THE SHIPPING COMMISSION VIEWED

FROM THE FORECASTLE.

IT

T was with regret and surprise, not unmingled with indignation, that the Merchant seamen and firemen of this country learnt that they were not to have professional representation on Mr. Chamberlain's Shipping Commission. They had been told over and over again that the sole object Mr. Chamberlain had in haranguing shipowners, introducing shipping bills, and proposing shipping councils was that the loss of life among sailors, through the greed and unscrupulosity of owners might be diminished by legislative interference. They had also witnessed concessions made in the composition of the Commission by the inclusion of a representation of the cargo-carrying interests. This concession rendered it more emphatically desirable that the views of the forecastle sailor should have a nautical exponent, because the evils which affect him are mainly referable to cargo-vessels. But Mr. Chamberlain could not, apparently, be induced to provide a better representative than Mr. Thomas Burt, M.P. Mr. Burt is distinguished by intimate knowledge of the mining life, and by an unsparing hostility to compulsory vaccination. With the sea it is not known that he has more than the average landsman's acquaintance. Why should Mr. Chamberlain choose him in preference to a sailor? It would be reckless to suppose that the Right Hon. gentleman apprehended that the boldest forecastle hand would be subdued into acquiescence with objectionable testimony by the concourse of owners and builders which the summoning of the Commission assembles. Yet there is so much evidence of real sympathy in Mr. Chamberlain's attitude towards the seaman that, however greatly the sailors may deplore his selection of Mr. Burt, they would hold it ungenerous and unjust, in the absence of explanation, to question the sincerity of his motives for doing so. It is not for them, at all events, to assume with his

antagonists that his adoption of sailors' grievances, as a subject to be drastically handled, is simply a political platform from which he can make a successful appeal to the emotionalism of the hour. He believes the mariner to be a wronged and oppressed man, and he has taken the side of the helpless and the poor, at the cost of rendering himself obnoxious to an opulent and powerful community. Let this be frankly admitted. To me it seems that Mr. Chamberlain has recognized the condition of the Merchant Service and of the men employed in it as a matter high above the draughts and windy currents of party politics; as a subject that belongs to the whole nation, and to the posterity of Englishmen. Of him it cannot be said, as it may of others in search of political stilts, that he chose the bowed and heavily-laden back of the humble sailor to render himself taller, to the extent of the poor fellow's stature, than the rest of the tip-toeing crowd, merely waiting for the broader, because better fed, shoulders of the Navy sailor to spring on to when the opportunity arrived. On the contrary, Mr. Chamberlain has put himself in front of mercantile Jack, and has encountered those who want the unfortunate man either to go to sea and be drowned, or be dealt with as a felon and locked up, with scorn and vehement eloquence, daring and truthful, though it must not be denied that an excess of generous zeal may have hurried him on one occasion into fixing the figures of loss of life at sea, due to the negligence of shipowners, at a larger total than analysis justifies. Mr. Chamberlain's unaffected belief in the indifference of the employer to the life of the sailor being beyond dispute, and as he is manifestly determined to expose to the gaze of the country a mass of facts which at present are little more than conundrums, owing to fierce denunciations on the one hand, and to sullen or derisive contradictions on the other, the eyes of British seamen will be necessarily riveted upon Mr. Thomas Burt, M.P., to whom, as the individual who, by virtue of Mr. Chamberlain's choice of him, must be assumed to know all about everything connected with the sea, they will look for the judgment, knowledge, and experience which alone can neutralize the arguments of the shipowner, and give the present condition of Mercantile Jack the publicity that will end in amending his calling.

Shipmasters and mates can speak for themselves; they are educated men and can tell their story. They suffer from scores of wrongs, as the forecastle hand does; but they are, or should be, qualified to put those wrongs into language, to give substance and sharpness to them; and if they desire an organ there is the whole press of the country before them, for it is certain at least that, let party feeling rage as it will, the disposition of English journalism throughout the nation is one of sympathy with the Mercantile Marine, and a hearty willingness to relate to the world the inner

existence, the trials, anxieties, and sufferings of the men who keep it going. Moreover, in Mr. Kennedy, a master-mariner who, I believe, forms one of the Commission, masters and mates will, I trust, find a representative cordial and determined in his interpretation of the life of the quarter-deck or bridge. But the mass of seamen and firemen are unlettered: their minds are full, but they cannot express them. They need a representative; not a man who has been, but who is still one of them; who could stick to the skirts of the most sagacious of shipowners and traverse his questions to witnesses by inquiries of the subtlest nature in relation to forecastle or deckhouse life. It may be that Mr. Chamberlain cannot find such a man: one who is squarely abreast of the marine times, to whom every species of sea-borne trade is familiar; who is at once a sailor and an engineer, a rigger and a fireman, who has worked among the furnaces of the ocean passenger-steamer, or wrestled with the reef-points of a brig full-up with coal from Blyth to Boulogne. Yet it ought not to be suggested that such a man as this is not to be had, otherwise you convert your nautical assessors, your ex-shipmasters and admirals, your long-since retired naval captains with whom the courts confer, or who yield to the inspirations of Mr. Rothery, into mere shams. For if these gentlemen are not side by side with whatever is latest in sea affairs, how can they presume, as sailors, to sit in judgment upon men who come before them with the ocean winds fresh about them, and their faces dark with the weather of ten thousand miles? But be this as it may if Mr. Burt desires to fulfil the serious obligations he has thought fit to accept, he ought, on accepting Mr. Chamberlain's offer, to have gone to sea at once, and given up his days and nights to the study of the calling; otherwise, Jack will find that his representative has suffered the owners to be one too many, even for Mr. Chamberlain. The primary object of the Commission will be to take evidence and report upon the overloading of ships. This chiefly, as vessels are said to go down and drown sailors because they are packed with more cargo than they can carry with any promise of safety. But the overloading of ships involves a score of other points, all relating to the same question, all susceptible of endless discussion. I have no doubt Mr. Burt will find out in due course that the mariner's acquaintance with theoretical arguments on freeboard is just sufficiently great to inspire him with a hearty contempt for the Tables which have been framed, and a still heartier disgust for the greed which the Tables desired by shipowners exemplify. He will ascertain that the sailor has heard something about the freeboard calculations of Lloyd's, and the humaner" loaded factors" of Sir Digby Murray; that here and there he has read about or been told of numerous definitions, opinions, scientific statements concerning awning-decked vessels, spar-decked

