Maritime Labour: Contributions to the History of Work at Sea, 1500-2000 9789048521111

Citation preview

maritime labour

1

2



Maritime labour: Contributions to the history of work at sea, 1500-2000 Edited by Richard Gorski

a Amsterdam, 2007

3

4

isbn 978 90 5260 284 4 © 2007, Richard Gorski No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in anyform or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Cover design: Jos Hendrix Typesetting: Ellen Bouma, Alkmaar Aksant Academic Publishers, p.o. Box 2169, nl-1000 cd Amsterdam, The Netherlands, www.aksant.nl



Table of contents

Introduction – Richard Gorski  7 Six cross-sections of the Dutch maritime labour market: A preliminary reconstruction and its implications (1610-1850) – Jelle van Lottum and Jan Lucassen  13 On maritime labour and maritime labour markets in Germany, 1700-1900 – Heide Gerstenberger  43 Swedish naval personnel in the merchant marine and in foreign naval service in the eighteenth century – György Nováky  61 Quantifying British seafarers, 1789-1828 – David J. Starkey   83 ‘But for the loves of the fishes’: Maritime labour and ecological culture in nineteenth-century Newfoundland – Sean T. Cadigan  105 The Shipping Federation and the free labour movement: A comparative study of waterfront and maritime industrial relations, c.1889-1891 –William Kenefick  129 Health and safety aboard British merchant ships: The case of first aid instruction, 1881-1908 – Richard Gorski  155 British merchant marine engineer licensing, 1865-1925 – Alston Kennerley  185 Transatlantic fishers: New England and British trawlermen, 1960-1972 – Colin J. Davis  219 Masters and chiefs: Enabling globalization, 1975-1995 – Tony Lane  235 About the contributors  258

5

6



Introduction

Introduction Richard Gorski – University of Hull This is a collection of soundings into various aspects of the history of maritime labour from the close of the Middle Ages to the present. The majority of the papers in this volume arose out of a workshop held at the Maritime Historical Studies Centre, University of Hull, in December 2005. The workshop was the first in a series of meetings in which to discuss and develop issues relating to the broad and cosmopolitan field of maritime labour history. The spatial emphasis of the essays in this collection is north European and Atlantic since they deal with the countries around the North Sea and Baltic with some coverage of North America. A more accurate title for the volume also would have recognized the inclusion of not only seafaring (work at sea in the strict sense) but also a number of associated shore-based industries and the communities and societies that these forms of labour helped to sustain. The phrase ‘work at sea’ naturally makes one think of merchant seafaring and its ancillary trades but, again, several papers in this collection deal with navies and naval personnel as important constituents of the seagoing workforce. Indeed, from time to time the authors leave the sea behind in order to examine broader issues such as labour markets, the regulation and institutions of seafaring, and industrial relations on the waterfront. But at all points there is a common theme of sea-related labour, and a common objective of better understanding what have often been perceived as difficult and elusive groups of people. The cost of properly recognizing the scope of the collection would have been an unacceptably unwieldy subtitle. The difficulty of deciding on an adequate title for the collection reflects the complexity of the subject and the diversity of scholarship devoted to it. It is unacceptable to speak of the history of seafaring (or of maritime labour, however broad or narrow the definition) for in reality there are multiple histories that intersect or diverge in accordance with the state of merchant shipping and other forms of maritime enterprise practised at different times and in different regions. There are common denominators of course; but the international or global aspects of shipping and seafaring were impinged upon and mediated by influences of a more or less localized character. In the popular imagination seafarers are often regarded as ‘citizens of the world’ and some probably chose to see themselves in this way; but plentiful evidence survives for the importance of the shore in shaping their lives and their identities. For most, the sea

7

8

Richard Gorski

was but one of several homes, if it was ‘home’ at all. Many of the essays in this collection directly address the implications of this dual existence. This is not the appropriate place for an extended historiographical survey of work at sea and ashore. Essays have been written which usefully locate studies of the labour force in the broader literature. Indeed, scholars with an interest in the maritime dimensions of the historical process have proven themselves to be an especially pensive and reflective group, and through these retrospective and agenda-setting articles it is possible to chart the intellectual and institutional development of the sub-discipline.1 What might be said here is that maritime history has been porous to new influences. Broadening conceptions of history, the application of modern research techniques (especially the capacity to process large volumes of data) and an increasing willingness among historians to borrow from other disciplines have benefited maritime history as much as any other specialist field of enquiry. Some of the most influential results can be seen in the works that recur in the footnotes to these essays, and one might single out a number of collections published in the 1970s and 1980s that stemmed (wholly or in part) from the Maritime History Unit of the Memorial University of Newfoundland. The Unit’s contribution continues as the base for the International Journal of Maritime History and its sister publication Research in Maritime History. The momentum provided by colleagues in Newfoundland and elsewhere has seen published output increase significantly over recent decades, and this is underpinned by a well-developed circuit of conferences, symposia and seminars. Maritime historical study continues to grow and expand in new directions, and that of course extends also to work on the ‘living machinery’ as one observer described seafarers in 1884.2 It is debatable if these developments have accelerated the subject’s entry into the professional or public mainstream; and it is equally uncertain if the cumulative changes can be characterized as the ‘New Maritime History’. The answer to both questions is probably a qualified ‘yes’. However, regular stock takes of the state of knowledge counsel against complacency for there remains a great deal of work to be done on the people of all kinds who were touched by 1  Notable English-language examples include: D.M. Williams, ‘The progress of maritime history, 1953-1993’, Journal of Transport History, 14/2 (1993), pp. 126-141; Maritime History at the Crossroads: A Critical Review of Recent Historiography, ed. F. Broeze (St John’s, Newfoundland, 1995); J.R. Bruijn, ‘Reflections on the recent past of maritime history in the Netherlands and abroad’, Frutta di Mare: Evolution and Revolution in the Maritime World in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. P.C. van Royen, L.R. Fischer and D.M. Williams (Amsterdam, 1998); New Directions in Mediterranean Maritime History, ed. G. Harlaftis and C. Vassallo, Research in Maritime History 28 (St John’s, Newfoundland, 2004). 2  W. Domett Stone, ‘Health of the Mercantile Marine’, The British Merchant Service Journal, 6 (1884), p. 211.



Introduction

the sea. The intellectual developments alluded to above have increased exponentially the possible lines of enquiry, and Marcus Rediker was surely correct in a recent essay to stress the challenge of producing more inclusive maritime historical research: ‘We need to get back to basics, to careful empirical reconstructions of the lifeways of peoples long rendered silent in the writing of history.’3 In this volume the contributions of van Lottum and Lucassen, Nováky and Starkey most clearly represent this ‘back to basics’ approach. All three papers offer painstaking reconstructions of maritime labour markets drawing upon bodies of source material that are incomplete and ill-suited to the peculiar needs of historians. That their research questions – numbers of seafarers; distribution by branch of service; patterns of service and movement between sectors – are answerable at all is due to historical efforts to enumerate and track available stocks of ships and seamen. These exercises are in themselves significant for what they say about the value attached in the past to maritime resources. Yet in their deployment of data to recover the overall dimensions and character of the maritime labour force, or parts thereof, each of these contributions has drawn upon, and exploited for analytical purposes, familiar subdivisions of the labour force. Thus, the overarching concept of the maritime labour force (for want of a better phrase) is only useful up to a point: it breaks down naturally into a host of more specific occupations, with real economic, social, and cultural distinctions, and can be broken down still further by a number of other variables. None of this vertical, horizontal and sectoral stratification makes the maritime labour force unique, but one might argue that the character of waterborne transport added complications to it that have only recently affected other labour markets in the era of globalization. Some barriers to historical understanding of seafarers and their work doubtless stem from the peculiarities of sea service and the often arcane intricacies of shiphandling under sail or steam.4 But at least as many problems – certainly those of quantification, career analysis and community reconstruction – derive from the scale and character of shipping of whatever kind. Only a proportion of shipping was ever international (in the modern accepted sense of the word), but work at sea 3  M. Rediker, ‘Toward a people’s history of the sea’, Maritime Empires: British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century, ed. D. Killingray and N. Rigby (Woodbridge, 2004), p. 199. 4  There is no definitive view on the ‘distinctiveness’ of seafarers (howsoever it is tested), and it is unlikely that one will emerge. Considerable attention, however, has been given to the question. See Working Men Who Got Wet, ed. R. Ommer and G. Panting (St John’s, Newfoundland, 1980); and E.W. Sager, Seafaring Labour: The Merchant Marine of Atlantic Canada, 1820-1914 (London, 1989). See also the comments of Cadigan and Gerstenberger in this volume.

9

10

Richard Gorski

in all periods carried with it extremes of distance and dispersion that can be difficult for scholars to contend with. An inevitable consequence of this has been the atomization of the maritime labour force, for it is natural to break large problems down into more manageable parts. Without large-scale collaborative (and ideally international) research projects, with considerable budgets to support them, the hope must be that the individual parts of the puzzle can be fitted together in ways that are mutually intelligible and that continue to promote fresh ways of thinking about those people who engaged with the seas. In this respect the organizational structures of shipping and seafaring suggest numerous methods of dissecting the maritime labour force. For example, an important recent work has demonstrated that there is still much to be gained from reconstructing the seafaring community of an individual port, in this case Salem in Massachusetts.5 The distinctive sectors or branches of shipping (already alluded to in connection with the papers of van Lottum and Lucassen, Nováky and Starkey) offer further analytical possibilities, though there is a danger that concentration on fishing or coasting, to name two examples, might neglect or underestimate the mobility or interchangeability of the workforce. Nonetheless, the contribution of Davis in this volume takes up this approach by assessing the occupational profile, prospects and concerns of fishermen on either side of the Atlantic in the 1960s. His findings serve as a reminder of the localized issues that affected and differentiated apparently similar workforces harvesting a shared, though increasingly scarce and divisive, resource. Similar themes of resource exploitation and survival in the face of capitalist organization are to be found in Cadigan’s treatment of ecological culture in nineteenth-century Newfoundland. The challenges of earning a living from the sea are set into a very broad framework of analysis which, in the process, marks out the ‘occupational pluralism’ of Newfoundlanders from among the possibilities of coastal and deep-sea shipping, fishing, whaling and sealing. Where they are discernible these rhythms of employment – including the difficult issue of labour migration between the sea and shore, whether in seasonal subsistence economies or in industrial complexes where nominal seamen might find alternative employment as labourers or factory hands – say something about the specialization and professionalization, or not, of seagoing workers. Kennerley’s paper on the licensing of engineers in the British 5  D. Vickers with V. Walsh, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (New Haven CT, 2005). See also the substantial ‘Roundtable’ evaluation of this work in International Journal of Maritime History, 17/2 (2005), pp. 311-65.



Introduction

merchant marine presents an intriguing case of this. His thorough analysis of engineers’ certificates says as much about professionalization as it does about practical adaptation to a new technology, but it is also significant that service aboard ship as an engineer might commonly have served as a stepping stone to more lucrative employment ashore. Professional solidarity also revealed itself in odd ways. Efforts in Britain from the 1880s to incorporate first aid training into the syllabus for officer candidates in the merchant service, as dealt with in Gorski’s contribution, clearly conflicted with contemporary views of the officer’s proper role aboard ship. Such cultural opposition was one of the factors that prolonged the process of change in the workplace. Kennerley, incidentally, makes good use of another form of disaggregation. All branches of seafaring were hierarchical and therefore the identification, isolation and analysis of masters, officers and common sailors can be helpful, though potentially at the expense of neglecting career progression, and at the risk of imposing artificial divisions on seagoing societies or misinterpreting divisions that did exist. Such divisions appear elsewhere in this volume as manifestations of the broader evolution of the sea-related industries from traditional ‘crafts’ into ever more proletarian, and arguably ever less distinctive, concerns. Cadigan’s findings for Newfoundland, supported by the recent work of Vickers and Walsh on New England, suggest a close association between the specialization of labour markets and industrialization. The advent of ‘big business’ and large-scale investment in shipping and fishing served to undermine the paternalistic relationships that had prevailed formerly at sea. Echoes of the same transition are central to Gerstenberger’s survey of German seafaring in the period 1700-1900, but more explicitly from the vantage points of custom and authority. The persistence of customary practices aboard German ships, the privileges enjoyed by seafarers, and the overwhelmingly informal means by which seamen were controlled, which were rooted in the social relations of the seamen’s home communities, have together made Gerstenberger suspicious of Marcus Rediker’s idea of an eighteenth-century seagoing proletariat advanced in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.6 However, interventions by the state to regulate seafaring in the nineteenth century and simultaneous changes in the pattern of German shipping meant that ‘the lives and labours of seamen had to be subordinated to the demands of economic competition’. Other moments in the industrialization and globalization of seafaring – and its consequences – are explored by Kenefick in his paper on the Shipping 6  M. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the AngloAmerican Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge, 1987).

11

12

Richard Gorski

Federation and Lane in his treatment of the experiences of officers in the employment market of the 1970s. Though the essays in this volume deal with a diverse range of subjects, with contexts that appear to be very disparate, and in ways that draw upon a number of different approaches and influences, it is clear nevertheless that they share much in common. Across the collection as a whole there can be found a number of recurrent themes in the history of maritime labour. Some have been drawn out in this brief introduction. Others will doubtless occur to readers of the volume. That these connections exist is itself important, however. They offer hope that collaborative, and ideally international research might, in the future, reveal much more about the men and women whose lives have been influenced by the sea.



Six cross-sections of the Dutch maritime labour market: A preliminary reconstruction and its implications (1610-1850) Jelle van Lottum and Jan Lucassen – International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam

i. Introduction An examination of the maritime labour market of the Dutch Republic, its prehistory and its aftermath, does not seem to need a defence. Nevertheless, it is good to briefly lay out where our main interests lie. Recently the success of the Dutch Republic has been explained in the framework of an ‘upscaling’ of centres in leadership in Europe during the early modern period. Starting in the city-states in northern Italy in the late middle ages the centre shifted – via the Southern Netherlands – to the Dutch Republic, and then in the eighteenth century to Britain. Only from the eighteenth century onwards were large territorial states able to mobilize effectively the potential of their populations. Before this the allocation of resources in the small political urban entities was relatively more effective.1 Logically, the next question is why the Low Countries were so well-placed to be able to take over this leadership for more than a century, which raises questions about the nature of Dutch society before it became, in the celebrated phrase of Sir William Temple, ‘the fear of some, the envy of others and the wonder of all their neighbours’.2 The provisional outcome of the debate on the preconditions for Dutch success is – according to historians like Jan Luiten van Zanden and Bas van Bavel – the early emergence of factor markets, including labour markets, in the late middle ages; or to put it differently and perhaps in an old-fashioned way, early commodification or the early rise of capitalism.3 As to the demise of the Republic, like its precursor Venice and its successor Britain, loss of leadership did not invariably imply rapid decline in an absolute sense. Dutch economic decline was relative rather than absolute

1  A Miracle Mirrored. The Dutch Republic in European Perspective, ed. K. Davids and J. Lucassen (Cambridge, 1995), p. 458. 2  The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, (Oxford, 1992), p. 4. 3  B.J.P. van Bavel and J. L. van Zanden, ‘The jump-start of the Holland economy during the latemedieval crisis, c.1350-c.1500’, Economic History Review, 57 (2004), pp. 503-532.

13

14

Jelle van Lottum and Jan Lucassen

in nature before the last decades of the eighteenth century.4 The engine of success, and later decline, was self-evidently the Dutch economy. It is an economy that has been characterized in many historical overviews of the Low Countries as maritime and colonial, though there are alternatives to this prevailing picture. In particular Jan de Vries has shown the importance of agricultural specialization and an efficient network of internal transportation. Others have stressed the significance of cheaply available peat as a source of energy, and of mass-immigration; but nobody would wish to deny that the Republic also was, in the words of Charles Boxer, a ‘Seaborne Empire’.5 For a long time the very fact that all seven provinces were so near to the sea prevented historians with an interest in commerce and shipping from asking the obvious question of how such a small population in comparison to most of its rivals – between 1.5 and 2 million – was able to provide enough hands to make this miracle work. The answer has become apparent in the interim. Without numerous immigrants the ‘Dutch miracle’ would have been impossible. Holland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries possessed the first truly international labour market in Western Europe.6 Another, complementary answer that has been proposed is the relatively high labour productivity of the sailors on Dutch ships.7 Both discussions, that regarding Dutch migration history (and the nature and implications of a multicultural society) and the historical development of labour productivity, give the study of the Dutch maritime labour market a much wider significance than that of maritime history, however interesting this may be in its own right. Remarkably, however, the quantitative basis for this debate is rather meagre. In 1977 estimates for the number of sailors on Dutch ships at several points in time (1610, 1630/40, 1680, 1725, 1770, and 1825) were presented and have since been repeated in the debates described above.8 For several reasons these 4  Davids and Lucassen, Miracle Mirrored, p. 454. 5  Cf. C.R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600-1800 (Hammondsworth, 1973); J.I. Israel, The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall (Oxford, 1995); J. de Vries and A. van der Woude, The First Modern Economy. Success, Failure and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815 (Cambridge, 1997). 6  J. Lucassen, ‘The international maritime labour market (sixteenth-nineteenth centuries)’, ‘Those emblems of hell?’ European Sailors and the Maritime Labour Market, 1570-1870, Research in Maritime History, 13, ed. P.C. van Royen, J.R. Bruijn and J. Lucassen (St John’s, Newfoundland, 1997); J. van Lottum, ‘Some aspects of migration in the North Sea region, ca. 1550-1800’, The Dynamics of Economic Culture in the Northsea- and Baltic Region (ca. 1250-1700), vol. 1, ed. H. Brand, P. Holm and L. Muller (forthcoming). 7  J. Lucassen and R. Unger, ‘Productivity in ocean shipping, 1450-1875’, International Journal of Maritime History, 12/2 (2000), pp. 127-41. 8  J. Lucassen, ‘Zeevarenden’, Maritieme Geschiedenis der Nederlanden II. Zeventiende eeuw, van 1585 tot ca. 1680 (Bussum, 1977), pp. 130-32 (the figures for 1610, 1630/40, and 1680), and J. Bruijn ‘Zeevarenden’, Maritieme Geschiedenis III, p. 147 (the figures for 1725, 1770, and 1825).



Six cross-sections of the Dutch maritime labour market

figures should be discussed critically for in part they can be improved upon. First, when originally published there was no opportunity for the authors to discuss at length the origin and value of their data, which subsequently made it difficult to discuss their robustness. Second, since 1977 maritime historical research has prospered and many new sources have become available. That is why we have decided to summarize here all the evidence currently available for six cross-sections of the seafaring labour market. We also propose to see if new data can be generated, and, if so, the extent to which they enhance our understanding of the maritime labour market, its impact on immigration, and the significance of shifts in labour productivity.9 By stressing the historiographical significance of the 1977 data we realize very well that there were earlier attempts to reconstruct the Dutch maritime sector. Most of these attempts concerned only the seventeenth century and were exclusively or mainly restricted to the number and the tonnage of ships, but it would be unwise to ignore them on this account, and some of them will play a role in our argument.10 Apart from Dutch authors, some foreign scholars have also dealt with the issue of assessing the Dutch maritime sector.11 Perhaps most famous in this respect was Walther Vogel. In 1915 this German scholar published a comparative study of the tonnages of European merchant fleets from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries in which he devoted 18 pages to the Low Countries. Vogel’s calculations enabled him to propose total tonnages for the German, Dutch, English, Scottish and French merchant fleets around 1570 and 1670 and – at least for the two first countries – around 1470.12 Summarized with slight adaptations in J. Bruijn and J. Lucassen, Op de schepen der Oost-indische Compagnie. Vijf artikelen van J. De Hullu (Groningen, 1980), pp. 13-14 and K. Davids, ‘Maritime Labour in the Netherlands, 1570-1870’, ‘Emblems of Hell’, p. 42. 9  We hope to publish an extensive account of these and even more cross-sections, as well as of serial data in our forthcoming book ‘Varen varen over de baren. De Nederlandse maritieme arbeidsmarkt 1470-1870’. 10  H.J. Koenen, Voorlezingen over de geschiedenis van scheepsbouw en zeevaart (Amsterdam, 1854), esp. 101-102; A. Elink Sterk jr., ‘Neêrlands scheepvaart en scheepsbouw, in den ouden tijd’ Staathuishoudkundig jaarboekje voor 1854 (Amsterdam, 1855), pp. 364-81; G.W. Vreede, Inleiding tot eene geschiedenis der Nederlandsche diplomatie (Utrecht, 1856-58) II, Appendix XXVIII, p. 116; P. J. Blok, ‘Memoire touchant le negoce et la navigation des Hollandois’, Bijdragen en Medelingen van het Historisch Genootschap, 24 (1903), pp. 221-342; J.E. Elias, Het voorspel van den Eersten Engelschen Oorlog, deel I (The Hague, 1920), esp. p. 61. 11  E. Baasch, Holländische Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Jena, 1927), pp. 160-174; H. Wätjen, ‘Zur Statistik der holländischen Heringsfischerei im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter, 16 (1910), pp. 159-168. 12  W. Vogel, ‘Zur Grösse der europäischen Handelsflotten im 15., 16. und 17. Jahrhundert. Ein historisch-statistischer Versuch’, Forschungen und Versuche zur Geschichte des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit. Festschrift Dietrich Schäfer zum siebzigsten Geburtstag dargebracht von seinen Schülern (Jena, 1915), pp. 268-333.

15

16

Jelle van Lottum and Jan Lucassen

ii. Methods and sources It is not easy to enumerate the number of seafarers in a given country at any given moment in time or during a year without the help of a well-organized occupational census. Only when sailors aboard the ships of a certain nationality, as well as those ashore, are counted at the same time do we get tolerably accurate information. For most countries this has only occurred in the twentieth century. One alternative approach is to count up the number of ships belonging to a particular country and from this estimate the numbers employed (mostly based on the extrapolation of averages per ton). Another is to enumerate seafarers on muster rolls and then multiply the total by the likely number of agreements that were made during the year. The last alternative, common to many maritime historians, is a combination of these approaches.13 The administration of ships and seamen varied greatly between the different types of navigation, whether mercantile, naval, whaling or fishing. In the Dutch case long-distance merchant vessels were rather well administrated, in particular if they were connected with monopolistic concerns like the Dutch East India Company (or VOC). The same can be said of the Dutch Navy. This does not mean, however, that all of the sources are easily available to historians and neatly ordered for them, because fire, flood and sheer neglect have levied a heavy toll, especially on documents produced before the early to mideighteenth century. Moreover, the records for short sea and coastal trips are less extensive. Let us examine briefly the sources that are available for the different types of navigation. The best sources available are those relating to the VOC in the period 16021795, and some of them have been made available through major publications. Although many muster rolls still await analysis, and the diligent student wishing to extract new evidence from them is nearly always recompensed, we know more about this important sector of shipping than of any other.14 Next in line comes the Dutch Navy which suffered a major loss of archives in the 13  P. Schuman, Tussen vlag en voorschip: een eeuw wettelijke en maatschappelijke emancipatie van zeevarenden ter Nederlandse koopvaardij, 1838-1940 (Amsterdam, 1995). 14  F.S. Gaastra, The Dutch East India Company. Expansion and Decline (Zutphen, 2003); J. de Vries, ‘Connecting Europe and Asia: A Quantitative Analysis of the Cape-Route Trade, 1497-1795’, Global Connections and Monetary History, 1470-1800, ed. D.O. Flynne, A. Giráldez, R. von Glahn (Aldershot, 2003), pp.35-106, who also makes comparisons with other companies; J. Lucassen, ‘A multinational and its labor force. The Dutch East India Company, 1595-1795’, International Labor and Working-Class History, 66 (2004), pp. 12-39. The highly informative website http://voc.websilon.nl/ contains a database with information on individual VOC sailors. It is intended to include in the database all sailors registered on the muster rolls of the company, which should total around 700.000. As of October 2006 the dataset comprised personnel sailing for the chambers of Delft, Hoorn, Rotterdam, Zeeland and Enkhuizen. The (large) chamber of Amsterdam will follow in the coming years.



Six cross-sections of the Dutch maritime labour market

nineteenth century, but which is well covered by the literature.15 The situation with the merchant companies that were active in the triangular trade between the Republic, Western Africa and the Americas is very uneven. The two West India Companies that existed (the first WIC 1621-1674, and the second 16751792) have bequeathed to historians much poorer archives than the VOC, and perhaps as a consequence there has been less scholarly interest in their weal and woe. Of the other organizations that traded in the same area, the archives of the Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie (1720-1850) offer us most. Fortunately recent overviews are available for this branch of navigation that enable us to pronounce on its most important aspects.16 Shipping between the Netherlands and the Mediterranean was more risky than any other branch of navigation, in particular during the seventeenth century. Generally friendly relations with the Ottoman Empire notwithstanding, too many enemies of the Dutch – first the Spaniards and later on the French; but most of all the North African pirates – threatened the security of ships and seafarers. For that reason in 1625 a coordinating body was established to oversee the protection of merchant vessels, to foster good diplomatic relations with the states on its shores, and to assist in the liberation of enslaved seamen. This Directie voor den Levantschen Handel, which also covered the south-western coast of Spain and the Atlantic coast of Morocco, was dissolved only in 1826 and has left major parts of its archives which have been released in a series of source publications. Recently historians have tended to neglect this branch of navigation, however.17 For similar reasons the Dutch herring fisheries and whaling trade also had centralized bodies to facilitate their activities, which has resulted in a well-developed historiography and a relatively good knowledge of the maritime labour markets involved.18 15  J.R. Bruijn, The Dutch Navy of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Columbia, 1993), and several contributions in Met man en macht. De militaire geschiedenis van Nederland 1550-2000, ed. J.R. Bruijn, and C.B. Wels (Amsterdam, 2003). See also: A.P. van Vliet, Vissers in oorlogstijd: de Zeeuwse zeevisserij in de jaren 1568-1648 (Middelburg, 2003); R.B. Prud’homme van Reine, ‘De Republiek als grote en kleine mogendheid ter zee (1648-1763)’, Met man en macht, pp.105-139. 16  Riches from Atlantic Commerce. Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1584-1817, ed. J. Postma and V. Enthoven (Leiden, 2003); and V. Enthoven, ‘Migration between the Netherlands and the New World, 1600-1800’, Atlantic Studies, 2 (2005), pp. 153-176. Major Dutch activities in the Americas started with the salt trade on the Venezuelan coast, for which the following placard is important: Provisionele ordre ende reglement waernae de Schippers die met hunne Schepen van dese stadt Hoorn, near West-Indien oft eenige Eylanden daer omtrent om Sout te laden sullen willen varen t’zy met Geschut oft sonder Gheschut hen sullen hebben te reguleren (Hoorn, 1622). 17  K. Heeringa, Bronnen tot de geschiedenis van den Levantschen handel. vol. 1 (1590-1660), vol. 2, (1661-1726) (The Hague, 1910, 1917); J.G. Nanninga, Bronnen tot de geschiedenis van den Levantschen handel. vol. 3 (1727-1765), vol. 4, part 1 and 2 (1765-1826) (The Hague, 1952, 1954 and 1966). 18  See among others: C. van Bochove, ‘De Hollandse haringvisserij tijdens de vroegmoderne tijd’,

17

18

Jelle van Lottum and Jan Lucassen

Highly problematic, however, is our knowledge of the bulk of the intraEuropean merchant marine. Admittedly the trade between the Republic and Russia has received fair attention from historians, and navigation through the Sound is covered of course by Danish source publications on the toll; but the large remainder of intra-European merchant shipping has been treated as a Cinderella.19 This cannot be blamed on idle historians, but is a result of the problems posed by reconstructing the fragmented and strictly private activities of traders. Because it lacked central oversight and records, research in this field is terribly difficult. Some historians nevertheless have tried to reconstruct shipping movements. Most successful in this endeavour have been students of particular Dutch ports, notably Amsterdam and the northern part of the province of Holland. For example, Van Royen has undertaken the immense task of reconstructing the intra-European maritime labour market of that area in the first decade of the eighteenth century on the basis of ships’ protests and freight contracts in the notarial archives. Boon to some degree did a follow-up study on part of the countryside of North Holland between 1680 and 1720.20 To sum up, longitudinal data (numbers of ships, freight rates, seafarers, etc) are available for the VOC and partially for the Navy, the sea fishery, whaling and some branches of long-distance trade, but are missing for most of the rest of the merchant marine, in particular for ships that plied the western and northern seas of Europe. Luckily some contemporaries, for various reasons, made more or less reliable estimates of the total Dutch maritime labour market or of major parts of it. These are few, but they are all that we have. It is our aim to discuss at some length these few available cross-sections, and based on them to venture new estimates of men involved. This will enable us to comTijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geschiedenis, 1 (2004), pp 3-27; C. van Bochove and J.L. van Zanden, ‘Two engines of early modern economic growth? Herring fisheries and whaling during the Dutch Golden Age, 1600-1800’, Ricchezza del mare, ricchezza dal mare. Secoli XIII-XVIII, ed. S. Cavaciocchi (Prato, 2006), pp. 557-574. For the nineteenth century, the work of Bo Poulsen provides very good data on the Dutch herring fisheries: B. Poulsen, Historical Exploitation of North Sea Herring Stocks. An Environmental History of the Dutch Herring Fisheries, c.1600-1860 (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Southern Denmark, 2006). For whaling see among others: C. de Jong, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse walvisvaart (Johannesburg, 1979); and L. Hacquebord, Smeerenburg. Het verblijf van Nederlandse walvisvaarders op de westkust van Spitsbergen in de 17e eeuw (Groningen, 1984). 19  For the most recent work on trade with Russia, see: J. W. Veluwenkamp, Archangel: Nederlandse ondernemers in Rusland 1550-1785 (Amsterdam, 2000). The famous study by Bang and Korst of course still remains an important and often used source: Tabeller over skibsfart og varetransport gennem Øresund, ed. N.E. Bang and K. Korst (Copenhagen, 1906). For Portugal see: C. Antunes, Globalisation in the Early Modern Period. The economic relationship between Amsterdam and Lisbon, 1640-1705 (Amsterdam, 2004). 20  P.C. van Royen, Zeevarenden op de koopvaardijvloot omstreeks 1700 (Amsterdam, 1987); P. Boon, Bouwers van de zee. Zeevarenden van het Westfriese platteland, c.1680-1720 (The Hague, 1996).



Six cross-sections of the Dutch maritime labour market

pare our results with earlier ones, in particular with the Bruijn and Lucassen estimates of 1977 and to discuss possible differences. One problem of definition should be addressed here: what do we mean by ‘the Dutch maritime labour market’ and especially by ‘Dutch’? On the one hand we have applied certain restrictions by excluding some ships; on the other we have applied a broad and all-encompassing definition. To begin with we have left out inland navigation. This means that our definition of the maritime labour market excludes in the Dutch case navigation on the rivers reaching Holland from Belgium (the river Meuse) and from Germany (the Rhine and the branches into which it splits in the Low Countries before reaching the North Sea), all canals and lakes, but also the sea arms intruding into Zeeland (in particular the Westerschelde linking Antwerp to the North Sea and the Oosterschelde) and Holland (in particular the Zuiderzee, now Ijsselmeer). The generally small vessels operating in these waters could be handled by one or two persons, who were rarely away from home for longer than a few hours or days, and perhaps a week at the most. Most skippers owned their ships and wage labour would not have been very important. That is why we do not consider this type of shipping as part of the maritime labour market. Furthermore, by our definition the Dutch labour market encompasses all ships owned by Dutch merchants and other entrepreneurs or investors throughout the globe. This implies in particular that we include Dutch owned ships in a colonial context, even when – as happened increasingly in the nineteenth century – they were not built in the Netherlands or never called at a Dutch port.21 The inclusion of Dutch owned ships in the colonies deserves some explanation for it is linked directly to the long time scale adopted here. During the period of the VOC and its predecessors, seamen willing to leave for the East had to agree to serve for three years, and in 1658 the length of service for the lowest rank of seamen was extended to five years. These agreements applied exclusively to service in Asia and did not include the outward and homebound voyages, meaning that the men served most of their time in Asian waters, 21  A dubious category which provisionally has been excluded by us are ships that were not owned but only hired by Dutch shipowners, as was common during wartime (including the Fourth AngloDutch War and the Napoleonic wars). During the same periods, ships were also re-flagged often. Cf. E.S. van Eyck van Heslinga, Van compagnie naar koopvaardij: de scheepvaartverbinding van de Bataafse Republiek met de koloniën in Azië 1795-1806 (Amsterdam, 1988); E.S. van Eyck van Heslinga, ‘De vlag dekt de lading. De Nederlandse koopvaardij in de Vierde Engelse Oorlog’, Tijdschrift voor Zeegeschiedenis, 1 (1982), pp. 102-113.

19

20

Jelle van Lottum and Jan Lucassen

sailing between Japan, China, Indonesia, India and Ceylon.22 All of this work was part and parcel of the Dutch maritime labour market, however remote it was from the Netherlands. For the period after the abolition of the VOC’s monopoly in 1795 comparability demands that those activities that had been an intrinsic part of the Company’s operations be taken into account as well. For our cross-sections of 1827 and 1850 this therefore includes not only all men aboard Dutch ships between Europe and Asia, but also the Dutch Navy in Indonesia and ships registered under Dutch ownership in the Dutch East Indies. According to our definition, all seamen manning these Dutch owned ships under the Dutch flag are an integral part of the ‘Dutch maritime labour market’. To clarify, however, neither during the period of VOC monopoly nor before or after it have we included seamen serving on the numerous ships owned by Indonesians, Chinese and Arabs in the Dutch colonies. We have taken a similar line with the West Indies. Finally, in our definition we have included only those who voluntarily signed up for a ship and performed a maritime profession whilst aboard. These parameters exclude soldiers, slaves, and also merchants or passengers in transit. Our method very much resembles that of our predecessors and is not original. Also it is rather straightforward: after a concise discussion of the circumstances leading to a particular estimate, including its dating, degree of completeness and inconsistencies, we compare the data with the time series available for certain branches of navigation and finally try to come up with the best possible results. For intra-European merchant shipping we have gone back to the primary sources, while for the other branches of navigation (the colonial merchant marine, the Navy, whaling and the fisheries) we have relied primarily on the best available modern secondary literature. For the VOC this comprises the three-volume collection Dutch-Asiatic Shipping,23 along with Bruijn and Lucassen (1980), Gaastra (2003) and Lucassen (2004);24 for the West Indies we have used the competent overview by Postma and Enthoven;25 and employment on intra-Asiatic ships in the nineteenth century is based on Knaap’s very valuable statistical overview of the Indonesian transport sector between 1819 and 1940 and Mansvelt’s assessment of the intra-insular ship-

22  Gaastra, Dutch East India Company, p. 81. 23  Dutch Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th Centuries, ed. J.R. Bruijn, F.S. Gaastra and I. Schöffer, Volumes 1-3 (The Hague, 1979-1987) [DAS hereafter]. 24  See notes 8 and 14, above. 25  See note 16, above.



Six cross-sections of the Dutch maritime labour market

ping sector.26 With regard to the Navy, we have consulted especially the work of Jaap Bruijn and Bosscher’s chapter on this topic in the Maritieme Geschiedenis der Nederlanden.27 Very good data for whaling and fishing can be found in the studies of van Bochove and van Zanden.28 Two of the seventeenth-century estimates, those of 1607 and 1694, were actually the result of commercial espionage by Spaniards and Frenchmen respectively. Another, that of 1635, was drawn up by the provincial government of Holland for tax purposes. The estimate of 1785 was produced by a highranking VOC official to laud the significance and benefits of his organization. Only the data from the nineteenth century (1827 and 1850) were collected by people with a primarily statistical interest. Together these six cross-sections are the best we have to begin with. The data are presented in Appendices 1-6 after the commentaries and analysis below. In a future phase of this research project they will be supplemented by an estimate for the fifteenth century, one for c.1550 and one for c.1870, all to be linked by the available longitudinal data, and by extrapolations from trade figures and other data where longitudinal data on shipping, let alone on crews, are lacking. This task will be most difficult but also urgent for the period between the estimates of 1694 and 1785 where nearly a century must be bridged.29

26  G.J. Knaap, ‘Transport 1819-1940’, Changing Economy in Indonesia. A Selection of Statistical Source Material from the Early 19thC up to 1950, ed. P. Boomgaard, (The Hague, 1989), pp 35-66; and W.M.F. Mansvelt, ‘De prauwvaart van de 19de eeuw’, Koloniale Studiën, 22 (1938), pp 89-102. 27  Ph.M. Bosscher, ‘Oorlogsvaart’, Maritieme Geschiedenis der Nederlanden III. Achttiende eeuw en eerste helft negentiende eeuw, van ca 1680 tot 1850-70 (Bussum, 1977), pp. 353-392. See note 15 for publications by Bruijn. Our figures pertain to the manning of the navy in peace time. In war time they were bigger, mainly due to recruitment among the merchant marine. For England see D.J. Starkey, ‘War and the Market for Seafarers in Britain 1736-1792’, Shipping and Trade, 1750-1950. Essays in International Maritime Economic History, ed. L.R. Fischer and H.W. Nordvik (Pontefract, 1990), pp. 25-42. For the colonial navy see A.M.C. van Dissel, ‘Tropenjaren: de Nederlandse zeemacht in Aziatische wateren (1816-1962), Man en macht, ed. Bruijn and Wels, pp. 245-284, In de Indische wateren. Anske Hielke Kuipers. Gezaghebber bij de Gouvernementsmarine 1833-1902, ed. M.E. Kuipers (Zutphen, 1999); and G.F. de Bruijn Kops, ‘Iets over de zeevaart in den Indischen Archipel’, Tijdschrift voor Nijverheid in Nederlandsch Indië, 1 (1854), pp. 21-69, 97-135, esp. pp. 97-113. 28  See note 18, above. 29  J.V.Th. Knoppers, ‘De vaart in Europa’, Maritieme Geschiedenis der Nederlanden III. Achttiende eeuw en eerste helft negentiende eeuw, van ca 1680 tot 1850-70 (Bussum, 1977), pp. 226-261 provides data for the number of ships and the total tonnage of the Dutch merchant marine in Europe c.1750. However, we have not yet found out on which primary sources these figures are based and thus have refrained from using them here.

