The eleven days it takes a container ship to cross the Atlantic Ocean includes visiting six time zones. Initially, this is a novelty, yet travelling east it is also a slow physical ordeal, a protracted water torture felt each morning at the breakfast table. This is because, in order to maintain working discipline, the daily schedule is set. Breakfast is served between seven and eight, except ‘seven’ keeps getting an hour earlier.

Organised time zones are, in the grand scheme of things, a recent development. Being a counting mechanism, they could not exist until there was an agreement on where zero lay, and that was only achieved at the 1884 International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC.. That conference, proposed by pub quiz answer president Chester A. Arthur, saw 26 nations appoint Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as ground zero – although two nations abstained from the vote, Denmark didn’t turn up, and France has always refused to use the word Greenwich. The decision would ultimately influence how the entire globe was run, yet the decision makers were a mix of navy men, envoys, government council legislatures, and science bods. None of the delegates were national leaders.

Choosing Britain made sense, albeit for reasons no longer true today, namely that it was an imperial power, operated more shipping than the rest of the world combined, and generally had its act together. Organising the world was very much part of Victorian Britain conquering it, and drawing lines and implementing rules symbolised power as much as guns and ships. Moreover, it had already taken steps along this path. The country had synchronised its rail network under ‘railway time‘ forty years earlier (railway time was adopted as the UK’s standard time in 1880), and GMT had already been selected as the standard for navigational maps at the 1871 International Geographical Congress in Antwerp.

Antwerp, as it happened, was the destination of my venture over the Atlantic. It was the penultimate leg of my trip back to Britain, and having rolled through a storm on day one, the container ship tootled slowly across the waves without much error or fuss. Indeed, the captain thought the experience might be boring, sitting around all day while his crew of Eastern European engineers and Filipino chief mate, cooks and steward pootled about, to the extent that on day six he very much ordered me to tour the engines with the chief engineer. Having politely not wanted to interrupt men at work, I realised I should have been more bothersome. There was ample time, after all, to stare at the water and learn about life on it.

Wilmington, North Carolina, from where we had departed, disappeared. Six weeks earlier I had been in Wilmington, Delaware. Despite being the two more noteable examples of the Wilmington place name that has spread throughout the states as readily as Springfield and Jackson, they would be largely engulfed by other interests. This very much mirrored Spencer Compton, 1st – and only – Earl of Wilmington for whom they are named. Considered Britain’s second Prime Minister (the term Prime Minister had yet to be used), Mr Compton died without children and has been quite forgotten by history, despite being the first PM to die in office. He is not even the most famous Prime Minister in his family: his great niece Catherine’s child, Spencer Perceval, trumped him by becoming the first – and only – Prime Minister to be assassinated.

By days six and seven on board, a general fog had taken over time. Each evening announcement that the clocks were moving again was annoying, but after breakfast I had an array of hours in which to nap. The crew did not. Medical advice to avoid the worst effects of such nautical jet lag would surely be to pursue a healthy lifestyle, but that is a difficult task on long-life food and within limited space. On top of that, or perhaps because of that, eighty percent of the Eastern Europeans aboard were avid supporters of smoking. They generally didn’t drink at sea, for good reason, but duty-free international waters and dark coloured cartons of rough cigarettes were vital. A 2013 study showed that tobacco smoke affects the circadian rhthym of mice. Presuming it also doesn’t do much for human sleep when rolling on the high seas, these guys must have felt atrocious.