SAFETY AND COMFORT AT SEA
The present-day sailor has a princely life compared with
that of his predecessors of the beginning and middle of the
last century. Those men were ill-paid, ill-fed, and for the
most part brutally treated. The whole system of dealing with
seamen was a villainous wrong, which stamps the period with
a dirty blot, at which the British people should be ashamed
to look. What awful crimes were permitted by the old
legislatures of agricultural plutocrats! Ships were allowed
to be sent to sea in an unseaworthy condition. Men were
forced to go in them for a living, and scores of these
well-insured coffins were never seen or heard of again after
leaving port. Their crews, composed sometimes of the cream
of manhood, were the victims of a murderous indifference
that consigned them to a watery grave; and the families who
survived the wholesale assassination were left as legacies
of shame to the British people, who by their callousness
made such things possible. Whole families were cast on the
charity of a merciless world, to starve or survive according
to their fitness. Political exigencies had not then arisen.
The people were content to live under the rule of a despotic
aristocracy, and so a devastating game of shipowning was
carried on with yearly recurring but unnoticed slaughter. In
one bad night the billows would roll over hundreds of human
souls, and no more would be heard of them, except, perhaps,
in a short paragraph making the simple announcement that it
was feared certain vessels and their crews had succumbed to
the storms of such and such dates. "Subscription lists for
sailors' wives, mothers, and orphans! Good heavens! What is
it coming to? _They_ have no votes! What, then, do they want
with subscriptions?" "But you subscribe for colliery,
factory, railroad, and other shore accidents. What
difference does it make how the bereavement occurs?" "Votes
make the difference--the importance of that should not be
overlooked!"
In disdain of the commonest rights of humanity this
nefarious business was allowed to flourish triumphant. The
bitter wail of widows and orphans was silenced by the
clamour for gold until all nature revolted against it. The
earth and the waters under the earth seemed to call aloud
for the infamy to be stayed. The rumbling noise of a
vigorous agitation permeated the air. Strenuous efforts
were made to block its progress. Charges of an attempt to
ruin the staple industry of the country were vociferously
proclaimed and contemptuously unheeded. Parliament was made
the centre of intrigue, whereby it was expected to thwart
the plans of the reformers, and throw legislation back a
decade, but the torrent rushed along, with a spirit that
broke through every barrier. Even the great Jew, Benjamin
Disraeli, funked further evasion and opposition, after the
memorable evening when Samuel Plimsoll electrified the
House, and stirred up the nation, by charging the Prime
Minister with the responsibility of proroguing Parliament in
order that shipping legislation should be evaded, and
further charged him with indifference to the loss of life at
sea! The onslaught was so fierce and irresistible that it
became a necessity not only to listen but to act. Thus it
came to pass that a hitherto obscure gentleman, who had no
connection whatever with the sea, was the means of carrying
into law one of the most beneficent pieces of legislation
that has ever been introduced to the House of Commons; and
his name will go down to distant ages, with renown
unsurpassed in the pages of Mercantile History. And shame to
him who would detract from the great reformer his share in
the act which has been the means of saving the lives of
multitudes of seamen, and which has stamped upon it the
immortal name of Samuel Plimsoll.
Drastic reforms cannot be brought about without causing
inconvenience and even suffering to some one; and I am bound
to say a vast amount of unnecessary hardship was caused in
condemning unseaworthy vessels, many of which belonged to
poor old captains who had saved a bit of money, and invested
it in this way long before there was any hint of the coming
legislation which was to interfere, and prevent them from
being sailed unless large sums of money were expended on
repairs. Scores of these poor fellows were ruined. Many of
them died of a broken heart. Many became insane; not a few
ended a miserable existence by taking their own lives; or
died in almshouses, and under other dependent conditions. Of
all classes of men, I do not know any who have such an
abhorrence for the poorhouse as the sailor class. They will
suffer the greatest privations in order to avoid it. It was
a hard, cruel fate to have the earnings of a lifetime, and
the means of livelihood, taken from them by a stroke of the
pen, without compensation; and England again degraded
herself by substituting one crime for another. These fine
old fellows had been at one time a grand national asset;
some of them had fought our battles at sea; but even apart
from this some compensation should have been voted to all
those who were to be affected by legislation that was sprung
upon them, and passed into law for the public good. It may
be said that any scheme of compensation must face heavy
difficulties, but that is not a sufficient reason for not
grappling with the question.
