Grand Old Flags

Flying high in vibrant white, black, and primary colors, maritime signal flags may seem archaic, but they were once a ship’s lifeline. 

MOST OFTEN SEEN THESE DAYS AS DECORATIONS adorning docked naval ships, maritime signal flags have been used as a form of communication since at least the sixteenth century. Before satellite systems and radio signals, ships relied on just these few flags to state who they were and where they were going, to ask for help, and to give warnings.
     The British Royal Navy was one of the first entities to create a formal flag code. In the early nineteenth century, Rear Admiral Home Popham used an existing numeric-system code as a basis for a system where flags represented both numbers and letters. Popham’s code, famous for helping England win the Battle of Trafalgar in the Napoleonic Wars, remained the most popular signal system until writer and former naval officer Frederick Marryat created a signal code designed not just for the navy, but for all ships.
     In the introduction to the first edition of his book Code of Signals for the Merchant Service, pub-lished in 1817, Marryat wrote that, previously, no code of signals existed for merchant ships, primarily because, while England was at war, it had been “…absolutely necessary to forbid communications between private ships while under the direction of men of war.” However, once the Napoleonic Wars ended, it made sense to offer merchants a code they could use to signal for help, or warn each other of any danger. Marryat’s numerical code, designed to be easier to use and understand than Popham’s, was an immediate success and translated into several other languages.
     The Commercial Code of Signals, created by the British Board of Trade in 1857, and which incorporated some of Marryat’s code, was rebranded as the International Code of Signals and intended for use by all major maritime powers. Yet World War I revealed the code’s limitations, as when it was relied upon to communicate between several international ships at once, and failed. The code underwent a significant update, and by 1930 was offered with German, French, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, and Norwegian translations. Throughout the rest of the twentieth century the ICS went through updates and revisions accounting for changes in technology, with Russian and Greek translations offered in the 1960s.
    Today the United Nations International Maritime Organization maintains the ICS, and the flags currently in use still reflect some of the designs used in Marryat’s system, such as the flags for the letters J and S, which bear his distinctive blue and white patterns. And while radios and satellites and other sorts of technological achievements have made the flags less necessary, all naval ships still carry them. Just in case. 

Originally published in the Summer 2017 issue of The Coastal Table.