A shallow, crowded shelf sea
The North Sea lies between Britain, Scandinavia and the coasts of the Low Countries, Germany and Denmark. It is mostly shallow, with large sandbanks such as the Dogger Bank, and it is strongly affected by tides and by storms that move in from the Atlantic. Several great rivers, including the Rhine, Thames, Elbe and Humber, flow into it, and the busy ports at their mouths made the sea a natural highway. Its shallow waters were also rich in fish, especially herring, which is central to its history.
Herring and the fishing fleets
Herring were a staple food of medieval Europe, in part because salted or smoked fish could be kept through Lent and other fast days. Large herring fisheries existed in the Baltic and the North Sea during the Middle Ages. In the North Sea, the Dutch rose to dominance from about the fifteenth century. A traditional story credits a fourteenth-century Dutchman, Willem Beukelszoon, with inventing the method of gutting and salting herring at sea, but historians treat the details cautiously, and the technique probably developed over time. What is clear is that the Dutch built a specialised fleet of large sailing fishing vessels called herring busses, which could stay at sea for weeks and process catches on board before returning to port. By the seventeenth century the Dutch “great fishery” was one of the foundations of the Dutch economy.
English, Scottish, Danish and German fishermen also fished the North Sea. Smaller sailing herring boats later worked the east coasts of Britain, and in the nineteenth century steam drifters, the herring drifter type, followed the shoals around the coast, with seasonal workers landing and gutting the catch at ports such as Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft and Peterhead. Industrial fishing and overfishing later brought dramatic declines in some herring stocks in the twentieth century, and fishery rules were tightened.
Dutch and English rivalry
The Dutch Republic and England competed for trade, fisheries and naval power in the seventeenth century. Three Anglo-Dutch wars were fought in the period 1652–1674, with a fourth in 1780–1784. Many battles were fought in the southern North Sea and the English Channel, including the Four Days’ Battle of 1666 and the Dutch raid on the Medway in 1667, when a Dutch fleet entered the River Medway and captured or burned English ships. The wars were driven by commercial rivalry, English navigation laws and wider European politics. They helped shape both navies, since the need for large numbers of capable warships pushed the development of the ship of the line.
Coal, colliers and coastal trade
One of the busiest sea routes in early modern Britain was the coal trade from Newcastle and the north-east to London. Colliers, sturdy and often slow ships, made the passage in great numbers and trained generations of seamen. Captain James Cook, whose later Cook Pacific voyages made him famous, learned his seamanship in the coal trade out of Whitby. The east coast ports were also centres for shipbuilding, whaling and trade with the Baltic.
Wreck-prone coasts
Sandbanks, shifting channels, strong tides and winter gales made the North Sea one of the more dangerous seas for sailing ships, especially on lee shores. The Goodwin Sands off Kent, the sands of the Norfolk coast, and rocks off Scotland and northern England were all responsible for numerous wrecks. Responses included lighthouse development along the coast, lightship stations moored off the worst sandbanks, and the growth of rescue organisations. In Britain, the Royal National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck, later the RNLI, was founded in 1824, and the lifeboat service gradually spread around the coast, often relying on local crews. The coasts also had a long tradition of wreck salvage and the laws governing it, and the activities of wreckers remain a subject of folklore as well as history.
War at sea in the twentieth century
The North Sea was the main theatre of the German-British naval confrontation in the First World War. The Dogger Bank action in January 1915 and the Battle of Jutland in 1916, in which the main British and German battle fleets met in the sea off Jutland, were the best-known engagements. Jutland fleet action ended without decisive outcome for either side, though the British retained control of the sea. In the Second World War, the sea saw convoys, mine warfare, submarine and air attacks, and operations along the Norwegian and east coast routes.
Oil, gas, wind and shipping
From the 1960s, the discovery of natural gas and later oil under the North Sea began a new phase. Offshore production grew in the British, Norwegian, Dutch and Danish sectors, involving supply vessels, drilling rigs and pipelines. Oil tankers and offshore support ships became a major part of the traffic. More recently, offshore wind farms have been built in large numbers. The sea also carries some of the densest shipping in the world, funnelling through the Strait of Dover, with ports such as Rotterdam, Antwerp, Hamburg and Felixstowe among the busiest in Europe. Traffic separation schemes and modern navigation aids reflect the long history of hazards.