The Chinese are in expansionist mood. Today the Chinese Navy and the US Navy had a confrontation in the South China Sea over the new islands that China is constructing. I am quite interested in this for personal reasons. This construction is taking place at a collection of what formerly were a collection of reefs and sandbars, and a notorious place for shipwrecks, called the Spratleys. I know of this because my late husband’s great grandfather was the master of a ship called the Tubelcain which foundered there and master and all hands went down with the ship. My husband’s grandfather was born posthumously as his grandmother had been on the voyage with her husband, but when she realised she was pregnant she was put ashore in Cape Town. If she had gone on she would also have drowned.