The great shipping question of the day is the loadline. Who is to be responsible for Plimsoll’s mark? Is the shipowner to go on fixing it at his own risk, or will the Government fix it for him? and if so, where? Is the carrying power of a vessel to be calculated by her surplus buoyancy, or is her clear side to be taken in relation to her depth of hold?—and is it possible to fix one loading point for all vessels, whether they be well-decked ships, or flush-decked ships, or hurricane-decked ships? All these are scientific conundrums, which will have to be solved sooner or later. They are certainly of the gravest possible moment to the shipping interests. As the law now stands, a shipowner is permitted to determine at what height on the vessel’s side a loadline shall be fixed; but, if, in the opinion of the officials, the loadmark does not furnish sufficient freeboard, the ship can be stopped, and forced to discharge as much of her cargo as shall raise her to the height the officials may consider she requires. The injustice of this is tolerably obvious. Practically, the Board of Trade have their preconceived theory of the proper freeboard of every vessel. They or their representatives say, “Yonder is a vessel of three thousand tons. She needs so many feet of clear side. Her owners, in our opinion, are overloading her. But let them proceed. When she is full, her stores, crew, and passengers aboard, and everything ready for the voyage, we will stop her and force her to disgorge.” Now, if the Board of Trade can decide after, why can they not decide before? Why should shipowners be obliged to guess at the theories of freeboard which the Board have in their mind, and be visited with the penalty of a costly delay if their conjectures should be wrong? The Government authorities say, We will not fix the loadline: you must do that at your own risk. But practically they do fix the loadline by empowering their representatives to stop ships which look to be overloaded. Surely it would be more consistent with common sense and common justice to determine a loadline for the shipowner before he fills up his ship than to keep the determination carefully concealed from him until his vessel is about to start or actually has commenced her voyage.

This, then, as I have said, is the great shipping question of the times, and it is the outcome of the wise and humane consideration how to diminish the perils of the deep for those who have to seek a living upon it. It is to be hoped that the numerous scientific controversies which have grown out of the subject of the loadline may not overcloud and conceal the object the Plimsoll disc was intended to effect. That object was to prevent owners from sending human lives to sea aboard ships so deeply freighted that the first heavy gale of wind was bound to sink them. Unhappily departmental timidity has gone very near to neutralizing a great and beneficent measure without satisfying the class who were to be appeased and quieted. Many overladen ships contrive somehow to sneak off to sea unnoticed by those functionaries whose duty it is to stop such vessels. If they founder with all hands the law considers itself sufficiently avenged by mulcting the owners and imprisoning them. Unfortunately, this does not save the sailor’s life. It is another illustration of the truth that every special interest is bound to suffer from the lack of thoroughness in the measures of those to whom it looks for protection. One seems to find the same perfunctoriness in most of the legislation that deals with sailors. It was a good thing to extinguish the old floating coffins. And yet it was but a half-measure, too. It was merely the lopping of a few twigs from a great rotten branch. A much larger evil than the despatching of unseaworthy ships was left untouched—I mean the construction of unseaworthy ships. It was monstrous, indeed, that men should be allowed to send on a dangerous voyage vessels which had been afloat for years and years, cobbled-up old fabrics which leaked like sieves, but whose safety was a matter of profound indifference to their owners, because of the insurance that must make whatever happened good luck to them. But it seems to me much more monstrous that men should be allowed to build ships—every one of which carries as large a company of souls as would equip a whole fleet of the old condemned coasters—whose iron frames and whose iron plates are fit for nothing but to be branded with the word “Murder,” so that when the metal fragments come ashore the beholder may know for what purpose they were designed.

