The shipping industry is unlike any other, in that it takes place largely in a very unstable element, far from the land in which its financial investors are based. Like agriculture and horticulture, it is dependent on the weather, but even those ancient means of earning a livelihood are rooted in the land. Mining, as distinct from quarrying, takes place below the surface of the land, and is in its own way an industry whose workforce labours beyond the element on which most of us live. Yet even that is closely linked by geography to the source of capital.

Shipping is unique in that it is absolutely dependent on trust. Its laws are the oldest codified system which protects all the participants, even down to the smallest boy. It protects the owners, the masters, the merchants who entrust their goods to the vessel, and the ordinary men who work in the vessel itself. What other terrestrially-based owner sees the means of earning a living disappearing routinely from view for months on end, yet trusts a group of comparative strangers to bring home not only a profit, but also the vessel, the means of repeating the exercise? Even a medieval tradesman sending his goods by a carrier to a market several days away retained at home the means of making further goods.

A ship makes money only when it is at sea, because it is the voyage itself, as a means of distribution, that generates the income. The owner or owners, who might number as many as forty, could go with the vessel to ensure its security, but the cost of feeding them would make the voyage unprofitable, and in any case an owner at sea is not in a position to do the networking that will ensure future cargoes. Hence, unless the vessel was very small, with one or two owner-masters, the owner must engage a master and crew to undertake the voyage and negotiate for a return cargo and bring the vessel home, wind and weather and enemy action permitting. It was, as far as can be seen from the Whitby evidence, a trust honoured for the most part in the observance.