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enlargement of several at the expense of the German lines that,
during the preceding two decades, had thrust their way to the very
forefront of the shipping world, only to lose it all by the terribly
mistaken policies that they themselves had helped to foster.
In 1900 the two greatest steamship lines in the world were the
Hamburg-American and the North German Lloyd. In 1910 they were
surpassed only by a consolidation of seven British and American
lines known as the International Mercantile Marine. Yet these two
huge companies, at the close of the World War, were left with hardly
more than a handful of ships each, all of their greatest liners, as well
as most of their smaller ones, having been taken from them to sail
under the British, American, French, and other flags.
Consequently, the greatest steamship company to-day—and it is
so great as to have no close second—is the International Mercantile
Marine, made up of the White Star, the Leyland, the American, and
the Atlantic Transport lines, the Dominion and British North Atlantic
Company, the National Steamship Company, and some other allied
shipping interests.
This combination of shipping lines is controlled by British and
American capital, but most of its ships sail under the British flag.
American shipping laws are partly responsible for this, because of
numerous restrictions they insist upon, which have proved to be
detrimental to lines operating ships under the American flag. Other
lines, entirely American owned, have been transferred to foreign
register for the same reason.
Prior to the World War American deep-sea shipping had shrunk to
a woeful degree, and most of America’s imports and exports were
carried in foreign ships. The war, however, changed all that, and the
United States, in a remarkably short time, had built ships enough to
place it second only to Great Britain on the sea. Many of these ships
were hurriedly and badly built, it is true, and many ridiculous
experiments were tried out, but, despite mistakes, a great merchant
fleet was built and put into operation. This, of course, was a war
measure, but with the signing of the Armistice America set herself
the task of operating this huge fleet. Post-war trade, however, did not
call for so many ships as were in operation, and vast fleets of ships
were tied up to deteriorate in idleness. Not only America suffered.
Great Britain, too, found herself with more ships than cargoes, and
all over the world ships were tied up to wait for better times or to fall
to pieces in the waiting.
This unfortunate condition, however, was not entirely without
advantages. It forced economies in operation that resulted in
increased efficiency, for ships could only continue to carry cargoes if
they did so at low rates, and the shipping lines, therefore, studied
every method by which they could reduce their costs of operation.
This, of course, brought about many rearrangements. Some
formerly successful lines went bankrupt. Many new and
inexperienced lines disappeared. Many masters and mates found
themselves ashore without work, forced to take employment at
whatever tasks they could get. But new lines did make their way, and
most of the experienced lines managed to hold on, even going into
new fields, as the practical elimination of the German lines gave
them some opportunity to do. And following the war, American ships
became known in ports where the American flag had not been seen
for a generation or more.
This probably means that America is on the seas to stay. No
longer do internal developments take the attentions of the entire
nation. The growth of manufacturing, the lack of wide public domains
open to the “homesteader,” the widespread American interests
overseas, all point to a permanent merchant marine, not, perhaps,
so great as is Great Britain’s, because America is not so vitally
dependent on the sea as is Great Britain, but great because America
is great, and growing because America is still developing.
In this development shipping lines are the vital factors. Individual
ships are merely pawns on a world-wide chessboard. A single ship
can do nothing in the complex structure of modern commerce. Lines
must maintain regular service. They must maintain home and foreign
offices. They must know where cargoes are to be had and where
they are to go. They must have armies of agents and brokers
constantly in touch with them. Their ships must be able to voyage
and return, voyage and return again, always filled, never idle, never
at a loss for cargoes, else their costly structures will crumble, their
finances wane, and they will find themselves faced with bankruptcy,
disruption, reorganization or destruction.
Because of world economics shipping lines find it possible to
develop or find themselves broken. Because the margin between
success and failure is usually a narrow one shipping lines find it
essential to seize upon every development that increases efficiency
and decreases cost. Simple steam engines became compound,
because shipping lines had to operate their ships with a smaller
outlay for fuel in order to compete with sail. Iron gave way to steel,
because greater strength was thus secured with less weight. The
turbine has made its way against the reciprocating engine because
of its increased efficiency and its consequent saving in expense. Oil
is being more and more widely burned instead of coal, because its
efficiency makes it cheaper through the use of fewer men, through
increased steaming ability and less weight, as well as its cleanliness
(on passenger ships) and the reduction in time used in coaling.