Legislation has protected the sailor; but read the reports of the marine inquiries held. Take the trouble to count for yourself the number of missing ships—missing nobody knows how or why—which are catalogued in a short twelvemonth. Glance at the depositions of the men brought ashore from vessels which have foundered under their feet. Here are facts speaking with a trumpet-tongue, sounding a deep and bitter reproach upon our British ears, and converting our legislative efforts into mere irony. Will any seaman pretend that Plimsoll’s mark, as we now have it, has abridged, by so much as one sixty-fourth part of the whole, the perils he had to face before the question of freeboard was ever made a subject of discussion? Will he assert that the extinction of the “floating coffin” has increased the chances of his safety, in the face of the innumerable iron ships which are, month after month, slipped along the ways into that ocean whose bottom they are bound to sound in due course? I am not speaking of the great ocean passenger steamship; she, no doubt, in point of construction and strength, may be as perfect as she looks, with the exterior gilt and paint, and the interior sumptuousness of velvet, and silk, and polished panelling. I am referring to the class of vessels which are doing the work of the old condemned coasters, and more than the work, since we find them pushing into seas into which the “coffin” never ventured. “The vessel did not arrive at her destination,” runs the report of a recent inquiry held by Mr. H. C. Rothery; “it may, therefore, fairly be concluded that she has gone to the bottom, and the object of the present inquiry is to ascertain, if possible, how she has been lost.” If possible!

To show the character of that possibility the Annex prints it thus “...”

Could anything be more eloquent? Will the builder interpret those points to signify his rivet-holes?

Or take from a late deposition the narrative of a shipmaster, who relates that “he proceeded;” the wind was so and so; such and such a light bore N.W., the land was three miles distant, the sea smooth, and the vessel steaming full speed. On a sudden it was noticed that the ship was down by the head. The engineer sounded the forehold, and found nearly four feet of water in it. Then all hands were called on deck and the steam pumps set to work. But the water gained on the pumps, and meanwhile the vessel steadily continued to settle down by the head. The fore hatches were removed, and nearly six feet of water found. The pumps continued working, and the crew baled with might and main with buckets. But all was of no good, so deponent got the boats ready for use. He tried to drive his ship shorewards, but she would not answer her helm, on which he stopped the engines and lowered the boats. They were picked up by another vessel, and shortly after they were aboard the ship they had quitted went down head foremost.

This occurred close to the land, where there was plenty of help, and so we get the poor shipmaster’s deposition. But it might have occurred leagues out at sea, where there was no succour, and then the ship would have been missing, “nothing heard of the crew,” and the formal marine inquiry would have wound up with another handful of dots. And what caused that steamer to go down head foremost on a fine clear day, and in smooth water? There was no collision; there were no shoals. Had a butt started? Had a head-plate worked loose? One is inclined to say ex pede Herculem of such disasters as this. They should save marine courts a deal of brain-cudgelling over incidents which, in the days of teak, and oak, and treenails, would truly take very solemn rank among the “unaccountables.”

This deposition worked very strongly in my head the other day when I happened to find myself standing under the bends of the towering iron skeleton of a ship that, when completed, would be 100 A 1, and qualified to carry three thousand tons of merchandize. The hammering all about me was sharp and furious, the sparks flew wildly, and as the white-hot rivets popped out of the holes they were cut and hammered by the men as though they were carrots. There were other ships on a line with this, one completely plated and painted, another half-finished, a third a mere outline of frames and keelson and stern-post and stem-pieces. The scene was an imposing one, and especially imposing was the appearance of the completed ship with the polish of her clean metal run and the gilt tracings about her figurehead and quarters. And yet when I turned my eyes from her to the skeleton under which I was standing I felt a good deal of my admiration leaking away from me. I called to a man who was hammering close beside me. “Do you know what clagging is, my friend?”

“Ay,” said he, looking at me with a broad grin, “ye dorn’t need to go very fur to find out the meanin’ o’ that word.”

“These things,” said I, striking a long curve of metal, “which in a wooden ship would be spoken of as ribs, are called frames, aren’t they?”

“Ay, those are the frames,” he answered.

“I suppose they have a good deal of weight to bear, a good deal of pressure to resist?” said I.

“Why,” he replied, “they’re pretty nigh the ship, man!”

“Then what do you make of that flaw there, and that crack there, and there, and there?” said I, pointing to the places as I spoke.

“Pooh!” said he, “when the plates are on that’s all covered up.”

“Yes,” said I, “so I suppose; but do you know I don’t see a frame that hasn’t three or four—and yonder is one with six—of those cracks and flaws plain to be viewed upon it. Considering the dimensions of this vessel, do you think it wise—I’m speaking in the interest of human lives, my man—to put in such defective iron as this?”

He made no answer, and was about to resume his work.

“Here,” said I, “there is no thirstier work than hammering,” and I gave him a shilling. “How do you get the iron plates which cover these ribs to fit?”

