Malta Seaman'S Book: Fill & Download for Free

If you Google “how to get a cruise ship job” you’ll get a lot of hits. Unfortunately many, if not most of the sites are scams. Never pay to get a cruise ship job, as the real employment agencies never charge you fees in advance. All of the cruise ship websites have a hiring page where you can apply, and they also have a list of all the websites they know to be scams, usually on the front page of their website.I need more information to answer your question accurately. Where do you want to work? Where are you from? What kind of skills do you have? Which languages do you speak? Which job are you after on a cruise ship? How much money would you need to earn to make it worthwhile? I know about the cruise ship industry sailing out of America so I’ll assume that’s what you want to do.There are a number of small American Cruise ships running down the Mississippi, along the East Coast and up to Alaska. They all have websites that they recruit hard from. The pay runs about $100 a day for someone with no experience, but it may be a long day. You will have no living expenses though so you should be able to save some money and get your feet wet in the industry. Google Lindblad Expeditions, Blount Small Ships Adventures, American Cruise Lines, American Safari Cruises/InnerSea Discoveries and you’ll see what I mean. Their websites will tell you all you need to know.If you are interested in the big cruise ships keep in mind only one in the US is actually an American Flag Ship, The Spirit of America, in the Hawaiian Islands. The Jones Act protects American Seamen’s jobs and does not permit foreign ships to carry cargo, or passengers, between American ports without an intervening foreign port. This isn't a problem in the Caribbean or on the coast of America and Canada but it is a problem in Hawaii where there is no alternate nation nearby, so any ship that only calls in the Hawaiian Islands must be American flag.Cruise Ship companies hate having to use American flag ships because then they have to follow American labor laws and a whole raft of other regulations, including very careful inspections by the US Coast Guard. Foreign ships have it much easier which in one of the main reasons Cruise Ships so often catch fire, sink, poison all the passengers with bad air, lose passengers at sea and just generally screw up. But a company can make a whole lot more money with lax employment and safety laws. I’m not saying non-American Cruise ships don’t follow any laws, I’m just saying they pick the flag that offers the best deal for the company, which is why so many Cruise Ships are flagged out of Malta, a tiny island in the Mediterranean that the Cruise Ship has likely never visited.So how do you get a job on a big foreign Cruise Ship out of the US? Well you’ll need to have a skill as they hire their unskilled workers, such as maids and dishwashers out of Third World countries and pay them very little. They use hiring partners in those countries to find the labor, which is where much of the fraud comes in. The cruise ship web site will identify the real hiring partners they use in a particular area. If you use one be sure to check up on its legitimacy.If you already have a skill, such as a singer, or a chef, or a hotel manager, or a photographer, or an accountant, the foreign Cruise Ships want to talk to you. These ships are similar to small cities and require many of the same skills a small city does. Again, look on the employment page of the cruise line and see if they need someone with your skills. If they do, call them up, make an appointment, nail the interview and you’re on your way. Some of the legitimate hiring partners also have openings for various skilled positions so check them as well.Since room and board are included and you may earn tips you can actually make a decent wage and have a great adventure working on a Cruise Ship. Some of the crew-only bars are legendary. If you have any further questions my book "The Big Bucks Guide to Shipping Out as a Merchant Seaman" tells you everything you need to know to ship out on any kind of an American civilian ship, including sailing yachts. I don’t have room here to tell you all you need to know so check it out on Amazon if you feel the need. Good Luck!

I doubt the Italians had to learn “how” to trade from the Arabs. They were very good at trading on their own! Their expansion into the Middle East came largely in the wake of the First Crusade. While the more adventurous Italian merchant houses had ventured into the Near East in very limited numbers before the First Crusade, setting up tiny enclaves in Alexandria, it was the crusades that gave impetus to the the Italian commercial states expanding their presence into the Middle East in a major way — an fact that greatly contributed to the flourishing of commercial enterprise across the Mediterranean.Background: Establishment of the Italian Presence in the Levant and their Role in the Crusader StatesWhile the First Crusade went tortuously overland and contained no notable maritime component, no sooner had Jerusalem been taken, however, than the need to establish permanent control over the coast of the Levant – or at least key cities that gave access to Jerusalem such as Acre and Jaffa ― became apparent. Capture and control of coastal cities in turn required naval forces that could, at a minimum, blockade a city held by the enemy so that a landward siege could be effective ― or, in some cases, called for an assault from the sea.The problem immediately faced by the Franks ― hanging on by their fingernails to the land captured in the First Crusade ― was that they were all, whether lords, knights or sergeants ― landlubbers. None of them was remotely prepared to or capable of undertaking maritime operations. In the age of sail, designing, building and operating sea-going vessels required highly specialized knowledge and skills. These were, furthermore, complex skills requiring years of apprenticeship and experience. There was no quick and easy way to turn a soldier into a sailor, or a knight into a marine officer.Fortunately, there were professional Christian seaman