21

22

Jelle van Lottum and Jan Lucassen

iii. The first cross-section: 1607 The earliest known estimate of the Dutch fleet dates from 1607, during the first phase of the Dutch Revolt against Spain, just before the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609-1621). Heavy fighting was going on by both land and sea. In Brussels, from where the archdukes ruled in the name of the Spanish King, an interest arose in the strength of Dutch naval power. To a large extent this could be equated with the size of the merchant marine, since merchantmen could be requisitioned by the States General in time of emergency. Therefore somebody – we know only that he was a Walloon or an inhabitant of Flanders or Brabant well versed in French, and that he may have lived in Dunkirk – consulted commercial, maritime and industrial experts who had recently lived in the North. On the basis of this information he drew up an extensive report intended to assist in the final suppression of the ‘rebels’, as he consistently called the inhabitants of the Dutch Republic.30 Most important for our purpose is his list of Dutch ships per ‘vaart’ (the region where they sailed, like the Baltic, the East Indies, the Mediterranean, etc), their frequency per year, the average last per ship, the average crew per ship and finally the total number of lasts and seamen. At first sight this is an impressive set of data, but, as many historians have already noted, it is a very difficult one to interpret, if only because of the problematic estimate of seamen. The anonymous agent’s total figure of 240,000 sailors is unrealistic because it roughly equals modern estimates of the total adult male population of the maritime provinces! Nevertheless, we should not be too quick in entirely dismissing the credibility of our unknown author as some historians have done in the past.31 Although the 1607 data contain many mistakes that give an exaggerated sense of Dutch power, their virtue lies in the fact that they at least provide a ‘guestimate’ of the maritime labour market at the beginning of the seventeenth century and therefore some basis for discussion, particularly of the intra-European section. As a rule we can trust the number of ships per 30  In September 1896 this report has been found in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris by P.J. Blok and published two years later: P.J. Blok, ‘Een merkwaardig aanvalsplan gericht tegen visscherij en handel der Verenigde Nederlanden in de eerste helft der 17de eeuw’, Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap, 19 (1898), pp. 1-61. 31  Cf. van Royen, Zeevarenden, pp. 13-14 and Elias, Eersten Engelschen Oorlog, pp. 60-61. Van Royen makes a (justified) correction of the sum of the number of ships made by the 1607 author and Elias’ adding up. Van Royen, however, does not take these figures seriously. It is important to note that an estimate originating also from the Southern Netherlands and dated 1646 is in fact an exact copy of the 1607 estimate and therefore is not a separate source. This document has been edited by A.L.Ph. de Robaulx de Soumoy, Considérations sur le gouvernement des Pays-Bas Vol. III, (Brussels, 1872). Blok wrongly states that there are substantial differences between the 1607 and the 1646 text: Blok, ‘Een merkwaardig aanvalsplan’, pp. 4-5.



Six cross-sections of the Dutch maritime labour market

branch and the average lasts per ship, but not the number of crew involved. For the latter we have used alternative sources of information (see Appendix 1). iv. The second cross-section: 1635 During the second and last phase of the Dutch Revolt (1621-1648) the States General imposed taxes on ships, based on their tonnage. That is why estimates were made of the magnitude of the Dutch fleet in order to calculate the likely tax yield. Several versions have survived, of which a revised account in the Amsterdam city council proceedings of 18 July 1636 seems to be the most reliable.32 It enumerates, again according to ‘vaart’, the number of ships, the average frequency of trips per vaart and the average tonnage expressed in lasts. Only data regarding certain destinations are missing, most notably Asia, Africa and the Americas, but this problem can be overcome by using secondary literature. All in all the 1636 figures are among the finest we have (see Appendix 2). v. The third cross-section: 1694 After the Revolt and the competitive wars between England and Holland, the last quarter of the seventeenth century was dominated by French-Dutch rivalry, epitomized by the rivalry between Louis XIV and king-cum-stadholder William III. During the Nine Years’ War (1688-1697) that ended with the Peace of Rijswijk the French – like the Spaniards at the beginning of the century – wanted to know exactly how strong the Dutch fleet was. Pierre Daniel Huet (1630-1721), bishop of Avranches and a famous economist, was commissioned to draw up a report to this effect. In a manuscript dating from 1694 entitled ‘Traité du Commerce des Hollandois’ Huet made his estimates, and continued adding to them until 1696. A careful comparison between the different surviving texts shows that a manuscript in the collections of the Netherlands Economic History Archives (NEHA), based at the International Institute of Social History, is the most reliable copy.33 A printed version appeared in 1712, though it provides nothing additional to the manuscript. The NEHA has printed editions of Huet’s work dated 1694, 1704 and later.34 In order to arrive at the best data we reverted back to the manual additions to the original Huet thesis, made by a knowledgeable Flemish merchant called 32  Gemeentearchief Amsterdam (GA), Archief van de Vroedschap, Vroedschapresoluties no. 14, 18-07-1636. This original has to be preferred over the edition by Vreede (see note 10, above). 33  NEHA, Bijzondere collecties no. 601, Collection Bruyard, 121. 34  1694: EHB 7690a; 1704: EHB 7695a; 1712: EHB Ned B/II/351; 1714: EHB Ned B/II/350.

23

24

Jelle van Lottum and Jan Lucassen

Isaac Loysen. His results, together with the original ones by Huet, were summarized in June 1699 by the French envoy Francois d’Usson de Bonrepaus (d. 1719) in his ‘Mémoire touchant le Négoce et la navigation des Hollandois dressée à Amsterdam’.35 From this complicated pedigree it is clear that the data are hard to date precisely. We prefer to stick to the original year of 1694, at the mid-point of the war. The quality of this data is not comparable to that used in the previous cross-section, but it is significant by virtue of its existence in an otherwise barren period for source material on the Dutch intra-European merchant marine (see Appendix 3). vi. The fourth cross-section: 1785 The next major conflict also brought the next estimate of Dutch maritime strength. The sudden English attack on Dutch merchant shipping towards the end of 1780 and early 1781 wreaked havoc. Hundreds of ships were taken hostage, and authorities on maritime affairs were obliged to ponder over solutions in these years of deep crisis, which also affected the VOC. One of the Company’s directors, Cornelis van der Oudermeulen (1735-1794), who was also an expert in other branches of commerce, in particular to the Mediterranean, drew up a report to show not only his colleagues but also a wider audience how important the VOC really was to Dutch society. In his report van der Oudermeulen catalogued the indirect benefits that, in his view, needed accounting for in any assessment of the Company’s value to the Republic at large. This approach led him to consider the overall size of the Dutch commercial marine (see Appendix 4).36. vii. The fifth cross-section: 1827 After the Napoleonic Wars and the occupation of the Netherlands by the French, the Dutch economy recuperated only slowly from the crisis that lasted from the 1780s until the establishment of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1815. Nonetheless, the maritime sector – which was hit disproportionately hard by the wars – along with the overall economy of the Netherlands was able 35  Published in P.J. Blok, ‘Memoire touchant le negoce et la navigation des Hollandois’, Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap, 24 (1903), pp. 221-342. 36  Published for internal use of the VOC directors in 1785 (the copy present in the National Archives [NA hereafter], Archives VOC 4672 contains a few important corrections) and in 1801 by D. Van Hogendorp, Stukken, raakende den tegenwoordigen toestand der Bataafsche bezittingen in Oost-Indië en den handel op dezelve (The Hague, 1801). The well-known French estimates of 1786-87 come up with a slightly smaller number of Dutch ships, viz. 1,871 in total with a tonnage of 397,709 (one tonneau measures 1.44 m3). See R. Romano, ‘Per una valutazione della flotta mercantile europea alla fine del secolo XVIII’, Studi in onore Amintore Fanfani, vol. V (Milan, 1962), pp. 577-578, 586.



Six cross-sections of the Dutch maritime labour market

to recover some of its former strength. The Dutch maritime labour market never reached its former size, however: the fragile state of the economy at the beginning of the century and then the mechanization of the fleet together conspired to keep employment levels below their seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury peaks. In contrast to the earlier cross-sections the one under scrutiny here was constructed for purely statistical purposes. In 1825 its author, J.A. Drieling (1781-1837), was assigned to compile a data-series to ‘enhance knowledge of the statistics of Dutch shipping and trade’.37 His work, which was published in 1829, is without doubt one of the earliest economic-statistical surveys of its time, and offers very good data from which to hazard an estimate of the size of the maritime labour market. Nevertheless, Drieling’s figures pose some important problems, the least of which stems from the fact that the Netherlands and Belgium were united at this time. This means that Belgian ships must be subtracted from the figures. Based on the share of shipping movements through the Belgian ports (mainly Antwerp and to a lesser extent Ostende), this amounts to roughly one fifth of the total fleet. More seriously, Drieling restricted himself to movements in and out of Dutch ports, thus excluding Dutch ships active in the colonies. Between 1819 and 1853 there are not too many data for Dutch merchant ships in the East, whereas those for the West are completely missing. What we have for this period and for the late 1850s allows us nevertheless to make what we think are reasonable estimates (see Appendix 5).38 viii. The sixth cross-section: 1850 With the development, in the nineteenth century, of statistical methods and acknowledgement of the importance of statistical research by the government and other authorities, the number of studies that allow for a reconstruction of the size of the labour market increases. Paradoxically, however, it is more difficult to construct an estimate for the year 1850 than for the previous cross-section of 1827, where a whole study was explicitly dedicated to the subject under scrutiny here. It is impossible, for instance, to divide the number of vessels and people employed between the various intra-European destinations. Using Wijnne’s account of Dutch shipping during the period 1846-1860,39 however, 37  J.A. Drieling, Bijdragen tot een vergelijkend overzicht van Nederlands zeevaart en handel (The Hague and Amsterdam, 1829), p. 3. 38  See Mansvelt, ‘prauwvaart’, p. 10, table IV. 39  H.A. Wijnne, De scheepvaart van het koningrijk der Nederlanden gedurende de jaren 1846-1860, vergeleken met die van eenige andere landen (Amsterdam, 1864). At p. 76 Wijnne criticizes and corrects

25

26

Jelle van Lottum and Jan Lucassen

it is possible to estimate the scale of intra-European shipping in general and the number of people involved in it. Like Drieling, Wijnne also exclusively discusses Dutch ships registered in Dutch ports. Therefore, as in the previous cross-section, we have had to incorporate Dutch merchant vessels registered in the East and West Indies. We are very fortunate that from 1858 onwards these are detailed in Sweijs’ yearbook on Dutch shipping, along with all other Dutch registered vessels (see Appendix 6).40 ix. Commentary: Historical developments 1600-1850 and their implications Our careful analysis has produced many new data, although the resulting overall trend does not differ fundamentally from that produced by Bruijn and Lucassen nearly thirty years ago. In Graph 1 below, the new and old estimates are plotted against each other. On the one hand, it is comforting that the overall trend does not differ substantially from the earlier findings; and, on the other, our analysis and critical scrutiny of the evidence permits greater confidence in our knowledge of the scale of Dutch maritime employment in the long run. Besides, our revised figures are significantly higher for 1607, 1635 and 1785 than was thought previously. More importantly, however, for some sub-markets and segments of the labour market there are more substantial differences between the new and old figures. The new estimates for employment in the four sub-markets, shown in Graph 2 below, confirm that the intraEuropean trade was without doubt the largest employer of maritime labour in the Netherlands. Although there was steep decline in this sector during the seventeenth century, by the 1780s manpower levels recovered to a point eclipsing its early seventeenth-century peak.41 This recovery in particular deviates from earlier estimates, which portrayed a decline during the eighteenth century. The other sub-markets follow relatively the same pattern as before, although our estimates for the Navy are consequently at a higher level.

earlier official statistics which showed a much larger number of ships. In these statistics, Wijnne claims, were a large number of ships included that were no longer in use. 40  H. Sweijs, Neêrlands vloot en rederijen (Rotterdam, 1858). From 1859 onwards Sweijs provides data on Dutch owned vessels based in the East and West Indies. 41  Van der Oudermeulen 1801 (p. 177) states that before the end of 1780, the numbers were without any doubt 25 per cent higher than in 1785. This would raise the overall result for the 1770s to some 65.000 men – most likely an all-time high (cf. Appendix 4).



Six cross-sections of the Dutch maritime labour market

Graph 1 – Employment in the Dutch maritime labour market

Sources: Appendices 1-6, below, and Davids, ‘Maritime labour’, p. 42, Table 1.

Graph 2 – Employment in the four maritime sub-markets, 1610-1850

Source: Appendices 1-6, below.

27

28

Jelle van Lottum and Jan Lucassen

Graph 3 – Estimated share of the non-sedentary workforce in the maritime labour market 70,000

14%

60,000

12%

50,000

10%

40,000

8%

30,000

6%

20,000

4%

10,000

2% 0 1600

0% 1650

1700

Maritime sedentary labour market

1750

1800

1850

%Volatile maritime work force

Sources: Appendices 1-6, below; and Bruijn and Lucassen, Op de schepen, p. 23, Davids, ‘Maritime labour’, p. 54.

But let us now concentrate more on the implications of the new overall figures, which are roughly 30 per cent higher for the first half century under scrutiny, and even higher for the later period. First, we would especially like to discuss the implications for the recruitment of seamen. If we relate these new results to demographic developments in the maritime provinces it could be argued that at least from the very beginning of the Dutch Republic until its end the maritime labour market equalled about one fifth of the total male labour force of the coastal provinces.42 This seems impressive as a headline proportion, though for several reasons it is not possible to draw straightforward conclusions from a simple ratio of maritime labour to total male population. The most significant problem is that these conventional population figures only encompass the sedentary population as enumerated in the rare censuses and, to a certain extent, statistics for births, marriages and deaths. 42  J. Lucassen, ‘The Netherlands, the Dutch, and long distance migration, in the late sixteenth centuries to early nineteen centuries’, Europeans on the Move. Studies on European Migration, 15001800, ed. N. Canny (Oxford, 1994), pp. 153-191, esp. 182-183. We suppose for the whole period that one quarter of the total population represented the adult male labour force.



Six cross-sections of the Dutch maritime labour market

The historical demography of the Dutch Republic has been built upon these evidential foundations. This in itself is not the issue: the problem lies in the extent to which the maritime labour market as defined here overlapped with the population likely to be captured in these sources. Conventional wisdom suggests that low-paid and high-risk sectors like the VOC, the Navy and longdistance shipping in general were populated by a shifting workforce, and one not necessarily accounted for in typical demographic sources, whereas betterpaid short-distance sectors (such as coastal shipping and the fisheries) were manned by sedentary seamen more likely to be included in Dutch population figures.43 In Graph 3, above, we have used the share of foreign sailors employed on vessels sailing to and within the West and East Indies as a proxy for the ‘non-sedentary’ (or ‘volatile’) maritime workforce. This proxy is justified by (but at the same time threatens to conceal) the fact that as many Dutch sedentary sailors were engaged on Dutch Colonial ships,44 as foreign sailors were on Dutch ships plying European waters, in particular the Mediterranean. Nevertheless it is clear that the longer the trip, the higher the risks and the lower the payment the higher the share of foreigners in Dutch shipping. Graph 3 shows that for the first survey-year only a small proportion of the maritime labour force was ‘volatile’. When the economy started to boom and the maritime sector found it increasingly difficult to man ships with (sedentary) local workers, the volatile labour force grew, attracting migrants from outside the maritime regions of the Republic. After the second half of the seventeenth century the Dutch economy began to encounter problems, and the various wars at the time of our third cross-section made employment decline as a whole. This, however, affected the volatile labour force disproportionately; their share declined to around 6 per cent. During the eighteenth century the tide changed again. Not only did overall employment levels in the maritime sector rise, but also at the same time more and more foreigners entered the maritime labour market. At the same time experienced Dutch sailors were recruited by new maritime powers and companies, like for example Russia, Denmark, Norway and Ostende. The foreigners worked especially in what can be described as the volatile sector par excellence, the VOC and the companies 43  Cf. J. Lucassen, ‘Mobilization of labour in early modern Europe’, Early Modern Capitalism. Economic and Social Change in Europe, 1400-1800, ed. M. Prak (London and New York, 2001), pp. 161-174. 44  See: D. van den Heuvel, ‘Bij uijtlandigheijt van haar man’ Echtgenoten van VOC-zeelieden, aangemonsterd voor de kamer Enkhuizen (1700-1750) (Amsterdam, 2005), and D. van den Heuvel, ‘Een zwaar bestaan? Het wel en wee van Enkhuizer zeemansvrouwen in de eerste helft van de achttiende eeuw’, Steevast 2006. Jaarboek van de Vereniging Oud Enkhuizen (2006), pp. 7-20.

29

30

Jelle van Lottum and Jan Lucassen

with western destinations. As a consequence, the share of the non-sedentary workers increased strongly to almost 12 per cent in the cross-section of 1785. At the start of the nineteenth century this labour market mechanism of growing employment linked to an even stronger growing share of volatile migrant labour, with the reverse mechanism in times of crisis, can no longer be observed. On the contrary, between 1785 and 1827 Graph 3 shows that when employment in the Dutch maritime labour market dropped, the share of volatile migrant labour dropped less quickly. This can be explained by the decreased importance of colonial shipping in and after the French period. Holland’s loss of political power and the abolition of the VOC with its specific recruitment policy led seaborne transport to split into two systems: one that involved European registered ships between Europe and Asia; and a second with Dutch ships (both merchant and naval vessels) registered in Asia and operating there. Vessels owned by Dutchmen in the East Indies that plied between the Indonesian islands were manned almost exclusively by Asian crews. Second, we must discuss the implications of our revised figures for our understanding of developments in labour productivity. Since our revisions of the Dutch maritime labour market diverge most sharply from accepted wisdom in the first half of the seventeenth and the second half of the eighteenth centuries, we will concentrate on these two periods, and more particularly on the cross-sections for 1635 (in preference to that of 1607 for which the data are less precise) and 1785. We will also devote some attention to labour productivity at the beginning of the nineteenth century because previous figures for this seem unexpectedly low. Tonnage and manpower figures for 1635 have hitherto resulted in a very favourable (for the period, and in comparison with other countries) overall Dutch productivity figure of 8.7 tons per man.45 Our new data are summarized in Table 1, below, in which the column ‘Tons Shipped’ is the outcome of multiplying the number of ships by the average last per ship (see Appendix 2) converted into tons.46 The overall revised result of 11.5 tons per man is more favourable than existing estimates but still lies within the range of earlier studies. The same goes for the still higher figures for ships that restricted them45  Lucassen and Unger, ‘Labour Productivity in Ocean Shipping’, pp. 127-141, especially p. 130 et seq; and Davids, ‘Maritime Labour in the Netherlands’, pp. 42-49. 46  Although this would have simplified our computation we have chosen not to omit the number of ships in both multiplications in order to make this table more readily comparable to the tables in the appendices. Moreover, as in other publications on this topic, we have not taken into account that ships used to make between one and four trips per annum according to the different branches of commerce.



Six cross-sections of the Dutch maritime labour market

31

selves to European waters. This implies that productivity gains in the half century after 1635 may have been slightly less impressive in the Netherlands than previously thought, though a lack of sufficiently detailed figures in our new estimate for 1694 means that this cannot be stated conclusively. The second half of the eighteenth century, in particular 1784, provides only a little more information. Accepted wisdom supposes a decline of Dutch maritime labour productivity in the first half of the eighteenth century and a stagnation in the second half, while other countries, and in particular England, showed substantial productivity growth at the same time. What do our revised figures, based primarily on Van der Oudermeulen, tell us in this respect? Van der Oudermeulen did not attempt to provide figures for men per branch with the concomitant tonnages, but satisfied himself with overall figures for

Table 1 – Labour productivity in Dutch shipping, 1635 Branch of Shipping

Men

Tons Shipped Tons per Man

Baltic

4,800

80,000

16.7

Norway

3,500

70,000

20

Northern Germany and Denmark

600

6,000

10

Southwestern England

800

8,000

10

Northern England/Scotland

300

3,000

10

Northwestern France

1,200

11,600

10.5

Southwestern France

3,900

50,000

12.8

[1,000]

?

?

800

12,000

15

4,800

60,000

12.5

Total Merchant Marine Europe (except Portugal)

20,700

300,600

14.5

WIC

14,000

[112,000]

[8]

VOC

3,500

[19,950]

[5.7]

38,200

[438,250]

[11.5]

Portugal Russia Mediterranean

Total Merchant Marine

Sources: Men: See Appendix 2, below; Tonnage (1 last = 2 tons): for the merchant marine in Europe in the document cited in note 32, for the WIC, based on Postma and Enthoven, Riches, we estimate a very rough median size of 200 tons per ship. For the VOC the oldest reliable overall figures available are 24,200 lasts (48,400 tons) in 1686 (see F.S. Gaastra, The Dutch East India Company. Expansion and Decline (Zutphen, 2003), p. 119) which for 8,500 sailors results in 5.7 tons per man. We have extrapolated these figures here for 1635 in square brackets.

32

Jelle van Lottum and Jan Lucassen

the European branches of the merchant marine. However, these boil down to nearly 17 tons per sailor – a substantial increase on the 14.5 tons found for 1635. When precisely this gain was achieved in the long period between 1635 and 1785 is impossible to discern at this moment. Finally, let us examine productivity in the first half of the nineteenth century. The 1827 figures for men and tonnage have produced in the existing literature a very unfavourable overall figure of 5.5 tons per man.47 From our previous discussion of Drieling’s figures it becomes obvious that there is no reason for this kind of pessimism – at least so long as we distinguish between ships based in Europe and those in Asia. Drieling’s figures of 16.5 tons for merchantmen operating between the Netherlands and England or France most probably mean that in the European branches of shipping labour productivity was stable between the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth. These new Dutch figures are much more in line with contemporary European averages that moved between 15 and 20 tons per man.48 At the same time the figures provided by Gerrit Knaap for late eighteenth-century Java show how low maritime labour productivity was there.49 To conclude, the revised manning figures also help us to better understand how labour productivity has developed in the long run. According to our new figures developments in the Netherlands were much more regular than earlier research suggested. Nevertheless, it is clear that Dutch performance was impressive in the seventeenth century, and it did not quite show the subsequent decline in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that was suggested hitherto, at least not in European waters. The overall productivity performance of the Dutch maritime labour force, if we include the colonies, has been affected by the low productivity in Indonesia.50

47  See note 45, above. 48  Cf. Drieling, Nederlandse zeevaart en handel, p. 34: ‘Therefore, beyond any doubt, we still are able to carry freights less costly than our English or French neighbours. After all it needs no further explanation that, although our labour productivity equals that of the English, the higher wages and higher costs of living in England lead to higher wages and boarding and living costs for the sailors there than in our fatherland; whereas the infinitely lower labour productivity of the French makes their merchant vessels more costly than ours.’ 49  G.J. Knaap, Shallow Waters, Rising Tide: Shipping and Trade in Java around 1775 (Leiden, 1996), pp. 36-37. 50  We cannot expand upon this point here, but heavier defensive responsibilities for the Indonesian sailors and in loading and unloading may provide part of the answer as to these differences. Cf. De Bruijn Kops, ‘Iets over de zeevaart’, pp. 97-113.



Six cross-sections of the Dutch maritime labour market

x. Conclusions These new estimates for Dutch maritime employment show that the labour market was much more important from the very onset of the Dutch Republic than previously thought. This seems to support the interpretations of van Zanden and van Bavel as they stress the high levels of Dutch economic performance already before the Golden Age. Because of the strength of maritime activity before the increase of foreign immigration into the Netherlands, we suppose that at the beginning of our period seamen on Dutch ships were recruited predominantly from the autochthonous population. The conspicuous presence of German and Scandinavian sailors on Dutch ships has to be dated later. Expansion of employment on Dutch ships before 1600 took place in North-western Europe and from 1600 onwards in American, African and Asian waters and even later in whaling (see the increases between 1636 and 1694). Both Dutchmen and foreigners could and did apply for these new jobs as figures for the VOC suggest.51 Available evidence suggests that Dutch sailors could obtain better jobs than foreigners, either in the intra-European sector or in the higher ranks of the colonial sectors. Telling is the omnipresence of poor fellows from the German interior among the soldiers of the VOC – a group that falls outside of our interest here. In the badly-paid sectors of the maritime labour market, in particular the VOC, before the 1710s no clear displacement of Dutchmen by foreigners can be observed, although related shifts through the ranks cannot be excluded. Thereafter, however, such displacement is clear. Our revised figures show a substantial growth in the intra-European merchant sector between 1694 and 1785 which opened up ample opportunities for Dutch seamen to exchange low-grade jobs in colonial waters for more attractive work in European waters. At the same time, the expanding prospects of the VOC, and perhaps also the WIC and similar companies, created berths for foreigners. The decline of the maritime sector towards the end of the Dutch Republic and during the socalled French Period was so catastrophic that it affected foreign and native seamen. At the same time the sedentary foreign-born population started to decrease, in particular because no newcomers wished to immigrate to this once prosperous but now faltering society.52

51  Bruijn and Lucassen, Op de schepen der Oost-Indische Compagnie; Lucassen, ‘A multinational and its labor force‘, pp. 14-22. 52  J. van Lottum, ‘Nieuwkomers in Nederland in de eerste helft van de negentiende eeuw’, Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis, 29 (2003), p. 3.

33

34

Jelle van Lottum and Jan Lucassen

In order to assess realistically total Dutch labour potential we have to take into account – besides the increase in total Dutch population through the arrival of more or less sedentary foreigners – a substantial and shifting number of European foreigners (principally Germans and Scandinavians) who became available from the seventeenth century onwards. They could find employment in the lowest sections of the maritime labour market, in particular on East Indiamen, not only as sailors but most of all as soldiers. Better opportunities became available for some of them only during the eighteenth century, in particular on the whaling ships. Finally, the sudden ‘Dutchification’ of crews shipping from Dutch ports around 1800 should not lead us to the wrong conclusion. While the European foreigner could no longer find easy employment on Dutch ships, Asian seamen were finding employment aboard Dutch ships sailing in Asia and on routes between Asia and Europe. This tendency, which was already apparent at the end of the eighteenth century,53 became unavoidable in the nineteenth century with the growth of shipping between Holland and the colonies from the 1830s onwards and – somewhat later – between the many islands of Indonesia.54 In the end it could be argued that Germans were replaced by Indonesians and Chinese, and that this transition made the Dutch labour market even more international or even global than it had been at the zenith of its power.

53  Lucassen, ‘A multinational and its labor force’, pp. 20-22. 54  J.N.F.M. à Campo, Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij. Stoomvaart en staatsvorming in de Indonesische archipel 1888-1914 (Hilversum, 1992), p. 683.



Six cross-sections of the Dutch maritime labour market

Appendices: Cross-sections for 1607, 1635, 1694, 1785, 1827, and 1850 In the notes and sources that follow a simplified referencing system has been used (author-year). The grand total number of ships is always in square brackets because figures for the navy are missing. Appendix 1. The cross-section of 1607 Destination/Type of shipping

No. of ships Avg. lasts per ship 100 90 30 120

Avg. crew size 10 8 5 17

Total crew 5,600 4,000 11,000 500 1,000

Baltic Norway Northern Germany, England and France Russia Mediterranean

564 500 2,200 20 40

Total European

3,560

22,100

West Indies and West Africa East Indies

49 33

2,450 2,000

Total colonial and long-distance

82

4,450

Navy Herring fisheries Whaling Other sea fisheries Grand total

522 0 ? [4,164]

30 0 ?

13 0 ?

10,000 6,786 0 ? 43,376

Notes and sources We have cautiously followed Blok 1898 with the following exceptions and caveats. Our average crew size – necessary to calculate a more realistic total crew size per branch – is invariably based on contemporary official Dutch regulations for the minimum of sailors to be carried per last (Van Royen 1987 p. 20, Tables 1-4). For the Baltic we prefer the lower number of ships and lasts of the Sound Toll Registers (Bang and Korst 1906, pp. 190-99, Table 1) and we have taken the average number of eastbound ships for the years 1606, 1607 and 1608. For Northern Germany, England and France we have chosen to leave out an additional number of 6,000 small ships (called smakken) reported by our source (Blok 1898, p. 16, pp. 33-34) from Friesland and Groningen, each manned by 4 sailors, because this would lead to a total that is hardly consistent with the number of inhabitants of these provinces, nor with our data for 1635 (see Appendix 2, below). For the Mediterranean the source comes up with totally unrealistic figures, but alternatives are hard to find. We have opted for a flat estimate of at least 1,000 sailors in this branch. West Indies and West Africa: Postma/Enthoven 2003 (p. 26 (Brazil), p. 94 (North America), p. 123 (WIC slave trade) and p. 405 (West Africa)). East Indies: crew according to Bruijn-Lucassen 1980 (p. 14, data for 1610), and the number of ships estimated by us (ships between Europe and Asia taken as a mean of the movements 1609-1611 in DAS, which is 13 per annum, together with an estimated 20 ships for the intra-Asian routes). Navy: Van Vliet 2003 (p. 52). Herring fisheries and whaling: Van Bochove 2004 and Van Bochove and Van Zanden 2006, respectively.

35

36

Jelle van Lottum and Jan Lucassen

Appendix 2. The cross-section of 1635 Destination/Type of shipping Baltic Norway Northern Germany and Denmark Southwestern England Northern England/Scotland Northwestern France Western France Southwestern France Portugal Russia Mediterranean Total European

No. of ships 400 350 150 100 50 10 140 300 ? 50 200

Avg. lasts per ship 100 100 20 40 30 20 40 83.3 ? 120 150

Avg. crew size 12 10 4 8 6 8 8 13 ? 16 24

Total crew 4,800 3,500 600 800 300 80 1,120 3,900 1,000 800 4,800

1,750

21,700

West Indies and Africa East Indies

280 54

14,000 3,500

Total colonial and long-distance

334

17,500

Navy Herring fisheries Whaling Other sea fisheries

641 13 ?

Grand total

[2,738]

30 ? ?

13 61 ?

10,000 8,333 798 ? 58,331

Notes and sources For the estimate of 1635, we have again used the official regulated ratio between crew and number of lasts. For the 300 ships to Southwestern France the source unfortunately does not provide the number of lasts per ship, but this could be derived from the tax yield given in the source itself. Portugal is missing in the source, which is sad given its importance at the end of the century (see Appendix 3, below). We decided to add a flat estimate of 1,000 seamen (cf. Antunes 2004, p. 95). West Indies and West Africa: Postma and Enthoven 2003, (p. 402, Table 14.2, data for 1650); our estimated average crew-size is 50 men (cf. Enthoven 2005, 161). East Indies: crew according to Bruijn-Lucassen 1980 (p. 137: data for 1625) and number of ships according to Gaastra 2003 (p. 85: 35 ships on intra-Asian routes) and DAS (ships between Europe and Asia taken as a mean of the movements 1624-1626, which is 19 per annum). Navy: our estimate based on Van Vliet 2003 (pp. 52 and 56) and Bruijn 1993 (p. 56). Herring fisheries and whaling: Van Bochove 2004 and Van Bochove and Van Zanden 2006, respectively.



Six cross-sections of the Dutch maritime labour market

Appendix 3. The cross-section of 1694 Destination/Type of shipping Baltic Norway Northern Germany and England France Portugal Russia Mediterranean and Spain Total European

No. of ships 400 300 ? 550 65 38 80

Lasts per ship ? ? ? 40 200 150 ?

Avg. crew size

Total crew

12 11 ? 8 25 16 50

4,800 3,300 1,000 4,400 1,625 608 4,000

1,433

19,733

West Indies and Africa East Indies

93 115

4,650 8,500

Total colonial and long-distance

208

13,150

Navy Herring fisheries Whaling Other sea fisheries

321 80 325

Grand total

[2,376]

30 ? ?

13 42 7

10,000 4,173 3,377 2,275 52,708

Notes and sources We have combined the three sources mentioned in the main text above to achieve the best possible results. The following caveats should be noted. The figures for the Baltic deviate strongly with what could be seen as acceptable, since the source mentions 1,000-1,200 ships. It is possible, however, that the author confused the number of journeys through the sound with the actual number of ships involved. If we take three passages through the sound as an average, the number of ships would stand at around 400 – a number that corresponds very well with the Sound Toll Registers. For Norway we have derived the number of ships, as well as the crew-size from the source; the exaggerated tonnage is, however, left out in our estimate. Unfortunately data for Northern Germany and England are missing in this source. We have decided to add a flat estimate of 1,000 crew. With regard to the shipping to France, the source only mentions 500-600 ships to La Rochelle. We take this for France as a whole. The trade with Portugal involved a considerable number of people and fortunately a combination of the three sources mentioned in the main text allows for an estimate of employment on this route. We have combined the 40-50 ships to Setubal of the ‘Traité’ and the 1712 printed edition with the 20 ships to Porto and Lisbon and with the tonnage of the ‘Mémoire’. This produces a figure consistent with other data given for Portugal (see Antunes 2004, pp. 95, 166, 174 and the Appendix 4, below). West Indies and West Africa: Postma and Enthoven 2003 (p. 406, Table 14.3, data for 1700). East Indies: crew according to Bruijn and Lucassen 1980 (p. 137, data for 1687/8) and number of ships according to Gaastra 2003 (p. 85, 80 ships on intra-Asian routes) and DAS (ships between Europe and Asia taken as a mean of the movements 1687-1689, which is 35 per annum). Navy: our estimate based on Bosscher 1977 (pp. 361, 386), Bruijn 1993 (p. 93: 9,500 in 1688), and Prud’homme van Reine 2003 (p. 126). Herring fisheries according to Van Bochove 2004 and Van Bochove and Van Zanden 2006. Whaling according to Van Bochove and Van Zanden 2006.

37

38

Jelle van Lottum and Jan Lucassen

Appendix 4. The cross-section of 1785 Destination/Type of shipping

No. of ships

Lasts per ship ? ? ? ? ?

Avg. crew size ? ? ? ? ?

Total crew ? ? ? ? ?

Baltic, Norway and Russia England France Portugal and Spain Mediterranean

1,176 588 189 126 42

Total European

2,121

25,000

West Indies and Africa East Indies

200 79

6,000 9,750

Total colonial and long-distance

279

15,750

Navy Herring fisheries Whaling Sea fisheries

156 82 232

Grand total

[2,870]

30 ? ?

13 42 7

10,000 2,028 3,444 1,624 57,846

Notes and sources Van der Oudermeulen’s lengthy report has a very complicated structure which we have tried to systematize by taking the following steps: (a) Van der Oudermeulen starts with a detailed list of numbers of ships with their average lasts, based on the ports of registry in the northern part of the province of Holland (including Amsterdam) and in the provinces of Friesland and Groningen. (b) From van der Oudermeulen’s total number of ships for the province of Holland and of the Republic as a whole we can also deduce the rough numbers for the ports in the Southwest. These are consistent with taxation data provided by De Vries 1968 (pp. 185-93). (c) If we accept that the subdivision of the European merchant marine for the province of Holland on the basis of incoming ships (whereas he supposes that three quarters of them are Dutch) is representative for the Republic as a whole, we can also arrive at numbers of ships per branch for the country as a whole. (d) Van der Oudermeulen provides us with a total number of seamen, alas without explanation but apparently based on supposed relationships between ships, tonnages and crew. As far as we can see these look reliable, inter alia because they are consistent with Appendix 5 hereafter. For the other branches (colonial merchant marine and fisheries) we rely on modern data, which in general are more or less consistent with the data provided by van der Oudermeulen – which raises his credibility. The navy is the only branch he does not discuss. West Indies and West Africa: Postma and Enthoven 2003 (p. 406, Table 14.3) and Enthoven 2005 (p. 161); East Indies: crew according to Bruijn and Lucassen 1980 (p. 137, data for 1780) and number of ships according to Gaastra 2003 (p. 88: 32 ships on intra-Asian routes) and DAS (ships between Europe and Asia taken as a mean of the movements 1778-1780, which is 47 per annum). Navy: our estimate based on Bruijn 1993 (p. 197). Herring fisheries according to Van Bochove 2004 and Van Bochove and Van Zanden (2006). Whaling according to Van Bochove and Van Zanden 2006).



Six cross-sections of the Dutch maritime labour market

Appendix 5. The cross-section of 1827 Destination/Type of shipping Baltics Norway Northern Germany and Denmark England France Portugal Russia Mediterranean Other destinations Total European

No. of ships 168 190 182 154 174 60 152 27 442

Lasts per ship

Avg. crew size

Total crew

36 42 26 40 49 48 60 68 70

4 5 3 5 6 6 7 8 8

734 958 575 747 1,035 348 1,107 220 3,698

1,549

9,422

West Indies and Africa–Holland West Indies and Africa (based) West Indies and Africa total East Indies–Holland East Indies (based) East Indies total

108 60 168 52 47 99

2,160 900 3,060 2,080 940 3.020

Total colonial and long-distance

277

Navy Herring fisheries Whaling Other sea fisheries

175 5 31

Grand total

[2,027]

210 30 300 83

20 15 40 20

6,080 30 ? ?

15 42 7

5,500 2,625 210 217 24,054

Notes and sources Drieling departs from figures for incoming and outgoing ships in Dutch ports according to nationality. Because of the unification of the Netherlands and Belgium between 1814 and 1830 we first have to deduct ships that were registered in Belgian ports. Furthermore, Drieling bases his estimates of total crew size only on the crew: ton ratio of Dutch ships registered in French and English ports (Drieling 1829, p. 33). This seems reasonable for the European merchant marine but not for Dutch ships operating elsewhere. The data for the colonies have to be split between the voyages from Holland to the colonies vv. and the voyages within the Indonesian Archipelago and within the Dutch West Indies. As to the first section: there were 52 ships for Holland-East Indies vv. based on Drieling (p. 57), with an average of 40 men per ship (Davids 1997, p. 48) and 108 ships Holland-West Indies vv. (pp. 64-68). For the West Indies an average crew-size of 20 has been adopted, based on the difference in size between East and West Indiamen for earlier years (where on average the ships bound for the East sailed with twice as many men). The average burden of the latter ships is also based on Drieling 1829. For the intra insular shipping in the Dutch East Indies, Mansvelt 1939 (p. 10) gives an average of 47 Dutch ships during the years 18251829. Based on Knaap 1996 and Sweijs 1858/1859 (see appendix 6, below) we suggest that ships plying the Indonesian waters had an average crew size of 20. The average tonnage is

39

40

Jelle van Lottum and Jan Lucassen also based on Sweijs 1858/1859. We do not have data for the Dutch ships based in the West Indies. Because of this lack of figures we have simply copied the 60 Dutch-owned ships with their crew from the next cross-section (see Appendix 6, below). Drieling gives figures for whaling and fishing but not for the navy. For the herring fisheries we, however, follow Poulsen 2006. For the Navy our estimate is based on Van Dissel 2003, 255 (4,677 in 1830 excluding the ‘colonial navy’. For the colonial navy see Kuipers 1999 (pp. 25-28), he mentions 34 ‘Kruisprauwen’ in 1821.



Six cross-sections of the Dutch maritime labour market

Appendix 6. The cross-section of 1850 Destination/Type of shipping Total European

No. of ships 1,481

West Indies and Africa–Holland West Indies and Africa (based) West Indies and Africa total East Indies–Holland East Indies (based) East Indies total

108 60 168 100 44 144

Total colonial and long-distance

312

Navy total Herring fisheries Whaling Other sea fisheries

144 0 ?

Grand total

Lasts per ship

[1,937]

210 30 300 83

Avg. crew size

Total crew

6

9,034

20 15 40 20

2,160 900 3.060 4.000 880 4.880 7,940

? 0 ?

13 0 ?