“They’re rolled,” he replied, pocketing the shilling with a look around.

“The part of the plate that overhangs another,” said I, “is, I think, called the landing?”

“Ay,” said he, “the lannin’, that’s right.”

“Do you see this landing, here?” I asked. “I’m not sure that I couldn’t put my little finger between.”

“Oh, the rivets ’ll draw that into its place,” said the man.

“True,” I exclaimed; “but you wouldn’t call it a fit?”

“No,” he answered; “I wouldn’t call it a fit, but the rivets ’ll make it one.”

“But, don’t you see,” said I, “that by prizing these plates together with the rivets you are putting work on the rivets for which they are not designed? If the blow of a sea springs the rivets, the plates must yawn. At this rate it seems to me that the rivets not only keep the plates together, but actually give the hull its shape.”

“What are ye, sir?” said he to me; “a surveyor?”

“No, my man,” I replied; “if I were, I should be talking to your master, not to you. Here’s another point that strikes me as worth noticing. Look at these rivet-holes. They’re all punched, I observe.”

“Certainly they’re punched,” he answered.

“But don’t you think they ought to be drilled?” I asked. “Punching is bound to weaken the rivet-holes, by cracking and dislocating the fibres of the metal around them, and rendering them the less fit as a hold for the rivets.”

“Drilling ’ud be much better, of course,” said the man; “but it ’ud pretty nigh double the expense, and that ’ud be going the wrong way to what the shipowners want.”

“But here again I see another curious feature,” said I. “Look through these rivet-holes, one after another, as many as you choose. There’s not a single hole in the front plates that corresponds with the holes in the plates at the back. How on earth are you going to drive a rivet through such a hole as that, for instance?” said I, pointing to a hole so much lower than the hole behind it that the apertures where the two plates met resembled a half-moon.

“Oh, we’ll rivet ’em somehow,” he answered, laughing, and without even glancing at the holes to which I sought to direct his attention.

At this juncture somebody who might have been the manager came sniffing curiously about me; the man went on with his work, and I moved off. Before quitting the yard, however, I walked over to the other vessels—the incomplete ones, I mean—and had a look at them. Here I found precisely the same kind of workmanship and material—the frames full of cracks and flaws, the rivet-holes roughly punched, and not a single hole corresponding with the holes behind; the “landings” yawning and waiting to be prized and warped and severely strained into their places by the rivets. I am not writing learnedly; I am avoiding all technicalities, as I wish the land-going public who know nothing about marine terms to understand me. Neither do I assert that this shipbuilding yard which I inspected is a typical one. But this much I will say, and as a man who has some small knowledge of the power and fury of the sea in a time of tempest—that were I a forecastle-hand and had to choose between one of these brand-new, A 1 iron steamships of from two thousand to three thousand tons gross and one of the old coasters which have long since been condemned and rendered impossible, I should be perfectly content to let the toss of a coin decide for me, satisfied that, so far as security at sea goes, there would be just as much promise of my speedy dissolution aboard such a brand-new steamer as aboard the sieve-like old coffin. It is not hard to understand what a reproach this kind of vessel is to us as a maritime nation and how it has come about. The same fierce competition that covers our tables with butter made of fat, and coffee made out of old beans, is covering the ocean with the sort of ships I am writing of. The problem is now how to build the cheapest steamer to carry a maximum cargo on a minimum draught of water, and to pass the surveyors as fit to go to sea. The shipbuilders are not to blame. They will do good work for good money; but if good money be not forthcoming, though some kind of work be expected, then they will give you frames which are only fit to sell for old iron; the workmanship will be mere “clagging,” the plates will be wrenched and warped into any kind of abominable fit by the rivets; the whole structure and the lives of the people who commit themselves to it will be made to depend upon points which no honest shipwright would dream of reckoning as factors in the binding and holding powers of the fabric; and the false and frail contrivance, doctored up and smothered over with paint, will be launched with all haste, and the next order proceeded with at once.

