First, we stopped at the Ferry Building Marketplace for breakfast, inch for inch, the greatest food hall in America.

CNN: A mancation failure in San Francisco

We already know foreign specialisation has squeezed the Brits out of most merchant, ferry and cruise liner building.

BBC: Fog on the Clyde

Reached by a four-minute ferry ride from Cunnamore Pier on the mainland near Skibbereen, the quaint, whitewashed building is one of the many traditional-style cottages that still outnumber the bungalows blighting much of the Irish countryside.

BBC: Ireland��s outlying islands

With these environmental concerns in mind, Van der Veen and his fellow Dutch captains Andreas Lackner and Jorne Langelaan set about building the Tres Hombres in 2007, using the hull of a former passenger ferry in the Aran Islands off the coast of Ireland.

CNN: Are traditional sail boats the future of trade?

Their firms are hobbled by the costs of building their own infrastructure: backup generators, water-treatment plants and fleets of buses to ferry staff to work.

ECONOMIST: India's economy