It was June and I had just completed secondary school, when Grandpa called to invite me over. My grandfather, Thomas Newland, was a merchant navy officer who sailed all over the world. When I was a child I spent hours listening to his stories of faraway lands and looking through his huge album, full of postcards, photos, drawings, maps, tickets, leaflets and notes…. Now he is retired, but still active, mostly as a researcher and a writer. Recently he has been working on – as he says – ‘his magnum opus’: the Great Book of European Maritime Heritage.