vessels, and flush-decked vessels; of vessels with three decks, vessels with closed-in superstructures, vessels of extreme proportions, and vessels which, not many years ago, would have been regarded as without proportions at all; that his soul has been sickened by limitless twaddle, all about moulded depth and co-efficient of fineness, surplus volume and percentage of surplus buoyancy, the situation of long ships when the behaviour of the sea neutralizes their midship "lifting power," and the various prospects which attend the duration of the sailor's life when his vessel is loaded in fresh water, brackish water, and salt water. Of a good deal of this-of as much of it as he has the strength and health to endure-Mr. Burt will, I trust, discover that the sailor has heard, laughed at, and scornfully ejected from his mind as he would an ill-flavoured quid of tobacco. He is sick of it, because he finds out that the more clever shipbuilders and shipowners become, and the more energetically they go to work to formulate their ideas and flourish their Tables, the more the mariner goes in peril of his life, the more ships disappear, the more sailors are drowned. Jack could take you to a ship and say she is safe or dangerous, and could explain why in a few sentences; but he recoils from the wars of the Martells and the Murrays; the clash of scientific words alarms him; he cannot for the life of him see why a ship should not be made safe by construction, stowage, freeboard and manning, without the clamour that leaves things as they are-that is to say, going on from bad to worse. Hence Mr. Burt will be doing wisely if he suffers the question of height of side to be fought out between the President of the Board of Trade and the shipowners without interference on his part, since he may take it that what the sailors want is freeboard enough to guarantee safety, so far as mere height of side can, in heavy weather and that all the talk, all the evidence, all the inquiries and contradictions will be of no use to him if the security of an amply tall side is not enforced.

For what, speaking for the sailor, could Mr. Burt say that is not known on this head? It is the seaman who is drowned when he is sent to fight with the ocean in a fabric whose covering-board is almost awash; and it is the seaman who asks that his ship may look like a ship and not like a raft, when she is loaded and steaming or sailing away. His eloquence can go no farther; and if it is to be a matter of a theoretical inch or two more to please the Board of Trade, or a theoretical inch or two less to please the owners-if, in short, it is not to be provided that the carrying capacity of ships shall be settled by tests of weight, as boilers are by expansion and chain cables by hydraulic strain, as cheese is by tasting and as gold is by ringing if it is not to be settled once for all that general rules cannot be applied to vessels of diverse forms and intended.

for widely different purposes, then Jack must make up his mind to go on earning wealth for his employers by the sacrifice of his life, and in that conviction, keep the silence and preserve the indifference of the drowned.

But should the construction of ships come under the notice of the Commission, Mr. Burt might, with advantage to the sailor, exhibit inquisitiveness. For instance, we all know that a ship built according to specified conditions may obtain a class at Lloyds. But before she can be classed she must be surveyed by an official appointed by Lloyd's Committee. Now let Mr. Burt put these questions:" Is it true that there are shipbuilders upon the Committee?" "It is true." "And in the towns where their yards are there are surveyors?" "Yes." "Is it conceivable that a surveyor who owes his situation to Lloyd's Committee would refuse to pass a ship built by a member of that Committee?" One knows what the reply would be; but one also knows what human nature is. Then as to material. The North-Eastern ports are and have been for a long time turning out vast quantities of tonnage. The Cleveland Hills are not far off, and much of the Cleveland pig is used for plates in building ships. As Wear-, Tyne- and Tees-built vessels are among the many which annually sink and drown their crews, Mr. Burt might consistently ask some questions about Cleveland pig. He might inquire if it be true that you cannot make a sound weld of iron where phosphorus is present in the iron or coal used? Does not the smallest quantity of sulphur or phosphorus prevent adhesion? Is not this the difficulty and danger of welding boiler plates? Is not the expulsion of the phosphorus accompanied by the removal of the carbon ? And in proportion to the diminution of carbon is there not decrease of tensile strength? If it need skill and ingenuity in " process so to eliminate the phosphorus contained in the ore as to render it fit, by the admixture of hæmatite and Spanish ore, for conversion into rails, what, Mr. Burt might ask, can be the quality of ship-plates and angle-bars made from the ore that is not subjected to the "processes" for the manufacture of steel? It is no uncommon sight to see a plate, intended for use in the construction of a ship, break in halves by a fall from no greater height than a railway truck. Let Mr. Burt himself examine ships in frame in yards to which his instincts as a representative of sailors will direct him, and count for himself the number of cracked and defective angles which are to bear the weight of a heavy cargo and all the straining and varying motions of a labouring fabric. You may build a very showy house with nine-inch walls and mortar that is half dirt: it looks a fine building certainly-but wait for the first gale of wind or a thunderstorm! Yet death need not necessarily lurk in the trowel and the bricks of the jerry housebuilder, if the skeleton does not rise from