Therefore, in so far as the loadline is designed for the protection of the sailor against the rapacity of those owners who would load their vessels down to their waterways, if they could only manage to make them float at that, there must always be a most unpleasant quality of insufficiency in the controversies the subject has excited, so long as they exclude consideration of the kind of vessels which are launched month after month and year after year from many shipbuilding yards. The absurdity of painting or nailing a loading disc upon the side of a vessel which is to a strong well-constructed ship what a cheap suburban villa built with nine-inch walls is to a house in Grosvenor or Berkeley-square, struck me forcibly, as I stood the other day looking at the flimsy metal skeletons which, when plated with thin sheets of iron and loaded with the dead weight of coal and freight and engines, are to confront and give battle to the terrible sea. I shall be asked if no protection is afforded the sailor against the deadly risks such shipbuilding as this involves by those marine surveyors, whose duties as inspectors are very clearly and precisely laid down for them by the authorities they represent? I answer, let those interested in the subject make a tour of inspection for themselves—slip in quietly, as I did, into those shipbuilding yards where cheap steamers are manufactured, and judge with their own eyes to what extent I am inaccurate in affirming that a proportion of the ships which are built in this country are renewing with tenfold disgrace those maritime crimes which were supposed to have been ground out of our civilization, and reviving with tenfold horror those peculiar forms of marine disasters which were hopefully assumed to have been shelved along with the old wooden craft.

And now let me say here a few words on the subject of marine surveying.

If there be one class of responsible men more than another who should be wholly above suspicion, who should be possessed of a moral courage equal, under all circumstances, to the unbending and unfaltering discharge of the duties accepted by them, they should consist, one would think, of the men employed by Lloyd’s and the Board of Trade to inspect the construction of ships, and to pronounce upon their fitness as sea-going fabrics. You have only to consider what is involved in the duties of marine surveyors to appreciate the high and extraordinary character of their obligations. Upon their capacity to distinguish between good and bad work, and upon their courage as judges to whom their employers entrust the exercise of the widest possible discretion, practically depends the life of every human being who goes to sea as a sailor or as a passenger. Of course, the difficulties of the vocation, humanly speaking, are not hard to understand. We may appreciate the embarrassment a surveyor labours under in having to condemn the work of a shipbuilder with whom he is on very friendly terms, to say no more. The temptation to inspect any other part of the fabric than that which imperatively calls for condemnation must, under certain circumstances, be very great. But let all this be freely admitted. Life is more precious than class sensibilities, and if an evil is to flourish only on the condition that nothing is said about it, most of us will agree that it is high time to cultivate candour, in that direction at least.

I have no hesitation in saying that a large proportion of the marine surveying of the day is one of the most glaring, as it certainly is the cruellest, of the shams of the period. Samples of work are passed which, were there the least sincerity and conscience in the minds of those who decide upon them, could under no possibility have left the yards in which they were produced. Men, women, and children are sent to sea in structures which never would have been permitted to quit the only place they are safe on—I mean the dry land—had the surveyors put any shadow of honesty into the duties they are appointed to discharge.

“Look,” said a gentleman to me the other day in a shipbuilding yard, “Look at that faulty work there! is it possible that Mr. —— (naming the surveyor) means to pass it?”

The surveyor stood at a distance; the gentleman called him and pointed out the defective work. The surveyor seemed surprised, and shook his head. “Ah,” said he, “that is too bad. I shan’t be able to pass that.” But he did pass it, for the gentleman some days after wrote to tell me that the faulty points had not been remedied, and that the ship was to be launched just as she was.

“What,” cries an American writer, in a Yankee shipping journal, “What of the Ismailia, Bernina, Bayard, Homer, Stamfordham, Telford, Zanzibar, Toxford, Sylvia, Surbiton, Joseph Pease, and the forty British steamers which foundered last year, and scores of others which have gone to Davy Jones’s Locker?” We are constantly boasting of the vastness and sovereignty of our mercantile marine; but we shall have to acquire a new theory of bragging if we are to reconcile our self-complacency with such plain-speaking as this, which comes to us in our own tongue from across the seas.

