Shipping office

“ Once or twice men have offered to pay me at the Shipping Office, and particularly on one occasion when a man had a trifle to pay he offered it there, which seemed greatly to offend the shipping master, who appeared to dislike the trouble of having to take the men separately. ”

“ But, though some Shipowners were of opinion that the system did not work well, and that they should be allowed to engage seamen, as other employers engage their workmen, without the presence of a shipping master, the Commissioners were of opinion that the shipping offices had been of great value and ought to be maintained, tersely remarking that if the captain of a merchant ship would take trouble to seek out eligible men he could arrange to meet them at the shipping offices, indeed, could engage them on board or elsewhere under a special application. ”

“ Beyond the advantages of savings-banks and money-order offices, specially for their use, a system has been established, through the medium of the shipping offices and the consulates abroad, under which, seamen, when paid off, can remit their wages without expense to their relatives at any port in the United Kingdom. ”

“ Seeing what our Shipowners have already accomplished, he might to advantage afford them facilities for self-government. The means, as I have shown, are already at his disposal. We have Lloyd’s Register, with its large staff of competent surveyors ready to aid, at our disposal, as also a similar association in Liverpool. We have mercantile marine boards, elected by popular constituencies, at all the leading seaports in the kingdom, under whose supervision the shipping officers are now placed, as well as the examination of all masters and mates. Leave them as they are ”

“ As a class, particularly those serving as common sailors, they are proverbially improvident, and frequently the prey of unscrupulous landsmen. Soon stripped when in port of their hard earnings, they are generally willing to accept employment on almost any terms. Their necessitous condition often compelled them to submit to harsh contracts which placed them completely in the power of masters of vessels. To remedy these evils, the office of shipping commissioner was created ”

“ Such licences were payable on a graduated scale on imports and exports not transferable, as well as upon transferable exports and imports. The fees received at the Admiralty were for licences to merchant vessels to carry guns; on granting [Pg 314] Mediterranean papers; on ships’ fines for loss of papers; on ships’ protection for three months; on protection granted to barges and boats for a similar period; on commissions, warrants, and appointments; on granting letters of marque; and on licences to join convoy; the Privy Council Office charging for licences to trade 4l. ”

“ A lens lantern, hanging from the arm of a post eight or ten feet high, and kept lighted by some neighboring farmer at a cost of $160 a year, lacks the romantic quality of a lighthouse towering above a hungry sea, but it is because there are nearly two thousand such lights on our shallow and crooked rivers that we have an interior shipping doing a carrying trade of millions a year, and giving employment to thousands of men.
Chief among the sailors' safeguards is the service performed by the United States revenue cutters. ”

“ This has brought out a new department of sea-labor, unknown, as a class, a century ago—the business of carrying goods which the owners of the vessels have no property in. In London, New York, Hamburg, and all other seaboard cities of this and other countries, the great majority of the160 shipping is owned, not by the merchants of the city, but by “transportation companies,” who agree to carry cargoes at a certain rate.
THE SALOON OF A SAILING PACKET-SHIP, ABOUT 1840. ”

“ He is not even to be presumed the owner, but may as probably be a shipping agent merely, who has fully executed all his authority by making the shipment. He has no funds for the purpose of these charges. He does not demand back the goods, but lets them go forward to their original destination on the old freight contract; they arrive in safety at New York. There is the place of destination, reached by the cargo. There is the proper place, and only proper place, of valuing the vessel, an American registered ship. The freight being lost, is a freight to the home port of destination. ”

“ There are no less than thirty steamships now running between New York and different ports in Europe. These are regular steamers carrying passengers and merchandise, beside which there are a number of transient ones that carry cargo only. But ten of them are American vessels, while the Boston, Portland, and Philadelphia lines are entirely European. The Atlantic trade is departing from us, and unless our shipping merchants exhibit more practical wisdom and enterprise they will ultimately be vanished in this contest. ”

“ TRANSPORTS LEAVING SOUTHAMPTON ON THE NIGHT PASSAGE TO FRANCE V MANNING
SEA-LABOUR cannot be likened to employment on shore. Once signed and boarded and to sea, there can be no dismissal and replacement of the men such as may be seen any morning at the street gates of a workshop or shipyard. Good or bad, we are bound as shipmates for a voyage. Ordinary laws and regulations cannot reach us in our sailing; we are given the Merchant Shipping Act for our guidance, the longest and wordiest Act on the Statute Book, a measure that presupposes a discipline that no longer exists. ”

“ The vast amount of shipping, now being built to class in Lloyd’s Register, is doubtless due chiefly to the confidence which the British shipping community repose in the Society’s present rules for the building of vessels, and the manner in which they are administered. ”

“ More attention should be given to merchant ships as an auxiliary of the Navy. The possibility of including their masters and crews in the Naval Reserve, with some reasonable compensation, should be thoroughly explored as a method of encouraging private operation of shipping. ”

“ Every master of a vessel from a foreign port is bound, immediately on his arrival at a port, and before he can report, make entry, or break bulk, under a penalty not to exceed $100, to deliver into the post-office all letters brought in his vessel, directed to any person in the United States, or the Territories thereof, which are under his care or within his power, except such letters as relate to the cargo or some part thereof. ”

“ By the law of the United States, in all foreign voyages, and in all coasting voyages to other than an adjoining state, there must be an agreement in writing, or in print, with every seaman on board the ship, (excepting only apprentices and servants of the master or owner,) declaring the voyage, and term or terms of time, for which such seaman is hired. [133] This contract is called the shipping-articles, and all the crew, including the master and officers, usually sign the same paper; it not being requisite that there should be a separate paper for each man. ”

