The British Navy was the biggest navy in the world at one time. Now it's smaller, but many sther ships are still used for importing and exporting goods and for taking people on business or holiday. In Liverpool there is a great museum of maritime history. It's got several shipls in the docks outside. Inside it shows what it was like to be on some of the ships.
Ships like this one- the Cutty Sark at Greenwich in London - Brought tea from India to Britain. It was a very profitable trade and made many people very rich. The ships used only sails and achieved very high speeds. Young men had to climb the rigging to put up the sails.
It was very dangerous.
Between 1830 and 1930 more than nine million people from all over Europe left from the part of Liverpool to start a new life in America of Australia.
Om tje earñu twentieth centruy there were large numbers of very elegrant passenger ships.
They crossed the Atlantic from Liverpoool or Southampton to New York in five or six days.
The most famous ship was probably the Titanic. It sank in 1912 and over 1,500 people drowned. It was the worst disaster in maritime history. You probably know about it from one of the most expensive films every made - Titanic!
On of the most famous shipping companies is Cunard. It's got the world's biggest cruise ship, the Queen Many 2, which crosses the Atlantic from Southampton to New York. It still takes five or six days but some people prefer that to five of six hours in a aeroplane.
The majority of people do trawel aroung the world by planet but ships are still very imporant for moving goods.
These metal boxes, of containers, are packed with clothes, television sets, computers, furniture and toys.
here at the Southampton Container Termial they unload more than one and a half million containers each year.
So the sea still plays a very important part in life in Britain.
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