very confusing.

I agree with him that there are many yachtsmen and some professionals who I would not let out in a pram dinghy, let alone in the vessels they are commanding.

It is significant that many commercial ships will have one watchkeeping officer on the bridge, no other lookout, and a helmsman on call. The ship will be on autopilot and, upon a target being seen, it will take two minutes or so before the helm is manned.

In the above article (published in this Journal in May 1997), it was mentioned that the work undertaken was carried out by the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) Institute of Satellite Navigation (ISN). It should be added that the second of the two projects was sponsored by the UK CAA National Air Traffic Services (NATS) in conjunction with the Defence Evaluation Research Agency (DERA) under contract Project Boscombe.