David Fickling on Twitter: "Here's a story about how a ship-eating clam hel...
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The naval shipworm Teredo Navalis is an under-appreciated marker of globalization.
It's a type of highly adapted clam that bores into waterlogged wood using the remnants of its shell as a rasping saw:
References in Greek texts from the 4th century BC are IMO suggestive of early voyages to the coast of West Africa, the nearest navigable mangrove forests (unless shipworm managed to somehow get carried across the Sinai isthmus):
This slows wooden ships down drastically and eventually destroys them.
Shipyards came up with various ways to solve the problem. Some boats had double hulls, with a cheap wooden outer surface that could be periodically replaced in dry dock.
Tar paint was also used, and lead or copper plates were bolted on to the keel from relatively early times.
The metal solution was probably most effective, but it had a problematic side-effect: it turned the ship into a giant battery.
That required a LOT of copper. Luckily for the British, there were large domestic deposits.
Cornwall and Devon had been mined since classical times as one of the ancient world's most important sources of tin, which was alloyed with copper to make bronze.
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