Three Villages and an Islet

The modern story does not begin in Chios town, or in Kambos among the orange groves and the coats of arms. It begins in three places on the barren north-eastern edge of the island and on a rock offshore, and the distinction matters.

The great merchant houses of Part VI — Ralli, Rodocanachi, Argenti, Mavrogordato — were the old Kambos aristocracy: landed, armigerous, urban, educated, and international by inheritance. The shipping families of Part VII came, in the main, from somewhere else entirely. They were captains' families from villages where the land was too poor to support anyone, who went to sea because there was no alternative, and who came ashore into ownership only in the twentieth century.

Both traditions are Chian, and by now they have intermarried extensively and are hard to separate. But they were, at the beginning, two different social worlds, and the second one produced the fleet.

Kardamyla sits on the north-east coast, in a deep bay under the mountains, and is properly two villages — Ano Kardamyla above and Kato Kardamyla below, with the port at Marmaro. The land behind it is rock and terrace and scrub. It is beautiful and it will not feed a family. If you had to name one village on earth as the source of modern Greek shipping, it would be this one, and the roll-call is genuinely startling for a place of a few thousand people: Livanos, Angelicoussis, Tsakos, Xylas, Carras, and others besides. The harbourfront has a monument to the Chian sailor; the churches, the school, and the harbour works were built with shipping money; and in August the population multiplies.

Vrontados lies closer to the town, strung along the coast to the north of it, and is the island's traditional home of shipwrights and master mariners. Its yards built caiques and schooners for generations, and its families supplied officers to everyone. It is also where the Daskalopetra sits, and where, every Easter, the congregations of two rival parish churches on facing hillsides fire tens of thousands of home-made rockets at each other's bell towers across the valley — a tradition of contested origin, spectacular danger, and complete seriousness, which has nothing to do with shipping but which anyone who has seen it will insist on mentioning.

And then there is Oinousses.

The Oinousses are a scatter of nine small islands lying in the channel between the north-eastern tip of Chios and the Anatolian mainland, in the middle of the shipping lane. Only one of them, Oinoussa, is inhabited. Its permanent population in recent censuses is in the region of eight hundred people.

It was settled in the eighteenth century, largely by families from the Peloponnese and from Kardamyla, on land that grows almost nothing. It developed as a community of captains and small shipowners, at first with caiques and sailing brigs, and then — through a mechanism this section will explain — into something entirely disproportionate. The families are Lemos, Pateras, Hadjipateras, Lyras, Los, Fafalios, Frangos, Lignos, and their many branches and cousins.

The visual evidence is what makes it concrete, and the first-time visitor tends to be quietly stunned. You arrive by ferry from Chios in under an hour. There is one small town rising from the harbour in tiers, with substantial houses — many of them built by shipowners, many of them shuttered for eleven months of the year. There is a merchant marine academy, training deck officers for the Greek fleet. There is a maritime museum whose collection of models, instruments, charts, flags, and paintings would be entirely respectable in a national capital. There is a bronze mermaid at the harbour entrance. And there is a cemetery, high above the town, full of family tombs of a scale, a material quality, and a marble expense that make no sense at all for an island of eight hundred people until you know what the families in them own.

The permanent residents number a few hundred. In August the harbour fills with yachts, the houses open, and a meaningful proportion of the beneficial ownership of the world's dry bulk and tanker fleet is within a few hundred metres of itself on one hillside.

So why here? Why these villages and not the hundred other poor Greek coastal settlements with the same rock and the same fish?

There is no single answer, but the components are reasonably clear, and every one of them reaches back into the earlier parts of this book.

The land could not feed them. True of northern Chios, and true of a great many other places. Necessary, not sufficient.

They had a seafaring tradition of very long standing. Chian shipping was not invented in 1945, or in 1900. The island had a merchant marine under the Genoese and under the Ottomans; Chian masters were carrying cargoes in the eastern Mediterranean when Greek independence was not yet a rumour, and Vrontados was building ships for centuries. There was an unbroken transmission of competence: how to handle a vessel, how to read a charter party, how to deal with a consul, how to get paid.

They had a diaspora with capital and a commercial network. This is the crucial link, and it is what separates Chios from other seafaring islands with equally good sailors. The Chian merchant houses had spent a century in international trade before the twentieth began. They had capital, credit, insurance relationships, commodity expertise, and — above all — an established, wealthy, well-connected Greek commercial presence in London, which was and remains the centre of world shipping finance, chartering, insurance, and law. A Chian captain who wanted to buy his first ship in 1925, or in 1955, was not a stranger walking into a bank. He was operating inside a community that already knew where the money was and could vouch for him.

They had a technology for pooling risk. The traditional Greek arrangement, co-ownership by shares — a vessel divided into fractions held by the captain, his relatives, the local merchant, and frequently by the crew themselves — allowed a village to finance a ship collectively. It spread the risk of total loss across a community rather than ruining one family, and it gave ordinary villagers an equity stake in shipping, which produced a village-wide financial literacy about ships, freight rates, and vessel values that is genuinely unusual anywhere in the world. In Kardamyla or on Oinousses, the man mending nets could tell you what a Panamax was worth.

That structure — fractional, transferable shares in a maritime venture, held by a community, with profits distributed in proportion — will sound familiar to anyone who has read chapter 22 of this book. The loca of the Maona worked the same way. A direct institutional descent cannot be demonstrated and should not be claimed; but both grew from the same Mediterranean commercial soil, and Chios spent two hundred and twenty years living inside the first version.

They had an apprenticeship system with no shortcuts. Sons of shipping families went to sea, and not as passengers. The pattern is remarkably consistent across every house in this section: school, then aboard as a cadet or deck boy, then the long grind up through the certificates, and in a great many cases command before any office job. This produced owners who had personally stood a watch in the North Atlantic in February, who had been aground or on fire or short of fuel, and who therefore could not be told convincing lies by a superintendent, a broker, a shipyard, or a charterer. It is the single explanation most often given, by Greek shipping people themselves, for why the family firms have consistently outlasted the corporations.

They married each other. Intensively and across generations, exactly as the merchant houses had. On Oinousses the network is so dense that the community functions as one extended kin group. Marriage moved capital, sealed partnerships, guaranteed credit, and reproduced the whole system in each generation.

And they stayed private. With a handful of exceptions, the Chian houses did not list, did not take outside equity, did not publish accounts, and did not hire chief executives from outside the family. This has real costs — it constrains capital and it concentrates risk — and it is a large part of why the true scale of the sector is so hard for outsiders to measure. It is also, as chapter 54 will argue, very close to the whole reason they survived.