Compensation to the cattle-owners during the cattle plague
was difficult no doubt to adjust. Indeed all revolutionary
schemes are surrounded with complexities that have to be got
over; but in the hands of skilled, willing workmen they can
be carried out. Not very long ago a political party
introduced a scheme for compensating the
publicans--ostensibly because drunkenness would be
diminished. It bubbled over with difficulties, but it would
have been passed into law had the other party of the state
not intervened in such a way as to prevent it. The same
political party which thought it right that the publicans
should be compensated, were not unmindful of some more of
their friends, and voted something like five million
sterling per annum to be distributed among landowners,
parsons, &c. When the poor old sailors, withered and broken
by hard usage, pleaded, for pity's sake, not to be ruined,
their appeals were ruthlessly ignored.
A most extraordinary feature of the agitation to prevent
loss of life at sea was the attitude of some shipmasters.
They believed it to be an undue interference with their
sacred rights. At the time when Mr. Plimsoll was vigorously
pushing his investigations into the causes for so many
vessels foundering, he went to Braila and Galatz, and
examined every English steamer he was allowed to visit. Some
owners, hearing that he was on a tour of investigation,
instructed their captains not to allow him admittance; and I
heard at the time that these instructions in some cases were
rudely carried out. One forenoon he paid a casual visit to
the steamer "_A----_," and entered into conversation with a
person whom he assumed to be the commander. He chatted some
time with him upon general topics, and soon discovered that
the captain was not of the same political faith as himself.
Shipmasters who take political sides are generally
conservative. Up to that time he had carefully avoided
making known his identity. At last he ventured to approach
the object of his visit. He said, "Now, Captain, we have had
a pleasant little chat; I should like to have your views
before I go, on the Plimsoll agitation. They may be of value
to me. I should like you to state also what you think of
Plimsoll. I have heard varied opinions of him."
"Well," said the captain, in broad North Shields dialect,
"you ask what I think of the agitation. My opinion is that
all the skallywags who are taking part in it should be
locked up, and have the cat every morning at five o'clock,
and every hour of the day after, until they abstain from
meddling with what they know nothing about! And as for
Plimsoll, I would tie one end of a rope round his neck, and
attach the other to a fire bar, and chuck him in there,"
pointing to the ebbing stream of the Danube!
"Then," said Mr. Plimsoll, "you are not in sympathy with the
movement?"
"No," said the infuriated skipper, "and nobody but a ----
fool would be!"
"But don't you think, Captain," said Mr. Plimsoll, "that the
measures you suggest are somewhat extreme, for after all
they are only trying to improve the condition of the
seamen?"
"Seamen be d----d," said this meteoric Northumbrian. "We
don't want ships turned into nurseries, and that's what it's
coming to!"
There were indications that the interview should cease. Mr.
Plimsoll thereupon prepared to take his leave. He apologised
to the captain for having taken up so much of his time,
handed him his card, and proceeded to land. The gallant
captain looked at the card, and called for his distinguished
visitor to wait, so that he might make known to him that he
was ignorant of his identity, otherwise he would have saved
him the pain of disclosing his opinions!
"And your method of putting a stop to agitation?"
interjected Plimsoll.
"Well," said the rollicking mariner, laughing at the joke
that had been played upon him, "we sailors express ourselves
_that way_, but we have no bad intentions!"
"I apprehend that is the case, Captain," said Plimsoll.
So ended an interview which is memorable to at least one
person; and not least notable for the friendship Mr.
Plimsoll showed towards his would-be executioner! The story
was told to me about two months after the interview occurred
by the captain himself. It is very odd that even one man,
especially a shipmaster, should have been found disagreeing
with a reform that was to be of so much benefit to all
classes of seafaring men.
Up to that time vessels were sent to sea scandalously
overladen. There was no fixed loadline as there is now.
Cargoes were badly stowed; no bagging was done. The fitting
of shifting boards was left pretty much to the caprice of
the master, who never at any time could be charged with
overdoing it, but rather the reverse. I am speaking now more
particularly of steamers, though to some extent the same
reckless disregard for human safety existed among sailing
vessels. It was necessary, however, that commanders of
"windjammers" should be more painstaking in the matter of
having their cargoes thoroughly stowed, and that adequate
bulkheads and shifting boards should be fitted; for the
shifting of a sailing vessel's cargo was accompanied with
the possibilities of serious consequences. Sailing vessels
cannot be brought head-on to wind and sea, as steamers can,
and the weather may be so boisterous as to make it
impossible to get into the holds; and even if these are
'accessible, the heavy "list" and continuous lurching
prohibit the trimming of the cargo to windward.
