ADMINISTRATION
Administration is used here for want of a better general term to cover
every form of management that is done ashore, as well as every form of
what might be called, by analogy with fleets and armies, non-combatant
work afloat. It falls into two natural divisions: the first includes
all private management, the second all that concerns the government.
Here, even more than in the other chapters, we are face to face with
such complex and enormous interests that we can only take the merest
glance at what those interests principally are.
The privately managed interests have both their business and their
philanthropic sides. Let us take the philanthropic first. Seamen's
Institutes have grown from very small beginnings, and are now to be
found in every port where English-speaking seamen congregate. They
began when, as the saying was, the sailor {172} earnt his money like a
horse and spent it like an ass. They flourish when the sailor is much
better able to look after himself. But their help is needed still; and
what they have done in the past has not been the least among the
influences which have made the common lot of the seaman so very much
better than it was. Another excellent influence is that of the Royal
National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen. This mission sends its
missioners afloat in its own steamers to tend the sick and bring some
of the amenities of shore life within the reach of those afloat.
Religion is among its influences, but only in an unsectarian way. Its
work in Canadian waters is directed by two able and self-sacrificing
men: Dr Grenfell, whose base is at St Anthony's in North-East
Newfoundland, and whose beat goes straight down north along the
Newfoundland Labrador, which faces the Atlantic; and Dr Hare, whose
base is Harrington, in the centre of the Canadian Labrador, which runs
in from the Strait of Belle Isle to Natashquan, more than two hundred
miles along the north shore of the Gulf, among a perfect labyrinth of
islands.
Next, the business side. As only a single instance can be given, and
as ordinary business management in shipping circles more or less {173}
resembles what is practised in other commercial affairs, the special
factor of marine insurance will alone be taken, as being the most
typically maritime and by far the most interesting historically.
Ordinary insurance on land is a mere thing of yesterday compared with
marine insurance, which, according to some, began in the ancient world,
and which was certainly known in the Middle Ages. It is credibly
reported to have been in vogue among the Lombards in the twelfth
century, and on much the same principles as are followed by Canadians
in the twentieth. It was certainly in vogue among the English before
Jacques Cartier discovered the St Lawrence. And in 1613, the year
Champlain discovered the site of Ottawa, a policy was taken out, in the
ordinary course of business, on that famous old London merchantman, the
_Tiger_, to which Shakespeare twice alludes, once in _Macbeth_ and
again in _Twelfth Night_.
Modern practice is based on the Imperial Marine Insurance Act of 1906,
which is a development of the Act of 1795, which, in its turn, was a
codification of the rules adopted at Lloyd's in 1779. Nothing shows
more unmistakably how supreme the British are in every affair of the
sea than these striking {174} facts: that 'A1 at Lloyd's' is an
expression accepted all the world over as a guarantee of prime
efficiency, that nearly every shipping country in the world has its own
imitation of Lloyd's, nearly always including the name of Lloyd, and
that the original Lloyd's at the Royal Exchange in London is still
unassailably first. Most people know that Lloyd's originated from the
marine underwriters who used to meet for both business and
entertainment at Lloyd's coffee-house in the seventeenth century. But
comparatively few seem to know that Lloyd's, like most of its
imitators, is not a gigantic insurance company, but an association of
carefully selected members, who agree to carry on their completely
independent business affairs in daily touch with each other. Lloyd's'
method differs from that of ordinary insurance in being conducted by
'underwriters,' each one of whom can write his name under any given
risk for any reasonable part of the whole. Thus, instead of insuring a
million with a company or a single man, the owner lays his case before
Lloyd's, whereupon any members who choose to do so can sign for
whatever proportion they intend to assume. In this way individual
losses are spread among a considerable number of underwriters. Long
{175} experience has proved that the individual and associated methods
of doing business have nowhere been more happily combined than they are
at Lloyd's to-day, and that this special form of combination suits both
parties in a shipping risk better than any other known.
Canadian shipping has often resented Lloyd's high rates against the St
Lawrence route, and threatened to establish a Lloyd's of its own. Yet,
on the whole, the original Lloyd's is the fairest, the soundest, and
incomparably the most expert association of its kind the world has ever
seen.
Business administration in marine affairs is complex enough. Lloyd's
alone is not the subject of one text-book, nor of several, but of a
regular and constantly increasing library. What, then, can usefully be
said in a very few words about the still more complex affairs of
government administration? The bare enumeration of the duties
performed by a single branch of the department of Marine and Fisheries
in Canada will give some faint idea of what the whole department does.
There are Naval, Fisheries, and Marine branches, each with sub-branches
of its own. Among the duties of the Marine branch are the following:
the construction of lighthouses and fog-alarms, {176} the maintenance
of lights and buoys, the building and maintenance of Dominion steamers,
the consideration of all aids to navigation, the maintenance of the St
Lawrence ship channel, the weather reports and forecasts,
investigations into wrecks, steamboat inspection, cattle-ship
inspection, marine hospitals, submarine signals, the carrying out of
the Merchant Shipping Act and other laws, humane service, subsidies to
wrecking plant, winter navigation, removal of obstructions,
examinations for masters' and mates' certificates, control of pilots,
government of ports and harbours, navigation of Hudson Bay and northern
waters generally, port wardens, wreck receivers, and harbour
commissioners.
Besides all this there are, in the work of the department, items like
the Dominion registry of more than eight thousand vessels, the
administration of the enormous fisheries, and the hydrographic survey.
Then, quite distinct from all these Canadian government activities, is
the British consular service, maintained by the Imperial government
alone, but available for every British subject. And round everything,
afloat and ashore, supporting, protecting, guaranteeing all, stands the
oldest, most glorious, and still the best of all the navies in {177}
the world--the Royal Navy of the motherland.
This is only a glance at the conditions of the present; while each
Imperial and Canadian service, department, branch, and sub-division has
a long, romantic, and most important history of its own. The
lighthouse service alone could supply hero-tales enough to fill a book.
The weather service is full of absorbing interest. And, what with
wireless telegraphy, submarine bells, direction indicators,
microthermometers as detectors of ice, and many other new appliances,
the whole practice of navigation is becoming an equally interesting
subject for a book filled with the 'fairy tales of science.' Even
hydrography--that is, the surveying and mapping (or 'charting') of the
water--has an appealing interest, to say nothing of its long and varied
history. Jacques Cartier, though he made no charts, may be truly
called the first Canadian hydrographer; for his sailing directions are
admirably clear and correct. In the next century we find Champlain
noting the peculiarities of the Laurentian waters to good effect; while
in the next again, the eighteenth, we come upon the famous Captain
Cook, one of the greatest hydrographers of all time. Cook was {178} at
Quebec with Wolfe, and afterwards spent several years in making a
wonderfully accurate survey of the St Lawrence and Gulf. His pupil,
Vancouver, after whom both a city and an island have been named, did
his work on the Pacific coast equally well. The principal hydrographer
of the nineteenth century was Admiral Bayfield, who extended the survey
over the Great Lakes, besides re-surveying all the older navigational
waters with such perfect skill that wherever nature has not made any
change his work stands to-day, reliable as ever. And it should be
noted that all the successful official surveys, up to the present
century, were made by naval officers--another little known and less
remembered service done for Canada by the British guardians of the sea.
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