6,989 1,872 0 ? 25,835

Notes and sources The number of seamen employed in the European fleet is based on Wijnne’s account of the Dutch shipping during the period 1846-1860. Wijnne mentions a total of 1,792 ships under the Dutch flag (p. 76). To obtain the scale of European shipping, we first determined the number of ships that sailed to and inside the East and West Indies (see below) and subsequently subtracted this number from the total number of Dutch ships given by Wijnne; the residue (1,793-312=1,481) is our estimate of intra-European shipping. To come to an estimate of the number of people employed on this intra-European fleet we used the average crew-size for the year 1827 (c.6 per vessel). Also for ships sailing between Holland and the colonies we took the same ratios as used for 1827 (40 men per ship for East Indiamen, and 20 for West Indiamen). Since there are no estimates available for 1850, the number of ships between the West Indies and Holland is extrapolated from 1829, the number of ships between the East Indies and Holland is based on Davids 1997 (p. 48), the tonnage is based on Drieling (1829). For Dutch-owned ships registered in Indonesian ports the tonnage is according to Sweijs 1859 and 1860 for a slightly lower number of ships than in Mansvelt 1939; on average a Dutch owned ship under Dutch flag based in Indonesia carried 168 ton and steamships 154 ton. The number of sailors per ship according to Knaap 1995 (p. 36), whose information is based on the late 18th century: tall ships of on average 500 lasts needed 1 man per 5 last or 1 men per 10 ton, whereas ships ranging from 100 to 200 lasts needed 1 man per 6 ton and smaller ships of 50 lasts even 1 man per 2 ton. If we apply these figures on the ca. 50 individual sailing ships for which we have data in 1858/1860 (Sweijs) this boils down to ca. 20 men per ship. We suppose that this also goes for the steamships. We used Sweijs 1859 (pp. 137-139) to acquire the number of Dutch rigged vessels present in the West Indies, whereas the number of ships based in Surinam are according to Sweijs 1864. The number of men per ship in the West Indies (15) is analogous to Knaap 1995 (p. 36) and is based on his information on the average number of sailors on a schooner, the most frequently used vessel in the West Indies. For the herring fisheries

41

42

Jelle van Lottum and Jan Lucassen we have used data provided by Poulsen 2006. For the Navy our estimate of 5.749 men is based on Van Dissel 2003 (p. 255), in 1850 excluding the ‘colonial navy’; for the latter see Kuipers 1999 (pp. 25-28), who mentions 5 schooners and 54 ‘Kruisprauwen’, totalling 10 European and 1.240 Indonesian shipmates in 1850.



On maritime labour and maritime labour markets in Germany, 1700-1900 Heide Gerstenberger – University of Bremen

i. Introduction: The limits of pre-modern German seafaring From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century the development of seafaring and hence of maritime labour markets in the German seafaring states1 was closely linked with the development of international law concerning the right to navigate the seas. This law – like any international law – was the outcome of power contests. If, from the sixteenth century onwards, German seafaring states were too weak to participate in this brokerage of power then they were nevertheless affected by the results. This article will focus on one of the reactions to changes in the Law of the Sea: the transition from custom to regulation in maritime labour and maritime labour markets. In the later middle ages, German towns had formed the Hanse (or Hanseatic League) in order to further the interests of local merchants. They bought privileges in foreign countries and they organized the military potential to defend these interests. Already in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Hanse merchants had made use of convoys as well as of sea-blockades to safeguard their position.2 By these means they had been able to not only fend off ‘pirates’3 but also any other attempt to encroach on their supremacy over the intermediate trade of Northern Europe. During the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries the Hanse was able to uphold its dominance in the North and Baltic Seas, but this position became endangered as soon as the interests of their potential competitors came to be defended by ships carrying artillery and by the nuclei of modern navies.4 While the military power of the Hanseatic League was effective enough until the beginning of the sixteenth century, the

1  By ‘German seafaring states’ I mean all the states which later became part of the Reich, regardless of the fact that some of them, for shorter or longer periods, belonged to foreign powers or today no longer belong to Germany. If the laws of those powers that conquered German regions were not wholly without influence and were sometimes made use of by locals, the link between the official (foreign) government and local developments was mainly fiscal. 2  K. Fritze and G. Krause claim that they invented these means of maritime warfare. See Fritze and Krause, Seekriege der HANSE. Das erste Kapitel deutscher Seekriegsgeschichte (Berlin, 1997), p. 188. 3  ‘Pirate’ in this period was a political definition. A pirate was somebody who was caught by people who, very often, practiced the same forms of robbery at sea when they saw a chance to. 4  P. Heinsius, ‘Anfänge der deutschen Marine’, Die erste deutsche Flotte, ed. W. Hubatsch (Herford and Bonn, 1981), p. 6.

43

44

Heide Gerstenberger

towns were not in a position to meet the fiscal or organizational requirements of maritime warfare which became necessary when rising territorial powers put some of their means into the modernization of their military potential. Having lost its supremacy at sea, the League could no longer uphold its position ashore. Former privileges of the Hanse towns in their outposts were abolished or severely curtailed. This loss of maritime military power and the ensuing loss of many trading privileges was the beginning of the end of the League. Its definite break-up came in the middle of the seventeenth century.5 After that time – for more than a century and a half thereafter – German merchant seafaring was more or less reduced to coastal traffic in nearby regions. Some German merchant ships still crossed the Baltic Sea to Scandinavia or to Russia, others went to England or to ports on the coasts of France and Spain, but only a very few ventured into the Mediterranean where pirates from the North African coasts had developed the business of capturing ships in order to enslave their crews.6 If this misfortune befell local seamen then church congregations, relatives, and friends usually managed to collect the ransom for them. In some German port towns, notably in Hamburg and Bremen, socalled ‘Sklavenkassen’ (slave funds) were set up in order to pay for the freedom of enslaved sailors, but in Danzig (Gdansk), for example, the local authorities opposed the establishment of such a fund when a few adventurous shipowners petitioned for one in 1750. The authorities did not think it wise for Gdansk shipowners to run the risk of having to pay ransom to the Bey of Algiers.7 The problem of piracy was aggravated by the fact that no German seafaring state could yet make use of any diplomatic personnel for negotiations with the rulers of the Barbary states. They therefore had to ask English or French consuls to negotiate the freedom of their enslaved countrymen. Since neither the former members of the Hanseatic League nor any of the small German principalities were in a position to take part in the competition for military dominance at sea, the principle of mare clausum totally excluded German merchants from overseas adventures. (It is no accident that the endeavours of the Duke of Brandenburg to establish a stronghold on the west coast of Africa in 1683 were very short lived.) As far as dominion was 5  On the decline of the Hanse see P. Dollinger, La Hanse (XIIe – to XVIIe siècles) (Paris 1964); and Fritze and Krause, Seekriege der HANSE, pp. 426-77, 142-87. 6  D.J. Starkey, ‘Pirates and Markets’, The Market for Seamen in the Age of Sail, Research in Maritime History, 7, ed. L.R. Fischer (St John’s, Newfoundland, 1994), p. 62. 7  E. Ciślak, ‘Die Erbeutung des Schiffes «Augustus III» durch Piraten und die Probleme der Danziger Seefahrt in der Mitte des 18. Jh.’, Das Handwerk der Seefahrt im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung, ed. H. Gerstenberger and U. Welke (Bremen, 1995), pp. 59-68.



On maritime labour and maritime labour markets in Germany, 1700-1900

concerned, the seas in the early modern period were considered to be just like land: open to conquest. This especially held true for claims to monopolize trade and plunder in certain overseas regions and to deny freedom of navigation in the waters that connected them with the European claimants. Though these respective rights – in England they came to be formalized in the so-called Navigation Laws of 1651 and 1660 – were difficult to enforce, alien shipowners acting without permission nevertheless ran considerable risks if they tried to encroach on zones of monopoly control. ii. Maritime labour in the Duchy of Oldenburg In short, then, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries German merchant seafaring was more or less reduced to coastal seafaring in nearby regions. It will therefore never be possible to even roughly outline German maritime labour markets before the second or third decades of the nineteenth century. It is not lack of research but lack of data which explains why German maritime historians have been more or less absent from the growing debate on the structures and functioning of maritime labour markets in Northern Europe from the seventeenth century onwards. Merchants and masters in German port towns knew all that they needed to know about their local maritime labour markets. Their knowledge was commensurate with the localized character and limited scale of shipping. Without the stimulus of overseas projects or naval recruitment, there was no development of bureaucracy or statistical interest in the number of seafarers from merchant ships who could possibly be enlisted in times of war. So all that can be offered are glimpses.8 I will give two examples in this paper. The first will demonstrate that the local character of recruitment did not always go uncontested. In the early decades of the eighteenth century, the sailors in Wismar, a small port town in Mecklenburg, formed a union in order to defend their monopoly in the local maritime labour market. In 1744 this Bootsleute-Kompagnie appealed to the royal court in Sweden for a decree to the effect that no master should be allowed to take on any ‘foreign’ (meaning out of town) sailor in spring before all the local seamen had found a ship.9 They pointed out – but we do not have to take their word for it – that such was the practice in all the other port towns around the rim of the Baltic. The decree 8  Unsurpassed – and probably the best that German maritime historians will be able to deliver on these questions – is Jürgen Brockstedt’s analysis of the development of maritime regions. J. Brockstedt, ‘Seefahrende an deutschen Küsten im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung (1815-1914)’, Seefahrt an deutschen Küsten im Wandel, 1815-1914, ed. J. Brockstedt (Neumünster, 1993), pp. 15-38. 9  In the period 1648-1815 Mecklenburg belonged to Sweden.

45

46

Heide Gerstenberger

was not forthcoming and, instead, the conflict went on for almost a century. In 1824 the local authorities decided that a muster of the local sailors should be held every year, fourteen days before carnival. It was to be a unique experience. All local sailors were to come in person to the rooms of the SchifferCompagnie. There the masters would inform each other about the skills and the behaviour of everyone. Only after all the local men with a good report were hired were masters allowed to take on seamen from out of town. This, of course, not only discriminated against foreign sailors but also against young men in Wismar who had not yet been engaged for a voyage and therefore could not prove to be skilled. The regulation was constantly circumvented. In 1829 the practice as well as the monopoly was abolished.10 My second example refers to the specific characteristic of German maritime labour markets that stemmed from the region’s political fragmentation. Unlike the very small town of Wismar, maritime labour markets of larger ports were often local and international at the same time; and, moreover, ‘international’ in a less restricted sense than might be applied to the nineteenth or twentieth century. Not only sailors from the North Frisian islands and from villages in northwest Germany, who, at least from the seventeenth century onwards, regularly went to Amsterdam to sign on for whalers or merchant ships, crossed a state border,11 but also many of those who, year after year, walked five or ten miles in order to find themselves a ship. For the latter of course it did not feel that way. Even if men from the Duchy of Oldenburg serving on Bremen ships were ‘foreigners’ who, in theory, should have asked the authorities for a passport, the maritime labour market was fundamentally local or at best regional. Therefore the ‘international’ character of these labour markets did not necessarily provoke administration. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the nineteenth century some of the more important port towns introduced the obligation to have crew members formally entered on a muster roll. Since masters (especially for the second or third voyage of the year) tended to neglect this obligation the data are not reliable enough to really ascertain numbers;12 10  See H. Gerstenberger, ‘Über die Stellung und den Stolz Wismarer Bootsleute’ Wismarer Beiträge, 9 (Wismar, 1993), pp. 45-53. The text is based on archival material in the Archiv der Hansestadt Wismar, especially on STAW, RA, IX, B7 Kaufmannskompagnie; STAW, RA, IX, Bootsleutekompagnie bis 1837; and STAW, Abt. III, Rep.1, Die Prozeßakten des Gewetts, 1790-1820. 11  See all of the articles in Nordfriesische Seefahrer in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. R. Bohn (Amsterdam, 1999); and the autobiography of J.J. Eschels, Lebensbeschreibung eines alten Seemannes (1835: Husum, 1983). 12  This implies certain reservations against the statistics which have been offered by Michael North. Even in Hamburg legal regulation and actual practice of seafaring were not identical. For a rather extended period, therefore, statistics of the Wassershout can at best be used as rough indica-



On maritime labour and maritime labour markets in Germany, 1700-1900

but we can make use of them in order to paint a rough picture of the geographical extent of a certain labour market. We can also try to ‘guestimate’ the percentage of the male population in a certain region that took part in maritime occupations. This is what I have been trying to do for the Duchy of Oldenburg, a small principality bordering the North Sea. If my findings on Oldenburg must be used with caution then they are nevertheless reliable enough to question one of the cornerstones of the social history of German seafaring. It has been common amongst German maritime historians to rely on the research that Emil Fitger conducted for the Verein für Sozialpolitik at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to Fitger until around 1870 ‘whole villages’ in the region of the river Weser were ‘predominantly engaged in seafaring’.13 Reproducing what inhabitants of the region had told him, Fitger stated that not only the sons of poor people but also heirs of farmsteads had usually been to sea for at least a few years. According to him this occupational pattern had only changed at the end of the nineteenth century when more and more industrial workshops in the region offered alternatives. At first sight these findings are more than convincing as far as the Duchy of Oldenburg is concerned.14 It was bordered by the river Weser and the North Sea, and its economy did not offer many alternatives for poor people to make ends meet. This situation was aggravated in the second half of the eighteenth century. From then on many rural families in this region became even poorer than they had been for a very long time. Year after year, therefore, large numbers of men and women, boys and girls left their villages to find seasonal employment. They made bricks in one or other of the nearby villages or went harvesting in Holland. Some – but not very many – went to Holland or Denmark to find a berth on a whaler, a fishing boat or a merchant ship; but most of tions of developments. See M. North, ‘German Sailors, 1650-1900’, ‘Those Emblems of Hell’? European Sailors and the Maritime Labour Market, 1570-1870, ed. P.C. van Royen, J.R. Bruijn, and J. Lucassen, Research in Maritime History, 3 (St John’s, Newfoundland, 1997), pp. 253-66. 13  E. Fitger, Die wirtschaftliche und technische Entwicklung der Seeschiffahrt von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis auf die Gegenwart (Leipzig, 1902), p. 115 (Author’s translation). This thesis has been taken up, for example, by Jürgen Brockstedt, ‘Seefahrende an deutschen Küsten’, pp. 15-39. In 1903 Karl Thieß, once again, endeavoured to analyze the importance of maritime labour in the Weser region. While Fitger had asked the local population Thieß asked the official representatives of agriculture (Landwirtschaftskammern). They confirmed that seafaring could no longer be taken up as a part time occupation but that the connection between the poor rural population and maritime occupations had not yet been dissolved. K. Thieß, Die Seeschiffahrt in ihrer Beziehung zur bäuerlichen Bevölkerung in Deutschland, Schriften des Vereins für Socialpolitik, no. 104, vol. 2, part 1 (Leipzig, 1903). 14  I have not looked into the geographical extent of the maritime labour market east of the river Weser.

47

48

Heide Gerstenberger

those who went looking for seasonal maritime employment either walked to Oldenburg (the capital of the duchy) or to Bremen. Officially they would have needed a passport when they left the duchy, but as far as can be gathered from the remaining data they simply did not bother to obtain one. These practices of seasonal maritime labourers provided the logic for studying muster rolls of ships sailing under the flags of Oldenburg and Bremen. Since they usually contain the birth dates and home villages of sailors, they could be made use of to establish a sort of rough statistical survey of the seasonal maritime labour force in the Duchy of Oldenburg for the years 1815, 1839 and 1855.15 The years were chosen somewhat at random. The year 1815 was the first for which there are ship registers in the archives of both Oldenburg and Bremen. Shortly after the Napoleonic wars the volume of shipping in the German seafaring states was especially modest. We therefore can assume that maritime labour markets were especially local in character. This might have changed when the first wave of emigration to the USA brought a boom to the shipping industry in Bremen. By 1839 this rise was already well under way, and the year was chosen for this reason. For 1855 one can make use of an extensive statistical survey of the Duchy of Oldenburg. The focus of my research was not the seafaring labour markets of Bremen or Oldenburg per se, but rather the connection of the population of the Duchy of Oldenburg with the maritime world.16 In this respect, the first very striking fact is that the participation of the male population between the ages of fourteen and sixty17 in maritime occupations was geographically and socially much more restricted than has hitherto been assumed. Most of the men and boys who sought seasonal labour on a ship out of Oldenburg or Bremen came from 15  The archival sources (from the Staatsarchiv Bremen and the Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv, Abt. Oldenburg) as well as the conclusions are discussed more extensively in H. Gerstenberger, “‘Ganze Dörfer widmeten sich vorwiegend dem seemännischen Beruf”?’, Zur See?, ed. H. Gerstenberger and U. Welke (Münster, 1999), pp. 107-137. 16  This focus has been provoked by debates on ‘coastal societies’ and on ‘North Sea Culture’. I wanted to find at least some material for discussions of ‘coast’ in the sociological sense. 17  If we do find quite a number of boys, aged fourteen, in the registers we hardly find any sailors who were more than forty years old. Assuming that their economic situation would have forced most of them to seek some sort of seasonal labour, I included men up to the age of sixty in the ‘labour force’ of the Duchy. This was taken as the reference data when estimating percentages of maritime labour. Data for labourers leaving the Duchy to seek employment in the VOC, the navy, merchant marine or in whaling in Holland must be collected there. Whenever I found any indication that boys and men from one of the villages in the Duchy left for Holland I have added a certain number to the percentage of the local male population engaged in maritime occupations. This is one of the reasons why the percentages have to be treated with caution. The other derives from the fact that in any official documentation persons are not noted as seasonal labourers but in their quality as landowners, craftsmen and so on.



On maritime labour and maritime labour markets in Germany, 1700-1900

villages that were no more than two miles away from these towns, or else they came from along the corridor of the river Weser where they would have been able to catch a boat to get to town. Hardly any of the seafarers lived more than five miles away from the next port town. There was one notable exception, and this is explicable by the fact that the village minister had made contacts in Holland and encouraged the men of his very poor congregation to make ends meet by taking up seasonal maritime labour there. Hence, year after year, groups of labourers regularly left Neuenkirchen for this reason. This also was one of the two villages where, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, around 25 per cent of the male population between the ages of fourteen and sixty regularly went to sea. This compares with an average of between 5 and 10 per cent in other villages, with occasional annual peaks of 20 per cent. Taking the Duchy of Oldenburg as a whole, the percentage probably never really surpassed 3 per cent. For 1890, when German seafaring was in serious difficulties, the percentage ascertained by an official survey was 1.3 per cent, including men working in the fisheries and aboard boats on the navigable rivers of the region. People who told Fitger that in former times boys and men ‘from every second house’ had gone to sea probably overlooked the marginality of the occupation because seafarers had many things to tell when they got home. That must have given them weight in the local traditions. As far as the overall marginality of maritime occupations is concerned, the Duchy of Oldenburg is not very different to other seafaring states. Charles Boxer found that even at the high points of Portuguese seafaring maritime labour in Portugal had always remained marginal, fragmented and limited in duration.18 Paul C. van Royen has confirmed these findings for all the European seafaring states in the era 1570 to 1870.19 We should add that for at least as long as maritime labour in the Duchy of Oldenburg remained an almost exclusively seasonal occupation it also remained a social practice which was embedded in local tradition. Even if poverty was the main reason for taking up any form of seasonal labour, proximity to a port town does not sufficiently explain the choice of maritime occupation. There were villages close to a port town or navigable river from which men left in spring in order to make bricks or to earn money in haymaking but 18  C.R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415-1825 (London, 1969), pp. 2, 4; cited after P.C. van Royen ‘The “National” Maritime Labour Market: Looking for Common Characteristics’, “Those Emblems of Hell”?, p. 5. 19  Ibid. p. 4.

49

50

Heide Gerstenberger

never tried to earn a living aboard ships. Moreover, villages characterized by maritime labour tended towards specialization in one its branches, whether in merchant seafaring or work aboard the river boats. Not only did sons often keep up the traditions of their fathers, but menfolk also followed local custom, usually leaving their villages in groups and upholding certain rites of adieu when they departed. It is only in the second half of the nineteenth century that we find individual seafarers coming from villages and small towns further inland in the muster rolls of Oldenburg and Bremen ships. By this time more and more ships from these ports had already stopped ‘keeping the season’, and their crews had to adjust to shipmates who spoke in Swabian or Bavarian dialect, some of them not even being Protestant but Catholic. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, maritime culture lost its local footing ashore to become an almost exclusively occupational culture. The advent of steam navigation and the much larger crews that it required only served to confirm this development. iii. From customary to legal regulation As long as German seafaring remained geographically limited and almost exclusively practiced as a seasonal trade there were no modern regulations to speak of. Sometimes local authorities had ordered masters to prevent their men from helping themselves to food and drink from barrels in the hold; but there were no institutions to enforce these decrees. Only in the case of outright theft were local authorities actually supposed to intervene. Theft in this context referred to a sailor who had concluded a contract, received his advance money and then failed to turn up for service. In this event he was to be prosecuted as a thief.20 On the whole, the customs of maritime labour more or less resembled those of any other trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This similarity was deepened by the fact that discipline aboard ships remained intermeshed with the practice of social control ashore, so long, that is, as most seafarers returned home during the winter months and as long as the maritime labour markets were still localized.21 If a seaman behaved badly or dishonourably during a voyage then everybody in his village would be informed about this after the ship’s return in the autumn. Similarly, if any master tried to take on 20  Archival resources are cited in U. Welke, Der Kapitän. Die Erfindung einer Herrschaftsform (Münster, 1997), pp. 185-91. 21  This point has been spelled out in H. Gerstenberger, ‘Men Apart: The Concept of “Total Institution” and the Analysis of Seafaring’, International Journal of Maritime History, 8/1 (1996), pp. 173-82.



On maritime labour and maritime labour markets in Germany, 1700-1900

grand airs then he would find it difficult to assemble an experienced crew for the next sailing season. Conflicts resolved before the elders of a seafarers’ company during the eighteenth century usually concerned economic matters: for example, the extra pay expected by crews if the early advent of winter forced a master to stay in a foreign port during the winter months, or the compensation due to a man who suffered an accident aboard ship. In deciding such matters, the elders sometimes referred to custom, but most of the time they simply applied what they considered to be common sense. Only in larger towns, and especially in Lübeck, do we find express reference to the Hanseatic customs, the so-called Lübisches Recht. Prior to the nineteenth century I have found only one recorded conflict over shipboard discipline that was brought before the elders of a seafarers’ company ashore. In 1744 the elders in Wismar decided that a sailor should pay a fine to the master because he had opposed one of his orders. The Bootsleute-Kompagnie, the local sailors’ organization, took this ruling to be utter nonsense. In a letter to the elders, dated 3 April, they wrote that if strict obedience to any order was to become the custom, ‘any malevolent master’ could use this ‘to command some new duties, such as have never before been asked of sailors. At the end of the voyage he would then report that the sailors had opposed him, and by that means he could pocket the wages of sailors’.22 This opinion, strange as it might appear in hindsight, did indeed reflect the prevailing customs in German seafaring at that time. If in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries custom in the merchant marine no longer aimed at the organization of voyages by associates, as had been the case with earlier North European maritime customs which came to be known under the heading of ‘Rôle d’Oléron’, it was still considered the fundamental right of an experienced seafarer to have his honour respected.23 This included the respect of his seamanship. Just like an artisan ashore, an experienced sailor could and usually did insist on the due recognition of his skills and knowledge. This would have included his right to voice objections against orders that he thought to be inappropriate or likely to endanger the safety of the ship and crew. As late as 1827 judges in Memel refused to punish sailors who refused to go to sea on a ship they thought to be unsafe after it had come out of a storm. They had stood by their own expert knowledge even after the ship had 22  Stadtarchiv Wismar, RA, IX, Bootsleutekompagnie bis 1837 (Author’s translation). 23  This, of course, was not unique to seafaring but part and parcel of any craft custom. On the centrality of the concept of honour see A. Grießinger, Das symbolische Kapital der Ehre (Frankfurt am Main, 1981).

51

52

Heide Gerstenberger

officially been declared seaworthy by local experts before the captain had given the order to cast off.24 Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the position of sailors aboard most German ships was founded not only on tradition but also on a specific economic relationship. It had long been a privilege of seafarers to ship a small amount of goods free of charge with which to conduct business on their own account. This privilege of Führung (voringe) made seamen into parties who had cargo aboard.25 It implied that sailors could demand enough time in port to see to their private affairs, and also that, having signed on for a particular destination, the master could not alter his route without the consent of the crew.26 Since they were allowed by custom as well as by law to carry their own cargoes, seamen could and often did insist that masters kept to the original plan of the voyage. This was especially the case if they had bought fruit or other perishable goods in the expectation of sailing directly to their home port. In some German ports as well as in Sweden (and therefore in Wismar) Führung came either to be prohibited or to be commuted into a money payment from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. It was not so easily eradicated, however. As late as 1830 seafarers in Lübeck complained against losing this privilege, pointing out that ‘from mate to boy’ they gained more from it than from their wages.27 When, in 1823, the criminal court in Stettin (Sczecin) judged a case of disobedience it did not look into the question of Führung, though this was probably the underlying reason why a crew from Swinemünde had forced their master to follow his original plan and return directly home. The judges decided that the sailors had not violated Prussian criminal law. Having to decide a similar case in 1836, the same court pointed out that the Prussian laws did not recognize the crime of mutiny. Shipmasters, just like masters ashore, were authorized to use disciplinary measures, including a ‘moderate chastise’, but criminal courts were not to be involved in conflicts over private labour contracts.28 As long as German seafaring remained overwhelmingly coastal and 24  Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Rep. 120.C, Ministerium für Handel und Gewerbe, Abth. XVII, Fach 3, Nr. 20, Vol. 1 , (pp. 33, 33r). 25  Masters and merchants often complained that sailors transported more than their allowance, using parts of the ship that were needed for stowing other things. See, for example, Stadtarchiv Lübeck, Rep. 49, 5, Kleine Behörde Seemannsamt, Wasserschout Protokolle über Gutachten 18241854 (p. 117). 26  At that time contracts still used to pertain to a ‘voyage’, meaning the voyage from the home port to the other port and back again. Sailors received a certain sum ‘for the voyage’ regardless of the time this may have taken. 27  Ibid. 28  Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Rep. 120., C., Ministerium für Handel und Gewerbe, Abth. XVII, Fach 4, Nr. 7 (p. 49f.).



On maritime labour and maritime labour markets in Germany, 1700-1900

seasonal, so until the end of the eighteenth century and in some places much later than that, German seafarers were not labourers in the modern sense of the word. They were very far from being early proletarians.29 Just like craftsmen ashore, the social position of seamen was not yet completely defined by their capacity to offer labour to a market. Instead, the social relationship of labour was still defined by the fact that sailors as well as masters possessed certain rights (privileges).30 As long as this customary relationship governed the practice of seafaring, sailors did not yet have to serve under captains in the modern sense of the word, under masters who acted as if they were commanders. In some places, however, things had begun to change with the weakening of the British Navigation Laws. Though the formal abolition of these laws did not occur until 1849, the American Revolution had already made them a dead letter. This meant that ships from Prussia could now go to England in order to find cargo for a voyage over the North Atlantic, and ships from Bremen could go to Virginia in order to import tobacco. This did not immediately make a big difference for the organization of shipping and maritime labour in many of the small port towns, but the new situation did have an impact in some of the larger ports, and most of all in Bremen. When, in 1795, shipowners in Bremen first decided to send ships to far-away destinations they asked the authorities for new regulations. They were to be specifically issued for each one of these ships.31 All of them included the prohibition of any private trade. This prohibition extended to captain and crew alike. In Prussia, in 1830, when the government issued special regulations for the ships of the state-owned Königlich Preußische Seehandlung, it was decreed that ‘since these ships are mostly destined for rather long voyages outside of Europe...nobody aboard whosoever is permitted to conduct any trade for his private profit, to buy or sell contraband, nor to agree to the transport of goods, packets or letters without the consent of the captain’.32 The wording of the regulation might be taken as an indication that private trade on shorter voyages was still more or less accepted and not yet prosecuted as smuggling. 29  Marcus Rediker’s hypothesis has simply no base in this historical reality. See M. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge, 1987). 30  This difference, the theoretical importance of which should not to underestimated, is spelled out very clearly by M. Sonenscher, Work and Wages. Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (Cambridge, 1989). 31  Visurgis §15, Staatsarchiv Bremen, 2-r.11.1.10, ‘Prozessuale Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Schiffsführung und Schiffsvolk’. 32  The regulation, dated 15 July 1830 is contained in the Bremer Staatsarchiv, 2-R.11 h.6 (Author’s translation).

53

54

Heide Gerstenberger

While seafaring in Prussia remained more or less customary until at least the 1820s, the new era in Bremen had already started two decades earlier. In 1802 the authorities decided to establish an institution – the Wasserschout – to effectively administer maritime regulations. Hamburg (1691) and Lübeck (1782) had similar offices based to some degree on the model of the Wasserschout in Holland; but the office in Bremen was quite different. While Hamburg’s Wasserschout was primarily designed to combat non-joining seamen who absconded with their advance wages, in Bremen the office was not only given the competency to officially register crews but also to maintain jurisdiction over the maritime labour force. In other words, Bremen’s authorities sought to effectively regulate maritime labour relations. The labour contract, from now on to be officially concluded and documented, was no longer conceived of as being a contract between the master and his men but between ‘the ship’ and its crew. Even if the term ‘Schiffsvolk’ continued in usage for a few more decades, it lost its traditional meaning at a stroke. This is significant. Schiffsvolk, literally meaning ‘the people of the ship’, was derived from the medieval notion of retinue, the following of a nobleman, and did not directly describe a relationship between subject and master. It contained the notion of obedience, but also of reciprocal obligation. These concepts had been deeply inscribed in maritime custom, defining labour relations as personal relationships between the master and his men to be governed by loyalty, the mutual respect of one’s honour and customary rights. When merchants dared to envisage long-distance voyages and tramp shipping these concepts were no longer thought fit to govern the practice of seafaring. Interference from outside the shipboard world was deemed necessary in effecting this transition. Looking back, some of the changes might appear slight. For those concerned they did make a difference, however. Since masters were no longer allowed to take on their men without official registration, menfolk from the Duchy of Oldenburg, for example, would have had to walk to Bremen not only in spring but also before a possible second or third voyage in the year, whereas previously they would often have been able to get aboard somewhere along the river Weser when the ship was already on its way to the North Sea. On each occasion they were now obliged to go to the office of the Wasserschout. There the crews were read the ship’s articles ‘slowly and clearly’33 before clearing to sea, even if they had already heard them once or twice in the same year. These articles included many novelties, amongst them a prohibition against 33  ‘Verordnung den Wasserschout und seine Pflichten betreffend’. Staatsarchiv Bremen 2-R.11.h.6.



On maritime labour and maritime labour markets in Germany, 1700-1900

carrying more tobacco than was necessary for personal use or any other contraband. If somebody was caught with such goods the master was authorized to throw the goods overboard. At the end of the voyage the culprit was to be punished by a deduction from his wages. Repeat offenders were to be struck from the list of Bremen sailors. Removal from the list was not quite as harsh a sanction as it appears, for it was easy enough to cross the state border to look for engagement in one of the other German port towns. Indeed, we should not assume that these regulations were executed to the letter; but we should nonetheless note the important fact that Bremen now had an official register of seamen. In fact the Schout was intended to control as well as register the maritime labour force, and to this end he was given jurisdiction over the various types of workplace conflict that occurred. For example, though masters were still authorized to discharge their crews at the end of a voyage, they were officially forbidden from deducting the wages of seamen who had infringed the articles of agreement. Instead, misdemeanours of this sort had to be reported to the Wasserschout. If the seaman accepted his fine then the proceedings were uncomplicated, but if he objected then the Wasserschout had to settle the dispute. It is from these procedures of arbitration and jurisdiction that we derive much of our knowledge about the realities of work at sea in the nineteenth century. In spite of the fact that the explanations and excuses submitted by seamen were written down (and probably reformulated) by an official, the records offer insights into the notions of right and wrong prevalent among sailors as well as into their concept of an honourable seaman. We invariably have descriptions of any given conflict by at least the two main parties involved, and quite often from one or two more witnesses. Of course these glimpses into life aboard are distorted by the fact that they were occasioned by conflicts. They are also distorted by the fact that there must have been many more conflicts than came to be reported. This assumption is derived from the fact that some masters appear very often in the records while others never reported any offences aboard their ships. In all probability these men were too proud to make it known that their personal authority was not always sufficient to solve disciplinary problems while underway. If a misdemeanour was judged by the Wasserschout to have been ‘severe’, he was not supposed to settle it by fine but was instead ordered to transfer the case to the criminal court. Already in the 1820s authorities in Bremen came to conceive of breach of contract as one of these severe cases. And it no longer made any difference if the advance money had been earned or not. Running away from a ship had traditionally only been considered to be a criminal act

55

56

Heide Gerstenberger

if it implied theft, that is if the advance money had not been earned, but the newly emerging definition treated any unauthorized ending of the contract as a crime, even if the sailor thereby lost all the wages that had already been earned. This behaviour now came to be called ‘desertion’. Without waiting for any new law to be passed, from 1825 onwards the criminal court in Bremen sentenced runaway seamen to prison terms. In order to inform the ‘interested public’ the names of convicted deserters were published in the local newspaper.34 This introduction of a quasi-military concept into the merchant marine was a revolution in German maritime custom. It was provoked by changes in the structure of shipping, more specifically the decline of mare clausum and the resulting new opportunities to engage in direct long-distance voyages or tramping. In order to make possible long periods of tramp shipping the lives and labours of seamen had to be subordinated to the demands of economic competition. Until that time German sailors had been used to the rhythms of seasonal labour, and had been familiar with voyages of a more or less predictable duration. Most of them had followed other occupations besides. When the new regulations removed these certainties, many seamen did not want to accept that from now on they were to be mere instruments of sea transport, to be ordered back and forth in the world according to the windfalls of economic conjuncture. If the interests of shipowners demanded the rapid transformation of the maritime labour market, it was only in Bremen that economic interests were directly translated into the sentences of criminal courts. Unlike Hamburg, Bremen had not revived its former institutions after the end of French occupation. This meant that the Admiralty Court, traditionally responsible for the practice of seafaring according to custom, was not reinstated. Economic interest therefore could reign almost unchecked. In other German states, especially in Lübeck, custom served to protect some traditional seafarers’ privileges for a few more decades, but even there owners were eager to participate in ‘speculations with the best prospects’, namely tramp shipping. As early as 1781 they petitioned for a new regulation, set down formally in writing, so that a master could produce the document before his men if he wanted to proceed further. This, merchants argued, would prevent situations where ‘The sailor wants to go home and the skipper must’. 35 By decreeing that sailors had to stay aboard until the ship came back to Lübeck or until it arrived to any port where men

34  See U. Welke, op.cit., p. 203. 35  Stadtarchiv Lübeck, ASA, Interna, Seesachen 44, 1 (Author’s translation).



On maritime labour and maritime labour markets in Germany, 1700-1900

could be hired for the same wages,36 the authorities in Lübeck tried to balance the interests of seamen with those of shipowners. This approach remained exceptional. The most interesting case, however, is Prussia, well known among historians as a state where industrial regulation was stricter than in any other German state. In Prussia, it was not custom but the principle of equality before the law that, for quite some time, was taken into consideration when it came to solving maritime labour conflicts. Several Prussian courts and high-ranking public servants pronounced that it was not for judges to intervene in private labour contracts. Nobody in Bremen was willing to listen to the Bremen born Prussian consul of the town, Delius, when he tried to convince shipowners that they had to raise the wages given for voyages to non-European destinations if they wanted to prevent seamen from absconding. One of the high Prussian officials seems to have learnt this lesson from him. In 1837 von Beuth wrote: ‘Running away from ship cannot be prevented by law. Its cause is the difference in wages. They are so much higher on English and American ships that sailors cannot resist. In time Prussian shipowners will have to consent to higher wages.’37 Once and again the Prussian consul in London, where many Prussian seamen were informed that their ships would be going on to other destinations rather than returning home, pointed out that this practice was a real hardship for men who had a family and ‘important interests at home’ to look after. He also remarked that the present regulations inevitably produced problems aboard.38 Another official observed that no law in the world would ‘emancipate’ Prussian shipowners from the effects of higher wages in other merchant marines.39 It was only after extended conflicts with its own administrative and judicial personnel that the Prussian government achieved the transformation of maritime labour which was thought to be in the best interests of the industry. In 1854 a special criminal law for seafarers was promulgated in Prussia, declaring any form of disobedience aboard as well as running away before the voyage had come to an end to be a criminal offence. This example was subsequently followed by all those German seafaring states which hitherto had not introduced special criminal laws for seafarers. 36  Ibid. 37  Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Rep. 120.C, Ministerium für Handel und Gewerbe, Abth. XVII, Fach 4, Nr. 27. Vol.2, Betr. ‘Die Verordnung wegen Aufrechterhaltung der Manneszucht auf Seeschiffen und wegen Bestrafung der Vergehungen gegen dieselben, vom 31. März 1841’ (Author’s translation). 38  Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Rep. 120, Ministerium für Handel und Gewerbe, Abth. XVII, Fach 3, Nr. 20, Vol. 4 (p. 98), cited after U. Welke, op. cit., p. 199. 39  For archival sources see U. Welke, op. cit. pp. 199-200.

57

58

Heide Gerstenberger

If seamen sometimes hoped that their ‘desertion’ would be forgotten after a few years they could never be sure. Some of those who fled from the brutality of a master when they had been a ship’s boy later asked for a pardon because they wanted to come home and study for a mate’s certificate. On more than one occasion, however, men who after several years dared to go home were caught and sentenced. This was only possible after maritime labour had been set off from any other modern form of labour by having the contract sanctioned by a special criminal law. By introducing the concept of desertion into merchant seafaring authorities tried to strengthen the interests of shipowners in the maritime labour market. That they did so by regulating labour in the merchant marine after the model of navies was – sometimes – excused by ‘national interest’ in the shipping industry. The concept of absolute command introduced into German merchant seafaring during the nineteenth century was modelled after regulations in foreign navies, but it was also caused by endeavours to shield off German maritime labour markets against foreign competition.40 iv. Conclusion Criminal law that demarcated seafarers from other labourers transformed the maritime labour contract into a relationship between the seafarer and state authority. This explains why sailors who argued that they had only run away because they regularly had been beaten or mistreated in other ways by masters or mates could not expect any leniency. From the introduction of special criminal laws for seafarers until the founding of the Reich in 1871 seafarers on German ships had not only officially lost any traditional privilege, but they were also denied the possibility of appealing to courts against the brutality of a master. Formal alteration of this legal situation in 1872 did not really make much difference. In order to officially accuse a superior one had to wait until the end of the voyage and stay ashore until the trial was opened, by which time any potential witness usually had long since gone back to sea. 41 Until the 40  This statement is in accordance with the analysis of Ulrich Welke. Welke, op.cit., passim. I disagree with Jann Marcus Witt, who – on the basis of autobiographies and material taken from countries with navies and a long tradition of overseas seafaring – once more developed the hypothesis that captains were already ‘masters next to god’ in the early modern period. J.M. Witt, Master next God? Der nordeuropäische Handelsschiffskapitän vom 17. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert, Schriften des Deutschen Schiffahrtsmuseums, 57 (Hamburg, 2001). 41  This point has been stressed by the economist Siegfried Heckscher in one of the Debates of the Verein für Socialpolitic. ‘Verhandlungen des Vereins für Socialpolitic über die Lage der in der Seeschiffahrt beschäftigten Arbeiter’, Schriften des Vereins für Socialpolitic, No. 113 (Leipzig, 1904), p. 74.