Shipping lines are very similar to railroads. A railroad train would
be of no use to any one if it were owned and operated as a unit,
even though it had all the tracks in a nation at its disposal. The train
is practical only because the railroad company maintains freight and
passenger stations, foreign and domestic agents, and all the detailed
force that a modern railroad requires. Furthermore, it sends its trains
over certain routes at certain specified intervals, ready to move
freight and passengers as they are ready to be moved. So must a
shipping line be operated. Ships must be where they are needed,
else freight accumulates or is diverted to other lines. The huge
investments ships require necessitate that there be no loss of time
and consequently ships must not wait for freight to come to them.
Because ships carry great amounts of freight and cannot lengthen or
shorten themselves, as trains can, to accommodate fluctuating
quantities, it is often necessary for freight to go in “tramp” steamers
to ports which attract small amounts of freight. But cargoes must be
waiting at those ports for shipment to some other or the ship loses
time and the line loses money. Because of this agents are for ever
busy, cablegrams are for ever being flashed through the ocean
depths, or ships are diverted by wireless in order to take advantage
of temporary conditions.
These are the duties of shipping lines, and the vast companies of
the modern world of the sea are amazingly capable, brilliantly alert,
for ever in touch with shifting channels of trade, alert to fill the needs
of a busy world that pays them only for the service it demands.
Perhaps the fierce competition of to-day seems harsh, yet it is
constructive. Perhaps it bears too heavily upon many deserving
individuals, yet through it has come about the vast improvement that
has marked the shipping world in the last hundred years—an
improvement that has shortened voyages, limited the time between
continents, reduced the very world until voyages around it are now
almost commonplace summer holidays.
Without competition the old East India Company sent its ships
from England to the East for 300 years, and served Britain little
better at the end of that time than at the beginning. With competition
the transatlantic voyage has been cut from forty days to little more
than four. Giant ships plough every sea and offer their magnificence
to every passenger who cares to pay the passage money. No longer
do silks and spices fill the holds of the argosies of the deep. Iron ore
or polished motor cars, bales of cotton or crates of textiles, toys or
machinery, hides or shoes, lumber or furniture—it matters not. Given
only a place of origin and another place overseas where buyers wish
it delivered and ships there will be to carry it. There is not a single
harbour between the eternal ice of the two polar seas that is not
visited by ships. There is not a person of the billion and a half who
inhabit the globe but is affected by them. The natives of Central
Africa buy cotton goods made in England of cotton grown in
Alabama. The Eskimos of the frozen north hunt for seals with guns
made in Connecticut. Oil that gushes from the rocks of
Transcaucasia is refined, and burned in motor cars as they roll along
the Champs Élysées. Copper from the Andes is made into roofing for
houses everywhere on earth. Toys made in Czechoslovakia or Japan
fill the counters of the toy shops of Britain and America.
No longer do oceans divide the world. As shipping lines continue
their development they cannot fail to weld the world into a vast
economic unit, interdependent and friendly, useful to one another
and to unnumbered generations of the future.
To-day we look back to the beginnings of the shipping lines and
smile as we think of their trifling activities. In a hundred years they
have grown from infancy to vigorous manhood, but their future will
not be one of senility. Instead, as years go by, their growth will
greatly continue, and a hundred years from now the point of view of
our children’s children will probably be to the shipping lines of to-day
what ours is to the lines of a hundred years ago.
CHAPTER XIV
THE IMPORTANCE OF SHIPS
S INCE time immemorial man has sailed the sea, yet is the sea
but little known. To most of us it is an enigma, even though we
may often have viewed its undulating surface from the deck chairs of
ocean liners. But the ocean is not to be learned by idling passengers
in deck chairs. One must play a part—no matter what—in the
struggle to master it before one may feel acquainted with it. Nor even
then may one become familiar, nor trust it over much. Sometimes it
rages loud and long, and finally, worn out with the strain of raging,
goes into a sort of restless doze, with occasional reawakenings of
anger. Sometimes it hides beneath a mask of fog—quiet but
untrustworthy, motionless but sulky—giving out no warnings of its
dangers, and stubbornly interfering with those that man sends out.
But these are not the moods most natural to the sea.
Its moods are generally genial. Sometimes it lies for days,
untroubled by its storms, unhidden by its fogs. All day its surface
twinkles in the sunlight or all night rocks the bright reflection of the
moon. It winks and smiles and whispers to the sides of every
passing ship. Its sounds are sibilant and liquid. Or it may be playful,
leaping joyously in great blue surges, through which the sunlight
gleams. Now and then, perhaps, a wave may pop an inquisitive crest
a little above the rail, and sprinkle sparkling drops of salty water over
a sailor or a passenger, but one need only look down beside the ship
and see the colour of the waves to know that therein lies only virile
playfulness.
