“State Regulation of Merchant Shipping 1839-1914: The Bulk Carrying Trades”

Summary

A major feature of state involvement with merchant shipping in the nineteenth century was that of concern over the safety of life at sea. In the mid-century, with the exception of the Passenger Acts which regulated the carriage of emigrants, such concern assumed the form of investigative rather than legislative action. The Select Committee on Shipwrecks of 1836 which undertook a lengthy and detailed examination of the problem of shipwreck and loss of life at sea was the first of a series of such investigations which added up to over a dozen Select Committees and Royal Commissions in a fifty-year period. On a more permanent basis the establishment of the Marine Department of the Board of Trade in 1850 with powers of inquiry into cases of shipwreck and the more accurate compilation of the Wreck Register from 1856 provided a regular flow of information on casualty and loss in the British mercantile marine. From the late 1860s the issue of maritime safety gained a fresh impetus with the campaigns of Hall and Plimsoll, and in the seventies concern was translated into positive action in the form of the well-known legislation on unseaworthy ships and load lines.

Less well known, however, is that both before and during the 1870s, government found it necessary to make special provision for certain bulk trades. In the nineteenth century, “volumes not values” were the essence of increasing ocean transport throughout the world and the expansion of British registered shipping was based on the long distance freighting of bulk commodities, notably before 1850 timber and cotton and later coal, mineral ores, fertilisers and grain. Two aspects of this development attracted notice of government. First, the sheer number of vessels engaged in the bulk trades which ensured that in any investigation or statistics of wrecks, vessels carrying, say, timber or grain, featured prominently. Contemporary analysis by trade of the Wreck Register in the 1860s made this abundantly clear. Secondly associated with the increase in vessel size which took place from the 1830s, there occurred a huge growth in the size of individual shipments. This led to the development of new bulk loading and stowage practices which while embodying obvious economic advantages brought with them their own special safety hazards.