On maritime labour and maritime labour markets in Germany, 1700-1900

1960s the civic rights of German seamen existed more in theory than in practice. After that time new regulations, but most of all the shortage of seamen on the labour market, made life and labour aboard German merchant ships a lot easier than it had been. This era of German seafaring only lasted for a very short time.

59

60

Heide Gerstenberger



Swedish naval personnel in the merchant marine and in foreign naval service in the eighteenth century11 György Nováky – Uppsala University

i. Introduction During the eighteenth century Sweden was mostly at peace. The severe setbacks and losses experienced in the Great Nordic War (1700-1720) had once again reduced Sweden to a small nation on the northern fringes of Europe. New social forces started to influence its development and the economy, especially trade, began to expand. However, the military continued to be a major social force even during peacetime. Professor Gunnar Artéus has described the eighteenth century as a period of thorough militarization of society. The different branches of the armed forces employed more than ten per cent of the adult male population of Sweden (including Finland), and a major part of state expenditure went on military needs.2 The role of the armed forces in society during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has recently been the object of new research, underlining social and economic aspects rather than military.3 From this point of view the eighteenth-century Swedish Navy offers interesting possibilities for research. Naval personnel could sell their navigational skills on an international labour market, combining a career in the navy with work abroad or in the merchant marine. The aim of this article is to discover aggregated trends and tendencies in the careers of naval personnel during the eighteenth century by using naval merit lists delivered by them to the Admiralty. ii. Sweden’s naval merit lists In 1732 the Swedish government laid down formal rules for merit lists for persons in naval service. The reason given for this action was the Admiralty’s ambition to appoint the most capable and deserving persons to available positions.4 About two decades later, in 1754, it was decreed that all personnel 1  A version of this article was previously published in Forum Navale. Skrifter utgivna av Sjöhistoriska Samfundet Nr. 62. 2  Gunnar Artéus, Krigsmakt och samhälle i frihetstidens Sverige (Stockholm, 1982), pp. 380-82. 3  See for instance E. Larsson, Från adlig uppforstan till borgerlig utbildning. Kungl. Svenska Krigsakademien 1792-1866 (Uppsala, 2005); and F. Thisner, Militärstatens arvegods. Officerstjänstens socialreproduktiva funktion i Sverige och Danmark, ca 1720-1800, Studia Historica Upsaliensia 230 (Uppsala 2007). 4  Författningssamling för Kongl. Maj:ts flotta, ed. S.W. Günther, vol. 5, 1858, p. 663.

61

62

György Nováky

should submit a merit list every three years. At the same time regulations were made for how to formally construct a list. It was to comprise ‘one column with dates for previous assignments, and a broader column with dates and short descriptions of the character of former assignments’.5 Merit lists or similar accounts were also needed in order to be entitled to pension funds. The Swedish Admiralty had already specified rules for the creation of a retirement fund for navy personnel (Amiralitets krigsmannakassan) in 1642 whereby part of the annual salary was to be paid into the fund by navy personnel. To be eligible for retirement funds the applicant had to have been in the service of the navy for thirty years, made all payments to the fund during active service, and have reached the age of fifty.6 The fund, however, was badly managed, mainly because the Crown frequently used it for more pressing state needs. It was not until the first half of the eighteenth century that the fund reached some stability through a decision by the Diet to guarantee it, and it was only in 1842 that it was properly institutionalized under the auspices of the Admiralty.7 However, since 1642 the fund had been the only source of a possible pension for naval personnel, and as such it was important despite its uncertain financial status. It seems that the merit lists (Flottans Meritförteckningar; hereafter FMF) were used for two purposes: foremost as curriculum vitae while applying for promotion, but also as proof of service certificates in respect of retirement. Many of these lists remain at the Royal War Archives in Stockholm and they allow the interesting possibility of reconstructing the careers of naval personnel. The provenance of the archive is, however, quite uncertain. There are no Admiralty Fund archives; instead the collection has been built through the tireless and industrious work of archivists. Therefore the archive does not cover all personnel, and the amount of documentation varies between individuals. In the best cases we find consecutive merit lists submitted, as demanded, every three years covering an officer’s entire career. For those who served abroad in some capacity during their careers it is not uncommon to find long stories about their experiences, especially the more dramatic ones. Though fascinating, this kind of material can be a distraction from the more mundane, but no less important, information preserved in the lists. In some cases exact dates, ships’ names and even the names of captains, along with certificates from other employers have been added. In less well-documented cases a merit list typically contains short notices of the type of service that the person had been 5  Loc. cit. 6  Författningssamling, vol. 1, 1851, p. 246. 7  Författningssamling, vol. 1, 1851, pp. 223-24.



Swedish naval personnel in the merchant marine and in foreign naval service

involved in, sometimes without any references to time or place. We are told, for example, that Erik Mannerstedt had ‘been several years in foreign service in many positions and sailed many seas’.8 Sometimes we only have a short note from a family member, asking the Admiralty to consider the relative for promotion while he was in foreign service.9 In these cases, without further evidence, one must conclude that either the nominee died before returning home and filing a proper merit list or that he left the navy for other reasons. Naval service was of course perilous: men died in storms or from scurvy and other diseases, and occasionally even in action; but men also left the service for a variety of other reasons. For these men we of course only have their final merit list, and their subsequent career remains unknown. The only printed compilation of eighteenth-century naval staff is Hjalmar Börjeson’s Biografiska anteckningar om Örlogsflottans Officerare 1700-1799, published in 1942. Börjeson’s list contains about 2,000 officers who were appointed during the century, and it is based mainly on ship lists and navy rolls in order to track the service of officers. Börjeson seems to have been able to trace the overwhelming majority of Swedish Navy officers, though he highlights some evidential problems. Source materials for the Gothenburg Squadron are largely missing, for instance.10 A comparison with FMF shows, however, that Börjeson’s compilation lacks 69 persons who became officers during the eighteenth century and who submitted a merit list. On the other hand I have found five people in Börjeson who have not left any trace in the FMF. A second very ambitious list can be found online. Bengt Nilsson has collected just under a thousand names of officers active during the period 1687-1721 by using a variety of primary and secondary sources. Nilsson recognizes problems with the sources and foresees a revision of his list in the future, however his list is of less relevance for this paper as it only covers the period up to the end of the Great Northern War (1700-1721).11 Compared to these compilations the FMF seems quite comprehensive and we might conclude that a majority of at least the officers are represented in the lists. The FMF contains altogether 2,382 persons for the period 1685-1932. Roughly two thirds of these ended their career as officers. A handful of persons appear twice, because of variations in how the name is spelled in differ8  See for instance Flottans Meritförteckningar (M-fiche) [FMF hereafter], K00547 3/11, Erik Mannerstedt. 9  See for instance FMF, K00548 5/9, Petter Fredrik Mittler. 10  H. Börjeson, Biografiska anteckningar om Örlogsflottans Officerare 1700-1799 (Stockholm, 1942). 11  B. Nilsson, Biografica: flottan – en matrikel över flottans officerare 1687-1721. Available online at http://members.tripod.com/Bengt_Nilsson/Biografica/index.htm

63

64

György Nováky

ent merit lists, and these doubles have been removed. The greatest difference in comparison with Börjeson’s and Nilsson’s compilations is that the FMF also contains people who were not and never became officers, either because they did not have the qualifications, were not of suitable social standing, died before an officer’s berth became available, or left the service for other reasons. This fact makes the FMF even more interesting as we get an insight into all kinds of personnel at every stage of a career in the navy. Although far from complete, the FMF archive is substantial and it probably constitutes a representative sample of the Swedish officer corps, and an illustrative sampling of the petty officers and common crew. It must also be noted that the merit lists were the basis for advancement, which means that only persons who envisioned a proper career in the navy bothered to submit them. Therefore the vast majority of crew, often conscripted, are not to be found in the lists – though we should remember that nearly all of those in the lists started their careers as ratings or trainee petty officers. ii. Analysis: Unlocking the potential of the merit lists The FMF archive offers the potential to address a wide range of questions concerning the navy and its personnel. In this paper discussion will be restricted to the character and extent of involvement in the merchant marine as well as in other navies during the eighteenth century. In other words, how rigidly linear was a career in Sweden’s navy in this period, and can its manpower contribution to other sectors be quantified and explained? In Table 1, below, the total population for whom merit lists survive has been divided according to period and type of service. For present purposes I am only concerned with naval personnel who were in active service during the eighteenth century, and more precisely those who served aboard ships. The table clearly shows that the majority of extant merit lists date from the eighteenth century. This reflects the relative importance of merit lists during this period: in the seventeenth century there were no formalized rules for submission, while in the nineteenth century the naval administration became increasingly skilful in administering its personnel, reducing the need for this type of documentation. As noted above the navy employed a wide variety of personnel besides seagoing personnel: artisans in dockyards; ministers; clerks; teachers; lawyers; and so forth. Some of these clerical and support staff served at sea – for instance larger vessels carried artisans, scribes and sometimes even a minister aboard – and these cases have been duly included in the ‘Service on Ships’ category.



Swedish naval personnel in the merchant marine and in foreign naval service

Table 1– The merit list population Activity Total population Active in eighteenth century In service on ships in eighteenth century In other kinds of service

Totals 2,382 1,696 1,377 319

Source: Flottans Meritförteckningar (M-fiche) K00528-K00561.

The table shows altogether 1,696 people who were employed by the navy in the eighteenth century, of whom 1,377 (81.2 per cent) served at sea at some point during their career. In the following analysis I shall concentrate on the experiences of that proportion of the ‘active’ population which can be located in mercantile or foreign naval employment. During peacetime opportunities to partake of these alternative forms of service were formalized through a system of applications for leave, provided that the men concerned served on ships belonging to friendly nations.12 To simplify matters I shall use the term ‘external service’ to cover both types of employment, mercantile and foreign naval. Intra-Baltic merchant shipping is not included in this analysis; this trade is viewed as ‘internal trade’, comparable to inland and coastal shipping in Sweden. The merit lists are even less specific when it comes to experiences in national and intra-Baltic navigation. Most of them only superficially mention service on merchant ships employed in the Baltic trades. These vessels tended to be very small, and sailing on them was, it seems, seldom considered worthy of merit to the navy. Probably it is for this reason that the merit lists deal very briefly, if at all, with Baltic navigation. Service with a foreign navy and long-distance shipping (defined as navigation to destinations beyond the Sound) were held in higher esteem, however. Evidently it was important for men to record these forms of service and to ensure that they were acknowledged by the naval authorities. Those who are mentioned in the merit lists as having undertaken external service are enumerated in Table 2, below. More than two fifths of all seafaring personnel fell into this category, indicating that career breaks from domestic naval service were fairly common. I have with certainty been able to establish the final rank achieved for 569 of the 583 men.13 Of these 448 reached the rank of officer while 121 served as petty officers. This group will be the main subject of investigation. 12  Författningssamling, vol. 6, 1859, pp. 134-74. 13  Börjeson, Biografiska Anteckningar, has been used to establish the final rank for officers.

65

66

György Nováky

Table 2 – The leave-taking population during the eighteenth century Activity Total seagoing service Total external service % External service

Total engaged 1,377 583 42.34

Source: Flottans Meritförteckningar (M-fiche) K00528-K00561.

iii. Patterns of external service: When, what and where? The first issues to be addressed concern the temporal dimensions of external service among Swedish naval personnel. Temporal distribution can be approached from three different vantage points. First, how were periods of external service generally distributed over the eighteenth century? Second, at which point in their careers and at what age did men embark on these forms of employment? Third, for how long did they stay, and what proportion did this represent of their total careers? The last point applies in particular to individuals who completed multiple periods of external service. Permission to leave the navy was, for understandable reasons, granted only during peacetime when Sweden did not need its men in active service. However, the Admiralty was not always able to recall all men from abroad if they were needed, although the rapidly expanding Swedish consular service was probably used for this purpose.14 Additionally, permission was sometimes given for service on allied ships even during times of war. There were, for instance, several men in Dutch naval service during the Great Northern War.15 Figure 1, below, is based on the merit lists of 583 people and it shows the absolute number of individuals that were absent each year. It certainly would have been useful to compare the number of persons in external service with the total manpower of the navy, but it is difficult to establish overall figures. Instead I have used the tonnages of the Swedish battle fleet computed by Jan Glete, and an estimate of the amount of officers in the navy made by Sten Carlsson. A few comments should be made about these data. The number of naval staff in external service is presented in absolute figures, however, the precise dates of absence are impossible to establish; parts of a year have therefore been counted as a whole year. Only those whose absence has been possible to 14  For the consular system in general see L. Müller, Consuls, Corsairs and Commerce: The Swedish Consular Service and Long-Distance Shipping, 1720-1815 (Uppsala, 2005). 15  See for instance FMF, K00529, 9/19, Johan Björck; FMF, 00529 9/14 David Ankarloo; and FMF, 00554 9/11, Paul Stolt.



Swedish naval personnel in the merchant marine and in foreign naval service

Number of Officers

Persons and thousands of tons

Figure 1 – Naval personnel in external service – General distribution and comparisons

Number

Tonnage

Officers

Sources: Flottans Meritförteckningar; J. Glete, Navies and Nations. Warships, Navies and Nation Building in Europe and America 1500-1860, vol. 2 (Stockholm, 1993), pp. 608-10; S. Carlsson, Ståndssamhälle och ståndspersoner (Lund, 1973), pp. 107-9.

establish with reasonable accuracy have been included. Tonnage is presented as a trend line based on displacement figures for every fifth year. The number of officers is presented as a trend line based on 10 observations, omitting the year 1717 because of an administrative reorganization which gives distorted figures for 1717-1719. As Figure 1 shows, annual absences were few up to 1718, but started to increase in the 1720s. The low participation in external service during the first quarter of the eighteenth century can certainly be explained by war. There was a need to regroup Sweden’s forces after the catastrophic battle of Poltava in 1709 when the entire field army was lost and Denmark re-entered the war. The troops that were left, both in the army and the navy, were needed at home. The low turnover of merit lists in the same period, however, may also be a result of the unclear rules governing their form and submission prior to 1734. In fact, the first datable merit list in the sub-group of 583 men was delivered by Lieutenant Jonas Hamborgh in 1717.16 Even though the FMF is less reliable for the duration of the Northern War, it has been included in Figure 1 because it shows a distinct increase in external service between 1700 and 1708. 16 

FMF, K00538 4/8, Jonas Hamborgh.

67

68

György Nováky

In 1700 Swedish troops, supported by the Dutch and English fleets, attacked Denmark and delivered a severe blow against the Danes in Humlebaek on Zealand. With Denmark neutralized Charles XII could focus his attention on Russia and after the Swedish victory at Narva the king’s attention was directed towards Poland. By 1702 the main army was in place in Lithuania and naval actions were reduced. Thus, naval actions were relatively few at least until 1709 when Denmark re-entered the war. The growth in external service in the period 1703-1709 may well be a function of the navy’s relatively modest employment. Variations in the extent of external service shown in Figure 1 are actually most easily explained by periods of peace and war. For instance, during the Hats’17 disastrous Russian War (1741-1743) we can see a reduction in participation, followed by a sharp increase after the war’s conclusion. The same happened during the Pomeranian War against Prussia (1757-1762), though the numbers did not recover as quickly as before. The next sharp decrease occurred during Gustav III’s Russian War (1788-1790) when hardly any officers were in external service, and again this decline was not immediately followed by recovery after the war. In attempting to set the FMF figures in context, it is clear from Figure 1 that the tonnage of the Swedish battle fleet remained relatively stable during the entire century. There was a build-up before the 1788-90 war in which the navy played a key role, but apart from that there were no significant changes. One might therefore expect to find that overall manpower levels were also stable, yet the number of officers per tonne rose slowly but steadily, a trend that must surely have been repeated among petty officers. Tentatively, since we lack total manning figures for the navy, it might be concluded that between 1720 and 1758 a sizeable proportion of the navy’s manpower was in external service at any given point in time. In the peak year of 1746 this amounted to 108 men, 32 of whom were officers, 72 petty officers and four unknown. The 1743 observation for the total officer corps gives a strength of 211 men, and extrapolating between the two suggests that as many as 15 per cent of Sweden’s naval officers were absent on external service at this time. For petty officers a comparison of this kind cannot be made, but there is no reason to doubt a similarly significant rate of absence in these peak years of external service. Thereafter, from around 1756 onwards, there was relative and absolute decline in absences abroad. I shall return to this point later on.

17  The ‘Hats’ (hattarna) were a political party during the Age of Liberty; their opponents were called the ‘Caps’ (mössorna).



Swedish naval personnel in the merchant marine and in foreign naval service

The second temporal dimension to be addressed is career structure. At which point(s) of their careers did people leave for external service? It must be borne in mind that the merit lists record all external service, including any that occurred prior to joining the navy. Many of the navy’s higher ranking petty officers like skippers and masters were directly recruited from the merchant marine and they certainly had many years of experience beforehand. The reason for recording previous maritime experience in merit lists was that navigation, especially outside the Baltic, was considered an advantage when applying for promotion. These were also the people who for one reason or another decided to stay in naval employ rather than returning to their former work in the merchant marine. Figure 2, below, illustrates when members of the external service sub-group were first granted leave of absence in relation to their employment or service in the navy. A total of 132 men joined the navy after having served in some other branch of shipping, and the majority (418 men) undertook external service after enrolling. The honour of the longest pre-naval career at sea fell to Lars Ljungbohm who became mate in 1781 at the age of 51. By then he had worked in various capacities for almost forty years, since 1742.18 At the other extreme we find Christian Georg von Schantz who enlisted in 1744 as a thirteen yearold and who after 33 years of service spent three years (1777-1779) as a Capitain de Vaisseaux in the French Navy.19 Although the first assignment in external service is quite widely distributed relative to enlistment in the navy, it seems that the majority of people joined the Swedish Navy first, and only later, usually after several years, went onto other things. The usual point of departure was from 1 to 12 years after joining the navy. Around 64 per cent of the group did exactly that. As will be seen in Figure 3, below, the patterns of age distribution for naval entry and external service are very similar. The only difference is the average age of the two categories. The average age for men entering naval service was 16 (16.29) years, the bulk of men having enlisted between the ages of 8 and 25. There are a few examples of enrolment in the navy before the age of seven (9 persons). Many of the very young were entered onto the navy rolls (or the infantry rolls) by their parents. Nobility in some cases ensured a child’s future career in this way, by using contacts, and perhaps money, but the active phase of their employment did not start until sometime later. The average age of commencement in external service was slightly higher at 20 (19.9), and the 18  FMF, K00546 1/9, Lars Ljungbohm. 19  FMF, K00552 3/10, Christian Georg von Schantz.

69

György Nováky

Figure 2 – First time of absence before/after entering naval service [N=552]

Number of persons

70

Years in service

Figure 3 – Age of enrolment in the navy [N=488] and first engagement in external service [N=493] 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

1

4

7

10

13

16

19

22

25

28

Age in external service

31

34

37

40

43

46

49

Age in Navy

Source: Flottans Meritförteckningar (M-fiche) K00528-K00561.

majority of those who entered were between the ages of 13 and 26. In the merchant marine it was common to start at the age of 7 or 8 as a cabin-boy (kajutvakt) or a deck hand (jungman, skeppsgosse). The third question of ‘when’ refers to the time spent in external service. The



Swedish naval personnel in the merchant marine and in foreign naval service

Figure 4 – Number of years in external service [N=576] 140

Number of persons

120 100 80 60 40 20 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Years

Source: Flottans Meritförteckningar (M-fiche) K00528-K00561.

vast majority of the group referred to here (421 out of 576) secured only one leave of absence from the navy for this purpose. A total of 126 men were in external service twice and the rest (31 men) were in external service three times or more. Anders Henrik Roman was the only person who was employed five times in external service. He was born in 1733 and joined the navy as a volunteer in 1751. Just before enlisting he had served aboard a Swedish merchant ship sailing to the Mediterranean and on another Swedish ship as gunner’s mate (konstapel) sailing to ‘foreign places’. After serving four years in the Navy he departed with a Swedish East Indiaman to Canton as helmsman and mate in training. He obtained his officer’s certificate in 1758, and was appointed lieutenant in 1760. In 1766 he rejoined the Swedish East India Company and made three journeys to China as second and first mate. Eventually he rose to the rank of major, but left the navy in 1774 – rather embittered, it seems, as he claimed to have been passed over for officer’s assignments on several occasions while absent from active naval service.20 Roman was unique in the length of his time away. Figure 4, above, suggests that a typical period of absence was two to three years, which corresponds with the standard leave granted by the navy, which was also three years.21 But it was not uncommon for men to stay away longer, either in one spell of leave or in several shorter periods. Altogether 456 persons (79.1 per cent) remained in external service up to eight years. 20  FMF, K00551 1/9, Anders Henrik Roman. See also Börjeson, Biografiska anteckningar, p. 159. 21  Författningssamling, vol. 6, 1859, pp. 134-74.

71

72

György Nováky

Table 3 – Breakdown of external service by type of assignment Type of service Swedish merchant marine Dutch merchant marine Dutch navy British merchant marine British navy French merchant marine French navy Spanish navy American merchant marine American navy German merchant marine Prussian navy Maltese merchant marine Italian merchant marine Portuguese merchant marine Portuguese navy Other Total merchant ships Total naval ships Grand total

No. of assignments 444 207 104 125 54 19 38 2 6 1 7 2 3 4 1 1 19 816 202 1,037

Source: Flottans Meritförteckningar (M-fiche) K00528-K00561.

The second means of analyzing the FMF data is to consider the type of activity engaged in by naval personnel during their absences. This task of distinguishing between merchant or naval service presents a number of problems. As noted above, the merit lists are occasionally very detailed: some carefully specify the ships’ and masters’ names, the dates and ports of departure and arrival, and the positions held aboard. Many merit lists at the very least provide dates, ships’ nationalities and the general regions of operation. Then again, in some cases only approximate periods and locations of activity are recorded. In these cases I have assumed that a ship’s nationality corresponds with the port of departure. Transports occurred occasionally, when a person was on his way to or from an external assignment. Anders Henrik Asping, for instance, was attacked by the French near New York in 1778 while serving in the British Navy. Tired of these adventures, he longed to get home and went to sea as a passenger on a merchant ship bound for Cork.22 Voyages like this in which the person was only a passenger have been omitted from analysis. The degree 22  FMF, K00528 l3/14, Anders Henrik Asping.



Swedish naval personnel in the merchant marine and in foreign naval service

of precision not only varies between merit lists but can also be inconsistent within them. As a rule, however, assignments aboard foreign naval vessels were noted in more detail, and this makes it possible to arrive at quite a reliable picture of the distribution of naval service and work aboard merchant ships. With reasonable certainty I have been able to extract adequate information from 88 per cent of the merit lists. Table 3, above, shows the number of different assignments according to type and nationality of the ship. The overwhelming majority of assignments were to merchant ships, and to Swedish or Dutch merchantmen in particular. If the merit lists had allowed an analysis of domestic and Baltic shipping as well, the figures would certainly show an even greater bias toward merchant shipping. The conclusion here must be that merchant ships were preferred to warships, even if we accept that some of those who enlisted in the navy already had seafaring experience, and therefore some of the assignments registered in the merit lists preceded their actual naval careers. These individuals were mostly, but not always, in the merchant marine until they were enrolled. However there are some exceptions to this rule. Edvard Johan Leijonstedt, for instance, served in the British Navy between the ages of 11 and 22 before returning to Sweden and joining the navy as a lieutenant in 1757.23 In order to further illustrate the figures in Table 3, I might add that 222 persons out of 512 registered only one assignment in their merit lists, 148 registered two and 142 registered three or more assignments while in external service. About half of the ‘one timers’ went to sea on Swedish merchant ships. Only 66 persons (12.89 per cent of the sample) registered exclusively foreign naval service in their lists. Table 3 shows that the overwhelming majority of the engagements were, apart from Swedish merchant ships, on Dutch, British and French ships, both merchant and naval. The figures, however, are aggregated and do not show any variations over time. In figure 5, below, I have tried to establish trends for the seven most common types of service in ten-year periods. The data are presented as trend lines extrapolated from the assignments and dates indicated in FMF. To a certain degree I have been forced to rely on assumptions in order to place certain assignments in a probable time period. However, as a rule these uncertainties only affect, if at all, the transitional parts of the figure. Still, the results should be treated as indicative of plausible trends rather than definitive. Assignments to the Swedish merchant marine show the same overall pat23 

FMF, K00544 5/8, Edvard Johan Leijonstedt.

73

György Nováky

Figure 5 – Trend lines of assignments in external service in ten year intervals 120

100

Number of assignments

74

A B

80

BF C

60

CF D DF

40

20

0 17001710

17111720

17211730

17311740

17411750

17511760

17611770

17711780

17811790

17911800

Ten year period

Source: Flottans Meritförteckningar (M-fiche) K00528-K00561. Key: A = Swedish Merchant Ship; B = Dutch Merchant Ship; BF = Dutch Navy; C = British Merchant Ship; CF = British Navy; D = French Merchant Ship; DF = French Navy.

tern as in Figure 1. The scale of this labour migration, albeit temporary, clearly affects the overall figures and throws up some interesting inter-relationships. For example, the fall in external service generally for the period 1739-1744 suggested in Figure 1 was really a decline in the number of foreign assignments. Movement between Sweden’s navy and its commercial marine was still buoyant in these years. More generally, the number of assignments increased steadily until the 1760s but then began to decrease. I have not found any simple explanation for this change. The number of serving naval officers, and presumably petty officers, continued to rise throughout the eighteenth century. Swedish trade through the Sound also intensified, yet external service (as defined here) declined in significance. There are several reasonable explanations for this, one being the striking growth of the so-called Archipelago Navy (Skårgårdsflottan) in the 1770s, comprising of small sloops, often operated with oars in the shallow waters protecting the coasts of Sweden and Finland, that absorbed an increasing number of men. This branch of service came under the administration of the army, and its personnel did not deliver merit lists to the Admiralty. On the other hand the Archipelago Navy had very few officers and its crews constituted mainly conscripted peasant boys from the country’s



Swedish naval personnel in the merchant marine and in foreign naval service

coastal regions.24 These ‘recruits’ were not likely to be of the calibre or disposition to join the navy proper and apply for leaves of absence. Nevertheless, the gradual tailing off of external service might indicate internal change within the late eighteenth-century navy. It is possible that increasing professionalization diminished the value of external service in relation to promotion, though this is an issue that must be addressed elsewhere. Assignments to the British Navy were low during the whole century mirroring the politically and diplomatically problematic relationship between Sweden and Britain. But considering that the English merchant marine grew steadily, as did trade with Sweden, one might have expected a greater number of assignments to the British merchant marine.25 The opposite would be true for the French Navy. The very few assignments shown above do not reflect the close diplomatic relationship which existed between these two countries until the French Revolution. The most dramatic drop in assignments occurred in the Dutch merchant marine and navy in the 1750s. In the early 1740s Dutch merchant shipping employed almost as many Swedes as the Swedish merchant marine, but already by the end of the same decade decline had set in. By the 1770s employment in the Dutch merchant marine was no longer an option for Swedes. Dutch shipping through the Sound continued at the same level throughout the eighteenth century, however, Dutch shipping to Sweden declined both in volume and value. By the 1760s the Mediterranean trade had became as important as the Baltic trade for Sweden and most of that trade was conducted with Swedish ships.26 The declining trade between Sweden and the Republic gave fewer possibilities for employment on Dutch ships, and as the value of that trade decreased employment probably became less profitable. The overall relationship between the migration of Swedish naval manpower to the merchant sectors of Sweden and the Dutch Republic can be explained through the economic changes that both of these countries experienced during the eighteenth century. Thomas Lindblad concluded that diminishing Swedish trade with the Dutch was at least partly a result of structural differences between the two economies: ‘The Dutch-Swedish trade declined in the eighteenth century because of the divergence between the growth paths in Sweden and the Republic.27 In other words, it was the revitalization of 24  P. Höij, ‘Båtsman vid skärgårdsflottan’, Skärgårdsflottan, ed. H. Norman (Lund, 2000), pp. 240-60. 25  Glete, Navies and Nations, vol. 2, p. 527. 26  E.F. Hecksher, Den svenska handelssjöfartens ekonomiska historia sedan Gustav Vasa. Sjöhistoriska samfundets skrifter, 1 (Uppsala, 1940). Appendix: ‘Sjöfarten genom Oresund 1754-1783’. 27  J.T. Lindblad, Swedish Trade with the Dutch Republic 1738-1795 (Amsterdam, 1982), p. 139.

75

76

György Nováky

Swedish shipping that reduced the number of Swedish seafarers in the Dutch merchant marine. The trend line for assignments to the Swedish merchant fleet, shown in Table 3 and Figure 5, clearly reflects this fact. Sweden eventually found a way to revive its shipping after the disastrous years of the Great Northern War. In 1723 a Navigation Act (Produktplakatet) was passed, which among other things forbade foreign ships from carrying Swedish products to and from Swedish ports, and foreign ships were only allowed to carry products from their native country. There was, however, one major modification to the latter rule: colonies were included in the definition of native country. After this date Sweden experienced a massive and steady increase in its native shipping.28 This fact is clearly visible in the patterns of employment and assignment uncovered through the analysis of FMF. The third and final analytical strand of this paper concerns the spatial patterns of service exhibited in the merit lists. Given the prevalence discussed above of ‘external service’ in the Swedish merchant marine, the question of destinations (or regional groupings of destinations in this case) is intimately connected with the economic strength and interests of the mother country. Other influences might be regarded as secondary, though they can be seen in the data presented in Table 4, below. Eli F. Heckscher was the first scholar to notice the dramatic increase of Swedish shipping in the eighteenth century, and he found that trade with the Mediterranean accounted for much of the growth. Salt was the axis around which this Iberian-Mediterranean traffic turned. Salt imports were crucial to the Swedish economy and it was the quest for new sources of supply that initially lured Swedish ships into the region.29 The importance of the Mediterranean to Swedish merchants and shippers is clearly evident in the FMF data, as shown above. Voyages to Mediterranean ports therefore were characteristic episodes in the broader seafaring careers preserved in the merit lists. Of course the figures in Table 4 must be treated with the same caution as those in Figure 5. Assignments have only been included in the table when the merit list clearly indicates a port or region of destination. In some cases the region refers to a main base of operations when the person was engaged for a longer period of time. The dataset of assignments is slightly larger than that used for Figure 5, the reason being that the merit lists more often indicate 28  Hecksher, Den svenska handelssjöfartens, pp. 21-23. 29  Hecksher, Den svenska handelssjöfartens, pp. 24-25; and also Müller, Consuls, pp. 61-62. For salt and the economy of Sweden in general see St. Carlén, Staten som marknadens salt: en studie i institutionsbildning, kollektivt handlande och tidig välfårdspolitik på en strategisk varumarknad i övergängen mellan merkantilism och liberalism 1720-1862 (Stockholm, 1997).



Swedish naval personnel in the merchant marine and in foreign naval service

77

Table 4 – Engagements broken down by destination Region East Atlantic (Bordeaux, Lisbon)

17001710

17111720

17211730

17311740

17411750

17511760

17611770

17711780

17811790

17911800

27

13

22

25

16

10

9

3

11

3

Islands)

0

0

1

1

1

2

0

0

0

0

North America

2

0

5

1

2

3

2

3

1

1

West Africa

0

0

9

7

7

11

3

3

1

0

West Indies (incl. Surinam)

8

5

35

39

42

41

24

15

10

9

Middle Atlantic (Madeira, Canary

East Indies (Batavia, China, India)

1

3

6

32

85

64

26

13

11

10

Mediterranean

23

10

72

99

100

95

43

33

60

24

North Atlantic, England, Holland

13

0

21

15

14

12

12

10

3

5

Source: Flottans Meritförteckningar (M-fiche) K00528-K00561.

destinations than the nationalities of ships. The table is based on a total of 1,348 assignments. Overall, as already noted, the largest number of assignments involved voyages to or within the Mediterranean. More than 41 per cent of all assignments in the merit lists give Leghorn, Smyrna, Malaga, Algiers and other ports in the Mediterranean as the main destination. If we add to this the figures for the East Atlantic (Lisbon, Bordeaux, etc) the share rises to around 50 per cent. This is not a surprise considering the course of Sweden’s economic development during the eighteenth century. What is more surprising is the considerable experience that men accrued sailing to destinations in the West and East Indies, respectively 17 and 18 per cent of the total. The East Indies is the easier of the two to explain. The Swedish East India Company (SEIC) was given its first charter in 1731 and sent altogether 116 ships to Surat, Bengal and China during the eighteenth century, and fifteen more in the first years of the nineteenth. The last cargo arrived at Gothenburg in 1806.30 From the time of the Company’s foundation the navy was willing to grant leave for employment in it not only to officers and petty officers, but also to conscripted men.31 More than a quarter of those (157 men) who registered external service in their merit lists could boast of experience of the East Indies. However, not all voyages to the East Indies were made in the service of SEIC; its Dutch and English equivalents, the VOC and EIC, persistently attracted Swedish manpower during the century. An indication of this is the importance of the East Indies as a 30  C. Konincx, The First and Second Charters of the Swedish East India Company (1731-1766) (Kortrijk, 1980). 31  Författningssamling, vol. 6, 1859, p. 108.

78

György Nováky

Figure 6 – Relative share of assignments to the four most important regions (ten-year intervals) 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

1700- 1711- 1721- 1731- 1742- 1751- 1761- 1771- 1781- 17911710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790 1800 North Sea

East Indies

West Indies

The Meditteranean

Other

Source: Flottans Meritförteckningar (M-fiche) K00528-K00561.

destination in the decade before the establishment of the SEIC (1720-30). This would seem to emphasize the appeal of the region itself in these decisions, or perhaps the opportunity to serve on Company ships of whatever flag. The same logic can be extended to the West Indies. Figure 6, above, shows the relative share of the four most frequent destinations recorded in FMF. Although the total number of assignments started to decline in the 1760s their relative share changed very little. Outside of the Baltic, the Mediterranean remained the predominant destination for this interesting group of Swedes. iv. Concluding remarks Sweden’s navy merit lists offer the potential to answer a variety of questions about the country’s navy and its merchant marine. Moreover, because of the writers’ anxiety to detail their seafaring experiences in toto, the lists also enable observations to be made about the interconnecting European and colonial markets for seamen. At the very least, some of the careers in FMF provide anecdotal evidence to support the existence of international maritime labour markets in the eighteenth century, even if one accepts that the men concerned



Swedish naval personnel in the merchant marine and in foreign naval service

were not necessarily typical. Some of them were truly citizens of the world. More narrowly, as a means of investigating the history of the Swedish Navy, although the merit lists do not cover all eighteenth-century personnel the dataset is large enough and sufficiently representative to indicate general trends. My aims in this paper have been to introduce the source materials and to perform a series of quantitative analyses relating to the patterns of ‘external service’ among the merit list population. Quantitative analysis of FMF reveals some clear and interesting general patterns, though some questions remain unanswered. If we consider the figures for the period 1720-1770 the figures obtained indicate that it was quite common for naval personnel to periodically seek employment outside the Swedish Navy. At times, especially when Sweden herself was at peace, a fair proportion of the available officers and petty officers took up alternative forms of employment. The main conclusion revealed is that service in the navy and external service were not alternative career choices but rather they complemented each other. The dominant trend seems to have been that a person joined the navy in his teens and then a few years later requested leave. He then went to sea on a merchant ship, typically destined for the Mediterranean. Often he was able to extend his leave and eventually returned after serving three to eight years abroad. Back in Sweden he returned to naval service for a few years, but often left again for a second or even third bout of leave. Not everybody conformed to this pattern, for people’s ages at enlistment varied, as did their prior seafaring experience; yet we find a clear tendency of movement away from and then back to the navy. It seems that external service constituted as much an option for naval personnel as the navy did for civilians. What was it then about external service that appealed to men in the Swedish Navy, and, conversely, what was it about the navy that attracted people to enlist? To answer these questions we must return to the analysis of employment by type or sector. The merit list data demonstrate that a majority of leave-takers from the navy found work on merchant ships: foreign navies hired some of these men, but they constituted a minor employer in the total sample. The prevalent view in earlier research was that the main reason for involvement in foreign service was the officers’ and petty officers’ desire to gain experience, and the possibility, especially during peacetime, of acquiring battle experience abroad thereby enhancing the possibilities for advancement at home.32 This motive is said to have been true for all service branches, but especially those 32 

H. Norman, ‘Inledning’, Skärgårdsflottan, p. 24.

79

80

György Nováky

branches, like the navy, artillery and sappers, where expert knowledge was valued as much as social standing.33 The results of this analysis contradict this thesis, at least in part. The profiles in the merit lists suggest the opposite, namely that men specifically chose employment aboard merchant ships. Navigational skills were of course developed through work on any sailing vessel. The fact that the merit lists record all kinds of service indicates that navigational competence as such was considered valuable by the navy. The chance, or risk, of battle experience was not totally absent in the merchant marine, especially if serving aboard the large East Indiamen that in size and even armament surpassed many warships. In the troubled, pirate infested, and politically disputed waters of the East and West Indies it was not uncommon for merchant vessels to be embroiled in conflict. So even crews in the merchant marine had a fair chance of gaining battle experience, particularly while sailing in more hazardous waters. Yet the bulk of assignments discussed here were on small, unarmed merchantmen in the Mediterranean trades, a fact that points to reasons for signing on other than career enhancement. Although the naval authorities considered most of these voyages to be of value, it was probably economic motives rather than anything else that lay behind the decision to apply for leave and find work on a merchant ship. Men in the lower echelons of the navy often went without a salary, or else obtained wages for a lesser position than the one actually held. This was not an uncommon practice in any branch of the Swedish armed forces. The need for money was obvious and sometimes acute. In addition there was the institutionalized system of payment for a position (ackord). Rather substantial sums were needed to reimburse the previous incumbent if a person wanted to step into a new position. Now, there is no proof whatsoever that this system prevailed in the navy, but it was in use in all the other branches both formally and sometimes informally.34 It is not too far fetched to assume that the same payments were expected in the navy, albeit informally perhaps. If this was the case, then the financial incentives for going into external service were even more compelling. However, this remains to be proved. In the end, officers and ratings of the navy, like anybody else with navigational skills, belonged to one of the few almost globally employable professions. In a period of expanding long-distance trade and intensifying colonial contests between the larger naval powers, there were numerous possibilities 33  Carlsson, Ståndssamhälle, pp.107-08. K. Wirilander, Herrskapsfolk: Ståndspersoner i Finland (Stockholm, 1982), pp. 190-91. 34  For ‘ackord’ see F. Thisner, Militärstatens arvegods.