And these are the more usual of the moods of the sea. Now and
then it turns gray with anger and flings itself about in fits of fuming
rage. Now and then it glowers beneath the fog, ugly and menacing.
But in that, as in its sunny gentleness and boisterous fun, it has only
the attributes of many a child—quick to foolish anger, quick to sullen
sulking, but just as quick to gentleness and fun, and much more
given to them.
But the sea, unfortunately, is generally judged by its moments of
petulance. It is generally the story dealing with storm or fog that finds
its way into the papers. In that we react toward the sea just as we do
toward our neighbours’ children. Weeks may pass during which they
are guiltless of a single childish prank and we are likely not to think
of them at all. But let them tie a tin can to our old dog’s tail or run our
cat high up among the branches of a tree, and we are likely to be
loud in criticism of them.
And so the sea. It periodically, so to speak, ties tin cans to the tails
of even the biggest ships. It sometimes drives badly treated vessels
into the protecting reaches of our harbours. But for every traveller
who has seen a storm at sea there are a hundred who never saw
one, albeit many of these latter, because the ship may have rolled a
bit too much to suit their untrained stomachs, would swear that they
had passed through storms of the very greatest magnitude.
But storms, by and large, are not so serious as landsmen
sometimes think. This is proved by the numerous long ocean
voyages that have been made—that are constantly being made, as a
matter of fact—by small ships, by yachts, by tiny sailboats, even by
open rowboats, all over the world, and often for pleasure.
In 1896 two young Americans left New York in a small light
rowboat, without sails or engine, and sixty-two days later landed at
Havre, France, having rowed the entire distance—aided, of course,
by the Gulf Stream Drift and by the fact that the prevailing winds
were from astern. Such a trip is foolhardy in the extreme and proves
nothing except that there are people foolish enough to do even so
nonsensical a thing.
THE SPRAY
In which Captain Joshua Slocum circumnavigated the
globe.
But in the United States the vital importance of ships is not widely
understood. During the last decade of the 19th Century and the first
one of the 20th it might almost have been said that the subject was
not understood at all. The World War corrected that somewhat, but
even after that holocaust had forced the subject before the public
and had created a condition that demanded ships, the subject was
not more than superficially grasped. The result was that the nation
that had suddenly leaped to a position in world shipping second only
to Great Britain so lightly took its responsibilities that its great fleet of
ships was permitted to run down when an economic crisis made it
impossible for them to find cargoes. Almost as important in this
deterioration of the American Merchant Marine after the war were
the backward laws and lack of interest on the part of the people.
But the United States is not so situated that the importance of
ships can easily be appreciated. The people would not starve if there
were no ships, for the nation’s own resources, seconded by those of
Canada, would prevent such a calamity. The land has coal and steel,
has copper and cotton and farm products. It could have enough
sugar without going overseas. Its great area and diversity of climatic
conditions produce, perhaps, more of the necessities of life than can
be produced by any other single nation. Yet is it dependent upon
ships. Without them the millions of automobiles would shortly stop
running—for lack of rubber, from which to make tires and insulation.
Without ships the vast wheat crop could only with difficulty be
harvested—for lack of binder twine, which is made from Yucatan
sisal.
These imports are vital and there are others equally so, besides
thousands without which we could get along, but less comfortably.
Coffee and tea, spices, silk, diamonds (not merely for jewellery,
which is unimportant, but for industry in which vast numbers of them
are essential to many processes of manufacture), chocolate, fish (or
at least most of them), many metals necessary to industry,
ingredients for many important drugs and medicines, mahogany and
other fine woods which are vital for more than furniture, and a
thousand other things that now are a part of everyday life.
The high standards of living now commonly accepted by the
people of the United States would be greatly lowered were it not for
the ships that bring to its ports the products of foreign lands and take
away the country’s excess food products and manufactured and raw
materials bought by those foreign lands.
AN EXPERIMENT OF 1924
This ship, designed by a German, is propelled by the
wind blowing against the two strange towers. These
towers are rotated by a motor with the result that,
according to the Magnus law, the pressure of the wind
becomes greater on one side of each tower than on the
other, thus tending to move the ship. It seems hardly
likely, at the time this book goes to press, that this
application of a formerly unused physical law will
revolutionize the propulsion of ships.
THE END