At Sea
Traditions are usually invented and often more recently than we might suppose. Take the traditional Anglo-Saxon Christmas, no longer imaginable without the canned accompaniment of Bing Crosby Dreaming of a White Christmas. Much of what passes as traditional Christmas festivities date back only as far as the reign of Queen Victoria. Her husband, the Prince Consort Albert introduced Christmas trees and logs from Germany that had hitherto been unknown in the British Isles. The process of tradition manufacture was extended by Charles Dickens, author of A Christmas Carol and The Pickwick Papers, the latter set nostalgically in the previous generation. This was the age of the stagecoach, a popular image on any British Christmas card, intended as a reassuring image of rural stability and age-old custom in the English countryside. In fact, the stage coach era lasted for only a single generation, on the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the reign of Queen Victoria, children began to hang Christmas stockings on their bedposts on Christmas Eve to find them filled with presents on the morning of Christmas Day. And one traditional gift has survived from those days through to the present: a bright, shiny, juicy orange.
For oranges were still something special in the nineteenth century. "Come buy my juicy St Michael's," was the cry on the lips of the London street-vendors. But who knew where St Michael's was located? The best oranges were thought to come from the island of San Miguel in the Azores, our current destination. England was the island's principal market for this luxury crop, with a fleet of lightly loaded topsail schooners racing chests of this perishable cargo to Britain in time for the Christmas season, when the oranges would be at their best. In 1854, some 60 million oranges were exported to Britain in a fleet of 70 schooners. The houses of the English orange merchants now form a distinctive part of the architectural heritage of the island. Two developments brought an end to this aspect of a traditional English Christmas. Firstly, the change from sail to steam in the 1860s tipped the balance against the Azores in favor of Mediterranean sources of oranges. Secondly, disease hit the Azorean orange crop in the 1880s at a time when production in California and Florida was opening up new sources of supply. San Miguel diversifies into new crops. It is the only place in Europe with tea plantations, but that's another story.
Traditions are usually invented and often more recently than we might suppose. Take the traditional Anglo-Saxon Christmas, no longer imaginable without the canned accompaniment of Bing Crosby Dreaming of a White Christmas. Much of what passes as traditional Christmas festivities date back only as far as the reign of Queen Victoria. Her husband, the Prince Consort Albert introduced Christmas trees and logs from Germany that had hitherto been unknown in the British Isles. The process of tradition manufacture was extended by Charles Dickens, author of A Christmas Carol and The Pickwick Papers, the latter set nostalgically in the previous generation. This was the age of the stagecoach, a popular image on any British Christmas card, intended as a reassuring image of rural stability and age-old custom in the English countryside. In fact, the stage coach era lasted for only a single generation, on the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the reign of Queen Victoria, children began to hang Christmas stockings on their bedposts on Christmas Eve to find them filled with presents on the morning of Christmas Day. And one traditional gift has survived from those days through to the present: a bright, shiny, juicy orange.
For oranges were still something special in the nineteenth century. "Come buy my juicy St Michael's," was the cry on the lips of the London street-vendors. But who knew where St Michael's was located? The best oranges were thought to come from the island of San Miguel in the Azores, our current destination. England was the island's principal market for this luxury crop, with a fleet of lightly loaded topsail schooners racing chests of this perishable cargo to Britain in time for the Christmas season, when the oranges would be at their best. In 1854, some 60 million oranges were exported to Britain in a fleet of 70 schooners. The houses of the English orange merchants now form a distinctive part of the architectural heritage of the island. Two developments brought an end to this aspect of a traditional English Christmas. Firstly, the change from sail to steam in the 1860s tipped the balance against the Azores in favor of Mediterranean sources of oranges. Secondly, disease hit the Azorean orange crop in the 1880s at a time when production in California and Florida was opening up new sources of supply. San Miguel diversifies into new crops. It is the only place in Europe with tea plantations, but that's another story.