Swedish naval personnel in the merchant marine and in foreign naval service

to earn a decent income by going to sea. Marcus Rediker considered British seamen as a sort of proletariat. According to Rediker, in the vibrant English ports a new kind of social category appeared, the seaborne proletariat, selling its labour, for good or bad, to whichever master was prepared to pay it a meagre salary.35 This might be true for Britain, although N.A.M Rodger has disputed the deficiency of naval pay.36 In Sweden the situation was very different. The navy guaranteed a small, but steady salary, and in addition to that a pension. A position in the navy also provided social cachet, which was necessary to maintain or even improve one’s standing. In this context external service as defined in this paper served two functions. First, it provided those involved with navigational skills, and occasionally even a taste of battle, which were valued by the Swedish Navy and offered proof of ability when applying for promotion. Second, if indeed there was a system of payment for preference in the navy, external service provided the necessary means to obtain it. If such a system did not exist, then additional experience helped indirectly to improve a man’s prospects. This was not a proletariat. The FMF archive attests the existence of a group of men who used their skills to tap into global flows of capital and then invested the proceeds very rationally in securing or improving their position at home. To again cite Rodger, ‘Foreign trade and the Navy... formed two elements of a single symbiotic system... The Navy protected trade and protected the country. Trade generated the seamen to man the Navy, and money to pay for it.’37 This dual relationship was most certainly true even in Sweden, albeit at a very personal level.

35  M. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Cambridge, 1987). 36  N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean. A Naval History of Britain: Volume 2, 1649-1815 (London, 2004), Appendix IV.

37 

Ibid. p. 580.

81

82



Quantifying British seafarers, 1789-1828 David J. Starkey – University of Hull

i. Introduction: ‘The very real minefield of statistics’ Pessimism has been the hallmark of most appraisals of the primary sources relating to the size and composition of the British seafaring labour force before the late nineteenth century. The tone was set by Ralph Davis, who observed in 1962 that the ‘pathway through the shipping statistics of the seventeenth and eighteenth century is a slippery and often misleading one’.1 Despite acknowledging that ‘researchers in the period after 1750 are well served with official records [relating] to seamen’,2 an assessment by Sarah Palmer and David M. Williams of the quality of this material was ‘certainly depressing and might even be characterized as defeatist, but it serves to indicate the very real minefield of statistics’ pertaining to seafaring labour before the mid-nineteenth century.3 Gordon Jackson was likewise less than optimistic in his efforts to quantify the human resource deployed in merchant vessels registered in Scotland from 1772 to 1808. Drawing upon records generated by the Customs service, he concluded that the ‘grand total of men who might well call themselves sailors was never assessed and cannot now be estimated with any degree of confidence’.4 Adopting a more positive approach, this chapter assesses the available source material and offers new estimates of the size of the British seafaring population during the 1789-1828 period. While particular attention is afforded to calculating the number of seamen employed in the merchant shipping industry, which has long proved to be the most difficult branch of the sea service to enumerate,5 the manpower engaged in the Royal Navy, privateering business, inland navigation and inshore fisheries is also quantified. In treading gingerly through this statistical minefield, the present study provides a measure of the development of Britain’s maritime interests over 1  R. Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1962), p. 395. 2  S. Palmer and D.M. Williams, ‘British Sailors, 1775-1870’ in ‘Those Emblems of Hell’? European Sailors and the Maritime Labour Market, 1570-1870, ed. P.C. van Royen, J.R. Bruijn and J. Lucassen (St John’s, Newfoundland, 1997), p. 96. 3  Palmer and Williams, ‘British Sailors’, p. 100. 4  G. Jackson, ‘Scottish Sailors’ in ‘Those Emblems of Hell’? ed. van Royen et al, p. 119. 5  Palmer and Williams, ‘British Sailors’, p. 97; P. Earle, Sailors: English Merchant Seamen, 16501775 (London, 1998), p. 7; V.C. Burton, ‘Counting Seafarers: The Published Records of the Registry of Merchant Seamen’, Mariner’s Mirror, 71 (1985), pp. 305-20.

83

84

David J. Starkey

a 40-year era, and an appraisal of the impact of two long, intense wars on the scale and composition of the seafaring workforce. It therefore follows in the footsteps of Ralph Davis and David J. Starkey,6 and will hopefully serve to dispel some of the pessimism that has tended to shroud this aspect of research into work at sea during the age of sail. ii. The seafaring workforce, 1789-1828: Sources and estimates In estimating the size of the seafaring population, care needs to be exercised with regard to the parameters of the analysis. Establishing the spatial remit, for instance, is not as simple as the terms ‘British’ and ‘Britain’ imply. The navigation records compiled by the Customs House are instructive in this respect, for in the late eighteenth century the grand total of this ‘official’ account comprised properties belonging to at least 150 ports and places of registry organized into eight territorial divisions of the ‘British Empire’ – England and Wales, Scotland, Ireland, British America, the British West Indies and the islands of Guernsey, Jersey and Man.7 Such aggregation has led to ill-founded comparisons, with figures relating to the largest division, England and Wales, confused with those for the British Isles – sometimes with, sometimes without, Guernsey, Jersey and Man – or those pertaining to the British Empire, which included the foreign dominions.8 In this study, to ensure consistency across a range of primary sources relating to various seafaring occupations, ‘Britain’ is interpreted as embracing England and Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Channel Islands (Jersey and Guernsey) and the Isle of Man, but not the colonial possessions across the Atlantic. The temporal bounds of the work are less contentious, if only because they are largely determined by the available primary sources. Accordingly, the investigation commences in 1789, the first full year in which statutory vessel registration, which had been instituted in 1786, was operational.9 The study ends in 1828, the last year for which the amounts collected from the levy of sixpence 6  R. Davis, ‘Seamen’s Sixpences: An Index of Commercial Activity, 1697-1828’ Economica, 23 (1956), pp. 328-43; D.J. Starkey, ‘War and the Market for Seafarers in Britain, 1736-1792’ in Shipping and Trade, 1750-1950: Essays in International Maritime Economic History, ed. L.R. Fischer and H.W. Nordvik (Pontefract, 1990), pp. 25-42. 7  The National Archives, Kew [TNA hereafter], CUST 17. The number of places of registration varied over time in line with the changing official status of ports and the extension or loss of dominions overseas. 8  For instance, Palmer and Williams (‘British Sailors’, p. 101) imply that the total number of men in the merchant navy was 87,569. This figure relates to those normally employed in vessels belonging to ports in England and Wales. 9  N. Cox, ‘The Records of the Registrar General of Shipping and Seamen’ Maritime History, 2 (1972), pp. 168-88.



Quantifying British seafarers, 1789-1828

per month deducted from the wages of seafarers serving in British-registered vessels were recorded. Within this 40-year period, the question of who should be classed as a British seafarer is complicated by a number of variable factors. Nationality is one such issue, for at any given time during the era a proportion of the workforce was of foreign extraction.10 The extent of this proportion was limited by law to 25 per cent in peacetime, the restriction being relaxed in wartime when the demand for labour invariably increased. Reservations also exist in relation to the quality of the seafaring workforce. While there is little primary evidence to indicate the age, experience and rank – that is, the level of skill – of the labour force as a whole, there are no contemporary quantifications of the activity rates of seafarers in terms of length of service and the extent to which they were engaged at sea on a part- or full-time basis. As it was not until the late nineteenth century that such uncertainties were more or less eliminated from state-generated employment records,11 it has to be assumed that in the 1789-1828 period the British seafaring workforce comprised people of all ranks and nationalities engaged in working British-owned vessels for part of any one year. Such vessels varied greatly in terms of size, operational range and function during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Accordingly, seafarers could sell their labour to various employers. They might join the Royal Navy and serve aboard the ships-of-the-line, frigates, corvettes and sundry other craft owned and operated by the state. Seamen might also find employment in a range of occupations in the private sector. Among the vessels registered in the British Isles, for example, were those set forth to carry cargoes to and from foreign destinations both trans-oceanic and across the ‘short seas’ to Europe, as well as those engaged in conveying goods and passengers between British ports in the so-called coasting trade. In wartime, such vessels, together with some purpose-built craft, might be converted into private ships-of-war and despatched to seek and appropriate seaborne properties belonging to the citizens of an enemy state, a practice authorized by licenses issued by the government. ‘Men used to the sea’ also served aboard another type of predator, the fishing ships and boats that formed a ubiquitous component of Britain’s maritime interests, but were seldom distinguished from trading vessels in official records generated before the 1880s.12 Some fishing craft, chiefly those engaged in offshore and distant-water fisheries, were at least 15 tons burthen, 10  Earle, Sailors, pp. 7, 201-4. 11  Burton, ‘Counting Seafarers’. 12  Burton, ‘Counting Seafarers’.

85

86

David J. Starkey

obliging their owners to register them under the terms of legislation passed in 1786. Others, however, were smaller and formed part of the non-registered component of the nation’s shipping stock, together with vessels employed in port, estuarial, riverine and canal work, known collectively as the ‘inland navigation’. Although various primary sources shed light on the size of the seafaring population, each of these was generated for reasons other than the enumeration of seafarers. Accordingly, the size of the seafaring population can only be estimated. Moreover, most sources relate to just part of a workforce that was deployed in various branches of the sea service. While it is evident that seafarers could and did move between these branches during their careers, the nature of the evidence makes it expedient to assess the scale of the seafaring population according to four occupational groupings; that is, merchant seamen, labour in the inland navigation and inshore fisheries, privateersmen and naval seafarers. Merchant seamen There were no specific attempts to establish the number of men working in the British merchant shipping industry during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although it was reported in the occupational breakdown of the 1801 Census of the Population that 144,558 men were employed as ‘Seamen, in Registered Ships’, it appears that this figure was derived from the accounts of the Registrar-General of Shipping rather than an enumeration of individual seafarers.13 Nevertheless, the extent of the human resource deployed in merchant vessels can be inferred from sources generated for other purposes. Two sets of records are especially useful in this respect. First, as the censustakers of 1801 realized, the material assembled in the administrative process by which British-owned vessels were registered includes estimates the size of the seafaring labour force.14 Second, information collected by the Sixpenny Office, which was charged with taxing the wages of merchant seafarers, offers a base on which the quantification of the workforce can be constructed.15 While examination of these sources reveals shortcomings that impair their evidential quality, these weaknesses can be addressed to yield a more accurate measure of the size of the workforce engaged in merchant vessels than has hitherto been produced. 13  Census of the Population, 1801. The Registrar-General’s figure for the number of men and boys usually employed in vessels belonging to the British Empire on 30 September was 149,756; TNA, CUST 17/23. 14  The Navigation Accounts for 1789-1808 were presented in the annual Customs returns. TNA, CUST 17/11-29. 15  TNA, ADM 68.



Quantifying British seafarers, 1789-1828

The records generated by the registration process are both promising and problematic in this regard. Instituted in 1786 under the terms of the Act of General Registry,16 the system of statutory registration provided the state with the administrative apparatus to quantify various aspects of its merchant shipping, shipbuilding and fishing industries. This legislation required all sea-going, decked British vessels of 15 tons burthen and over to be registered with the Customs officer in their home port. To fulfil this obligation, shipowners had to supply details of their vessel’s name and home port, the place and date of her building or capture, her dimensions, rigging and tonnage burthen, together with the names and occupations of her owners, and the name of her master. Such information was entered in registry books held locally in each Customs port, with transcripts forwarded to London for collection in the central Customs House. The Act also established the Office of the Registrar General of Shipping, which was responsible, inter alia, for aggregating the locally-generated data relating to the registration of the nation’s merchant shipping.17 These aggregations appeared in tabular form in the ‘Navigation Account’ presented annually from 1789 to 1808 by the Customs Office. Figures pertaining to the size of the labour force were included, as the titles of the appropriate tables indicate: An Account of the Number of Vessels with the Amount of their Tonnage & the Number of Men & Boys usually employed on Navigating of the Same that belonged to the several Ports of the British Empire on the 30th September…18 While these accounts place historians on ‘firmer ground’ in their quest to measure the extent of the shipping industry’s labour force,19 it is important to ascertain what is meant by the figures they offer. As the rubric indicates, the statistics relate to the number of vessels that belonged to British and colonial ports on a particular day of the year. On the reasonable assumption that ‘belonging to’ can be interpreted as ‘registered in’, this is primarily an account of the number and tonnage of merchant vessels, including private ships-of-war, of 15 tons burthen or more that were on the statutory register on 30 September in each respective year. While this excludes craft of 14 tons burthen or less, it includes vessels that were not actually in service on the census date for one of two reasons. First, as some shipowners were inefficient in cancelling registrations, the register incorporates a number of vessels that had been lost or broken up. The size of this ‘ghost’ fleet – which is likely to have increased over time 16  26 Geo. III, c.60. 17  Cox, ‘Records of the Registrar General’, pp. 169-70. 18  TNA, CUST 17. 19  C. Lloyd, The British Seaman, 1200-1860: A Social Survey (London 2nd edition, 1970), p. 107.

87

88

David J. Starkey

due to the cumulative character of such under-reporting – is uncertain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was probably a significant proportion, however, as the implementation of a new, more accurate system of registration in 1827 led to a fall of 13 per cent in the total tonnage registered as compared to the previous year.20 Second, due to the seasonality of many trades, the needs of maintenance, repair and modification, and the ‘turnaround’ time spent in port while cargoes were discharged and vessels re-fitted, a proportion of the registered shipping stock would have been laid up or inactive on the date that the account was assembled. Again, the extent of this non-operational segment of the merchant fleet is unknown, although it has been suggested that the average trading vessel was laid up for between a quarter and a third of the year in the late eighteenth century.21 The manning figures provided in the Navigation Accounts relate to the number of men and boys – presumably including all ranks and apprentices – that were usually employed in working the vessels on the statutory register. In essence, therefore, these statistics were based on a calculation of the labour power required to work a shipping stock that included ‘ghost’ vessels, as well as those laid up and those tied up in port. While this clearly leads to overstatement of the aggregate number of active seafarers, the method by which the manning figures were devised might also serve to exaggerate the size of the workforce. Although crew size was not one of the variables that shipowners had to provide when registering their vessels, the Accounts disaggregate the number of men and boys required to navigate the shipping stock by port and tonnage class. The statistics recorded were not the products of a simple multiplier based on the number and/or tonnage of vessels in each classification. In both Minehead and Padstow, for instance, three vessels totalling 48 tons burthen were entered in the ‘20 tons and under’ ton range in the 1801 Account. The manning figures differed, however, with seven men and boys usually engaged in the Minehead vessels and 10 required to navigate those belonging to Padstow.22 This implies that the totals were derived from estimates of the number of seafarers needed for each individual vessel made by either her owner or the Customs official in the port of registration. Either way, it is probable that these were measures of the intended, rather than the actual, complement – especially in the higher tonnage ranges – a practice that would 20  Davis, ‘Seamen’s Sixpences’, p. 334; Palmer and Williams, ‘British Sailors’, p. 99, suggest that the proportion was perhaps 20 to 25 per cent by the 1830s. 21  Davis, Shipping Industry, p. 71. 22  TNA, CUST 17/23.



Quantifying British seafarers, 1789-1828

tend to inflate the size of the labour force.23 The second set of records that can be used to quantify the shipping industry’s workforce was generated through the collection of ‘seamen’s sixpences’, a tax that was levied on seafarer’s earnings to pay for the maintenance of Greenwich Hospital for sick and wounded seamen. Founded in 1695 by royal bounty, the Hospital’s chief source of funding was established in legislation passed during the following year. Accordingly, the ‘Act for the Increase and Incouragement of Seamen’ provided that: Every seamen whatsoever, that shall serve his Majesty, His Heirs or Successors, or any other Person or Persons whatsoever, in any of His Majesty’s Ships, or in any Ship or Vessel whatsoever, belonging or to belong to any subjects of England, or any other of His Majesty’s Dominions, shall allow, and there shall be paid out of the Wages of every such Seaman to grow due for such his Service, Sixpence per Mensem.24 The collection of the sixpenny duty was the responsibility of the ‘ReceiverGeneral of the Sixpences from Merchant Seamen’ in London, with local Receivers appointed to gather the tax in the outports of Britain and the colonies. Accounts of monies remitted to the Sixpenny Office were kept, and summaries of the amounts collected survive for the periods 1707-1713 and 1717-1828. Receipts from London and the outports were recorded separately, and from 1735 incoming monies from the individual ports of England and Wales were itemized, with Scottish and Irish ports distinguished from 1804.25 These records offer two types of information that can be used to estimate employment levels in the British merchant shipping industry from 1707 to 1828. First, annual accounts of the ‘Number of Seamen that have been employed in the Merchants’ Service’ were produced by the Sixpenny Office. Unfortunately, only the accounts pertaining to the 1740-1766 period, and to 1788, have survived,26 and even these appear to understate the magnitude of 23  The practice of declaring intended rather than actual crew sizes was used with regard to privateering vessels. See D.J. Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter, 1990), pp. 293-94. 24  7 & 8 William III, c. 21. The Act also addressed the problem of manning the Navy by creating a register of seamen which proved to be ineffective. 25  TNA, ADM 68. For an appraisal of the provenance and utility of the sixpenny records, see Davis, ‘Seamen’s Sixpences’. 26  The account for 1740-1766 is in British Library, London [BL hereafter], Additional Manuscripts, 38340, f. 17, while that for 1788 is in BL Add. MS, 38,432, f. 38.

89

90

David J. Starkey

the workforce. For instance, the 1788 account indicates that 55,013 seafarers were engaged in the shipping industry. This is just over half of the total of 106,347 contained in the Navigation Account of 1790,27 a major discrepancy even if, as seems likely, the latter source exaggerated the seafaring population. Moreover, contemporaries questioned the veracity of the figure, no less an observer than Lord Liverpool, the architect of the 1786 Act of General Registry, asserting that: The number of seamen who paid the sixpenny duty to Greenwich Hospital in the year 1788 was 55,013. There are certainly many more who evaded the payment of the duty.28 Second, the aggregate sixpenny tax yield offers a base upon which estimates of the shipping industry’s workforce can be constructed. Such calculations entail the adjustment of the data to take into account various exclusions and anomalies that are evident in the process by which the sixpenny duty was remitted and recorded during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The most important of these modifications relates to the amounts received by the Sixpenny Office. In essence, these comprised monies paid directly to the Receiver General in respect of London vessels, and indirectly through the agency of local Receivers and Controllers in the outports of the various territorial divisions of the British Empire. In contrast to the procedure which applied in London, the commission paid to local officials charged with collecting the duty in the outports was deducted from the gross amount collected. From an initial rate of 11.25%, the commission normally levied had risen to 12.5% by 1769. Additionally, each local Receiver was entitled to deduct his expenses, a sum that was usually less than 1 per cent of the local yield. There were local variations in the proportion deducted, however, the most notable occurring at Liverpool, where a commission rate of 7.5% applied throughout the period.29 To calculate the number of seafarers working in the shipping industry, gross, rather than net, sixpenny returns are required. 30 This is facilitated by the existence in the sixpenny records of both sets of figures for the 1804-1828 period.31 Analysis of these data indicates that average deductions of 13.1, 12.5 27  TNA, CUST 17/11. 28  BL, Add MS, 38,432, f. 38. 29  Davis, ‘Seamen’s Sixpences’. 30  As the ‘total incomings’ tabulated by Davis, ‘Seamen’s Sixpences’, pp. 339-43 – which were used by Starkey, ‘War and the Market’, to calculate the number of seamen-months worked – represent the net receipts of the Receiver-General after deduction of the local collectors’ commission and expenses, rather than the gross amount collected, the totals are lower than the true figure. Davis also excluded remittances from the Channel Islands, which have been included in the present analysis. 31  TNA, ADM 68.



Quantifying British seafarers, 1789-1828

and 12.6 per cent were evident in the remittances made from the outports of England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland respectively. By applying these proportions to the corresponding net sums recorded by the Sixpenny Office down to 1803, a consistent series of gross sixpenny returns has been assembled for the 1789-1828 period. These have been subjected to further correction in respect of the remittances from Liverpool and Bristol, which were distorted in the years 1799-1803 by the inclusion of wages forfeited by seafarers who deserted from slaving vessels in the Caribbean. Although Davis adjusted his figures to embrace this anomaly, his deduction was based on impression rather than calculation.32 As the actual amounts are available for five years from 1804 to 1808,33 when this ceased to be an issue due to the abolition of the slave trade, more precise modifications can be made. Accordingly, the Liverpool remittances have been reduced by 42.12% for the 1799-1803 period, while 6.33% has been subtracted from the equivalent figures for Bristol. In contrast, no adjustments have been made to account for the seafarers who were successful in evading payment of the sixpenny tax, which Lord Liverpool cited as a cause of understatement.34 As Davis asserts, after the system of collection was reformed in 1747, evasion was probably much less of a problem than Lord Liverpool believed. By the mid-eighteenth century, those seafarers, namely inshore fishermen and crews of open boats, who had proved most adept at avoiding payment of the sixpenny duty, had been excluded from liability by successive amendments to the 1696 Act. Foreign-going and coasting vessels could not be brought into port without the knowledge of customs officials, who also acted as local Receivers and registrars of shipping, and would surely have noticed declarations of suspiciously small crews. Moreover, a degree of self-interest, and therefore self regulation, pervaded the system. Accordingly, as the Receiver’s payment was determined by the amount of duty collected, it was in his interest to ensure that he received all monies due. At the same time, from 1729 all shipmasters were required by law to register each crew member in a muster roll that was to be submitted to customs officials on arrival in port. As this record proved that an individual had been employed, and had earned wages, for a specified period of service, it was in the interest of each seafarer to ensure that he was not omitted from the roll. Although there may have been some evasion of the duty in the smaller ports, it appears unlikely that this seriously impaired the sixpenny returns of the late eighteenth and early 32  Davis, ‘Seamen’s Sixpences’, p. 332, n. 4. 33  TNA, ADM 68. 34  BL, Add. MS, 38,432, f. 38.

91

92

David J. Starkey

nineteenth centuries.35 Modifying the outport figures to take commissions, expenses and forfeitures into account, and adding in the London totals, which were not affected by these factors, yields a consistent series of gross sixpenny returns for the 1789-1828 period (see Table 2). These monetary amounts have been transformed into estimates of the size of the workforce by multiplying each pound remitted by 40 to produce a figure for seaman-months, which has then been divided by the number of months worked by the average seafarer to offer an estimate of the size of the workforce which paid the sixpenny duty in a given year. Had it been the case that each man worked for the entire year, this calculation would be simply effected by deploying a divisor of 12. However, all references to seafaring in this period concur in asserting that the great majority of merchant seamen worked for just part of the year.36 In addressing this issue, Starkey used the sixpenny records to calculate that seamen worked for an average of 9.67 months of the year during the 1736-1792 period.37 This mean figure ignores two variables which affected the working year of seafarers: whether a state of peace or war prevailed, and the proportion of men engaged in foreign-going, as opposed to coastal, vessels. To accommodate these factors, a sample of 132 muster rolls assembled by the masters of Hull vessels – 58 in the foreign trades, and 74 coasters – in the 1792-1793 and 1800-1804 periods was examined.38 This analysis indicated that the average seafarer in the foreign trades was engaged for 7.7 months of each peacetime year, and for 8.2 months of wartime years, while the corresponding figures for coastal seamen were 7.9 and 6 months respectively. These estimates of annual activity rates have been applied as divisors in calculating the number of active seafarers from the seaman-month aggregates, which in turn have been broken down into two parts, with two-thirds apportioned to the foreign trades and one-third to coastal shipping – a rough division based on the manning figures contained in the CUST 17 accounts. Sample estimates resulting from this process are compared to those derived from the Navigation Accounts produced by the Registrar-General of Shipping in Table 1. Comparison of the two sets of estimates reveals that in the 1789-1801 period between 109,000 and 133,000 seafarers were working in the shipping industry according to the Navigation Accounts, a total that exceeded the workforce 35  Davis, ‘Seamen’s Sixpences’, pp. 330-31. 36  For instance, see Davis, Shipping Industry; Earle, Sailors. 37  Starkey, ‘War and the Market’, p. 41. 38  Shipmasters were required by statute to submit muster rolls, which comprised lists of the names, ranks and length of service of all the men who worked aboard the vessel, to the appropriate authorities at the end of each voyage. The original Hull muster rolls are held in the Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull, while fair copies are kept in Trinity House, Hull. Mr K. Payne provided me with this information.



Quantifying British seafarers, 1789-1828

Table 1 – Tons-per-man ratios derived from the Navigation Accounts (NA) and Sixpenny Records (6d), 1792-1801 Year 1792 1795 1798 1801

Tons registered 1,435,574 1,425,669 1,493,954 1,837,720

Seafaring workforce NA 6d 71,429 109,757 74,766 104,345 78,725 114,731 92,484 132,276

Tons-per-man NA 6d 20.1 13.1 19.1 13.7 19.0 13.0 19.9 13.9

Sources: ‘Tons Registered’ and ‘NA’: TNA, CUST 17/12-29. ‘6d’: derived from TNA, ADM 68.

calculated from the sixpenny returns by between 30,000 and 39,000 men. This substantial differential perhaps reflects contrasts in the scope of the two respective primary sources. It is probable, for instance, that apprentices were included in the manning figures produced by the Registrar-General of Shipping, and excluded from the sixpenny records on the grounds that they did not earn a wage and therefore were not liable to pay that duty. Although figures as to the number of apprentices engaged in the merchant shipping industry during the 1789-1828 period are lacking, some 8,002 were registered in 1835, suggesting that such an inconsistency would have accounted for just part of the overall discrepancy.39 Further inconsistencies between the two estimates arose from the time periods to which they referred. Whereas the Navigation Accounts purport to enumerate the seafaring workforce on 30 September in each year, the seamen’s sixpences were remitted on a staggered basis, with those from London paid immediately, receipts from the English outports arriving on average 4½ months after they had been collected, and Irish and Scottish dues paid at least 18 months later.40 To some extent, these differences in scope render the two series incompatible, but they hardly explain the marked divergence in the manning figures that are apparent in Table 1. The main explanation appears to lie in the weaknesses that are inherent to the Navigation Accounts, particularly with regard to the proportion of the shipping stock that was deemed to be active on the census date. That this led to a major overstatement of the size of the workforce was implied by Lord Liverpool, a ‘well informed writer on shipping’,41 who dismissed the manning figures produced by the Registrar-General as ‘considerably exaggerated’ and suggested that the size of the shipping industry’s workforce was actually in

39  V.C. Burton, ‘Apprenticeship Regulation and Maritime Labour in the Nineteenth Century’ International Journal of Maritime History, 1/1 (1989), p. 36. 40  Davis, ‘Seamen’s Sixpences’, p. 332. 41  Ibid., p. 300.

93

94

David J. Starkey

the region of 75,000-80,000 men in the early 1790s.42 The relationship between the tonnage registered and the size of the workforce lends support to his point of view. Accordingly, as Table 1 shows, the Navigation Accounts infer that ratios between 13.1 and 13.9 tons-per-man applied in British-registered vessels during the 1792-1801 period. Although the trend in these figures suggests that crew sizes were falling slightly, the timing and extent of the contraction does not concur with the general pattern evident in other sources. For instance, Davis has shown that the average tons-per-man ratio of shipping entering London had already reached 15 by 1766,43 while a Parliamentary enquiry heard that colliers were manned at the rate of 20 tons-per-man in 1800.44 Moreover, vessels employed in the wartime transport service, which required relatively large crews for protective purposes, were manned according to a stipulated ratio of five men and one boy per 100 tons, a rate of around 18 tons-per-man.45 Such evidence indicates that the actual manning levels were considerably lower than those derived from the Navigation Accounts. At the same time, the estimates based on the gross sixpenny receipts not only concur with Lord Liverpool’s informed guess, but also yield ton-per-man ratios ranging from 19 to 20.1, which accord with those prevailing in various branches of the commercial sea service. For these reasons, the manning figures calculated from the records of the sixpenny duty, as presented in Table 2, are the preferred measure of the size of the workforce engaged in the British merchant shipping industry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

42  BL, Add. MS, 38,432 f. 38. 43  Davis, Shipping Industry, p. 71. 44  Evidence presented by William Marshall to the Select Committee on the Coal Trade in 1800, cited in S. Ville, English Shipowning in the Industrial Revolution (Manchester, 1987), p. 48. 45  Ville, English Shipowning, p. 96.



Quantifying British seafarers, 1789-1828

Table 2 – Number of seafarers employed in the merchant shipping industry, 1789-1828 Year

Sixpences collected (£)

Coastal trade (seafarers)

Foreign trade (seafarers)

51,068 24,887 14,746 1789 48,492 23,632 14,002 1790 47,800 23,295 13,802 1791 48,025 23,404 13,867 1792 41,337 29,692 13,361 1793 43,397 29,805 13,412 1794 44,349 30,351 13,658 1795 49,142 33,604 15,122 1796 43,213 29,630 13,333 1797 46,217 31,958 14,381 1798 50,261 34,661 15,597 1799 51,177 35,306 15,888 1800 54,578 37,543 16,894 1801 77,537 37,787 22,389 1802 54,728 37,312 16,790 1803 57,343 39,315 17,692 1804 54,436 37,915 17,062 1805 59,262 41,040 18,468 1806 53,794 36,946 16,626 1807 57,966 39,679 17,856 1808 62,048 42,469 19,111 1809 66,076 45,214 20,346 1810 64,111 43,846 19,731 1811 70,143 47,946 21,575 1812 68,521 46,859 21,086 1813 78,625 53,735 24,179 1814 100,443 68,636 30,886 1815 83,119 40,507 24,001 1816 71,290 34,743 20,585 1817 75,539 36,813 21,812 1818 76,665 37,362 22,137 1819 73,260 35,703 21,154 1820 73,911 36,020 21,342 1821 73,361 35,752 21,183 1822 74,221 36,171 21,431 1823 73,400 35,771 21,194 1824 74,253 36,186 21,440 1825 78,072 38,048 22,543 1826 74,969 36,536 21,647 1827 77,556 37,796 22,394 1828 Source: derived from The National Archive, ADM 68. See Appendix 2.

Total number of seafarers 75,955 72,124 71,095 71,429 71,029 73,202 74,700 82,746 72,843 78,175 84,922 86,483 92,121 115,324 92,040 96,658 92,351 100,302 90,740 97,645 104,517 111,290 107,957 118,089 115,380 132,360 169,079 123,626 106,033 112,352 114,027 108,963 109,931 109,113 110,392 109,171 110,439 116,120 111,505 115,352

95

96

David J. Starkey

Labour in the inland navigation and inshore fisheries The men employed in the inland navigation and inshore fisheries were exempted from paying the sixpenny duty. Thirty years after that tax ceased to be collected, J.H. Brown, the Registrar-General of Seamen, reported that: there are several thousands of seamen employed in small vessels, respecting which there is much difficulty, as their movements do not appear in the customs reports… There exists no available data for ascertaining the resident population engaged in fishing or other occupations connected with the seas, rivers, and canals of this country.46 Accordingly, the number of seafarers engaged in such activities can only be estimated through a resort to alternative sources of information. This has been achieved by assuming that the undecked vessels of under 15 tons excluded from the provisions of the 1786 Registry Act were deployed in the inland navigation and inshore fisheries. Analysis of British-owned merchant tonnage in 1792 infers that such non-registered vessels comprised 11.05% of the total shipping stock. This proportion has been applied to the shipping industry’s manpower totals to provide an approximate measure of the number of seafarers engaged in inland and inshore vessels during the 1789-1828 period (see Appendix 1). Privateersmen Some 1,795 privately-owned vessels were authorized by the issue of letters of marque to seize the seaborne properties of enemy citizens during the French Revolutionary War, the figure rising to 1,810 in the 1803-1815 conflict.47 The great majority of these craft were licensed traders, or ‘letters of marque’, whose primary purpose was to deliver commercial cargoes rather than attack enemy shipping. Indeed, in the respective wars, only 216 and 175 vessels exhibited the characteristics of private ships-of-war despatched with the specific intention of generating income from the capture, and condemnation by due process of law, of prize ships and cargoes.48 From 1747 to 1815, when the last letter of marque 46  ‘Report of the Royal Commission on Manning the Navy, Appendix to Minutes of Evidence’, British Parliamentary Papers [PP hereafter] 1859, VI, p. 364. 47  Starkey, British Privateering, pp. 322-23. 48  D.J. Starkey, ‘A Restless Spirit: British Privateering Enterprise, 1739-1815’ in Pirates and Privateers: New Perspectives on the War on Trade in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. D.J. Starkey, E.S. van Eyck van Heslinga and J.A. de Moor (Exeter, 1997), p. 134. An analysis of the privateering fleet is provided by Starkey, British Privateering, pp. 35-58.



Quantifying British seafarers, 1789-1828

was issued in the High Court of Admiralty, the seafarers who worked in these licensed traders and private ships-of-war were obliged to pay the sixpenny duty and therefore formed part of the seafaring population enumerated in Table 2. As the ‘letters of marque’ were essentially commercial vessels, it is assumed that they operated regardless of the state of hostilities and therefore their crews have not been deducted from the shipping industry totals for 1793-1801 and 1803-15. Private ships-of-war, on the other hand, could only function in wartime. As theirs was a singular activity, the men who served aboard these predatory craft have been counted separately, the manning figures being derived from the declarations made before the High Court of Admiralty by those applying for letters of marque. To avoid double counting, the privateersmen quantified in Appendix 1 have been subtracted from the total numbers of seamen engaged in the foreign trades (Table 2) and merchant shipping (Appendix 1). Naval seafarers Various primary sources offer estimates of the number of men serving in the Royal Navy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.49 The first national census of the population, for instance, indicates that a total of 126,279 naval seafarers and marines were employed in 1801.50 As was the case in the shipping industry, it appears that this figure was derived from other estimates rather than a genuine headcount of those enumerated at the census point. Consequently, the sum is not far removed from the totals provided in occasional returns submitted by the Admiralty to Parliament, which relate that 81,743, 113,211 and 99,831 seamen and marines were ‘obtained’ in 1794, 1800 and 1804 respectively.51 Annual series of statistics can also be assembled from papers generated by the House of Commons. Accordingly, for most, but by no means all, years in the eighteenth century, the monthly returns of the Navy Board, which included information on the number of men-of-warsmen and marines borne for pay, were published by order of the House of Commons.52 A more complete ‘Return of the Number of Seamen (including Officers), Boys and Marines, voted for the Royal Navy, and actually borne’ was printed as an appendix to the 1859 Royal Commission on Manning the Navy.53 In 1968, 49  N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean. A Naval History of Britain: Volume 2, 1649-1815 (London, 2004), pp. 635-39. 50  Census of the Population, 1801. 51  TNA, ADM 7/567, cited in M. Lewis, A Social History of the Navy, 1793-1815 (London, 1960), p. 120. 52  House of Commons Journals, XXII-XLII. 53  ‘Report of the Royal Commission on Manning the Navy, Appendix to Minutes of Evidence’, PP 1859, VI, pp. 362-63.

97

98

David J. Starkey

Christopher Lloyd drew on this and other sources to compile accounts of the numbers of men ‘voted’ by Parliament, ‘borne’ (entered on a ship’s books) and ‘mustered’ (actually on board, but not necessarily borne) in most years of the 1701-1855 period.54 As the figures for men voted are an ‘accounting fiction’,55 and as the estimates of those mustered are far from complete, data on the number of men borne are preferred in this analysis. Moreover, as those provided by Lloyd are incomplete for the 1815-1828 era, the statistics printed by the 1859 Royal Commission have been selected for the current analysis and are presented in Appendix 1. iii. The seafaring workforce, 1789-1828: Trends and reflections The estimates presented in Appendix 1 indicate that the labour force engaged in working British-owned vessels comprised nearly 160,000 seafarers in 1828, an increase of over 55,000, or 52.7%, on the equivalent total in 1789. Within this 40-year span, the pace of growth was uneven. Having reached a nadir of 96,683 in 1792, the population of seamen increased rapidly to surpass 204,000 in 1796, when a gentler rate of growth took the total to 234,663 in 1801. The marked contraction that ensued gave way to a renewed upward surge in 1804, which saw the number of seafarers exceed 260,000 in 1809 and average 271,000 per annum over the next six years. In 1816, a pronounced reduction in manpower took place, leading to a decade or so of relative stability in which the workforce fluctuated mildly between 142,000 and 162,000 seafarers. With regard to the various seafaring occupations, the pattern of growth was also uneven. Employment in the Navy, for instance, fluctuated widely. Whereas just 17,361 seafarers were borne for pay in 1792, over 147,000 were entered on the books of naval ships in 1813. Within these extremes, the magnitude of the Navy’s human resource was conditioned by the needs of war. Averaging 27,845 men in the four peacetime years of 1789-1792, the labour force had more than doubled in size by the end of 1793, the first year of the French Revolutionary War. From then until 1797 there was a rapid expansion in numbers, the labour force reaching a plateau of around 120,000 down to 1800 when a further surge saw the workforce peak at 131,959 men in 1801. With the cessation of hostilities, a marked contraction occurred. The naval complement had halved by 1803, when the trend was reversed as conflict with France resumed. Attaining the 1801 level by 1807, the Navy’s labour force continued to expand down to 1813, when 147,087 men were borne for pay. As had been 54  Lloyd, British Seaman, pp. 261-64. 55  Rodger, Command of the Ocean, p. 636.



Quantifying British seafarers, 1789-1828

the case in 1802, demobilization swiftly followed the end of hostilities, and from 1817 to 1823 the size of the naval complement, at an average of 24,035 per year, was smaller than that in being in the peacetime years before 1793. In the five years down to 1828, however, this mean figure rose to nearly 32,000 (see Table 3, below and Appendix 1). In the private sector, enlistment in private ships-of-war was an option favoured by comparatively few seafarers in the 1793-1801 and 1803-1815 conflicts. Even at its zenith in 1793, when 2,114 men were engaged in the predatory business, privateersmen constituted just 1.5% of the seafaring workforce. Employment levels dwindled thereafter, as Appendix 1 shows, with a secondary peak of 1,874 privateersmen – a mere 1.1% of the total labour force – evident in 1803.56 In marked contrast, significant and growing numbers of men were engaged in merchant shipping during the 1789-1828 period.57 Whereas an average of 72,651 seafarers was employed in the foreign and coastal trades in 1789-1792, the equivalent figure for the 1825-1828 period was 113,354, an increase of 51.9%. Such expansion generally occurred at a steady rate, with the gradual upward trends evident in 1793-1801, 1803-1813 and 1817-1828 punctuated by sharp increases in 1802 and 1814-1816. As these pronounced upturns coincided with the end of hostilities, they perhaps reflected growth in trading activity in the safer conditions of peacetime and the concomitant absorption by the mercantile marine of labour demobilized from the Royal Navy. Equally, the surge in employment levels may have been more apparent than real, with sixpenny payments rising swiftly as vessels returned to their home ports after comparatively long, war-induced absences overseas. Employment in foreigngoing and coastal vessels followed a similar trajectory for much of the 40-year period, although there were two notable divergences from this general pattern. Accordingly, while the growth in the labour force that occurred in 1802 was largely concentrated in the foreign trade, the relatively high employment levels evident in coastal shipping during the 1808-1813 period were not regained after the surge of 1814-1816 had abated (see Table 2).

56  It is no co-incidence that these peaks occurred in the opening years of the respective conflicts. At these junctures, privateering venturers, who were intent on profiting from the seizure of prizes, generally perceived that their chances of achieving their aim were optimal, largely because they knew, or assumed, that enemy merchantmen would be at sea unaware of, and unprepared for, the onset of war. Starkey, British Privateering, pp. 196-99. 57  As employment in the inland navigation and inshore fisheries has been calculated as a fixed proportion (11.05%) of the foreign and coastal trades, the same long-term patterns are evident. That is, there was steady growth over the 1789-1828 period, with peaks apparent on the cessation of hostilities in 1802 and 1814-1816.