willing to support the efforts to re-establish Christian control over the Holy Land. As early as December 1099, a large Pisan fleet arrived at Jaffa to aid the beleaguered Franks in Outremer (it was too soon to speak of a kingdom). They failed to do much at this time and sailed for home after Easter, but they were replaced by some 200 Venetian ships. In the years to come the great Italian maritime cities repeatedly “lent” their fleets to the Frankish forces in Outremer.Malcolm Barber notes in his seminal work The Crusader States that the treaty negotiated with the Venetians in 1000 “set the pattern for future agreements with the maritime cities and, in that sense, began the process of establishing the Italian communes in the East….” This agreement granted to Venice a church, market, and one third of the booty of any city captured by the Franks in the Holy Land, as well as the city of Tripoli in its entirety, if captured in the period between June 24 and August 15, 1000. I.e. anything the Franks captured during the period in which their fleet was engaged in operations against the Saracens.In the event, all that was captured in 1000 was Haifa, but it set a precedent. The arrival of the Genoese fleet in Jaffa in time for the summer campaigning season in 1101 enabled the Franks to seize control of both Arsuf and Caesarea. In 1102, the Genoese contributed to the fall of Tortosa, and two years later assisted in the capture of Gibelet, and ― most important ― Acre. In 1109, Tripoli itself surrendered, and the Genoese were granted a full third of city.Meanwhile, the Venetians had returned and assisted in the capture of Sidon and, notably, Tyre ― a city that had resisted capture by the Franks for a quarter century before falling in 1124. For this service, the Venetians received “a church, street, square and oven in every royal and baronial city in the kingdom….Lawsuits between Venetians and against Venetians by outside parties were to be settled in Venetian courts…Property left by Venetians who died…would be under Venetian control. Finally, the Venetians would have a third part of the cities of Tyre and Ascalon.”The rapaciousness so often attributed to all crusaders, many of whom in fact indebted themselves to undertake the pilgrimage to the Holy Land, would appear to have been very prominent among the Italian maritime powers. Joshua Prawer argues in his article about the Italian communes that the Italians were concerned less about the Holy Land than about “dominating the lines of communication and commerce between the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and Europe.” This set them apart from the other residents, both native and immigrant, because they never fully identified with the crusader states, but rather with their cities of origin.Certainly, the Italian communes retained their aloofness from the rest of crusader society. The right to their own courts was fiercely defended, as were their other privileges, particularly the immunity from royal taxes and service. They remained enclaves of foreigners, rather like diplomatic or colonial enclaves in later centuries, living by their own laws, speaking their own language, and retaining their rivalries. As Prawer puts it, “they might have been regarded by everyone else in the kingdom as a class apart, but they were a class composed of bitter rivals.”In the early years, they were little more than trading outposts with communal lodgings and warehouses. The so-called “palazzios” of the Italian merchant communes were fact composed of warehouse space on the ground floor (that could be rented out by individual merchants by the square foot), and lodgings on the upper floors, rented out by the week or month. In between were the offices, courts, and reception rooms for the commune’s administrative bodies. In short, the large, multi-storied buildings occupying roughly a city block were not grand residences, but the practical consolidation of functional space need by a transient population of sailors and sea captains, merchants and agents. These men came only briefly to conduct business and returned “home” ― to Pisa, Genoa, or Venice ― as soon as possible. Their families remained in the home city.Only gradually did some of the less prominent members of that transient community start to stay longer in the East. Only very exceptionally, such as in the case of the Embriachi family of Genoa, did prominent, aristocratic families establish a permanent presence in Outremer. Yet men of lesser standing at home sometimes found it advantageous to settle, marry and acquire personal property in Outremer.Although by the 13th century, there were some members of the Italian Communes who were third or fourth generation residents of Outremer, they remained legally and emotionally the subjects of their home cities rather than Kingdom of Jerusalem. This found expression, for example, in the way the communes took sides in the civil war between the barons of Outremer and the Hohenstaufen Emperors along the same lines as their home cities ― the Venetians and Genoese opposing Frederick II and the Pisans supporting him. Tragically, the Italian cities as commercial rivals came to view each other as the greater enemy than the surrounding Saracens with whom they all traded. This resulted in open warfare played out with assassinations, attacks and fighting in the streets of Acre and Tyre particularly. This war was bloody, costing as many as 20,000 lives according to some sources.Yet far more tragic was that the local barons and military orders took sides in this war, so that what started as commercial rivalry soon tore the Kingdom of Jerusalem apart. It also paralyzed trade, and so weakened the kingdom economically ― at a time when the Mamlukes were on the rise. It is therefore fair to say that the commercial rivalries of the Italian communes contributed materially to the demise and fall of the crusader states in the second half of the 13th century. But they had become very rich doing so!The Lucrative Prize: Commercial Enterprise in the Crusader StatesPrior to the crusades, the coastal ports of the Levant had fallen into a period of neglect and decay. Trade between