Foreign News: Big Bed

In the arrowhead of land between the rivers Test and Itchen six miles up the inlet called Southampton Water, the Port of Southampton points a great trap of docks, like a lobster's claw, toward the sea. With that claw in the past two decades Southampton has snapped up most of Britain's passenger ocean traffic, ended a 19th Century slump. For three centuries Southampton's too shallow basin, where King Canute may have spoken to the tide and whence the Pilgrims' Mayflower sailed, had lain nearly empty. Humiliated as a "decayed town," South ampton was further...

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