99

100

David J. Starkey

Table 3 – Number of seafarers engaged (average per year) in privately-owned and naval vessels, 1798-1828 Years Privately-owned 80,679 1789-1792 88,922 1793-1801 122,396 1803-1815 124,463 1816-1828 Sources: see Appendices 1 and 2.

Naval 27,845 107,828 123,622 26,124

Total 108,524 196,761 245,981 152,374

The trends evident in the aggregate and sectoral manpower estimates reflect the broad influences that conditioned the development of Britain’s maritime interests during the 1789-1828 period. In terms of annual averages, as Table 3 indicates, the seafaring workforce was larger by almost 44,000 men in the post-1816 years than it had been before 1793, an increase that may have been further enhanced by efficiency gains in the operation of commercial vessels made during this period. As the Navy’s peacetime complement remained more or less unchanged, this growth was largely due to the expansion of the shipping industry’s workforce, which accounted for the bulk of the seafarers working in privately-owned vessels. Such a conclusion supports the case advanced by various authors regarding the impetus given to shipping by an increase in the tempo of economic activity during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.58 Nevertheless, it should be borne in mind that the proportionate increase in the number of merchant seamen between 1753-1755 and 1790-1792 was 46.2%59 – not far short of the 51.9% rise evident between 1789-1792 and 1825-1828 (Appendix 1) period – inferring that an increase in tempo can be traced back to at least the mid-eighteenth century. The impact of war on the size and composition of the seafaring workforce constituted a further continuity with the past. As in previous conflicts, naval manpower increased dramatically as peace gave way to war. Accordingly, a fourfold expansion was evident in the annual averages of 1789-1792 and 1793-1801, although these means conceal extremes of 17,361 in 1792 and 131,959 in 1801 (Appendix 1). As the average increase was similar to that evident in the Seven Years and American Revolutionary conflicts,60 the principal difference between the 1793-1815 and earlier wars was in numbers recruited rather than proportionate increases. That the shipping industry’s workforce emerged numerically 58  Davis, ‘Seamen’s Sixpences’, p. 338; Ville, English Shipowning, pp. 10-13; S. Palmer, Politics, Shipping and the Repeal of the Navigation Laws (Manchester, 1990), pp. 1-7. 59  Starkey, ‘War and the Market’, p. 29. The estimates of 35,781 for 1753-1755 and 52,310 for 17901792 are not compatible with those presented in the current work. 60  Starkey, ‘War and the Market’, p. 29.



Quantifying British seafarers, 1789-1828

stronger from a long period of conflict also had precedents, for the wars of the mid-eighteenth century had generally served to foster the growth of the seafaring population.61 But in this respect there was one significant contrast in the later campaign. Whereas in the mid-eighteenth century conflicts the number of men enlisted aboard merchant vessels fell in wartime, the opposite was true in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars as average aggregates increased from less than 81,000 to nearly 89,000 between 1789-1792 and 1793-1801, and still further to over 122,000 in the 1803-1815 conflict (Table 3). Conceivably this was due to the decline in the number of relatively labour-intensive private shipsof-war, which had engaged the services of up to 8,140 and 8,831 men per month in the 1756-1762 and 1777-1783 conflicts respectively.62 It is far more likely, however, that the contraction in privateering was itself a function of the existence of more favourable investment opportunities offered to shipowners and merchants by the carriage of cargoes. In turn, this probably reflected the greater control exercised over the sea lanes by the Royal Navy in conjunction with the growing demands for tonnage that were stimulated by the buoyancy of an economy in the early throes of industrialization. The precise balance of such causal factors, and the means by which the tonnage and seafaring labour markets adapted to the pressures on supply from both the private and public sectors, are issues that warrant further research.

61  Ibid., p. 39. 62  Ibid., p. 40.

101

102

David J. Starkey

Appendix 1 British seafaring workforce by occupation, 1789-1828 Grand (5) (4) (3) (2) (1) total Private ships- Sub-total Inland Merchant (4+5) Royal Navy (1+ 2+3) of-war navigation shipping Year 104,744 20,396 84,348 8,393 75,955 1789 119,620 39,526 80,094 7,970 72,124 1790 113,048 34,097 78,951 7,856 71,095 1791 96,683 17,361 79,322 7,893 71,429 1792 140,267 59,042 81,225 2,114 8,082 71,029 1793 165,425 83,891 81,534 219 8,113 73,202 1794 182,636 99,608 83,028 66 8,262 74,700 1795 204,309 112,382 91,927 34 9,147 82,746 1796 201,102 120,046 81,056 148 8,065 72,843 1797 207,106 119,592 87,424 550 8,699 78,175 1798 215,228 120,409 94,819 462 9,435 84,922 1799 220,111 123,527 96,584 490 9,611 86,483 1800 234,663 131,959 102,704 363 10,220 92,121 1801 205,832 77,765 128,067 12,743 115,324 1802 171,218 67,148 104,070 1,874 10,156 92,040 1803 206,922 99,372 107,550 190 10,702 96,658 1804 217,734 114,012 103,722 1,050 10,321 92,351 1805 235,131 122,860 112,271 797 11,172 100,302 1806 231,987 130,917 101,070 273 10,057 90,740 1807 248,152 139,605 108,547 101 10,801 97,645 1808 260,566 144,387 116,179 102 11,560 104,517 1809 270,000 146,312 123,688 90 12,308 111,290 1810 264,708 144,762 119,946 54 11,935 107,957 1811 276,005 144,844 131,161 21 13,051 118,089 1812 275,274 147,087 128,187 52 12,755 115,380 1813 273,407 126,414 146,993 7 14,626 132,360 1814 266,653 78,891 187,762 0 18,683 169,079 1815 172,483 35,196 137,287 13,661 123,626 1816 140,694 22,944 117,750 11,717 106,033 1817 147,793 23,026 124,767 12,415 112,352 1818 149,857 23,230 126,627 12,600 114,027 1819 144,988 23,985 121,003 12,040 108,963 1820 147,015 24,937 122,078 12,147 109,931 1821 144,976 23,806 121,170 12,057 109,113 1822 148,904 26,314 122,590 12,198 110,392 1823 151,736 30,502 121,234 12,063 109,171 1824 154,099 31,456 122,643 12,204 110,439 1825 161,470 32,519 128,951 12,831 116,120 1826 156,932 33,106 123,826 12,321 111,505 1827 159,916 31,818 128,098 12,746 115,352 1828 Sources: (1) derived from TNA, ADM 68 (see Appendix 2); (2) derived from TNA, ADM 68; (3) derived from TNA, HCA 25, 26; (5) BPP, 1859, VI, 362-63, Report of the Royal Commission on Manning the Navy, Appendix to Minutes of Evidence.



Quantifying British seafarers, 1789-1828

Appendix 2 Sources and methods used in estimating numbers of merchant seamen Adjustments were made to render the net receipts of the Receiver-General of Sixpences (TNA, ADM 68) into gross returns (see text). The gross returns were multiplied by 40 to provide notional figures of seaman-months, and then divided by an estimate of the average number of months seamen worked in each year. This calculation was based on a sample of muster rolls submitted by masters of Hull vessels in 1790-1790 and 1801-1804 (Trinity House, Hull, Muster Rolls), which indicated medians of 8.2 and 6 in the foreign and coastal trades in wartime, and 7.7 and 7.9 in the foreign and coastal trades in peacetime. These divisors were then applied to the gross sixpenny returns, two-thirds of which were notionally apportioned to the foreign trade and onethird to the coastal trade. These apportionments were based on the tonnage registered in 1792 according to the Navigation Accounts (TNA, CUST 17/13). Mr K. Payne assisted in these calculations. For instance, the number employed in 1806 was calculated as follows: £18,468 x 40 = 738,720 seamen-months 738,720 = 246,240 (coastal trade) + 492,480 (foreign trade) 246,240 / 6 months = 41,040 seafarers, coastal trade 443,360 / 8.2 months = 60,059, of whom 797 were privateersmen 60,059 – 797 = 59,262 seafarers, foreign trade 1806 total = 100,302 (41,040 coastal + 59,262 foreign trade)

103

104



‘But for the loves of the fishes’: Maritime labour and ecological culture in nineteenth-century Newfoundland Sean T. Cadigan – Memorial University of Newfoundland

i. Introduction Over the past twenty years, researchers have emphasized the importance of the early modern capitalist organization of maritime labour, whether in seafaring, fishing, or hunting sea mammals; they depict maritime labourers as either market agents or the vanguard of proletarian resistance to exploitation at sea. Yet works on seafaring in New England and Atlantic Canada suggest that maritime workers often served in paternalistic relationships defined by the bonds of kin and community in the ports from which they sailed. Most seafarers worked for short periods of their lives in deep-sea trades; they otherwise worked in a variety of related trades ashore, or within the context of much more household-like, small-scale production in fisheries or coastal trading, such as in the case of outport Newfoundland. We must pay more attention to the wider culture of such people, which mediated the exchange between their work and capitalist market imperatives and demonstrates that in such an environment, the moral world of preindustrial communities did not simply dissolve in the alienated relationships between labour and capital at sea. The maritime labourers of Newfoundland worked in an international capitalist economy, but capitalist social relations did not define completely their social, economic, and ecological relationships. In the Newfoundland case, notions of a moral economy, of what comprised ‘fair’ exchange between employers and employed, or between merchants and fishers, emerged in close association with the entrenchment of household production in the outport fishery after 1815. Such concepts persisted through the early twentieth century, and suggest an early sensitivity to the ecological problem of resource depletion associated with more capital-intensive forms of marine-resource harvesting. Not all European settlers on the North Atlantic littoral embraced mechanistic market values and systems of property rights associated with the Scientific Revolution and the maturation of capitalism in Europe by the end of the eighteenth century. The depleted ground fisheries of Atlantic Canada might mislead us with the notion that the history of outport Newfoundland has been that of the unremitting exhaustion of marine resources. However, fishing people expressed ecological concerns by drawing on older Anglo-American understandings about the rights of the commons.

105

106

Sean T. Cadigan

ii. Capitalism, maritime labour and fishing Recent scholarship on labour in the early Newfoundland fishery understands it as a form of waged service in a vernacular capitalist industry, and echoes themes in Marcus Rediker’s initial argument about early eighteenth-century seafarers in the deep-sea, long-distance voyages of the Anglo-American merchant marine. Later amplified in collaboration with Peter Linebaugh, Rediker argued that seafarers were the first international proletarians, a group of waged, collective workers united by the increasingly exploitative nature of shipping, and in the vanguard of resistance to all forms of exploitation in the Atlantic world.1 From a much different interest in placing Newfoundland at the heart of a ‘greater New England’ in the North Atlantic World, and in an otherwise superb reinterpretation of its early history, Peter Pope has similarly argued that the fishing industry was always capitalist. He suggests that the commercial, market-oriented nature of staple production in the seventeenth century stamped every form of social and economic relationship in the fishery with the same essential capitalist character. While addressing social differentiation in fishing communities, Pope argues that distinguishing between various forms of service between masters and servants makes no difference in terms of the capitalist nature of fishing.2 His view comes very close to suggesting that the market exchange of labour by wages and shares assumes an almost universal, trans-historical quality as opposed to having a historical specificity grounded in the particular economic and social relations, and culture, of maritime people. However, Pope’s work has the advantage of thinking about maritime workers in the context of a process of transatlantic community formation. In the seafaring literature, so too has Eric Sager suggested that we must think about maritime workers not primarily from their brief sojourns as workers on deepsea voyages, but as part of a wider pattern of service. From this perspective, maritime workers often served in paternalistic relationships aboard a wide variety of vessels, many of which were almost extensions of kin groups among the coastal communities from which they sailed. In such an environment, Sager concludes, the alienated relationships between labour and capital are later phenomena, divorced from a community-based moral world in which 1  M. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the AngloAmerican Maritime World 1700-1750 (Cambridge and New York, 1987); P. Linebaugh and M. Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000). 2  P.E. Pope, Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill and London, 2004), pp. 185-93.



‘But for the loves of the fishes’

relationships based on the mutuality of craft outweighed the market imperatives of capital accumulation.3 Aboard their craft, masters cultivated the loyalty of their crews by directing the affairs of their vessels according to notions of fairness and justice held in common by the communities and extended kin groups from which they all often came. Such negotiated authority often took the form of patriarchal ideals of the ordering, but benevolent, father figure that lay at the heart of so much of political culture in the preindustrial AngloAmerican world. Throughout this world, the uneven and limited development of state institutions in the context of a variety of local economic and social formations meant that elites, whether merchants, gentry, early industrialists, or political oligarchs, exercised power partially by cultivating the acceptance of those they governed or exploited, that is to say, by acting paternalistically.4 Although they do not use the term, Daniel Vickers and Vince Walsh have more recently made similar arguments about the importance of paternalistic authority among seafarers, embedded in customary social relationships extending from the maritime community ashore to the workplace at sea. Vickers suggests that analyses of seafarers as proletarians have relied too much on prominent and romantic accounts of deep-sea, long-distance voyages. What defined seafarers as ‘maritime people’, according to Vickers, ‘was less the distances they travelled than the time they spent upon the water’. In the case of Massachusetts, at least until the nineteenth century, most people fared on the sea, from a very young age, by fishing, engaging in coastal trade, or crewing on shorter voyages at least as much as by working in long-distance voyaging.5 Vickers points out that fishing, coasting, and a variety of shore-based work were central to the experience of maritime people, defining the bulk of their maritime labour more so than did deep-sea voyaging. Furthermore, although most men from coastal Massachusetts spent much time at sea, ‘few of them were dedicated specialists. Before, during, and after their careers afloat, they 3  E.W. Sager, Seafaring Labour: The Merchant Marine of Atlantic Canada, 1820-1914 (Montreal and Kingston, 1989). 4  My work relies heavily on the concepts of paternalism and moral economy as developed by E.P. Thompson in his many works. Particularly important influences were his ‘Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?’ Social History, 3 (1978), pp. 133-65, and ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,’ Past and Present, 50 (1971), pp. 76-136. Thompson revised and expanded upon the ideas in these essays as part of his Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York, 1991). I also draw on B.D. Palmer, Working-Class Experience: Rethinking the History of Canadian Labour, 1800-1991 (Toronto, 2nd edition 1992), pp. 427. See S. Cadigan, ‘Power and Agency in Newfoundland and Labrador’s History’, Labour/Le Travail, 54 (Fall 2004), pp. 223-43. 5  D. Vickers and V. Walsh, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (New Haven and London, 2005), pp. 1-3.

107

108

Sean T. Cadigan

spent much of their time on shore gardening, hunting, cutting wood, gathering hay, tending animals, building and repairing their homes, and doing scores of other tasks.’6 This occupational pluralism, which characterized the maritime communities of New England until undermined by the development of continental industrialization and the more specialized labour markets of the region’s later deep-sea fleet, also defined the coastal communities of Newfoundland. From the seventeenth century, the fishing industry encouraged the settlement of Newfoundland by Europeans. However, this does not mean that most of the English and Irish people came with cultures fully defined by a Christian cosmology, market values and systems of property rights that proved much more ecologically destructive than the spirituality, subsistence-orientation, and gift-giving exchanges of the First Nations. Yet environmental and ecological history presumes the essentially capitalist nature of the British arrival in the Americas, and suggests that Europeans could only bring to America the capitalist commodification and subordination of nature.7 In the Newfoundland case, it is tempting to allow indignation about the depletion or extinction of many marine species, especially northern cod (Gadus morhua), to suggest that a ‘European invasion forever disrupted’ an earlier ‘harmonious interweaving’ of all life, both aboriginal human and non-human, in Newfoundland’s coastal ecosystems.8 But there is more to the story of European expansion abroad than the motivations of merchant capitalists or imperial officials. Common people often migrated within the context of such groups’ market-based impulses, but their own desires and inclinations were more complex. People of the producing and labouring classes moved to subsist and reproduce themselves, their families, households, and wider social relationships in reaction to the manner in which capitalist development at home threatened the fabric of preindustrial society. The people who left England for America, for example, carried with them a tradition of popular regulation of access to the commons. These rural people

6  Vickers and Walsh, Young Men and the Sea, pp. 24, 60. 7  A.W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT, 1972); Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge, 1986); W. Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983), p. 76; T. Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 190; C. Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill and London, 1989); D. Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York, 1993). 8  F. Mowat, The New Founde Land: A Personal Voyage of Discovery (Toronto, 1990), p. 229.



‘But for the loves of the fishes’

had developed a variety of practices, customary rules, and means of enforcement to prevent over-grazing of common pastures, to ensure the overall health of herds using the commons, and to provide equitable access to other forms of common property such as forest waste.9 In Newfoundland, fishing people tried to regulate access to common-property marine resources in similar fashion. Their efforts suggest that fishers’ desire to conserve the resources upon which they depended was more important than their desire to fish without regard for each other, contrary to the myth of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ that lies at the ideological core of Canadian fisheries management.10 iii. Moral economy The material circumstances of fishing in early nineteenth-century Newfoundland discouraged market relationships between labour and capital at the point of production, but fostered moral economic regulation of access by settlers to common property both on land and at sea.11 Throughout the eighteenth century, the wars of the North Atlantic encouraged British merchants to specialize in the business of trading in fish, while the actual production of fish fell to lower-cost, household-based resident fishing enterprises. The international economic depression that followed the end of the wars with Napoleon in 1815 ended the migratory fishery at Newfoundland; immigration collapsed, and 9  D.R. Matthews, Controlling Common Property (Toronto, 1993); B.J. McCay, ‘The Oceans Commons and Community’, Dalhousie Review, 74/3 (Fall/Winter 1994-95), pp. 310-39; J.M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 110-59. 10  The ‘tragedy of the commons’ school argues that the impossibility of enclosing fish as private property forced exploitation without regard for conservation to avoid the problem of rent dissipation. See H. Scott Gordon, ‘The Economic Theory of a Common-Property Resource: The Fishery’, Journal of Political Economy, 62 (1954), pp. 124-42; G. Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Managing the Commons, ed. J. Baden and G.J. Hardin (San Francisco, 1977), pp. 16-30. For opposing arguments see B.J. McCay and J.M. Acheson, ‘Human Ecology and the Commons’, The Question of the Commons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources, ed. McCay and Acheson (Tucson, 1987), pp. 1-36. 11  The commercial organization of the British fishery proved disastrous to the small population of Beothuk, the Amerindian inhabitants of Newfoundland. The early migratory fishery included the seasonal abandonment of fish flakes, stages, and dwellings. The Beothuk scavenged such premises for metals, prompting European settlement and retaliation. The Beothuk responded by a retreat into the interior, where they found insufficient resources to replace the marine animals upon which they depended. By 1829, the Beothuk had become extinct. See R. Pastore, ‘Fishermen, Furriers, and Beothuks: The Economy of Extinction’, Man in the Northeast, 33 (1987), pp. 47-60; Pastore, ‘The Collapse of the Beothuk World’, Acadiensis, 19/1 (Fall, 1989), pp. 52-71; P. Pope, ‘Scavengers and Caretakers: Beothuk/European Settlement Dynamics in Seventeenth-Century Newfoundland’, Newfoundland Studies, 9/2 (1993), pp. 279-93; I. Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk (Montreal and Kingston, 1996), passim.

109

110

Sean T. Cadigan

population developed slowly by natural increase thereafter. The post-1815 depression led merchants to restrict credit and to finally abandon the bank fishery, with its more costly larger vessels, to the French, Americans, and, later, Nova Scotians. Fishing people survived in a sub-arctic, cold-ocean coastal ecology by asserting a moral economic regulation of local resources. For example, fishers had initially responded to credit restrictions by rioting against merchants hoarding food, and by asserting their belief in a customary right to food at fair prices. This social unrest forced the state to encourage supplementary, but essentially subsistence, farming, even though Newfoundland’s shallow and infertile soil, limited boreal woodlands, and short, wet and cold growing season limited farming. Supplementary farming allowed fishing people to establish their own household production in the fishery as garden produce filled shortfalls in provisioning caused by credit restrictions. Governors recognized early a moral right of access to land by preventing members of the colony’s professional elite from enclosing large tracts of land at the expense of fishing people.12 While exploited by merchants, settlers in household fisheries were independent of direct supervision by them. Settlers preferred to establish their own household production rather than to continue under the direct supervision of merchants as wage labourers. In addition to making salt fish for commercial exchange, outport households engaged in other production such as wood-cutting, berry-picking, and all the work associated with building, equipping, and maintaining fishing and household premises to satisfy their needs and limit the amount of credit they required from merchants in exchange for fish and seal products. Households occasionally hired servants, but even in the fishery such employment was to supplement family labour until such time as the household might supply all of its own needs. People exchanged labour, goods, and services with each other, but in the informal markets of the local community, where considerations of kin and community rather than reference to the local merchant and capitalist markets generally governed such exchanges.13 The desire of fishing people for a competency independent of fish 12  S.T. Cadigan, ‘The Moral Economy of the Commons: Ecology and Equity in the Newfoundland Cod Fishery, 1815-1855’, Labour/Le Travail, 43 (Spring 1999), pp. 9-43. 13  P.A. Thornton, ‘The Transition From the Migratory to the Resident Fishery in the Strait of Belle Isle’, Merchant Credit and Labour Strategies in Historical Perspective, ed. Rosemary E. Ommer (Fredericton, NB, 1990), pp. 138-66; S.T. Cadigan, Hope and Deception in Conception Bay: MerchantSettler Relations in Newfoundland, 1785-1855 (Toronto, 1995); Cadigan, ‘Whipping Them into Shape: State Refinement of Patriarchy among Conception Bay Fishing Families, 1787-1825’, Their Lives and Times: Women in Newfoundland and Labrador, ed. C. McGrath, B. Neis and M. Porter (St John’s, Newfoundland, 1995), pp. 48-59. The entrenchment of household production by family labour took



‘But for the loves of the fishes’

merchants or dependence on service to any other master was the basis of their moral economy. They often acted directly to protest against merchants’ price manipulations of their accounts in truck. Fishing people might act individually by assaulting merchants or their agents, but occasionally their protests assumed collective and political dimensions that drew on the customs, rural rebellions and radicalism of late-eighteenth century England and Ireland. In essence, settlers’ struggle for competency was a form of class struggle, a desire to be free of merchants’ mastery. Such struggle might force merchants into more paternalistic credit practices, ones that cloaked exploitation in a superficial and unequal mutuality. While paternalism forestalled more open conflict, it was something claimed from below by fishing people as much as granted from above by merchants, as they demanded more than the simple ‘logic of the market’ in social relationships.14 The quest for competency fostered communal practices to ensure that all households might reproduce themselves. Fishing people’s moral economy of access denied anyone the right to take more than their fair share of local resources, or to damage resources so badly that they would not be available to future generations. In an effort to maintain a sustainable dynamic equilibrium with local resources working-age people moved from long-populated areas to settlement frontiers within Newfoundland, and eventually from the colony as a whole, to counter-balance high birth rates. As populations grew to levels that threatened the ability of all to survive, many left to ensure their families’ successful reproduction over time. Young families would leave their original communities to find new places from which to fish. Settled families place earliest in the longest settled parts of Newfoundland – Conception Bay and the southern shore of the Avalon Peninsula. In Bonavista, Trinity, Placentia, and St. Mary’s Bays, more remote areas additionally disturbed by conflicting Anglo-French exploitation, families could supply their fishing households with enough labour until the 1850s, and the remainder of the island (held by the French) would not do so until the 1870s. See M. Staveley, ‘Population Dynamics in Newfoundland: The Regional Patterns’, The Peopling of Newfoundland: Essays in Historical Geography, ed. J.J. Mannion (St John’s, Newfoundland, 1977), pp. 49-76. 14  On competency see D. Vickers, ‘Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early America’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 47 (1990), pp. 3-29. On the popular regulation of truck see Cadigan, Hope and Deception, pp. 83-122. See also L. Little, ‘Collective Action in Outport Newfoundland: A Case Study from the 1830s’, Labour/Le Travail, 26 (Fall 1990), pp. 7-35. This view of the moral economy as a form of class struggle conflicts with the arguments in J. Overton, ‘Academic Populists, the Informal Economy and Those Benevolent Merchants: Politics and Income Security Reform in Newfoundland’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 28/1 (2000), pp. 33-35. A very different argument about paternalism as an instrument of rule for fish merchants may be found in G. Sider, Between History and Tomorrow: Making and Breaking Everyday Life in Rural Newfoundland (Peterborough ON, 2003), pp. 124-7, and J. Bannister, The Rule of the Admirals: Law, Custom and Naval Government in Newfoundland, 1699-1832 (Toronto, 2003), pp. 245-54. For a critique of the Sider and Bannister views see Cadigan, ‘Power and Agency,’ pp. 223-43.

111

112

Sean T. Cadigan

would eventually allow only as many others to marry into their communities as the local ecology would support. Any other potential settlers would have to move on.15 Even apparently capitalist wage labour found a place in the strategies of competency. Fishing people did not hesitate to take temporary employment on fixed wages or shares in shipping, the seal hunt, or in newer, more capitalintensive fisheries such as at Labrador or on the Grand Banks as a means of ensuring the overall competency of their households. Throughout the later nineteenth century, coastal Newfoundlanders engaged in the maritime labour of coastal fishing, trading, and short-term voyaging that was very similar to that of seventeenth and eighteenth century coastal Massachusetts. By the 1860s, Newfoundland shipping consisted mostly of schooners, averaging about 56 tons in size, and used primarily for fishing and coastal trade. Newfoundland did not develop a deep-sea carrying trade; its ports had few of the brigs, barques, and ships of other neighbouring regional ports. Besides schooners, Newfoundland mercantile firms, particularly in St John’s, Carbonear, and Harbour Grace, might invest in brigantines, the favourite vessel of the offshore seal hunt. Merchants and planters used their schooners to travel to Labrador and, with government support in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the various fishing banks off Newfoundland to fish. While the Canadian Maritime provinces developed other industries, fishing remained the most important single industry in Newfoundland. The fisheries of the Canadian Maritime provinces diversified in invertebrates such as lobster, and pelagic species such as herring and mackerel. However, Newfoundland’s industry remained dominated by the quest for cod, especially northern cod, although there were smaller fisheries for lobster and salmon. Limited economic diversification ashore ensured that Newfoundland remained a maritime economy characterized by household production, although work in shipping became more important to the occupational pluralism of outport households by the end of the nineteenth century. The percentage of all those employed in Newfoundland who worked directly in the fishery ranged from 89 per cent in 1857 to 82 per cent in 1884, and from 1890 to 1900 roughly 80 per cent of the adult male population continued to work in the fisheries.16 15  P.A. Thornton, ‘Dynamic Equilibrium: Settlement, Population and Ecology in the Strait of Belle Isle, Newfoundland, 1840-1940’, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Aberdeen, 1979; Thornton, ‘Newfoundland’s Frontier Demographic Experience: The World We Have Not Lost’, Newfoundland Studies, 1/2 (1985), pp. 141-62. See also A.G. Macpherson, ‘A Modal Sequence in the Peopling of Central Bonavista Bay, 1676-1857’, Peopling of Newfoundland, pp. 102-35. 16  Newfoundland, Census of Newfoundland (St John’s, Newfoundland, 1845-1884). R.E. Ommer,



‘But for the loves of the fishes’

Although most maritime labourers in Newfoundland did not travel too far or long from their home ports in the course of fishing or trading, their work might occasionally take them on deep-sea voyages. Most people spent their time at sea fishing from small craft or schooners, but they also coasted, trading in ports ranging from the Maritime provinces of Canada down the American seaboard to the fish and lumber markets of the West Indies and Brazil. Local schooners carried fish to European markets, and from there fishers might embark on voyages that could last for quite a while, either as their merchants and captains looked for good prices and return cargoes, or by joining another ship. John Froude, born in Twillingate, Newfoundland in 1863, went to sea for the first time at the age of fourteen. He recalled at the end of his career, ‘I have sailed around the great globe over the bounding bellows of the 5 great oceans the 7 seas lakes and rivers of the world to 32 different countries 77 seaporttowns and citys one hundred and fifty nine thousand seven hundred miles in my travels of 2270592,000 secons of time [sic].’17 Froude had first crossed the Atlantic on a fishing schooner in 1887, and from various ports in Europe signed on as a crewmember of ships and barques for the next six years. Over the course of approximately the next 40 years, Froude fished, built boats, coasted, and worked at many jobs ashore. All the while, he kept a diary of his experiences, writing in his own style and grammar, ‘echoing the cadence and rhymes of hymns and sea shanties’.18 Newfoundland seafarers such as Froude found themselves entwined in the paternalistic ties that bound together the masters of fishing schooners and their crews. Throughout Newfoundland, the importance of the household organization of most fishing operations meant that the authority of skippers on larger vessels became an almost organic extension of the familial patriarchy of households themselves. ‘The model’ of authority at sea ‘was in fact that of the family or the household as the basis of orderly society, and the ship was a type of working household with the master at its head.’19 In smaller vessels, skippers required the consensus of their crewmates. In larger vessels, especially those of the seal hunt, commanded by trusted clients and employees of ‘Ships and Shipping, 1863-1914’, plate 39; and C.G. Head, R.E. Ommer, and P.A. Thornton, ‘Canadian Fisheries, 1850-1900’, Historical Atlas of Canada, Volume II: The Land Transformed, 1800-1891, ed. R.L. Gentilcore (Toronto, 1993); E.W. Sager and J.J. Mannion, ‘Sea and Livelihood in Atlantic Canada’, plate 23, Historical Atlas of Canada, Volume III: Addressing the Twentieth Century, ed. D. Kerr and D.W. Holdsworth (Toronto, 1990). 17  J.W. Froude, On the High Seas: The Diary of Capt. John W. Froude, Twillingate, 1863-1939 (St John’s, Newfoundland, 1983), p. 1. 18  Sager, Maritime Labour, pp. 24, 73, 114, 122-23, 228-29. 19  Ibid., pp. 44-51.

113

114

Sean T. Cadigan

the largest mercantile firms, captains were more autocratic. They took all the credit for successful hunts as if they personally killed the seals. Yet even in the seal hunt, captains depended on the personal loyalty of their crews; they dispensed favours and patronage as well as discipline.20 Paternalistic relations between masters and crews at sea preserved for maritime workers such as Froude the customary reciprocity of their communities’ moral economies against the potentially corrosive influence of more alienated, market relationships between labour and capital. However, the moral economic regulation of access to the commons by fishing people could not, on its own, maintain equilibrium between their fishing effort and fish populations. Although fishing effort increased steadily over the nineteenth century, fishers were exhausting discrete bay or sub-stocks of northern cod, and Newfoundland’s salt cod exports spiralled downward. Merchants responded to failing catches and falling prices by restricting credit, especially for winter supplies, and encouraging their better-off clients to purchase fishing gears such as trawl lines and cod seines that intensified effort.21 By the 1840s, fishers who continued the traditional method of fishing only by hand lines began protesting against the introduction of more intensive harvesting gears. Some of these protests involved the destruction of newer equipment, while others were anonymous assaults on the equipment’s owners. The use of assaults and vandalism to punish those who violated community norms about the responsible use of common resources may seem repugnant, but the actions of these nineteenth-century fishers constituted an attempt to limit the problems of open access fostered by the mercantile organization of the fishery. As in the case of the Luddites’ machine-breaking and other collective acts in England, the Newfoundland protesters were not simply fighting the introduction of new technologies into their industry. Instead, fishers, like the Luddites, rejected the shift in economic and social relationships that prompted the use of the new equipment. In the Newfoundland case, this shift included the intensification of capital investment in fishing and consequent narrowing of the distribution of benefits from the exploitation of fish stocks to those who might afford such investment. A movement led by Trinity Bay merchant William Kelson articulated the economic, social, and ecological concerns of protesters by demanding the bar20  Ryan, Ice Hunters, pp. 213-63; B.C. Busch, The War Against the Seals: A History of the North American Seal Fishery (Kingston and Montreal, 1985), pp. 65-94. 21  Cadigan and J.A. Hutchings, ‘Nineteenth-Century Expansion of the Newfoundland Fishery for Atlantic Cod: An Exploration of Underlying Causes’, The Exploited Seas: New Directions for Marine Environmental History, ed. P. Holm, T.D. Smith and D.J. Starkey (St John’s, Newfoundland, 2001), pp. 31-65.



‘But for the loves of the fishes’

ring of capital-intensive gears. Kelson argued that these gears allowed only the few who could afford them to catch more of the increasingly sparse resource, leaving the mass of fishing society to destitution. Kelson campaigned in the local press, and spoke at mass demonstrations by fishers on the Bonavista Peninsula. He used the pseudonym ‘Izaak Walton’ to invoke the sentiments expressed in the original Walton’s 1653 work The Compleat Angler. Walton suggested that nature was a sacred order with which, like the social order, people should tamper only with great caution. As a merchant’s agent, Kelson saw the destitution caused by credit restriction, and had been personally threatened by clients whom his employers, Slade and Company, had instructed him to cut off. Kelson agreed with fishers who felt that more capital-intensive fishing equipment over-exploited fish and produced the scarcity that led to credit restriction in the first place. He thought it unjust that the proliferation of this more intensive equipment would make it more difficult for those who used more rudimentary gear to make a living.22 The moral economic sentiments of Kelson and his followers was hard put to withstand the corrosive influence of the capitalist organization of the fishing industry. Merchant firms’ credit strategies promoted more open-access exploitation of the fishery by supporting the introduction of more intensive harvesting technologies. In the 1840s, the use of cod seines and trawl lines (called bultows at the time) had become more widespread than the older hook-andline method of fishing; they were essential to the initial recovery and subsequent short-term maintenance of exports. By the 1860s fishers were using gill nets. The introduction of newer gears tended to improve catches for a short period, but declines soon returned, prompting the use of even more intensive gears. As technological change proved insufficient to sustain catch rates, merchants began to provide credit, supplemented by colonial subsidies, for the development of a fishing fleet that could range further afield, first to new fishing grounds in outer headland areas, then northward along the Labrador coast, and onto the fishing banks. The northward expansion of the Labrador fishery began in earnest in the 1860s. In 1856, about 700 Newfoundland vessels sailed to Labrador each season, fishing between Blanc Sablon and Cape Harrison, the northern limit of the Labrador fishery at that time. Through the 1860s, schooners ventured north of Cape Harrison to Hopedale, and by 1870 Newfoundland vessels sailed north of Hopedale. Over the next two decades, schooner crews pushed farther north in their quest for cod, and by the 1890s 22  Cadigan, ‘The Moral Economy of the Commons’, pp. 34-42.

115

116

Sean T. Cadigan

some were venturing north of Ramah to the northern tip of Labrador, often sailing such astonishing distances through fog and ice in nothing more than jack boats, small, schooner-rigged craft of no more than twenty tons.23 Fishing people met the depletion of local fish populations with protests, and the colonial legislature routinely received petitions from fishers from almost every part of Newfoundland during the second half of the nineteenth century asking for the prohibition or restriction of more intensive fishing gears. The colonial government showed little interest in limiting trawl lines. In 1845, the legislature had enacted legislation to encourage the use of trawl lines in competition with the French on the Grand Banks. Merchants, such as Robert Pack of Carbonear, testified before a Select Committee of the House of Assembly in 1845 that the use of bultows on the Grand Banks represented a new, more intensive exploitation of the largest cod which congregated there. These Pack believed to be the ‘mother fish’ of all other cod. Thomas Job of St John’s agreed, stating that ‘I have heard it stated by some of the oldest fishermen that this mode of fishing is destructive of the species by taking the female fish before spawning’. Other St John’s merchants supported Job. Nicholas Mudge, for example, condemned the bultows as being destructive of ‘mother fish’, and hoped that the British imperial government would prevent the French use of the gear. Instead, British inattention and lack of care about the situation in Newfoundland encouraged merchants such as Mudge to try to compete on as equal a footing as possible to get the biggest and best fish possible for market. The attitude of Mudge and his fellow merchants, like that of the Newfoundland government, appears to have been that, if the cod were going to be destroyed, it might as will be by Newfoundland interests as by competitors such as the French.24 Fishers were less resigned to the trawl lines, and occasionally took more direct action. In 1863, for example, the fishing people of Juricle, Tite’s Cove, and Herring Cove on the south coast decided that trawl lines were destroying the local cod fishery, imposed a voluntary self-ban, and hauled up and destroyed the trawl lines of the few who would not observe the ban. Throughout the 1860s the number of attacks on gill nets and trawl lines increased alongside popular support for a more peaceful and legal regulation of fishing effort by government.25 Thereafter, fishers from south-coast communities such 23  Cadigan and Hutchings, ‘Nineteenth-Century Expansion’, p. 33. 24  Government of Newfoundland, Journal of the General Assembly of Newfoundland, 3, III, 1845, appendix, report and evidence of the Committee ‘appointed to enquire into the state of the Fisheries on the Banks and Shores of Newfoundland’, 22 April 1845, pp. 203-249. 25  S.T. Cadigan, ‘Failed Proposals for Fisheries Management and Conservation in Newfoundland,



‘But for the loves of the fishes’

as Oderin continued to demand that the government consider protecting the ‘mother fish’ by banning or limiting the use of trawl lines.26 These fishing people, like the merchants who opposed the government’s subsidy of trawl lines, understood ‘mother fish’ in a way that is still used in the Newfoundland fishing industry. ‘Mother fish’ were ‘breeders’, or ‘very large, pale or “white” fish, sometimes with large amounts of spawn in them’. Fishers believed these to be the most mature cod, whose reproductive preoccupation led them to stay put in deep trenches, channels or gullies. There, the fish were beyond most of the fishing technologies of the day, except the relatively inefficient hand lines, which could not be used to harvest the great fish in large numbers. The newer trawl lines, stationary gear that allowed hundreds of baited hooks to be set close to the bottom, caught more of the mother fish.27 Outport Newfoundlanders recognized that their commercial activity risked depletion of cod stocks, and expected their colonial government to regulate effort by controls on new gears and the length of fishing seasons. Interested primarily in economic expansion of the industry, the Newfoundland government did little except experiment with artificial propagation of cod and lobster stocks, limit seasons for the use of some fishing gear, and aid the development of a viable herring fishery to augment the cod fishery.28 Steadfastly ignoring evidence that fish resources were suffering as a result of the pattern of development in the fishing industry, the government preferred to blame foreigners for any signs of depletion, a tactic that was to become all too popular in the twentieth century. Throughout the nineteenth century, the colonial government and press usually argued that the proponents of controlled access to the commons were too lazy or backward to introduce new fishing methods themselves. This response ignored the widening gap between those fishers who, backed by merchant credit, were willing and able to invest more in new boats and fishing gear, and the vast, impoverished majority who could not. Their growing poverty, which observers such as Kelson blamed on more capitalintensive fishing gear allowing fewer people to take more fish, undercut the ability of fishing people to maintain their opposition to the intensification of

1855-1880’, Fishing Places, Fishing People: Traditions and Issues in Canadian Small-Scale Fisheries, ed. D. Newell and R. Ommer (Toronto, 1999), pp. 147-69. 26  Evening Mercury, St John’s, 12 August 1889; The Daily Colonist, St John’s, 18 October 1889, 6 April 1892. 27  B. Neis et al., ‘Fisheries assessment: what can be learned from interviewing resource users?’, Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, 56 (1999), p. 1953. 28  K.W. Hewitt, ‘The Newfoundland Fishery and State Intervention in the Nineteenth Century: The Fisheries Commission, 1888-1893’, Newfoundland Studies, 9/1 (1993), pp. 58-80.