the various parts of the Seljuk Empire moved primarily overland, as did trade across North Africa. The Mediterranean remained a contested area with Arab pirates from North Africa endangering European and Byzantine shipping — and vice versa. The great trading ports were Alexandria and Constantinople. All that changed with the establishment of the crusader states on the mainland of the Levant (1099–1291) and on Cyprus (1192 —1571).These states revived the coastal cities of the Levant, especially Acre, Tyre, and Tripoli, but to a lesser degree Jaffa, Caesarea, Haifa, Sidon, Beirut, and Latakia. Following the fall of Acre to the Mamluks in 1291, Famagusta in Cyprus became the central trading post of the Eastern Mediterranean.From roughly 1123, when the Venetians destroyed a large Fatimid fleet, until the rise of the Ottomans, the Mediterranean was dominated by Western naval power. In the 12th century, the combination of Byzantine, Sicilian and Italian naval power protected the merchant shipping of Europe, and in the later centuries the Italians, particularly Venice, and the Hospitallers (Knights of Rhodes and Malta) provided this protection.Meanwhile, trading concessions to the Italian maritime powers (Genoa, Venice, Pisa) had transformed the major Frankish cities into thriving ports for both the import and export of goods. Soon caravans from as far away as India and Ethiopia were making for the ports of the Levant in order to sell their wares. Indeed, even Chinese pottery of the period has been found in archaeological excavations.The products passing through the ports of the Middle East were highly diverse. They included such high-value products as pharmaceuticals, spices, silks, cloth-of-gold (also known as siglatin — derived from silk Latin/silk for the Latins), ivory and incense. Other important exports were sugar (mass-produced in factories for the first time under the Franks), honey, soap, glass, pottery, icons, illuminated manuscripts, and jewelry. (Below the ruins of a 13th-century sugar mill at Kolossi in Cyprus.)Looking more closely at only one of these, textiles, some of the finest cloth known to the medieval world originated in the Near East. Egyptian cotton and linen, both renowned for their quality, were exported through the ports of the Levant as was silk from Damascus. Words familiar to us as types of cloth such as muslin, gauze, and damask derive their names from the cities that first produced them in export quantities, namely Mosul, Gaza and Damascus.Glass, on the other hand, was a product produced in the crusader states directly. Beirut was famous for its red glass, Tyre for its white glass. Glass was used in plates for windows, but could also be enameled to create exquisite drinking vessels. Stained glass was likewise used both as decorative windows and in the production of luxury objects such a perfume bottles and chalices.When speaking of jewelry, one specialty of the crusader states were mementos of the Holy Land for pilgrims to take home with them. Another product unique to this period in the Middle East were reliquaries, beautiful gold and silver containers for the protection and display of holy relics.Coming in through these ports were equally valuable products: fur, timber (a very valuable product in the Middle East due to scarcity), wool, iron, and — shamefully — slaves. While slavery was no longer practiced in Western Europe, the economy of the entire Islamic world was still entirely dependent upon slave labor. This created a nearly insatiable demand for fresh human beings. The Italian maritime powers eagerly developed a highly lucrative trade in humans, buying “barbarians” (non-baptized) captives largely from what is now Russia and selling these in the Arab slave markets of the Middle East — passing through the ports of the Latin East on the way.Last but not least, there was an enormous “trade” in pilgrims. This religious tourism, which included Jews and Muslims but was predominantly Christian, was a huge boon to the economy of the region. Thousands of ships sailed twice a year bringing tens of thousands pilgrims annually from the West to the Holy Land. Like today, these tourists needed places to stay and eat. They needed tour guides, transportation, and security. They bought souvenirs and shoes, clothes suitable to the climate, and gifts to take back home. If they got sick (and thousands of them did!), they needed medical attention. If they died, they needed burial. Whatever they did, they created employment and income for those already in the Middle East.Trade volumes and values were so great that Christians and Muslims both were loath to interrupt it — even during hostilities. A Muslim pilgrim to Mecca passing through the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (yes, that was not only possible but common) reported in amazement that even while the military elites were engaged in skirmishing, trade continued uninhibited. (He was writing in the early 1180s.)Indeed, the value of trade sometimes made the military elites reluctant to engage in warfare at all, since their own revenues derived in large part from taxes on trade, markets, anchorage etc. This was particularly true under the Ayyubid successors to Saladin (1193–1250). Altogether, we know of more than 100 truces between the Franks and Saracens, all designed to end hostilities and allow trade to flow.The economics of the crusader states will be a major focus of my forthcoming book: “The Holy Land in the Era of the Crusades: Kingdoms at the Crossroads of Civilizations,” Pen & Sword, 2021. Meanwhile, it provides atmosphere and color in my novels set in the crusader states.Key Sources:Baber, Malcolm. The Crusader States. Yale University Press, 2012, p. 60.Barber, p. 140Prawer, Joshua. “Social Classes in the Crusader States: the ‘Minorities.’ Zacour, Norman and Harry W. Hazard, editors. A History of the Crusades Volume Five: The Impact of the Crusades on the Near East. University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, p.174Prawer, p. 177.La Monte, John. Feudal Monarchy in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem 100 to 1291. Medieval Academy of America, 1932, p. 241.