But the great loss of life was not altogether caused by
allowing rotten, leaky, badly equipped sailing vessels to go
to sea, nor by the neglect of commanders of both sailers and
steamers to adopt reasonable precautions for the purpose of
avoiding casualty. At the very time when the whole country
was ablaze with excitement over the harrowing disclosures
that investigation had brought to light, Lloyds'
Classification Committee was allowing a type of
narrow-gutted, double-decked, long-legged, veritable coffins
to be built, that were destined to take hundreds of poor
fellows to their doom. Their peculiarity was to capsize, or
continuously to float on their broadsides. Superhuman effort
could not have kept them on their legs. Neither bagging
transverse or thwartship bulkheads were of any avail. Scores
of them that were never heard of after leaving port found a
resting-place, with the whole of their crews, at the bottom
of the Atlantic Ocean. They lie there, unless enormous
pressure has crushed them into mud; and their tombs, could
they be revealed, would give ghastly testimony to the
incompetence of naval architects. No amount of precautionary
measures could have made this type of craft seaworthy. They
were not shaped to go to sea. My own impression is, apart
from the crankiness of these rattletraps, there was a vast
amount of overloading which was the cause of many vessels
being sent to the bottom; so many, indeed, that it became a
common saying among seamen who were employed in the Baltic
trade that if the North Sea were to dry up it would resemble
a green field, because of the quantity of green steamers
that had perished there. Perhaps the phrase was merely a
picturesque figure of speech, as the North Sea makes no
distinction as to the claim it has on its victims, and the
colour of paint does neither attract nor repel its favour.
Notwithstanding the startling evidence which proved that
there was something radically wrong in the design and
construction of what was known as the "three-deck rule"
type, Lloyds' Classification and the Board of Trade
officials adhered to the idea of their superiority over
every other class. The Hartlepool Well-decker became the
object of hostility. It was pronounced by dignified
theorists to be unsafe. The long wells combined with a low
freeboard lacerated their imaginations. They could not speak
of it without exhibiting strong emotion. "Suppose," said
they, "a sea were to break into the fore well and fill it,
the vessel would obviously become overburdened. Her buoyancy
would be _nil_, and she would succumb to the elements."
But practical minds had provided against such an
eventuality. These objects of aversion had what is called a
raised quarter-deck; two ends which stood boldly out of the
water, and of course a big "sheer." Heavy seas rarely came
over their bows or sterns, and when they did the bulk of the
water did not remain or seem to affect their buoyancy. The
heaviest water was taken aboard amidship, when they were
running with a beam sea or scudding before a gale; but owing
to their great sheer it gravitated in a small space against
the bridge bulkhead, the structure of which was strong
enough to stand excessive pressure. They were considered to
be the finest and safest tramps afloat by men who sailed in
them. Vessels of two thousand tons deadweight, with only
eighteen to twenty-four inches freeboard, would make winter
Atlantic passages without losing a rope-yarn, while many of
the three-deckers with six or seven feet freeboard never
reached their destination. Still the theorists kept up their
unreasoning opposition to the Well-deckers, and the
Hartlepool men were driven to take the matter up vigorously.
They would have no indefinite, haughty assertions. They
demanded investigation; and the result of it proved that the
theorists were wrong, and the men of practical ideas were
right. It was proved that there were singularly few cases of
foundering among these vessels, and that fewer lives were
lost in them than in any others. This is not the only
instance in which Lloyds' Classification Committee have
been proved wrong in their opinions. They refused in the
same way, for some time, to class Turrets. I was obliged to
give up a conditional contract which I had made with Messrs.
Doxford and Sons, of Sunderland, for the first built of
these, in consequence of their refusal to class. But Turrets
have now been well tested, and prove very superior
sea-boats. Underwriters, indeed, could not have better
risks; and, what is as good a test as any of a vessel's
seagoing qualities, is the readiness of seamen to join and
their reluctance to leave it.
But each successive depression in shipping unrolls the
resources of the mind, and there are evolved new ideas which
disclose advantages hitherto unknown. They may not be great,
but they are usually sufficient to make it possible to carry
on a profitable trade instead of stopping altogether or
working at a loss. It was this that brought the Switchback
into existence: a vessel, by the way, which has a short,
deep well forward; a long bridge; raised after deck; and a
long well and poop aft. Then came the Turret, and then the
Trunk; and last, the Single Decker on the "three-deck rule."
I do not believe it possible that any of these will ever
founder if they are properly handled, if their cargoes are
properly stowed, and if no accident to machinery or
stearing-gear occurs. They may come into collision with
something, run on to a sand-bank or reef, and then founder,
but not by force of hard buffeting. I am persuaded that the
chances are a thousand to one in favour of them pulling
through any storm in any ocean. But this is not all that can
be said of them. The men that compose the crew have
spacious, comfortable, healthy quarters, whereas in the old
days, besides the prospect of being taken to Davy Jones's
locker, men were housed in veritable piggeries: leaky,
insanitary hovels, not good enough to bury a dead dog in.