117

118

Sean T. Cadigan

marine-resource exploitation. If fishing people could not get credit directly from merchants because they would not adopt new fishing methods, they faced only two choices in the absence of government regulation of access: they could either adopt the new methods or, if they could not afford this, go to work for those who could. In either case, people’s livelihoods came to depend on accepting open-access in the fishery. Once fishers adopted a more capital-intensive gear, the pressure to exploit resources more severely took over. Fishers had to work harder and longer to pay off the debt incurred as a result of investing in new equipment and larger vessels. The construction of more wideranging vessels also meant that fishers increasingly intruded on each others’ fishing grounds, making the possibility of community self-management less likely. The opportunity for resistance and defence of the moral economy was very limited: a pattern of brief, intense opposition, followed by resignation to new fishing technology as governments refused to intervene, continued to the end of the nineteenth century.29 Kelson was also troubled by the manner in which increasing effort in the seal hunt was affecting the seal herds. He warned the colonial government that vessels were leaving for the ice earlier in the year, and taking seals that were so immature as to be almost commercially useless, and so were hurting the ability of the herds to reproduce themselves.30 Kelson observed that the mercantile organization of the seal hunt was causing the open-access problem of resource depletion as outport people relied increasingly on the seal hunt to make up for catch and credit shortfalls in the local cod fishery. The early seal fishery had been a small-scale land-based affair, in which people used nets to capture mature seals that wandered close to shore. Harp seals bred in large congregations on offshore ice. That encouraged mercantile investment in schooners, which could go to the herds to kill the newly-born white-coated pups whose hides and fat were of the highest value. The seal hunt was dangerous work, in which crews would often have to leave their vessels and walk for miles, jumping from ice pan to ice pan, and risking death by jumping onto slob ice. Philip Tocque, a mercantile clerk, shopkeeper, and, later, Anglican cleric, claimed that the hunt was ‘a nursery for moral and spiritual evils. It has a tendency to harden the heart and render it insensible to the finer feelings of human nature. It is a constant scene of bloodshed and slaughter.’31

29  Cadigan and Hutching, ‘Nineteenth-Century Expansion’; Cadigan, ‘Failed Proposals’. 30  The Public Ledger, St John’s, 31 August 1858. 31  P. Tocque, Wandering Thoughts: or, Solitary Hours (London, 1846), p. 196.



‘But for the loves of the fishes’

Tocque’s observation appears to confirm contemporary views of the seal hunt as cruel and inhumane. But his main complaint was that sealers had the temerity to hunt on the Sabbath rather than that they must hunt on the other days of the week. His description of the dangers and hardships suffered by sealers suggests a more important explanation of sealers’ apparent callousness when it came to the messy work of killing seals. Sealers risked life and limb to provide for their families each spring by travelling to the pack ice, leaving the ships in work teams called watches, and hopping from ice floe to ice floe in search of seals to kill. Individual hunters routinely succumbed to frigid waters, but the crushing ice, the cold, and the unpredictable gales of snow and freezing rain that mark spring in the North Atlantic occasionally claimed entire ships and their crews. Many hunters died or suffered serious injuries because of the risks their captains took in sending watches out in bad weather, or because ship owners poorly equipped their ships. The seal hunt spent human life easily in ways that hardened hunters’ hearts more so than did killing seals.32 Sealers were caught up in the near-cutthroat economic rivalry and precipitous over-exploitation of seals by merchants as they rushed into the pack ice with bigger schooners and brigantines. The introduction of steamers from the late 1860s was a response to over-exploitation of readily accessible herds, as many outport Newfoundlanders recognized. Public debate about the need for conservation legislation grew throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.33 Opponents of the steamers echoed Kelson’s concern that the vessels sailed too early and pointlessly killed too many immature and breeding-age seals. Driven by the need of vessel owners and captains to meet the much higher overhead costs of the new steamers, sealers from such vessels killed far more animals than they could drag back to their vessels. The sealers heaped dead seals they could not personally bring back on large patches of sea ice called pans. The steamers were supposed to return so that the crews could retrieve the remainder, but often lost these ‘panned’ seals. Outport people found such waste ‘an unwarrantable abuse of the treasures of the sea which Providence provides for the general good of all’ and demanded 32  Ryan, Ice Hunters, 243-327. 33  C.W. Sanger, ‘Technological and Spatial Adaptation in the Newfoundland Seal Fishery During the Nineteenth Century’. Unpublished MA thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1973, pp. 12-53; C.W. Sanger, ‘The Dundee-St John’s Connection: Nineteenth Century Interlinkages Between Scottish Arctic Whaling and the Newfoundland Seal Fishery’, Newfoundland Studies, 4/1 (1988), p. 1. S. Ryan, The Ice Hunters: A History of Newfoundland Sealing to 1914 (St John’s, Newfoundland, 1994), pp. 98-100, 105-6, 111-17.

119

120

Sean T. Cadigan

that government restrict the practice. Opponents protested openly against merchants for squandering a resource to the detriment of fishing people.34 In 1886, the crew of the steamer SS Hector, commanded by Captain Edward White, and owned by Job Brothers and Company of St John’s, encountered the anger of people from Twillingate when they panned seals. Their ship had become jammed in the ice about twelve miles from Twillingate on 8 March, and the crew spent about seven or eight hours struggling over the ice to seals close by the shore. The crew killed and panned about 5,000 seals, but were too exhausted to make it back to the Hector. At risk of dying from exposure, the sealers reached Twillingate, and were sheltered by the inhabitants. Over the next two days, the people of Twillingate took 1,000 of the panned seals ashore rather than seeing them lost. Captain White complained that he had lost all of the seals, and wanted compensation for the salvage of some by Twillingate residents. This prompted local ire, expressed in the community’s newspaper. The paper argued that seals were part of the bounty of a ‘kind Providence’, and there seemed to be no stopping the manner in which the steamer hunt was ‘destroying the common wealth of the country’. ‘Where are all the seals that were killed and bulked this spring?’ asked the editor of the newspaper: Where are the Hector’s 5,000? We are positive that they were not brought to Twillingate, and nearly all the men from the neighbouring localities were sealing from here. Yet late intelligences inform us that that steamer arrived at St John’s with 1,200. This is the way in which thousands of seals are lost every year and still there is no redress for such wanton destruction of wealth. Sportsmen can have laws made to protect Game, which affords them recreation when it suits their convenience, but here is one of our staple industries that is annually declining owing principally to the unwarrantable modes in its prosecution, without any attempt being made to legislate for its protection.35 The editor further suggested that the colonial government should control the rapacity of the steamer hunt by banning operations on Sundays. Hunting on the Sabbath only compounded the profanity of wasting the bounty of nature.36 The Newfoundland government made some small efforts to control the hunt. It had passed legislation in the 1870s that prohibited steamers from 34  Twillingate Sun, 19 May 1881; 14 January 1882. 35  Twillingate Sun, 8 May 1886. 36  Twillingate Sun, 5 March 1887.



‘But for the loves of the fishes’

leaving for the ice before 10 March, but mercantile opposition defeated its proposed ban. In 1887, the government passed laws considering unattended panned seals to be abandoned, and permitted each steamer only one trip to the ice to participate in the hunt. But merchants argued that the seal hunt now depended on steamers, and their pressure meant that the regulations prohibiting second trips disappeared periodically through the late 1890s. Fearing loss of employment in the seal hunt if merchants began to withdraw from the industry, the Fishermen’s Protective Union (FPU) supported the steamers in the early twentieth century. Founded in 1908 by William Coaker, the FPU was primarily a populist marketing co-operative and political organization. It represented inshore fishing people in an attempt to eliminate merchants as brokers in the marketing of fish. The FPU also advocated the rights of fishing people in a wide variety of areas, including natural-resource management. The FPU’s leadership concentrated on improving the working conditions and pay of steamers’ crews, but the membership argued for some sort of official restraint on effort in the industry. Seeing the waste of the steamers as blasphemous, for example, FPU members at Change Islands asked the government to consider a Sunday ban on sealing to lessen the impact of the hunt on the herds.37 Such a ban did not appear; the government’s efforts to protect seal stocks ‘were feeble and enjoyed very little success’.38 Desperately in need of any employment because of the depletion of local inshore fisheries through capitalist restructuring, fishing people were hardly in a position to break a similar pattern of over-capacity and resource depletion in the seal hunt without the support of government. The process of ecological depletion in the cod fisheries and seal hunt of Newfoundland does not appear to have matched the rapid cycle of industrial expansion and depletion of animal populations in the international whaling industry. Yet there is good reason to believe that the more factory-like setting of whaling ships did not break down the moral economy of maritime workers. Newfoundland had a brief, but intensive whale hunt from shore stations by steamers beginning in 1898, peaking in 1904, and declining by 1917. While recent work suggests that the open-access nature of the industry led to rapid depletion of whale herds and the end of the industry, it does not address the views of workers in the industry about their work. Fishing people who lived close by these operations feared the ecological impact of depleting whale herds, which frequented the same grounds as the fish they caught. By 1902 the politi37  Fishermen’s Advocate, Coakerville, 4 June 1910; Port Union, 24 May 1929. 38  Ryan, Ice Hunters, pp. 115-17.

121

122

Sean T. Cadigan

cal pressure arising from such concerns led to the first Newfoundland regulation of the whale hunt. The 1902 regulations did not help conserve whale populations because they failed to prohibit the killing of females, or limit the number of licences the colony issued for the hunt, or even establish a maximum catch per licence. Inadequacies in the new regulations did not prevent fishers from continuing to press for better conservation of local whale populations. However, their efforts failed to limit overexpansion by industrialists with state support.39 Although the people who worked in the whale hunt appreciated the incomes and related economic spin-offs in their communities, their concerns about depletion suggest that they understood the necessity of balancing increased effort against the likelihood that the hunt could destroy the animals upon which they depended. The literature on Anglo-American whaling allows speculation about how maritime people might have felt about hunting whales. Whaling vessels were processing facilities, complete with furnace-like try-works for rendering blubber into oil. Whalers had larger crews, and a much greater division of labour than on other vessels, although most crewmembers were competent mariners in their own right and could do virtually all shipboard jobs.40 At first glance, the literature suggests that whalers had little sympathy for the great creatures of the oceans, which they slaughtered and converted into commodities of bone and oil. In 1842, for example, the Nova Scotian hunter Benjamin Doane, son of a Barrington Harbour coaster and sea captain, shipped aboard a schooner, the Jane, as a seaman. While whaling off the west coast of Newfoundland, Doane observed the hunting of what he called a humpback ‘cow whale’ and its young ‘calf’. His captain’s boat harpooned and lanced the larger whale, then came alongside and lanced the calf. Doane claimed that the humpback had a very strong ‘mother instinct’, and in the course of the pursuit ‘stopped suddenly and rolled on her side, as if to take her stricken infant to her breast’. The manoeuvre saved neither calf nor mother; a good thing, from Doane’s perspective, because his shipmates lost the larger humpback and had only the calf to ‘try out’.41 39  A.B. Dickinson and C.W. Sanger, Twentieth-Century Shore-Station Whaling in Newfoundland and Labrador (Montreal and Kingston, 2005), pp. 31, 43, 63-83. 40  The literature on whaling is extensive, but see B.L. Colby, For Oil and Buggy Whips: Whaling Captains of New London County, Connecticut (Mystic, CT, 1990); L.E. Davis, R.E. Gallman, and K. Gleiter, In Pursuit of Leviathan: Technology, Institutions, Productivity, and Profits in American Whaling, 1816-1906 (Chicago and London, 1997); T. Barrow, The Whaling Trade of North-East England: 17501850 (Sunderland, 2001); N. Watson, The Dundee Whalers: 1750-1914 (East Linton, 2003). 41  B. Doane, Following the Sea: A Young Sailor’s Account of the Seafaring Life in the Mid-1800s (Halifax, 1987), p. 24.



‘But for the loves of the fishes’

Even in whaling, the commodification of market exchange did not harden completely the ecological sensibilities of maritime workers. A few years later, the American whaler Charles Nordhoff recounted a similar chase off the coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Part of a mate’s boat crew, Nordhoff pursued a cow whale and its calf, but began to refer to it as a ‘mother’ fighting for ‘her’ calf by trying to stay between it and the whale boat. Finally, the whalers won out, and killed both whales. Nordhoff, however, could not help but observe that ‘never did mother, of whatever species, display a more absorbing affection for her young than did this whale’. The whaler felt ashamed at what he had done, claiming that ‘there was scarcely one in the pursuit, but felt as though we were taking a dishonorable advantage of her’.42 Mary Brewster, who cruised with her husband, whaling master William Brewster of Connecticut, in 1846, observed that he and the crew were happy to be at work slaughtering whales, and that it was ‘the first time I could willingly see blood shed so freely’. Nonetheless, Eliza Williams, aboard the whaling ship Florida, later recounted that she took great pleasure in seeing whales swimming with each other, ‘but it made me feel very bad to see them spouting blood as thick as it could be, and the last struggles of death after they had run and sounded and the boats had pulled up and lanced them and fired bomb lances into them – then to see them lie tumbling and rolling about in the water, dying.’43 We might think that Williams’ revulsion stood in marked contrast to Brewster’s reaction, and even more so to Martha Smith Brewer Brown’s exclamation on 13 January 1848 that ‘today I have the unspeakable pleasure of seeing a whale brought along side’. Brown was not bloodthirsty; rather, she had been at sea for about four months, sailing with her whaling captain husband from Long Island into the merciless heat of the Indian Ocean. She did not see cruel commodification in the whale’s death. Rather, killing the leviathan was the way home: ‘It [is] quite encouraging to think we have got one of the thirty or forty we have to get, ere we can anticipate returning home. It looks like a long day I can assure you to look ahead to the time when this ship shall be full of oil and we homeward bound.’44 Brown’s emphasis on the importance of home is significant, for it suggests that the institutional and social frameworks of families, households, and communities were at least as important to maritime workers as were those 42  In Yankee Windjammers, ed. C. Nordhoff (New York, 1940), p. 292. 43  ‘She Was a Sister Sailor’: The Whaling Journals of Mary Brewster, 1845-1851, ed. J. Druett (Mystic, CT, 1992), p. 93. 44  She Went a Whaling: The Journal of Martha Smith Brewer Brown from Orient, Long island, New York, around the world on the whaling ship Lucy Ann, 1847-1849, ed. A. MacKay (Orient, 1993), pp. 47-8.

123

124

Sean T. Cadigan

of ships or ports, a point usually ignored by studies of the supposedly proletarian experiences of male seafarers on long-distance voyages. Furthermore, the literature on whaling and fishing emphasizes the critical role that women played in the reproduction of families, households, and communities over time, and the importance of women’s production, particularly in the backward linkages of the whaling industry, and in the forward processing of shore work in the manufacture of salt cod. In many communities throughout the North Atlantic, women have been important commercial fishers, especially in the context of local markets. It may be stating the obvious to say that women have been at the core of the particular reproductive strategies which encompass the life cycle of people from cradle to grave. At least in the case of Newfoundland’s outport communities, the demographic developments associated with such strategies dominated the basic ecological framework in which people lived: the dynamic equilibrium Thornton described between humans and the other constituent biota of their local ecosystems. But for all of our understanding of the importance of women to the production and reproduction of the maritime world, we know little about their ecological culture. In a provocative essay, Melody Graulich suggests that maritime women spent a great deal of their lives in the landwash, living within the tidal margins of land and sea, with all of its compelling imagery of birth and death. There they developed a harmonious, almost maternal, and perhaps fatalistic sense of the sea as both giver and taker of life.45 The integration of women’s work into the commercial production of maritime households means that we must be careful about how we interpret the apparently chivalrous views of whalers such as Doane or Nordhoff about the cruelty of the hunt. Their concern for the plight of female whales and their offspring might be interpreted as a manifestation of the exaggerated masculinity of whalers, a paradoxical discarding of ‘feminine attributes’ at sea while living up to the roles of breadwinners and protectors of wives, children, and other dependants at home.46 The comments made by Mary Brewster and Martha 45  M. Graulich, ‘Opening Windows toward the Sea: Harmony and Reconciliation in American Women’s Sea Literature’, Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 17001920, ed. M.S. Creighton and L. Norling (Baltimore and London, 1996), pp. 204-26. On women in fishing communities, see Cadigan, Hope and Deception, pp. 64-80; P. Thompson, with T. Waily and T. Lummis, Living the Fishing (London, 1983), pp. 167-81; P. Frank, Yorkshire Fisherfolk: A Social History of the Yorkshire Inshore Fishing Community (Chichester, 2002). On women in whaling communities see L. Norling, Captain Ahab had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720-1870 (Chapel Hill and London, 2000). 46  M.S. Creighton, Rites and Passages: The Experience of American Whaling, 1830-1870 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 162-73, 208.



‘But for the loves of the fishes’

Brown on the killing of whales were not particularly delicate or tender in a bourgeois feminine sense, and did not live up to male chivalrous notions of delicate womanhood. Maritime homes and communities reflected little of the division into masculine, market-oriented public spheres and feminine, household-oriented private ones. Both men and women had direct experience with the killing of marine animals, or with the processing of the remains of such animals into marketable commodities. Killing animals was essential to the maintenance of their homes. For ‘home’ was an apparently simple term that encompassed the complex process of the reproduction of families, households, and communities over time; it lay at the heart of the relationship between maritime people and the environments in which they worked. At its core, ‘an essentially materialistic view of nature’ may have imbued this relationship; maritime fishers, sealers, and whalers had to kill animals so that reproduction could occur. In the case of the common personification of female whales and larger, more fecund, fish as ‘mothers’, we may detect ‘a desire to make an omnipotent nature seem orderly and comprehensible’.47 But there is no reason to think that simple materialism alone was at work in the popular personification of hunted animals. In many societies that depend on the harvesting of particular species of wild fish, such fish ‘are considered sacred or are held to be kin of humans, or both’.48 Many settlers in Newfoundand carried with them the popular religious traditions of the English West Country, such as that farm animals knelt and prayed at Christmas. These traditions recognized the interdependence of people and animals in agrarian life, and attempted to make a place for the latter in the community and moral economy through personification.49 Among the fishers and whalers discussed here, the effort to personify cod and whales as mothers was most likely an attempt to render the nature of these animals in familiar terms. To give another example, in 1888 a newspaper correspondent in St John’s tried to explain the reproductive habits of cod, herring, and other fish by stating that they shared with all creatures an essential biological urge to procreate: ‘under the impulse of the grand passion which pervades all animated existence – which throbs in the breast of the codfish and in the heart 47  Rediker, Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, p. 185. 48  E.N. Anderson, ‘Fish as Gods and Kin’, Folk Management in the World’s Fisheries, ed. C.L. Dyer and J.R. McGoodwin (Niwot, CO, 1994), p. 55. 49  M.J. Lovelace, ‘Animals Kneeling at Christmas: A Belief Topic and Its Calendar Context in Newfoundland’, Studies in Newfoundland Folklore: Community and Process (St John’s, Newfoundland, 1991), pp. 48-9; J. Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey 1825-1875 (Oxford, 1976), pp. 259-312.

125

126

Sean T. Cadigan

of the young man and maiden… But for the loves of the fishes, human loves and human pairings would be pretty scarce in Newfoundland. Thus wonderfully does nature bind us together in one great whole.’50 An appreciation of the interdependence of people and the animals upon which they preyed, an acknowledgement of being bound together in this ‘great whole’, constituted an important ecological consciousness within the culture of maritime people. Maritime people saw the waste of such resources, as in the case of the Newfoundland seal hunt, as blasphemous because it did not allow the balance of the ‘one great whole’ to continue. Such perceptions demand a rethinking of the apparent ghastliness of the hunt, as perceived by bourgeois observers such as Tocque. Modern, and post-modern, sensibilities make it easy to forget just how important blood has been to almost every human society. Societies have attached symbolic and ritualistic significance to bloodshed in the course of people’s biological life cycles. Many societies shed the blood of people or animals to mark important events and rites of passage, to signify group membership, or to invoke divine intervention in the course of human events. Other societies used substitutes to commemorate sacred blood sacrifice, such as wine in the Christian tradition.51 Piero Camporesi suggests that blood ‘permeated’ the early modern world: ‘From birth to death, the sight and smell of blood were part of the human and social pilgrimage of each and all.’52 Few were as awash in blood as have been maritime people for most of the history of the North Atlantic. Lanced whales broiled the water with it; skinning seals stained white ice and soaked hunters; butchering animals produced blood that was often processed into foods; children might well be born amidst a tragic flood of it; and people often died in its midst. In all cases blood may have represented a potent, fluid representation of balance, a spiritual symbol of life and death that people did not wantonly shed. Nonetheless, spilling blood was a routine and necessary element of maritime labour. It might mean the difference between life and death, as in the case of a seal hunter in the early 1860s from Greenspond, on the northeast coast of Newfoundland. Julian Moreton, a Church of England missionary there, later recalled the man, a fellow, and two boys had gone hunting on drift ice close to shore, but were carried further out to sea by wind. The boys and one of the men soon died of exposure, but the fourth companion ‘had the good fortune 50  The Evening Mercury, St John’s, 3 July 1888. 51  M.L. Meyer, Thicker than Water: The Origins of Blood as Symbol and Ritual (New York and London, 2005), passim. See also M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo (London and New York, 1966, 2002), pp. 149-50. 52  P. Camporesi, Juice of Life: The Symbolic and Magic Significance of Blood (New York, 1995), p. 27.



‘But for the loves of the fishes’

to see a sleeping seal, which he managed to reach and kill. He sucked its warm blood, and was reinvigorated.’53 Few people likely had to partake of such awful communion, but killing seals was a welcome act in coastal communities which, as in the case of the northeast communities stretching from Cape Fogo to Cape John in Newfoundland, might be running short of supplies after a long winter. The appearance of pack ice and seals might relieve the threat of hunger, and always lightened the load of debt by proving much needed employment at a very slow time of the year in terms of the economy. In one such spring, ‘the sealing enthusiasm even inspired some of our lady friends, who travelled out to the seals, and were as successful in killing and bringing a “tow” to land as were any of the old professional seal-hunters.’54 iv. Conclusion Although sealers might object to his view of their work, most of the maritime people discussed here would likely have agreed with Tocque’s observation that the ‘sea is a stupendous effect of creative skill and wisdom, and holds a prominent place among the sublimer objects of nature’, especially in ‘consideration that in its ample bosom the stately ship bears the fortunes of thousands, displays the wonderful adaptation of a nature to the wants of man.’55 Maritime labour consisted of using the sea and its creatures to meet human needs. Fishers, sealers, whalers, and their families and households, had no romantic vision of ‘nature as a nurturing mother’, or of themselves as part of an organic whole. They rather held to what has been termed a ‘typically Elizabethan view of nature… [as] a kindly and caring motherly provider, a manifestation of the God who had implemented a designed, planned order on the world. This order imposed ethical norms of behaviour on the human being, the central feature of which was behavioural self-restraint in conformity with the pattern of natural order.’56 However, the fact that such an older view of nature was alive and well in the coastal communities of Newfoundland in the second half of the nineteenth century suggests that we may not see a Western environmental consciousness as being subsumed by the mechanistic views of ‘the Scientific Revolution and the rise of a market-oriented culture in early modern Europe’.57 The people who fished and hunted seals, and perhaps 53  J. Moreton, Life and Work in Newfoundland (1863), ed. N. Winsor, (Newtown, NL, 1977), p. 8. 54  The Twillingate Sun, 24 March 1888. Ryan, Ice Hunters, pp. 388-89. 55  P. Tocque, The Mighty Deep (New York, 1852), p. 17. 56  C. Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, 1980), p. 6. 57  Merchant, Death of Nature, p. xvi.

127

128

Sean T. Cadigan

those who engaged in whaling, used nature, but not in ways determined primarily by market motivations. These people settled the Newfoundland coastline because of the fish trade, and the market motivations of fish merchants were always a great force that they had to contend with. But the core values of these maritime people were of a moral economic nature. Embedded in popular religious traditions and folklore, such values often contradicted the more bourgeois values expressed, for example, in the official churches.58 The moral economy of these maritime people rested on a notion that people should engage in fair transactions with each other, and that their sense of fairness rested on a commitment to the rights of competency. Each household had the right to reproduce itself over time without being mastered by another, especially as wage labourers. Such reproduction depended on the persistence, and therefore responsible exploitation, of natural resources. There is no doubt that basic self-interest drove such consciousness: maritime people knew that they had to balance their numbers and the natural world on which their survival depended. Maritime families and communities faced much more difficult prospects of reproducing themselves over time if the species upon which they depended were depleted. Nonetheless, there were tragic, constant examples of marine animal populations being depleted, or becoming extinct, as a result of commercial exploitation. Maritime people did not embrace market values, but they could not escape the capitalist organization of fishing, sealing, or whaling. The organization of these industries led to resource depletion, but not without opposition on the part of the people who harvested them. Without state support, however, such opposition was unable to alter the strategies merchants used to invest capital in more intensive forms of resource harvesting. Over the long term, this left maritime people with little option but to conform to such strategies, and to become further entrapped in the political economy of capitalism in the North Atlantic world.

58  Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society, pp. 262-3.



The Shipping Federation and the free labour movement: A comparative study of waterfront and maritime industrial relations, c.1889-1891 William Kenefick – University of Dundee

i. Waterfront and maritime trade unionism c.1850-1891: The Scottish context It was Sydney and Beatrice Webb who suggested that the ‘new unionism’ of the late 1880s and early 1890s was a different type of trade unionism and since then historians have come to accept this view of ‘new directions in industrial relations’. Indeed, as it was linked to the organization of unskilled workers and because of its connections with the socialist movement many historians have read into it ‘evidence of a new class consciousnesses’. Moreover, it was commonly held that the impulse for this movement was historically linked with the London dock strike of August 1889, or at the very earliest the strike of match girls during the previous summer. It was therefore a movement that had its roots in London: ‘a view that – although highly persistent – has long been untenable’ – and particularly so in the Scottish context.1 Engels argued at the time of the London dock strike that if the dockers could organize themselves then other sections of workers would follow, and in the aftermath of the strike Harry Quelch, of the London South Side Labour Protection League, wrote how this dispute created ‘the impetus and enthusiasm for combination among large numbers of workers hitherto unorganized’.2 In Scotland, however, organizations of dockers, seamen, carters and porters had been evident long before the London strike. The artisan phase of early dock unionism began with the emergence of the Glasgow Harbour Labourers’ Union (GHLU) in 1853; the transition to a more general type of dock unionism came with the formation of the Aberdeen Shore Workers’ Union in 1883, and later the Greenock Dock Labourers’ Union and the Glasgow Harbour Mineral Workers’ Union (GHMWU) both formed in 1887; and in 1886 the Clyde Associated Mariners’ Society was established at Glasgow (a year before the formation of the National Amalgamated Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union 1  W.H. Fraser, A History of British Trade Unionism, 1700-1998 (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 71-72. See also W. Kenefick, ‘A Historiographical and Comparative Survey of Dock Labour c.1889 to 1920 and the Neglect of the Port of Glasgow’, Scottish Labour History Journal, 31 (1996), pp. 51-71. 2  H. Quelch, Trade Unionism, Co-operation and Social Democracy (London, 1892), pp. 3-4.

129

130

William Kenefick

(NASFU) in 1887). But these were essentially local trade union societies and not national organizations.3 The first mass general dock unions did not emerge until the late 1880s, and in Scotland by early February 1889 the Glasgow Herald reported that Glasgow dockers had formed the National Union of Dock Labourers (NUDL).4 Indeed, by June – along with the Seamen’s Union (NASFU) – the NUDL was already involved in its first serious dispute with the shipping employers. The strike spread across Scotland from Glasgow and Greenock on the western seaboard to Aberdeen, Dundee, Bo’ness, Burntisland, Leith and Grangemouth on the east, and included Derry and Liverpool. The employers bought in sufficient ‘free labour’ to keep the docks and shipping lines operating, however, and within a month the strike was over. The NUDL nevertheless went on to set up branches in all these ports with the exceptions of Aberdeen and Greenock where dock unions already existed. The Seamen’s Union started with a branch in Aberdeen in 1887 and established a branch at Glasgow in 1888 after the collapse of the local Mariners’ Union. Indeed, by the time of the London Dock Strike the NUDL and the Seamen’s Union had branches throughout Scotland. After the 1889 strike it was reported widely in the press that the leaders of the NUDL noted that it took thirty scabs to do the work of ten dockers, and even the port authorities were on record as stating that in some cases it took the ‘free labourers’ three to four times as long to turn-around a vessel. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, however, the employers declared themselves satisfied with the replacement labour. The Irish-born leaders of the NUDL Edward McHugh and Richard McGhee seized upon this, and advised all returning NUDL members to ‘work like the farm workers worked’. This became known as ‘Ca’canny’ – a ‘go-slow’ or a ‘go-easy’ – and soon after this strategy was initiated McHugh was approached by the shipowners who promised wage increases if the men would work normally.5 To this growing arsenal McHugh and McGhee added what was widely reported in the Scottish press as that Irish weapon of revolt – the boycott. After the defeat of 1889 the dockers and seamen and their trade union leaders knew it would be difficult to emerge victorious in an all-out labour war against the shipping employers and their counterparts in the shipping kindred trades. 3  W. Kenefick, Rebellious and Contrary: The Glasgow Dockers, 1853-1932 (East Linton, 2000), pp. 93, 168, 186-8, 192. 4  The Glasgow Herald, 6 February 1889. 5  Kenefick, Rebellious and Contrary, pp. 190-91.



The Shipping Federation and the free labour movement

By boycotting a specific port, shipping line, or an individual employer, however, the dockers in particular proved that such guerrilla tactics could win occasional and important victories. The go-slow had already won concessions and McHugh and McGhee’s tactics were applauded by ‘old’ and ‘new’ trade unionists alike. Through the successful employment of the boycott their reputations were further enhanced. Thereafter ‘Ca’canny’ and the boycott became the foremost industrial relations strategies of the NUDL.6 Through the use of ‘Ca’ Canny’ and the boycott the dockers and the seamen grew in confidence and their membership expanded in equal magnitude. The movement started at Glasgow but even by the early months of 1889 membership had swelled across Scotland. Their ‘novel and daring’ industrial strategies clearly paid dividends and this was recognized in the Annual Report of the Glasgow Trades Council in the autumn of 1889: We think the notice of those who have set a good example during the year would be incomplete if no mention was made of the Dock Labourers, a body of men who have been looked upon very much as if it was impossible to make anything of them in the way of improving their position... It is good to be able to say so much for such a large and hitherto underestimated body of men. The Report concluded by noting that the NUDL represented 4,000 dockers at Glasgow alone and that nationally the NASFU had a membership of 7,000,7 and this all occurred before the full impact of the Great London Dock Strike was felt across Britain generally. Yet Keith Laybourne would still closely identify the new unionism with London and, ‘without retelling well-known stories’, point to Annie Besant’s match girls, Will Thorne’s gas workers and the London dockers – led by Tom Mann, Ben Tillett and John Burns – as the prime movers in this movement.8 Its impact on trade union membership was literally quite staggering. When reporting the Dundee Trades Union Congress (TUC) in 1889, The Scotsman reminded its readers that when that body first gathered at Manchester ‘twenty-two years before’ it had forty-eight delegates representing 250,000 workers. The Dundee Congress of September 1889 was expected to welcome an estimated 250 delegates – seventy more than the year before – accounting for an aggregate trade union membership of something 6  E. Taplin, The Dockers’ Union: A Study of the National Union of Dock Labourers, 1889-1922 (Leicester, 1986), p. 30. 7  Glasgow Trades Council, Annual Report, 1888-89, p. 8. 8  K. Laybourn, A History of British Trade Unionism (Stroud, 1997 edn.), p. 72.

131

132

William Kenefick

in the region of 750,000 working men.9 When the President of the TUC made his fraternal greeting to the Liverpool Congress in 1890 he welcomed 460 delegates representing a combined estimated membership of 1,427,000 workers.10 It was without doubt the most important gathering of its kind the country had ever seen, but for The Times and The Scotsman and the massed ranks of the British press the Liverpool Congress was important for one particular reason: it was the arena where the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ forms of trade unionism vied for supremacy. But if the historiography of the ‘new unionism’ tells us anything it is that this type of analysis of ‘old’ and ‘new’ is too simplistic. The whole topic remains a much contested area of academic debate, and to date labour historians have failed to precisely define such basic issues as timing, impact and what is actually meant by ‘new unionism’. Indeed, excepting the occasional footnote and odd reference scattered here and there, Scotland barely figures at all in the historiography of the ‘new unionism’. For contemporaries, however, the ‘new unionism’ was real enough. While the London Dock Strike clearly attracted some sympathy from the British press, by 1890 it was viewed as increasingly provocative and tyrannical. By then it was Havelock Wilson’s Seamen’s Union that was increasingly viewed as one of the worst examples of this new and aggressive movement, and in particular the solidarity shown by the dockers and other kindred shipping workers through the use of sympathetic strike-action. The seamen’s fight to unionize and organize the shipping industry reached new heights during the early 1890s, and as tensions mounted the press came to view this matter as a great labour war waged by the seamen and their allies against the shipping employers in an effort ‘to transfer the control of shipping from the owners to the unions’.11 When the Shipping Federation was formed late in 1890 this contest reached it zenith, and in its aftermath the employers’ actions not only resulted in defeat for the seamen and their allies, but, as the press believed, delivered a major and decisive blow against the forces of anarchy and tyranny unleashed through the despotic ‘new unionism’. What follows is the establishment press view in both England and Scotland of how these contests unfolded. Through this narrative of events it is possible to investigate the parallel themes of convergence and divergence: first, by analyzing the similarities but specifically the differences in the industrial strategies adopted by the shipping employers and waterfront and maritime trade 9  The Scotsman, 2 September 1889. 10 The Times, 2 September 1890. 11 The Times, 10 September 1890.



The Shipping Federation and the free labour movement

unionists across Britain; and second, by considering the wider implications for the colonial labour force in Britain and Australasia and the convergence and contact between transnational federations of employers and workers. ii. The impact of the new unionism: The early years As noted in L.H. Powell’s history of the Shipping Federation that body was ‘formally constituted’ on 2 September, 1890 and incorporated on 30 September. It was founded ‘in an age of hostility between employers and workmen as a “permanent battle-axe”, as one record has it, against “oppression and abuse”’. These were the days when ‘obdurate resistance was countered by ugly violence’, when ‘Federation “ticket” crews were smuggled on board at dead of night to avoid pickets, and Federation officials were often stoned on sight’. But when preparing his book for publication in 1950 Powell could state with confidence that those unhappy days were gone and that a transformation had taken place in industrial relations between shipowners and seafarers because of the actions of ‘far-sighted leaders on both sides who came to realise that their interests were joint, not separate’.12 Powell was of course making reference to the leadership of Havelock Wilson who by 1911 was willing to make deals with the Shipping Federation in return for union recognition and a union monopoly on labour supply. The NSFU under Wilson continued to move closer to the Shipping Federation with the formation of the National Maritime Board in 1917 and in 1922 extended this arrangement to allow the NSFU and the Shipping Federation to jointly control employment in the shipping industry. In 1920 the Seamen’s Union became the NUS and was by then ‘a company union’ and by the 1930s had formed a closed shop.13 Indeed, the closed shop was not fundamentally challenged until the 1960s when a new militant leadership began to assert some control over the union.14 Fourteen years after Powell professed peaceful relations between employers and seafarers there was a national seamen’s strike – the first largescale strike of note in more than half a century.15 In the interim, however, the Shipping Federation asserted its dominance over industrial relations and in particular the employment of non-union labour through the Federation ‘ticket’. 12  L.H. Powell, The Shipping Federation: A History of the First Sixty Years 1890-1950 (London, 1950), p. 1. 13  W. Kenefick, ‘Transport Unions in Scotland from the nineteenth century to present’, Scottish Life and Society. A Compendium of Scottish Ethnology. Vol. 8: Transport, Communications and the Media, ed. C. Harvie and K. Vietch (forthcoming). 14  Fraser, History of British Trade Unionism, pp. 211-12. 15  Kenefick, ‘Transport Unions in Scotland’.

133

134

William Kenefick

Powell notes that shipowners had formed associations in the past, for instance at Sunderland in the 1870s where they joined together to fight against the ‘tyrannical and dictatorial body of unionists’ combined in the Sunderland Seafarers Society. Port and shipping employers at Glasgow did likewise and broke a strike by the Glasgow Harbour Labourers Society in 1872 (the GHLS later gained considerable notoriety when it operated as a Free Labour Society in league with the Shipping Federation at Glasgow in the early 1890s). The GHLS was referred to as the ‘Old Society’ and was formed in 1852 as an elitist artisanal shipworkers’ union, and apart from a brief time during the port strike of 1872 it never seriously attempted to recruit ordinary dock and quayside workers into its ranks.16 In 1885 a ‘Central Association of Shipowners’ was set up in Glasgow, Sunderland and Newcastle and it made the first serious attempt to organize a permanent country-wide body to represent shipping interests across Britain. But it was not until the ‘stirring and turbulent times’ of the 1880s and early 1890s that serious consideration was given to the formation of a national ‘fully incorporated Shipowners Society’.17 Although the Shipping Federation reputedly emerged from an organization at Tynemouth, the methods it later advocated and adopted were already common practice at the port of Glasgow. In 1887 the employers there forced the collapse of the Clyde Associated Mariners’ Society after only a year in existence, and in 1888 they broke the Glasgow Harbour Mineral Labourers’ Union, formed only in the previous year, after the imposition of a port-wide lock-out and by bringing in replacement labour to operate the port. A year later, in June 1889, the employers became embroiled in a Clyde-wide dispute with the Seamen’s Union and the recently formed Glasgow-based NUDL. In the time honoured tradition the employers set out to break this strike by introducing replacement labour.18 During the first week of the strike Havelock Wilson addressed a large meeting of seamen and dockers and noted a threat ‘alluded to’ by the shipowners at Glasgow ‘to bring in foreign labour to take the place of seamen on strike’, and as the strike by then had spread to Edinburgh the employers there were planning a similar response. He noted that the shipowners had free labour agents working in ‘Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Germany’ to find replacement labour, but because of a scarcity of men in each location could not raise replacements. He concluded by stressing that the leadership was prepared for such a contingency in any case.19 16  Kenefick, Rebellious and Contrary, pp. 168-9. See also W. Kenefick, Red Scotland! The Rise and Fall of the Radical Left, c. 1872 to 1932 (Edinburgh, 2007), pp. 33-34. 17  Powel, The Shipping Federation, p. 2. 18  Kenefick, Rebellious and Contrary, p. 192. 19  The Scotsman, 7 June 1889.