sings the contemporary sailor; but there is very little use in his shouting “Ahoy,” if the only response he gets is the appointment of men who, filling offices designed for his protection, deliberately ignore their most grave and great responsibilities and lure him, by what are absolutely false representations, into committing his life to unseaworthy ships. Unhappily in marine topics public interest is only to be awaked by reiteration. But let it be remembered that it is not only Jack’s life that is jeopardized by our new shipbuilding departures. The subject is one that concerns every living being that crosses the ocean or who has friends at sea. The sailor, we know, is an abstraction. Nautical as we are as a people, we barely take count of him unless as a stage show, or as the pig-tailed Jack Pudding of a romance. But when we think of passengers we think of our friends and of ourselves. Is the loss of the Clan Macduff still within living memory? Everybody was much shocked at the time by that dreadful wreck. But shore-going people would have been more shocked had they taken the trouble to master the meaning of the Wreck Commissioner’s finding, when, by absolving the owner from all responsibility on the grounds that the vessel had been passed by a Board of Trade surveyor, he practically decided that the Board of Trade, through the official who certificated the Clan Macduff, was answerable for the dreadful disaster that befel her. At this rate what assurance have the travelling public, leaving sailors out of the question, that their lives are in any degree cared for? Apparently the Board of Trade are not to be reached if one of their servants passes a ship which goes to pieces as an ill-built, crazy machine in the first gale of wind she encounters; whilst the owner of the sea-coffin becomes an irresponsible being on the merits of a certificate cunningly courted and fraudulently given. If the Wreck Commissioner’s law be sound, then the criminality of certificating unseaworthy ships is intensified by the fact that it secures the owners against all penalties. Of course, both the Board of Trade and Lloyd’s act with perfect sincerity. They appoint the best men they can get for the trifling wages they give to do certain work, and it is not their fault that some of these men should prove unfaithful. But since nothing can be more certain than that the whole system of marine surveyorship, as we have it, is deceptive, blundering, and in a high degree obnoxious to human life and property, is it not about time that we set to work to invent some better method for guaranteeing, so far as shipbuilding workmanship and material go, the lives and property of the hundreds and thousands of people who go to sea as sailors and passengers? No society nor Government department has a right to subject men invested with powers made solemn by their involvement of precious life to the temptations to faithlessness which surround the marine surveyor.

“How on earth did the builders manage to get that cruelly ill-built vessel passed?” was asked not long since.

“Why, sir,” was the answer, “by taking care that the surveyor saw her through no other medium than a bottle of champagne.”

A glass of liquor may cost a hundred lives; but the surveyor still keeps his place, and draws his little salary, and goes on passing bad work, with every shipwright in his district sniggering over the man’s complaisance. Is it a system proper to denounce? I think it is; and no disinterested person who is in the secret but must deplore it as deeply dishonouring to the highest and most opulent and fertile branch of British industry, and as a species of legalized and truly rank conspiracy against the lives of passengers and sailors.

I have briefly referred to the case of the Clan Macduff; it will serve my purpose to give a more particular instance of marine surveying as I found it reported at length in one of the shipping journals. The brig Scio was a wooden vessel built in 1839, and she was still afloat in 1881. She was the property of a Mr. Blumer Bushell, of South Shields, who had purchased her for £110, probably quite as much as she was worth. She was docked and repaired at a cost of £336. Her first start, after leaving the doctor’s hands, was unfortunate, for she went ashore at Kunda and damaged her keel. This was repaired, £84 being spent upon her. Next voyage she went to sea with a crew of eight hands, and a load of four hundred and twenty-nine tons of coal, her registered tonnage being a trifle over two hundred and sixty-five. Scarcely was she at sea when she was found to be making water. The master’s attention was engrossed by the job of pumping, in the midst of which the wind breezed up hard, the vessel fell off, the mainboom jibed and broke in halves, one piece of which, falling upon a boy, struck him down dead. The leak increased, and the crew compelled the master to run for Leith Roads. Here the vessel was placed on the mud, and caulked as high as nine feet of water around her would let the irons go. Thus soldered, she started once more, and plumped on to Inchkeith. She was towed off after discharging fifteen tons of cargo, and was docked with four hundred and fourteen tons of coal in her bottom. A portion of her crew now refused to share any more of her fortunes, so they were discharged and others shipped in their room. Once more this noble brig proceeded, but had not put fifteen miles betwixt her and the land when the crew came aft in a body, swore that the water was coming in fast and must presently drown the ship, and begged the master to put back. This he did, in the face of a strong head wind, which obliged him to beat up the Firth of Forth in short tacks. By-and-by a squall came along and blew the lower fore-top-sail out of the bolt-ropes. Soon afterwards the Scio struck on some sands off Buckhaven, but managed to beat over them. The master said he now wanted to haul his brig off the land, but that the men refused to turn to. The crew denied this, but, let the truth be what it would, not long after the vessel had beaten over the sands she went ashore somewhere north of Kirkcaldy, on which the crew very sensibly got out. Such is the picturesque history of a brig which no man will believe could by any possibility have been found afloat in these days of the stringent Merchant Shipping Act, and of surveyors appointed by the Board of Trade to stop rotten vessels from proceeding to sea. It was declared at the re-hearing—for a good deal of litigation was generated by this dismal old brig—that two shipwright surveyors, who were officers of the Board of Trade, inspected the vessel whilst under repairs, visiting her several times and pointing out what should be done. Yet you will have observed that the Scio never quitted the dock without all hands going to the pumps, only to knock off in order to come aft and request the skipper to put back to save their lives. And, as if this most unimpeachable testimony to the value of Board of Trade surveying was not of sufficient weight, there comes a Mr. Turner into court with samples of the timbers and planks of the wreck which he had inspected on the beach, and this gentleman deliberately declares—pointing to the samples as he speaks—that, from the survey he made of the wretched old hooker’s remains, she was unseaworthy.

