Landlocked Switzerland runs an ocean fleet, and Britain's once-dominant one has shrunk
A merchant navy is simply a country's registered fleet of trading ships, but its story is full of surprises. Britain's name for it was a royal honour after the First World War, Switzerland keeps seagoing ships based at Basel on the Rhine, and Greek owners controlled the world's largest fleet by tonnage in 2015.
King George V granted British commercial shipping the title Merchant Navy in recognition of its service during the First World War, and other nations later borrowed the term or the variant merchant marine. In Britain the fleet is treated as a uniformed service rather than just another transport industry, which is why the Red and Blue Ensigns hang beside the Cenotaph in London. Its relative weight has collapsed, though: in 1939 it carried 33 percent of global tonnage, the largest share of any country, but by 2012 only 3 percent.
The Second World War created or reshaped fleets across the Commonwealth. Canada founded its merchant navy in 1939 and played a major part in the Battle of the Atlantic, replacing heavy British losses with Park Ships, its version of the American Liberty Ship, crewed by mariners trained at St. Margarets Bay in Nova Scotia. New Zealand's wartime fleet was a loose collection of private companies rather than a single force; on the route to Britain, 64 of its ships were sunk and 140 seafarers died. Australia marks Merchant Navy Day each 3 September.
Switzerland's high-seas fleet began with ships bought by the government during that war to guarantee critical supplies. Subsidies kept a private fleet running until 1953, and by 2006 it numbered 26 vessels, mostly container ships.
Elsewhere the numbers tell different stories. Greece, where seafaring is arguably the oldest trade, had 5,226 Greek-owned vessels in 2015 and ranked first for tankers and bulk carriers. India supplies around 12.8 percent of the world's ship officers. The United States fleet stood at 422 ships and about 69,000 people in 2009, with more than 700 American-owned vessels flagged abroad; under a 1936 law its civilian mariners count as military personnel in wartime.
Source: Merchant navy
