Traders at the National Maritime Museum

When I blogged on Trinity House's 500th birthday (and what a cake it would have had to be to get that many candles on it) O'Docker assumed, not unreasonably, that I'd been to the exhibition at the National Maritime Museum on that subject.

I hadn't, but having gone through the Thames Tunnel on the first booking on Sunday morning (really heavy demand for those tickets) there was plenty of time to head downriver to Greenwich to have a look round.

To be honest it was a bit underwhelming, with a couple of videos of old salts heading off for a month on a lighthouse, but there seemed to be some new exhibits so I took the opportunity to look round, in particular the Traders.

This picture caught my eye:

It's the dockyard for the East India Company on the Thames and what a lot of boats they were building, serious ocean going transports.

But then there has never been another company like the "Honourable Company", which is probably just as well, given the colonial occupation of India, the Bengal famine and of course the Opium Wars, when blighty went to war with China because they wouldn't buy our opium (the cheek of it).

A highlight for me of the exhibition was this video:



Very thought provoking, with an interestingly diverse range of views.