“ We have held that shipping instructions, given to a freight conductor on a common carrier prior to any movement, put a car into interstate commerce [12] when the instructions were for shipment to an out-of-state destination after a preliminary transit between points in the state of loading. When a shipper delivers his commodity to a common carrier with instructions for billing by such carrier without purposeful delay via another or other common carriers to an out-of-state destination, we think interstate commerce has begun. ”

“ We are often put to great loss, and cannot execute orders, by not getting them up in sufficient time. If you lose the opportunity of shipping by a vessel that sails only once a year from a port you lose the order. I have experienced considerable difficulty by that. The correspondent says, if you can ship my goods by such a vessel, send me the order; and if you cannot get them ready you lose in the trade.
9. Do you consider the canal and waggon communication sufficient to enable the merchants to execute their orders with promptitude and certainty? ”

“ There are inspectors in the docks, whose business it is to examine the coffee and send specimens of it to the broker's office in the city. It is the same with all the other shiploads that come in. They are examined by inspectors, specimens are taken out and sent to the city, and the goods themselves are stored in the warehouses.
"Now, we will suppose a person wishes to buy some of these goods to make up a cargo. Perhaps it is a man who is going to send a ship to Africa after elephants' tusks, and he wants a great variety of goods to send there to pay the natives for them. ”

“ Is the United States Shipping Board Merchant Fleet Corporation, as an agency of the United States, immune for suit for the tortious acts of persons whom it has employed to carry on the operation of merchant vessels of the United States, and who have been selected by it with due care? ”

“ There appear to be now employed in these questionable operations, no less than 117 Government surveyors, “shipwrights,” and “engineers,” stationed at different ports in the United Kingdom, twelve of whom are retired officers of the Royal Navy, besides a good many so-called “shipwrights,” who can have very little knowledge of the construction of merchant ships or of their requirements. ”

“ I turn the more cosily amid my blankets.)
Oh yes! He would have something to growl at, that young man who asked if the 'Skipp-ah' was aboard, and said he "was deshed if he could see what we hed to complain of."
He would learn, painfully, that a ship, snugly moored in the south-east corner of the Queen's Dock (stern-on to a telephone call-box) , and the same craft, labouring in the teeth of a Cape Horn gale, present some points of difference; that it is a far cry from 58° South to the Clyde Repair Works, and that the business of shipping is not entirely a matter of ledgers. ”

“ Subsequently, by the Merchant Marine Act of 1936, 49 Stat. 1987, 46 U.S.C.A. § 1101 et seq., the United States Maritime Commission was created and the functions and duties of the former Shipping Board were transferred to it.↑ Under the standard forms of contract utilized for these arrangements by the Shipping Board and later by the Maritime Commission, the private operator, though designated as 'agent' somewhat in the manner of the Administration's General Service Agreement, undertook to 'man the ship' along with other duties assumed. ”

“ The arrivals of all ships are reported from the telegraph station at Sandy Hook, and as soon as it is announced at the barge office that a steamer or ship “from foreign ports” is off soundings, two Inspectors are placed on a revenue cutter, and sent down to take charge of the arriving vessel. From the moment they set foot on the vessel’s deck, they are in supreme control of the cargo and passengers. ”

“ There belonged, in round numbers, to the United Kingdom and her colonies and possessions on the 1st January, 1875, 7,500,000 tons of merchant vessels: of these about 2,000,000 tons were steam vessels; and as each of these will perform the work of four sailing vessels, it may be said that we now possess in our merchant service an equivalent to 13,500,000 registered tons of sailing shipping, so that in twenty-five years we have more than trebled Admiral Martin’s highest estimate.
[91] The question of impressment is too important to be passed over without any notice. ”

“ Or they might be welded into one great national institution directly controlled by all the various branches of the shipping community in harmony with their sentiments, and alive to the wants and necessities always arising through the growth and development of trade and commerce.
Individuals may do wrong, and, though it may be for their interests to have a good sound ship, there is no denying the fact that ships are sent to sea which [Pg 534] are not seaworthy; but corporations and associations cannot do wrong with the same impunity. ”

“ Ores of every description, on an oversea voyage, should be stowed in a boxed hold, or on platforms in the centre of the ship, thoroughly blocked from the sides. In a word, the proper stowage of a ship, whether as regards her form or the nature of her cargo, is a science which has not been sufficiently studied.
[304] We must ever remember that although, since we relieved our Shipowners of all the restrictions to which they were subjected by the Navigation Laws, they have advanced above all other nations, the shipping of many of those nations are now running them a very close race. ”

“ The master is bound to deliver the goods in a reasonable time. What may be so, depends upon the facilities there may be for the discharge of the cargo at the port of delivery, and the impediments in the way of it. When the shipment is large, or, from the master's storage of it, it cannot be landed in a day, if he lands a part of it, his lien upon the whole gives him the power to ask from the consignee of the merchandise a satisfactory security for the payment of the entire freight as called for by the bill of lading. ”

“ It is unfortunate that no adequate statement has been forthcoming setting before the public the important services shipowners are performing for the country, and the serious position of the shipping industry. Even in the House of Commons the voice of the shipowner has never been effectively raised. ”

“ Under the conditions of the Acts of Parliament [Pg 425] whereby the Docks were established, the directors have power to levy rates and frame regulations and bye-laws for the proper conduct of business. For instance, certain rules require to be observed by vessels entering or leaving the docks, and by the crews while they remain there. For the protection of the revenue, no ship is allowed to break bulk until her cargo is duly entered, nor any baggage to be taken away until it has been examined by an officer of the Customs. ”