Christopher Wright started out as a chemical engineer in England, but fortuitously took a position as a junior analyst at a shipping consultancy in London in the early 1960’s. Shipping analytics proved to be an area that really appealed, and fifty years later he is the retired Principal of The Mariport Group Ltd. a consulting company, that for nearly 40 years, specialized in economics and operational issues for ports and the shipping industry.
His first involvement with Arctic shipping was while with another marine consulting company in Nassau Bahamas where, in 1973, he helped negotiate an Arctic shipping contract to move industrial minerals from Deception Bay to a processing plant in Germany. He has had a wide-ranging career involving many different aspects of international and regional shipping. From 1996 he worked to successfully re-establish overnight cruising on the Great Lakes of North America through a sister company: Cruising the Great Lakes. During the most recent twenty-five years his work focused on Arctic and Northern issues, and he is still working with a major Canadian engineering company on their Northern projects.
Concerned at the lack of historical reference material about the Arctic, he wrote Arctic Cargo: A History of Marine Transportation in Canada’s North, (published in 2016) to provide an essential reference work about the region.
However, Arctic Cargo did not address cruise activity in the North, and in March 2020 he published Of Penguins and Polar Bears: A History of Cold Water Cruising. This broad analysis of the development of cruise activity in Polar regions built on a short paper on Canadian Arctic cruising posted on the Arctic Cargo website. Because the expedition cruise industry is so dynamic, he maintains a web site to provide regular updates on the fleet and destinations.
CONTACT