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By Root 947 0

and other southern ports over northern and western ports such as Liverpool and Glasgow. Even so, London continued to struggle. “From being the world’s largest port after Rotterdam and New York, London has been overhauled by Antwerp, Hamburg, and Le Havre,” the British shipping magazine Fairplay warned in 1975. “If the present situation is allowed to continue she will slip still further down the ‘big league’ and face the grim prospect of being relegated to the role of feeder port to the continent.” Meanwhile, Felixstowe surged. In 1968, the new containerport had handled all of 18,252 loaded containers. By 1974, 137,850 loaded boxes passed through the port, which was well on its way to becoming the major port for British trade with North America. As containerization’s economies of scale begin to take hold, more than 40 percent of all container movements in British harbors would soon occur in a single port, Felixstowe, whose traffic at the dawn of the container age had been too small even to merit statistical mention.36

The preparations for container shipping in the United States and Europe provided Asian governments a lesson. In the United States, ports responded to containerization with no overriding rhyme or reason; cities such as New York and San Francisco squandered tax money on wharves and cranes that had little chance of recouping the initial investment, even as cities that might have become important containerports, such as Philadelphia, failed to invest in time. In Britain, the government was so terrified of the waterfront unions that it took few steps to prepare for the container era until the first ships were already in port. In continental Europe, the ports that had the foresight to plan for container shipping, notably Rotterdam, Antwerp, and Bremen, were the first to capture the traffic. Along Asia’s Pacific rim, it seemed apparent that containerization would require major change, and change had to be planned.37

Time seemed to be on the Asians’ side. The shift from breakbulk shipping to container shipping had greatly reduced the cost of loading or unloading a vessel, but it made no difference at all in the operating cost once the vessel left port. This meant that the benefits from switching to container shipping were greatest on shorter routes, for which the savings in cargo handling and port time came to a very large proportion of the total cost of a voyage. The experts reckoned that there was less money to be saved on long-distance routes involving weeks at sea, such as those from the United States to Japan or Britain to Australia. Some even argued that containerization was infeasible in the Pacific and Australian trades, because expensive ships would be tied up for too long and because returning empty containers across seven thousand miles of ocean would prove impossibly expensive.38

The race to put containerships on the North Atlantic by the winter of 1966 drew attention in Asia. In early 1966, with Sea-Land preparing to deliver containers to a U.S. base on the Japanese island of Okinawa, a council established by the Japanese transport ministry was issuing directives to promote container services. The transport ministry soon came up with a plan to build twenty-two containership berths in Tokyo and in Kobe, near Osaka, while Sea-Land developed docks in Yokohama. The Australian Maritime Services Board quickly scrapped plans to build conventional wharves at Sydney and invited bids for construction of a container terminal in September 1966, although no international ship line had yet expressed interest in providing containership service to Sydney. The first fully containerized ship to serve the Far East, belonging to Matson, sailed from Tokyo to San Francisco in September 1967, and large-scale container shipping arrived the following year. International containerships came to Australia in 1969, and Sydney, Yokohama, and Melbourne quickly vaulted to the top rank among the world’s containerports.39

TABLE 5

Largest Containerports by Tonnage, 1969

Other governments were not far behind. Taiwan’s national port