There is no arrogance in pretending to wisdom after the event has happened. The surveyors might affirm what they chose, but we, having the end of the story under our eyes, are at full liberty to say that no declarations that the brig was seaworthy can make her seaworthy in the face of the water that ran into her bottom, and that kept the crew pumping and hurrying back to land to save their lives. Theories are excellent things in the absence of facts; but when a fact comes in the road the biggest theory must make way. The pumping and the putting back are the most satirical commentaries which can be imagined on the declarations of the Board of Trade surveyors. What is their notion of seaworthiness? Is it pumping morning, noon, and night, and all hands imploring the skipper to put his helm up and try back? If it be not that, if, on the contrary, they define seaworthiness to consist of a tight, well-found craft, how are they going to reconcile the results of their survey of the brig Scio with the results of her attempted voyages?

I quote this example of surveying because it is illustrative of the worthlessness of the supervision practised by the Board of Trade under the present system of protecting life and property, and because it is typical of much of the work that is done in that way by the men who are paid to look after the interests they represent. The land-going justices who sat at a re-hearing of the first investigation absolved the owner on the grounds that he did all that he could to render his brig seaworthy—that is to say, “taking into consideration the precautions taken by the owner, under the surveillance of the Board of Trade surveyors at Shields and at Leith, and having all the work executed by practical men of long standing, the Court could come to no other conclusion than that set forth in the judgment.”

But what said the assessors, the nautical element in this investigation? “We do not concur in this judgment ... and will furnish our own report.” That report is the only endurable supplement to the justices’ annex that could be devised. The writers declare that the brig was not properly and efficiently repaired, and that she was not in a good and seaworthy condition when she left Leith; “that, in their opinion, the Scio was in all probability in a worse state when she left Leith on November 26th than when she left the Tyne on the 2nd.” They deny that the owner used all those reasonable means in opening the Scio out and ascertaining her exact condition which, as a practical man, he should have known a vessel of her age required, “and which he had such ample and available means of doing in his own dock, thereby neglecting to ensure her being sent to sea in a seaworthy condition.”

The whole story bears out this decision; and, the assessors’ judgment being unquestionably correct, what are we to think of the surveyors who could allow the brig to go to sea leaking like a sieve and then come into court and speak well of the vessel on the grounds that they had superintended the repairing of her and had even pointed out what should be done? In this case, happily, no lives were lost; the brig went ashore and her people left her. But, suppose she had gone down and drowned her crew out of hand, would not the Board of Trade, in the person of their representative, have been morally guilty of the death of the men? Assuredly they accepted the responsibility of that brig being in a fit condition to go to sea, as they accept the responsibility of every vessel which their representatives pass being seaworthy. This consideration ought surely to give significance to the system of supervision they now practise; and to make them ask themselves whether, having regard to the weight and solemnity of their self-imposed obligations, they have any right, as servants of the public, to persist in multiplying the perils of the deep by a sham and hollow method of inspection. There is not a shipmaster in the country who is not sensible of the necessity of a speedy reform in this matter; and there is not a passenger who would not eagerly join in the cry for reformation were even but a very little bit of the truth published in language which should be intelligible to the landsman.^[79]