A Ship in Harbour Is Safe, but That Is Not What a Ship Is For

In 1405 the Ming admiral Zheng He sailed from Nanjing with more than three hundred ships, some of them larger than anything that Europe would build for another century, and over twenty thousand men. His seven voyages reached India, Arabia and the coast of East Africa. In 1433 the voyages stopped. The court, preoccupied with the northern frontier and suspicious of the cost, banned ocean going ships, and the records of the expeditions were reportedly destroyed. Within a few decades the small ships of Portugal were sailing round Africa and in 1498 Vasco da Gama reached Calicut. The line attributed to the American writer John A. Shedd, that a ship in harbour is safe but that is not what ships are built for, describes the choice that China made.

The saying has a plain meaning. A ship has a purpose, which is to carry people and goods across water, and the purpose can be served only by leaving the harbour. Safety is a condition, not a goal. A person who treats avoiding failure as the highest aim has misunderstood what he is for. The same applies to nations, institutions and individuals, which can pursue protection so completely that they forget what they were trying to protect.

Human beings are inclined to the harbour. Psychologists have shown that losses weigh more heavily than gains of the same size, an asymmetry that Kahneman and Tversky called loss aversion. People will pass up a bet with a good chance of winning because of the pain of the possible loss. The tendency has made sense in an uncertain world, but it also leads to the choice of the secure job over the interesting one, the familiar town over the unfamiliar, and the old method over the new. Each decision seems prudent, and together they can make a life that is smaller than it could have been.

History repeats the pattern at the national scale. Japan under the Tokugawa shoguns closed its ports to almost all foreigners in the 1630s, and for more than two centuries it enjoyed peace and a refined culture. When Commodore Perry's warships arrived in 1853, the country found that it was far behind in military technology and had to modernise at great speed. The harbour had been safe, but the world outside had moved on. By contrast, the Polynesian navigators who crossed thousands of kilometres of open Pacific in canoes, guided by stars and swells, settled the farthest islands of the planet long before Europeans dared to leave sight of land.

The harbour had been safe, but the world outside had moved on.

Indian history has its own voyagers. The Chola emperor Rajendra Chola sent a fleet across the Bay of Bengal in the eleventh century that struck at the Srivijaya kingdom in Southeast Asia, and Tamil traders sailed to Rome and Java for centuries. The kingdoms of the Indian coast prospered from the monsoon trade, and their temples and scripts spread across Southeast Asia. Later periods of inwardness, when crossing the sea was seen by some as a loss of ritual purity, coincided with a retreat from this commercial role, and Indian shipping fell into foreign hands.

The principle holds for individuals. A student who chooses a career solely for security may find the decades dull. A scientist who works only on questions where success is certain will never discover anything surprising. Alexander Fleming, Marie Curie and Ramanujan, each in his or her way, left the harbour of accepted problems. The entrepreneur who starts a business knows that most new ventures fail, and yet societies that have many such ventures grow richer than those that prize stability above all. Nassim Taleb argues that some systems are antifragile, gaining strength from shocks, and a person who is never tested remains fragile.

Everyday courage is smaller than a voyage. A student who stands up in class to give an answer that may be wrong, a clerk who reports an irregularity to his superior and a woman who applies for a job in another city are all leaving harbour in their own way. None will be remembered, but each has tested what he or she is made of. Small departures train the habit that large ones require.

Yet the metaphor must not be read as praise for recklessness. A ship needs a seaworthy hull, a skilled crew, a chart and a destination. Many ships have left harbour and been lost, and the fact that sailing is the purpose of a ship does not make every voyage wise. The Titanic was sailing as a ship should when it struck the iceberg, and speed in dangerous waters was her undoing. A leader who takes risks without preparing for them is not brave but careless. The saying asks for courage, and courage is the management of fear and not its absence.

Harbours also have a purpose, and wise captains honour it. A captain who turns back before a storm has not abandoned the voyage but kept the ship that makes later voyages possible. A ship needs a port to be repaired, supplied and rested, and the captains who return safely are those who knew when to turn back. Soldiers need rest, entrepreneurs need reserves and families need a home to which they can come back. The harbour is the base from which the voyage becomes possible, and the best ships spend part of every year in one. What is wrong is to mistake the harbour for the destination.

There is an irony in the saying that is easy to overlook. The ship that stays in the harbour is not really safe, because wood rots, barnacles gather on the hull, ropes weaken and the crew grows idle. Standing still has its own kind of risk, only slower and less visible, and the person who has avoided every danger may discover that he has simply exchanged a dramatic failure for a quiet one. What is safe depends on the period of time one considers, and no one can tell in advance whether the harbour or the sea will, in the end, prove the greater danger.