The Shipping Federation and the free labour movement

By the second week of June the dispute had escalated into a national strike and as it spread across the country the seamen and dockers set up branches of their respective unions in all the main ports across the entire length of the Scottish waterfront. As time went on, however, the employers began to find sufficient supplies of replacement labour and predictably inflicted simultaneous defeats on the NUDL and the Seamen’s Union. The men returned to the same terms and conditions that prevailed before the strike and were forced by mutual agreement to work alongside the ‘free labour’ men – many of whom were kept on after the strike. The employers professed themselves happy with the outcome despite having to endure longer turn-around times at the dockside and some loss of operational efficiency while at sea. For the dockers the defeat was sweetened somewhat by the success of the tactics of ‘Ca’canny’ and the boycott, and they gained some improvements in pay and conditions as a result. Indeed, this industrial relations strategy was seen as much more effective than the strike. For the seamen, though, the situation was different: it was felt that the problem of free labour required more militant solutions. These included wider and more formal federation with the dockers and the shipping kindred trades accompanied by an industry-wide general strike and the wholesale intimidation of strike-breakers. The shipowners seemed determined to break the Seamen’s Union, but even after a prolonged period of industrial unrest and discontent which continued through to the summer of 1890 they still lacked unity of purpose. Despite their steadfast resolve to manage their industry as they saw fit, and their determined stand against the forces of organized waterfront and maritime trade unionism, it was the port employers and shipowners of Glasgow in particular who resisted all attempts to secure the necessary agreement to form a federated employers’ association. Indeed, given the absence of industrial consensus on the matter of federation, coupled with the growing strength and confidence of the Seamen’s Union and the continuing sympathetic support among dockers and other kindred workers for the seamen’s cause, it was difficult to see how the anticipated coup de grâce could ever be administered. Towards the end of 1890, however, there appeared an opportunity to deliver this blow. The port transport and shipping employers took their chance to bring the industry back under their control. iii. ‘An age of hostility’: Towards the formation of the Shipping Federation It may have happened more by accident than design but matters came to a head in August 1890 when the Seamen’s Union made public its determina-

135

136

William Kenefick

tion to extort from the employers an agreement on two fundamental demands: first, that all seamen aboard British ships should be members of the NASFU; and second, that all seamen should be engaged at the Shipping Offices and not aboard ship. As the shipowners saw it – and later this was made clear in a prominent and very effective press campaign – the first demand meant the exclusion of all ‘non-unionists’ and a trade union monopoly in favour of the Seamen’s Union which was ‘by no means the only union’ representing maritime workers. The second demand was designed to further enforce wholesale membership of NASFU. It was noted that once aboard ship there were ‘no facilities…for detecting’ whether seamen were union men or not, and little or no opportunity to compel them to join – not least when a vessel was at sea. However, if sailors had to report to Shipping Offices in order to secure an engagement, they could be identified and, if necessary, intimidated into becoming members of the union.20 In making these demands the seamen were clearly preparing the ground for the next phase of industrial confrontation with their employers, but the real turning point came when the Seamen’s Union publicly boasted that in time it intended to ‘compel every ship’s master and every seaman’, regardless of rank or occupation, ‘to join the union’. Moreover, until this aim was achieved the leader of the seamen, Havelock Wilson, would instruct his men not to work any ship unless the master and officers were members of an organization known as the ‘National Certificated Shipmasters and Officers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland’. It would seem that much of the ruckus and uproar over the unionization of masters and officers – which tyrannical course of action the establishment press volubly and roundly condemned – was not as clearcut as the press suggested. There was much confusion over the exact nature and form of the proposed union. It was suggested that this ‘Shipmasters and Officers’ Union’ had over twenty branches throughout Britain by the end of 1890 with a membership of somewhere between 7,000 and 9,000. But apart from these press reports there is little or no evidence to demonstrate that this organization was ever formed as a fully and officially incorporated trade union or trade society, or that it operated in any effective or meaningful way within the shipping industry. Of course, there were associations and societies of shipmasters and officers but they were never intended to be trade unions and they clearly distanced themselves from bodies tainted with the new unionism. Indeed, other than 20 

The Times, Editorial Leader, 13 December 1890.



The Shipping Federation and the free labour movement

press speculation it is far from clear whether the shipmasters and officers had ever entered into any direct contact with the body proposed, threatened and sponsored by the Seamen’s Union. For example, in a letter published in The Times in December 1890 the Shipmasters’ Society of London stated openly that it would resist any attempt by any organization to ‘coerce ship masters or officers into becoming trade union members’, but left open the question of whether it had made contact with this body. This resolution was originally moved by the London Society before the Shipping Federation was formed, but it was made public at that point because the shipmasters felt it desirable for the Federation to add their condemnation of this proposal.21 The Federation, of course, was in ‘perfect sympathy’ and added: That they would not willingly permit their trusted masters and officers to become the bondsmen of trade union officials, whose present and threatened actions [were] subversive of discipline, and fraught with danger to security of life and property at sea.22 The original resolution was sent to the Federation by Captain Albert G. Froud, secretary of the Shipmasters’ Society, and then passed onto the The Times by the Shipping Federation. But in the Times article that followed it was stated that Captain Froud’s Society and its ‘kindred associations’ were ‘practically Trade Unions of the highest order’. Captain Froud objected strongly to this term and in a later communication stressed that the Shipmasters’ Society was ‘not a Trade Union’. It was established for the ‘mutual protection and advancement of the general interests of its members’. Indeed, the first article of the Society’s constitution stated that it did not have the power – even if it harboured the desire – to entertain any question of ‘interference in disputes between shipmasters and his owners’, and that was why the resolution was passed and sent to the Federation in the first instance. The good Captain wished to set the record straight but he was also aware that the Shipmasters’ actions had initially helped ‘the cause of the Shipping Federation when that body was being formed.’23 The Shipping Federation did not respond to Captain Froud on this or, indeed, any other occasion and were happy to let the press and the public believe that the Shipmasters’ Society was simply another form of trade unionism. This being the case the shipmasters and officers could be influenced by the 21  Resolution passed by the Shipmasters’ Society, London, 3 September 1890. 22  The Scotsman, 12 September 1890. 23  Letters to the Editor, The Times, 15 December 1890.

137

138

William Kenefick

Seamen’s Union – who embodied ‘in the most audacious form the pretension peculiar to the new unionism’ – and the interests of the shipowners and ultimately the public were therefore threatened. Captain Froud was aware of this slight of hand, which explains his anxiety to clarify the status of his Society to the press, the general public and the Shipping Federation. Beyond this, though, he did not press the matter for he was clearly in sympathy with the Shipping Federation’s aims. Given the lack of any further scrutiny into the matter – either by the Shipmasters’ Society or its ‘kindred association’ – the press and the Federation were equally happy to let the matter rest. The Scotsman reported the matter in somewhat different terms. While noting that there existed various mutual societies for shipmasters and officers in Scotland and England, with a membership of 7,000, it stressed that they were in no sense trade unions. Nor did they wish to become so constituted. Generally, however, the press reiterated in the strongest terms that the shipmasters and officers were being coerced into what was practically a newly formed branch of the Seamen’s Union, and that the Shipping Federation was fighting to ensure that their masters and officers remained free and non-unionized. Despite Powell’s reference to the ‘National Certificated Officers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland’, there is no specific mention of it the press. It would seem that this body was confused with the Shipmasters’ Society or other similar associations, and all the available evidence suggests that at no time did they harbour any notion of becoming trade unions. Indeed, as will be shown below, these bodies went on to unite themselves into a Federation of their own (the Shipmasters’ and Officers’ Federation) and quickly became affiliated to the Shipping Federation. Whatever the facts of the matter, according to Powell the National Certificated Officers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland did not in any case survive very long (if it ever existed at all); but the issue of the unionization of masters and officers was, in the words Havelock Wilson, ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’. As a result, the Shipping Federation came into existence as ‘a fighting machine to counter the strike weapon’. Significantly, ‘it made no secret of the fact.’24 It is possible that the whole episode described above was part of a propaganda exercise carefully choreographed to the Shipping Federation’s benefit. The Federation garnered the undivided attention and sympathy of the press, and its claim to be the guardian of shipping was further enhanced when it demonstrated active links between striking waterfront and maritime workers 24 

Powell, The Shipping Federation, pp. 4-7. See also Kenefick, Red Scotland, p. 34.



The Shipping Federation and the free labour movement

in Britain and Australia. At that point there was a major industrial dispute taking place in Australia within the maritime and kindred trades, and groups of seamen, dockers and other labourers working on the same shipping lines in Britain took strike action in sympathy with their Australian colleagues. The Australian dispute largely concerned the issue of the employment of non-union labour, but from a press perspective the cause célèbre was the employers’ refusal to recognize the affiliation of the Marine Officers’ Association to the Australian Federation of Labour. Indeed, with the Seamen’s Union openly advocating the same course of action it was only a matter of time before it occurred in Britain. iv. The shipping crisis and the free labour cause: International contacts and employer solidarity According to the press by the later months of 1890 the port transport and shipping industries faced the ‘gravest crisis’ that they ‘had ever experienced’, and for this reason it was right and legitimate that the Shipping Employers Federation had been formed to defend themselves against the forces of new unionism. It was reported that the Australian employers struggling to defend their rights against similar trade union tactics were not yet federated, and had they been, posited numerous press reports and editorials, they would have been better placed to act ‘at once and in unison’ against the forces of unrest and anarchy. With the formation, in September 1890, of the Shipping Federation in Britain the employers demonstrated that they had learned from the Australian experience and were well prepared for the oncoming industrial war. Indeed, as noted above, in terms of press and public propaganda they were already well ahead of the game. It became evident very quickly that the seamen now faced a powerful adversary – ‘an organization of shipowners representing a capital of £100,000,000 invested in 6,500,000 gross registered tonnage’.25 This impressive statistic was not lost on the press. For example, coverage in both The Times and The Scotsman clearly demonstrated the wide support for the Shipping Federation and its aims and principles. On 10 September, within a week of its formation, The Times reported that ‘one fact [was] already abundantly certain – namely, that the federation will exceed in magnitude anything ever before attempted in the way of organizing capital’. It was the first, and arguably the most formidable employers’ association to be formed in Britain and it provided a blueprint for 25  The Scotsman, 9 October 1890.

139

140

William Kenefick

other associations to follow. With a few exceptions – most notably the port of Glasgow, the ‘Second City of Empire’ – the Shipping Federation united almost the whole of the shipping interests operating across the United Kingdom. But they also had a broader perspective and from the start made it clear that it was only a matter of time before Australian and New Zealand shipowners formed their own federation. If this prediction proved correct, it would be open to all these colonial bodies to join the federation establishment in London, so that the scheme of operation would thus eventually embrace not merely the United Kingdom, but the British Empire. In this way British and colonial shipowners would work hand in hand in the event of difficulties arising in either Great or Greater Britain, the result, if necessary, being not only a bond of sympathy, but a common purse and combined action. The press and a good many shipowners were clearly excited about the prospect of challenging head-on the philosophy of new unionism and replacing it with the principles of ‘free labourism’. The reports also noted that there was already in place a network of ‘free labour agents’ who were more widely dispersed around the country than was generally known.26 Indeed, as noted previously it was only discovered by accident that the Glasgow shipowners had agents operating in northern Europe during the June dispute of 1889, although in the final analysis it is clear that their replacement labour needs were met through British agencies. The Scotsman commented in a similar fashion that the movement to federalize the whole of the shipping industry was probably the opening of a new chapter in the present and impending struggle between the organized forces of labour and capital in the British shipping trade. In the history of trade unionism it has seldom occurred that the combination of the workers has been met by an organization for the mutual protection and indemnification against loss through the stoppage of trade, so powerful as that which, under the name of the Shipping Federation, now confronts the leaders of the Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union.27 The tone of this report was representative of the British establishment press. At last, the coercive tactics of the Seamen’s Union could be challenged. Moreover, ordinary rank and file members of the union now had the oppor26  The Times, 10 September 1890. 27  The Scotsman, 9 October 1890.



The Shipping Federation and the free labour movement

tunity to choose ‘Free Labour’ over trade union tyranny. This became a major theme in the Federation’s propaganda. It was persistently argued that too many men had been ‘bullied’ and ‘intimidated’ into taking up trade union membership. The global dimensions of this new industrial relations initiative on the part of the shipping industry were already evident before the formation of the Shipping Federation, but once it was in operation it clearly excited interest from abroad. A telegram of 5 September – just three days after the Federation was officially formed – from the Shipowners’ Association in Melbourne to the President of the Shipping Federation in London read simply: hearty thanks for your cordial support. powerful combination here. a conference is to be held next week. opinion of the public with us. we are fighting for the same principle as you. It was then reported that in Melbourne various steamship companies were gradually resuming the coasting and colonial business by employing non-union men, that the supply of labour at the wharves was increasing, and that ‘any strikers caught molesting non-unionists were heavily fined or imprisoned’. At Sydney a conference of employers of labour was to be to be held later on 9 September to discuss federation and that one thousand special constables had already been sworn-in in preparation to continue the fight and achieve their ends.28 In Britain there was no general strike but the seamen, dockers and other kindred bodies still practised strike by stealth through the use of the sympathetic boycotting of particular employers, shipping lines or the smaller ports and harbours employing non-union free labour, and by the now ubiquitous ‘go-slow’. By the second week of September The Scotsman reported that ‘So far as can be ascertained, the Dock Labourers’ Union and Seamen’s Union has not yet received a decisive defeat [and] it is impossible at present to predict what course will be pursued by the non-unionists’. By early October, however, The Times was already noting that ‘good progress had been made’ through the Federation’s campaign to promote free labour: across Britain there was an ‘abundant supply of seamen, firemen and dockers’ willing to work with non-union labour and there were already discussions regarding the issue of a Federation ticket. Indeed, the report concluded that the ‘free labour scheme’ proposed by the Federation ‘was not necessarily hostile to trade unionism’ 28  The Scotsman, 6 September 1890.

141

142

William Kenefick

and, more especially, ‘those unions which [had] no coercive tendencies’.29 By October the fight was well underway and wherever there was a strike it seemed that the Shipping Federation managed to ensure a good supply of replacement labour. This was certainly the case at both Dundee and Edinburgh’s Leith docks. It was also the case that certain lines of shipping were deliberately laid up in order to effect a ‘lock-out’ of the seamen and dockers. Owners, in other words, were now playing the dockers and seamen at their own game. It was at this time that James Bolam, the Leith secretary of the Scottish Shipmasters’ Association and secretary of the recently formed Shipmasters’ and Officers’ Federation, wrote to the Shipping Federation asking for clarification that if a vessel was laid up in connection with Federation, that the master and officers of such a vessel, if members of the Shipmasters’ and Officers’ Federation, will not be paid off from such vessel, but will be kept on pay as part of the scheme of indemnity under which the owners of such a vessel comes. Mr Laws of the Shipping Federation replied that the masters could expect payment from the owners if they filed a legitimate claim on the Federation and if that vessel had been directed to be laid up by order of the Federation Executive.30 Towards the end of October reports circulated of the Federation’s threat to intensify the dispute by ordering a total stoppage of trade until a more reasonable state of affairs prevailed. It was also widely reported that both the seamen’s and dockers’ unions were suffering financially, whereas the Federation could raise £20,000 at the drop of hat by simply raising a levy of one penny per ton of their membership. These employer tactics on the waterfront worked in parallel with a successful propaganda campaign. The public seemingly had little sympathy for any form of new unionism and the press ensured that it remained that way. For example, both The Scotsman and The Times reported on 22 and 23 October respectively that the shipowners faced a new threat, not from any trouble engaging ‘free labour’, or, indeed, by the intimidating tactics of the seamen and dockers’ unions in opposing these measures, but from the sympathetic action of trade union crewed ships being refused permission to discharge or load by members of the dockers’ unions. They offered the example of the Ariadne, a vessel that was loaded at Barrow by the owners’ own trade union men and 29  The Times, 6 October 1890. 30  The Scotsman, 16 October 1890.



The Shipping Federation and the free labour movement

manned by a trade union crew. The Ariadne was destined for Birkenhead to discharge its cargo but in the interim the NUDL at Barrow had telegraphed its offices and instructed its members not to unload the vessel. The employers pointed out that the ship complied in all respects with the NUDL’s demands, but they were told that unless they discharged all their non-union men their vessels would be boycotted. It was also noted that the carters had been persuaded to come out in sympathy with the dockers and seamen.31 The Ariadne episode prompted two separate letters to appear on 24 October. The first noted the violent manner in which the seamen and dockers conducted themselves at such times, and the second letter stressed that the alleged action of the NUDL in boycotting the Ariadne at Birkenhead was an offence against criminal law. Thus the leaders of the NUDL could be indicted for conspiracy as their object was to ‘prejudice, impoverish, and injure the owners of the Ariadne’. The correspondent concluded that ‘the arm of the common law is not yet so shortened as not to reach this really new tyranny’.32 Moreover, because the seamen and dockers and ‘all kindred associations’ proposed a great federation of their own to further such ‘coercive tactics’, as was the case in Australia, the Shipping Federation should rightly, and however reluctantly, go ahead with ‘the general laying-up of their ships at every port in the Kingdom’. The published response of the President of the Barrow branch of the NUDL called into question the reporting of the affair:33 Sir,- Permit me to correct a statement in an article contained in your paper under the heading of “Impending Crisis in the Shipping Federation.” You state that the Ariadne was loaded by union men, and that she had a union crew. I beg leave to state that both assertions are untrue, for not a single man that loaded her belonged to any society, and only a few of her crew were union men when she left here. He concluded: ‘Hoping you will give this the same publicity as the article in question’. The letter was printed, but there was no correction or retraction made in any article across the many column inches of newsprint that followed that day or thereafter. Only days before the same newspaper had printed the thoughts of the Federation regarding the many men who, it believed, would turn their backs 31  The Scotsman, 22 October 1890; and The Times, 23 October 1890. 32  Letters to the Editor, The Times, 24 October 1890. 33  Letters to the Editor, The Times, 25 October 1890.

143

144

William Kenefick

on their union because they disliked the ‘tyrannical and coercive’ tactics of the new unionism. Yet in the letters page a few days later a representative of the Allan Shipping Line informed the readership of The Times and Tom McCarthy of the DWRGWU that grainmen who were his members were refusing to accept the decision of a board of arbitration which McCarthy had accepted on behalf of the union sometime before. The Allan Line therefore issued a debit note for £100 demurrage for the loss of business because of the grainmen’s actions. Here was a clear case of rank and file membership displeasure shown against the conciliatory tactics of the NUDL in accepting arbitration. Far from being ‘intimidated’ into union membership, the men actively questioned the role and decision making of their leaders. This was hardly an attitude of acquiescence and compliance. No analysis was offered of this event or other such examples of the tendency towards arbitration and conciliation, and it is therefore clear that the public was only being presented with half-truths and often outright lies. As the threat of a lock-out loomed ever larger there was clearly much unanimity among shipowners across most districts, but there was also divergence of opinion on both sides of the growing industrial divide. The Clyde Shipworkers Association, for example, was not convinced of the Federation’s latest scheme despite having used at one time or another all the industrial tactics then advocated and practiced by it. Indeed, the Clyde Association argued ‘that the wholesale laying up of vessels should not even be discussed’, yet at the same time it was involved in orchestrating a great free labour campaign in Glasgow by converting the old artisan-based Glasgow Harbour Labourers’ Society (GHLU) into a type of free labour organization. Ironically, the GHLU still functioned as a bona fide trade union and for its ‘scab-labour’ activities between 1890 and 1892 it was expelled from the TUC at Glasgow.34 In what seemed like a separate development it was announced that a new scheme for piecework had been issued by the directors of the Royal Victoria and Albert docks in London. The scheme in essence cut out the middleman from the hiring process. Since this had been one of the aims of the previous year’s London Dock Strike the feeling was that this would prove generally acceptable to the dockers’ unions and their rank and file.35 It may well be that this was a deliberate tactic to create tension between the seamen and their traditional allies for it was around this time that reports surfaced of the 34  Kenefick, Rebellious and Contrary, pp. 176-7. 35  The Times, 25 October 1890. Letters to the Editor and leading article on ‘The Shipping Trade and the Dock Question’.



The Shipping Federation and the free labour movement

dockers’ reluctance to discuss or become involved in any general widespread dispute of the type advocated by the Seamen’s Union. This was precisely the situation at Cardiff where it was reported ‘that the executive of the Dockers’ Union [was] making strenuous exertions to prevent any general stoppage’.36 Another report noted that Cardiff seemed the most likely arena for a struggle with the Shipping Federation and that only ‘recognition of free labour [could] avoid a crisis’. Plans to form free labour associations were also firmly in place at North Shields and Southampton, and due to a strike at Plymouth they were now contemplating the same there. It was also noted that a month long strike at Grangemouth had ended in defeat for the dockers.37 Ironically, all of this occurred as Havelock Wilson and the Seamen’s Union were preparing to take the question of federation to another level when they met with other trade unions at a specially convened meeting at London on 29 October 1890, where they proposed the formation of The National Federated Unions of Sailors, Firemen, Dock Labourers, Wherrymen, Miners, Coal Porters, Gas Stokers, Flatmen, Bargemen, Carters, and other kindred trades connected with the shipping industry. The chief object was to organize all workers connected to the shipping industry and in the event of a dispute ‘withdraw the other members of the federation in support thereof’. Eleven organizations were present including Glasgow and Liverpool NUDL representatives, as well as the Aberdeen Shore Labourers’ Union. It was also noted that a delegate from the Australian Labour Defence Committee was due to arrive in London that night in order to help ‘raise funds to be dispatched to the colonies to enable the strikers to continue their struggle’. The great port transport strikes in Australia were closely associated with the shipping crisis in Britain, and the Shipping Federation was learning many lessons from this. Indeed, through letters to the press by G.A. Laws, the Manager and Secretary of the Shipping Federation, events in Australia were kept before the public. In one letter he noted that the situation there resulted from the demands of the federated unions of Australia that the Marine Officers’ Association affiliate with them. When the shipowners refused the federated unions came out on strike:

36  The Times, 27 October 1890. 37  The Times, 30 October 1890. Article on ‘Capital and Labour’.

145

146

William Kenefick

the federated unions [first] called out the officers, stewards, seamen, and firemen, and upon their places being filled with free labour, the coalheavers, lightermen, carmen, and, in fact, nearly all the trade unions in the colony called out their men. Indeed, so great was the public displeasure at this strike that people from many walks of life – farmers and gentlemen and in one case even a bishop – came to the docks to help load and unload cargo. With the Colonial Government protecting the free labourers the shipping industry was back to work again in a comparatively short period of time, and the trade unionists were now effectively unemployed. The following telegraph was sent from Australia to the Federation offices on Friday 31 October, and then sent on to The Times: officers, stewards, wharf labourers, bargemen resume work; only a few vacancies available; the strike now regarded as over; decisive victory for employers of labour. free men are being kept well together. It was reiterated that the tactics adopted by the unions in Australia were being adopted in Britain, and that the various shipmasters’ and officers’ associations in Britain – with an estimated 9,000 members – sought protection from the Federation against the Seamen’s Union. The shipowners, noted Mr Laws, did not object to the existence of the officers’ associations but they would not tolerate them being brought under the control of ‘aggressive federated trade unions’. He professed that he simply wished to put to the public the plain truth of the matter: that the contest that has been carried on so successfully by the shipowners of Australia…will be fought with equal vigour on this side. Moreover, it is highly desirable that the public should realise that the struggle now going on is not altogether one between ‘capital and labour,’ but rather between the highly-favoured labourers who enrolled themselves in unions, and the free men who they exclude. The members of the Shipping Federation have no desire to quarrel with trades unions of a proper kind, but they are prepared at any cost to contend vigorously against the tyranny of the new unionism, with its system of dictation, boycotting, and oppression.38

38 

The Times, 1 November 1890. Letters to the Editor.



The Shipping Federation and the free labour movement

The press reminded its readers that the unions and workers associated with the shipping industry in Britain intended to form a Federation of Labour to ‘counteract any action by the Shipping Federation’ that might be deemed hostile to workers’ interests.39 On 14 November this Federation of Labour was up and running, according to The Times, with the stated intention of taking on the shipowners.40 On the same day The Scotsman noted that the Shipping Federation had joined with the London Association of Shipowners and Brokers, whose membership accounted for one million tons bringing the total tonnage for the membership of the Federation to 6,500,000.41 v. Press and public opinion and industrial divergence Just a few days prior to this merger there was an interesting letter printed in The Times from one Elizabeth Kitto noting how wise it was that the shipping interests had ‘organized’ and that it was clear they were now ‘quite capable of taking care of themselves in any struggle that might be forced upon them’. But her main concern was how the port employers at London had lost the labour struggle during the Dock Strike. She noted four causes for this defeat. Causes three and four related to the ‘apathy of the merchants of the City of London’ and the financial weakness of the companies themselves. The second related to the ‘weakness of the police authorities’ in exercising control over the strikers. They had allowed ‘a free hand to our “new masters” whose tyranny [was] seeking to override the law of the land.’ Miss Kitto’s main point, however, concerned the public’s ‘misplaced sympathy’ for the plight of the dockers during the strike of August and September 1889. The lack of sympathy this time around clearly pleased her, and given the financially weakened position of the unions in Britain, and the fact that the Australian unions were losing their own battle, it was obvious to her ‘that no misplaced help could be expected from those colonies’ – as had occurred during the Dock Strike – and the demons raised by the new trade unionism could now finally be ‘laid to rest’.42 Indeed, at that juncture an Australian delegation was in Britain seeking financial assistance from the British, and it was therefore unlikely that the seamen could expect anything like the £30,000 raised on behalf of the dockers the previous year.

39  The Times, 20 October 1890. 40  ‘The Shipping Crisis’ Part IV ‘Leith’. 14 November 1890. 41  The Scotsman, 14 November 1890. 42  The Times, 10 November 1890. Letters to the Editor.

147

148

William Kenefick

Miss Kitto was correct in her conclusion that public opinion was not on the side of the seamen.43 In fact it was not clear if they could rely even on the support of the dockers, for the new scheme of employment introduced at London docks to exclude middlemen was a sign of co-operation between employers and employed. By December there were signs of estrangement between the dockers and the other workers connected with the shipping industry, and for the first time since the beginning of the Dock Strike in August 1889, noted the Times, relations between the dockers and their employers were harmonious. Significant in this respect was the absence of the dockers from the new United Labour Council of the Port of London, which almost immediately threatened to precipitate an Australian style general strike. The United Labour Council comprised all the industries connected with the shipping and kindred trades. According to a leading editorial in The Times the Council’s main aim was to see that all workers in the shipping kindred trades were unionized through strike action, and it therefore supported seamen’s demands for men to be employed through the Shipping Offices. It seems that the Federation found no difficulty in engaging free labour to replace striking seamen, but it was harder to replace shipwrights, carpenters, painters, coaltrimmers and other workers needed to make vessels ready for sea. The Shipping Federation remit did not extend to the allied industries and nor did the recently formed Federation of Labour; but the United Labour Council could at least hope to influence such groups of workers and this could prove to be a weakness in the Federation’s structure. The crisis threatened to escalate, but the refusal of the dockers, lightermen, stevedores and the United Riggers Association to take part in any general strike action must have come as some relief to the shipping employers.44 Whether by accident or design the employers had managed to drive a wedge between the seamen and their traditional waterfront allies. By the end of 1890, then, the Shipping Federation’s influence had grown considerably in many British ports, but it must not be forgotten that some of the biggest shipowners, while supporting the aims of the Federation, did not feel inclined to join it. Of the major English ports Liverpool was one where the employers declined to join, and in Scotland neither Leith nor Glasgow were part of the scheme. The press noted that as members of local owners’ associations the employers there were ipso facto members of the Federation, but the tonnage they represented was not included in the Federation membership and no levy could be made against this if any dispute arose. It would seem that 43  T. McCarthy, The Great London Dock Strike 1889: The Story of the Labour Movement’s First Great Victory (London, 1988), p. 149. 44  The Times, 13 December 1890. Editorial leader.



The Shipping Federation and the free labour movement

these employers were as resistant to the voice of organized capital as they were to organized labour.45 The ‘crisis in shipping’ between January and March 1891 was precipitated through the strike at Cardiff docks. To consider it in great detail here is not possible, but the end result was defeat for the seamen and the reluctant acceptance of the principle of the Federation Ticket. The collapse of the seamen’s dispute, which did involve many quayside workers and waterfront based shipworkers, was seen as a great cause for celebration. Not only did it mean that the crisis in shipping was over but also that the movement that brought about that crisis had collapsed. The Times noted that ‘the more aggressive features of the “new unionism” [had] sustained a blow from which they [would] not readily recover’, and defeat marked ‘a stampede from the ranks’ of the seamen’s union. Union officials reportedly admitted as much. Before the emergence of the Shipping Federation many men joined because they felt that the possession of a union card was ‘an almost indispensable passport to employment’. With that type of coercion at an end, observed a Times correspondent, ‘the men [could] get just as good encouragement with a “ticket” as a card’. Thus the Shipping Federation had gained a signal victory and the rights of free labour were upheld in the face of aggressive trade unionism.46 The attempt by the seamen and their allies ‘to transfer the control of shipping from the owners to the unions’ had ended in defeat.47 The year 1891 was to prove disastrous for the dock and maritime trade unions in general as sectionalism and a lack of solidarity effectively reversed the gains made during the high noon of the new unionism. Ironically, it had all started so brightly for the maritime trades with the formation of the Federation of Trade and Labour Unions. When this was formed it boasted twenty-five affiliated unions, but its operation was ‘perfunctory’ and concession after concession was made to the port employers and the Shipping Federation throughout 1891. This ultimately proved disastrous for the seamen and after the failed port strike in December the foundation was laid ‘for the subsequent decline of London port unionism for the rest of the decade.’48

45  This was part of a series of reports on ‘The Shipping Crisis’ reported in The Times towards the end of 1890: I – Cardiff (3 Nov); II – Bristol and Plymouth (8 Nov); III – The Tyne (10 Nov); IV – Leith (14 Nov); V – Glasgow (19 Nov); VI – Belfast and Dublin (25 Nov), and VII – Liverpool (6 Dec). London was constantly referred to throughout these reports in a comparative context. 46  The Times, 13 March 1891. 47  The Times, 18 March 1891. 48  K. Coates and T. Topham, The Making of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (Oxford, 1991), pp. 142-44.

149

150

William Kenefick

vi. Scotland in comparative perspective In Scotland the struggle with the Shipping Federation was generally seen as part of a bigger contest for industrial supremacy between port and maritime workers and their employers. First and foremost it was the London and Cardiff waterfront and maritime workers who were regarded as the main protagonists in these disputes.49 But it was clear from the start that the Federation would answer the call of any employers at any port to help break a trade union stranglehold – even ports such as Glasgow or Liverpool which were not affiliated to it. Aberdeen was reported as being part of the dispute during February 1891, for example. Press reports warned that the number of ships affected by the strike was ‘rapidly increasing’, and unlike other ports the Aberdeen Shore Labourers’ Union had joined the seamen and voted unanimously to boycott any ship manned by Shipping Federation free labour.50 The shore labourers were also closely associated with several disturbances and a ‘near riot’ in their support of the seamen, and on one occasion the police were forced to ‘draw batons’ to impose civil order. On Sunday 1 March serious riots occurred at London when Federation men were attacked, and there were similar reports made about events unfolding at Cardiff and Hull. Once again the actions and activities of the seamen and waterfront workers at the port of Aberdeen were noted, but it was also clear that Aberdeen was the only Scottish port mentioned in connection with the seamen’s dispute. By this point the strike was spreading among seamen, and the Aberdeen Shore Labourers’ Union still adhered to its decision not to work Federation manned ships, though the press sensed that some men were wavering within the ranks. At a meeting held on the evening of 1 March a motion was placed before the men ‘That the members of the Aberdeen Shore Labourers’ Union block all vessels manned by the Federation’. An amendment was proposed that the men should work as usual, which was rejected by ‘an overwhelming majority’; but all of this suggests that cracks were beginning to appear in the resolve of the Aberdeen shore workers, unlike the Federation ‘whose resolve was solid’.51 Aberdeen was still the only Scottish port involved in the troubles, although by 6 March Leith had become embroiled in the dispute over the issue of the ‘Federation Ticket’. The Leith branch of the Seamen’s Union was said to be ‘exceedingly strong’, but the number of Federation men at the port was increasing, and the Federation refused to employ anyone – including 49  The Scotsman, 12 February 1891. 50  The Scotsman, 27 February 1891. 51  The Scotsman, 2 March 1891.



The Shipping Federation and the free labour movement

dockers and some kindred trade workers associated with their ships – who did not hold one of its tickets. On that same day the Shipping Federation had formed a branch at the port of Dundee. The dispute at Aberdeen was still proving ‘lively’, however. With fifteen boats affected by the industrial action the Federation stepped up the importation of replacement labour into the port, creating a powder keg situation where hundreds of strikers waited on the arrival of Federation men, ultimately resulting in unrest and riot. Stones and missiles were thrown and after the Riot Act was read again for the second time in a matter of days the police drew batons and eventually restored order, but another charge was ordered later that evening when a group of strikers tried to reach the Federation vessels. In the meantime more and more workers were coming before the courts for their part in strike activities.52 By early March 1891 Havelock Wilson had issued a warning to the Federation that if it persisted on pursuing its policy of issuing tickets he would ‘call out’ the entire membership of the union across every port in the country. The Federation stuck to its guns, however, and in the meantime other societies including the dock unions sought to arrange discussions with it to negotiate the reinstatement of their members in return for accepting the Federation ticket. The Federation’s position in these negotiations was simple. The ‘shipowners [were] perfectly willing to re-engage the unionist strikers so far as vacancies occur, and provided their rules are accepted’, but not at the expense of discharging free labour men who had come to their aid during the crisis. Elsewhere, namely in those ports where the Federation had little support, calls for strike action were rejected. A meeting of seamen at Glasgow, for example, heard proposals to call a general strike but a resolution was passed unanimously ‘that the present relations with the Clyde shipowners did not warrant the members of the Glasgow branch taking any action’ at that time. A similar resolution was put to seamen at Liverpool who, like their Glasgow brethren, stated that they had ‘no grievance against the Liverpool shipowners’. Leith’s seamen also later refused to take any further action against the shipowners.53 When shipowners had no desire to impose the Federation ticket on their men, the men were unwilling to follow Havelock Wilson into the fray. Meanwhile at Aberdeen divisions were hardening. Both sides of the dispute were reported as showing ‘unflinching support’ for their respective cause. Indeed, at a mass meeting of seamen and shore labourers held in the second week in March, and after a protest march through the city in support of the 52  The Scotsman, 5 March 1891. 53  Noted in a later report in the The Scotsman, 11 March 1890.

151

152

William Kenefick

strike, speakers stressed ‘that the strike was only beginning’. The seamen and firemen, it was reported, had been backed up by their more than worthy brethren the shore labourers (‘three cheers for the shore labourers’) and by their united efforts they would do their best to win the battle. It was argued that the whole situation had been brought about by the imposition of the Federation ticket. If the employers would not listen to reason then they (the strikers) ‘would adopt other methods – and these were political methods’. ‘They would have to make use of the political machinery and return men to Parliament’ to carry out what the people’s will desired, and there they would fight to force the Federation to remove ‘this abominable ticket’. Other speeches were heard along similar lines. Two unnamed speakers reportedly ‘gave expression to their socialistic views of the League (perhaps a reference to the Land League) with which they were associated’.54 By then, however, the strike was clearly running out of steam and even at Aberdeen the seamen’s unions were in the first throes of suing for a peaceful return to work provided that the shore labourers were reinstated. By the third week of the strike the port was quiet, which was a speedy and significant turn around given the level of civil disturbance experienced during the dispute.55 It had finally become clear to all quarters, reported a gleeful press, ‘that the Shipping Federation is too strong for the Union’. At Aberdeen the Federation declined to have anything further to do with strikers. With the free labourers safely and securely in place, the strikers were now facing unemployment and were attempting to ‘vainly solicit re-employment’. As expected, suggested The Scotsman, the success of the Federation encouraged other capitalists to follow their example, and it seems that coal-owners were first to follow suit. The result of the Shipping federation’s victory, however, was conspicuous proof of the antagonism between the New Unionism and individual and social liberty. The very basis of New Unionism is official despotism. The strength of the capitalist federation must, on the other hand, be the vindication of individual liberty. Not only is such a federation justifiable, but it is wholly praiseworthy. It is not only for the good of the capitalists concerned, but it is for the interests of 54  The Scotsman, 9 March 1891. 55  The Scotsman, 16 March 1891.



The Shipping Federation and the free labour movement

society and for the benefit of the individual workman. The piece finished with what amounted to a tirade against the tyranny of trade unionism where even the leadership of the artisanal ‘old’ unions was generally described as despotic, and as bad as any ‘grand monarch’. The author hoped ‘that society in general will have the wisdom to see that its most enduring interests are bound up with the maintenance of free labour.’56 The dispute was at an end and the Shipping Federation had won decisively the labour war. In the aftermath of victory – despite proclamations to the contrary – the Federation systematically oversaw the slow but sure dismantling of the many new unions, and in places such as Aberdeen where workers had stood firmly against them they systematically wiped out the seamen’s and the shore workers’ unions. Across the eastern seaboard of Scotland they effected the same result. It was only during the ‘Labour Unrest’ unrest of 1910-1914 that Aberdeen and other east coast ports generally reorganized in any effective and meaningful sense. vii. Conclusions The press clearly felt that a major blow had been dealt to the aspirations of the new unions when the Shipping Federation defeated a broad alliance of waterside, maritime and kindred trade unions in 1891. The existing historiography generally supports this view of the conflict and identifies it as a decisive turning point in the history of maritime and port transport trade unionism. For the labour history of the period the formation of the first national and effective employers’ federation in 1890 demonstrates the extent to which the unionism of the waterfront and seagoing workforce signalled ‘a new direction in industrial relations’. The extent to which this movement reflected a new class consciousnesses is too broad a question to address here, however. What can be said is that the strand of new unionism that emerged in the late 1880s had a broad impact and influenced aspects of ‘old unionism’. The new unionist gains made by the dockers and seamen inspired unskilled and skilled workers alike, and a case in point was the railway workers’ disputes that took place in Scotland during 1890-1. Like the seamen and the dockers, the railwaymen’s dispute ended in failure but it did offer the railway unions in Scotland their first real lesson in industrial solidarity and proved to be a historical watershed in their trade union development. The spirit of the militant phase of the new unionism was broken in 1891 as were many of the new unions that 56 

The Scotsman, 17 March 1891.

153

154

William Kenefick

sprung up at this time; but that spirit was reinvigorated when it became influential among the skilled unions. Thus it was somewhat premature in 1891 for the press to claim that the Shipping Federation had secured a great victory not only for capital but for society as a whole. Put simply, capital and society had to wait another seven years before that claim was more or less made good, for it was only by 1898 that the progress of aggressive and militant-style ‘new trade unionism’ was halted when the strong and determined Engineering Employers Federation comprehensively defeated the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. The Engineering Federation worked to a blueprint drafted by the Shipping Federation and reaped similar rewards. By 1898 the Engineering Federation was in an unassailable position. Even then ‘bastard socialism’ was perceived to have played a role in promoting industrial unrest in the first instance. In other words, the left-radical ‘new unionists’ simply regrouped after 1891 to turn their attentions to the ‘richer and more powerful old unions’. They did this, argued the employers and the press, in order to promote ‘socialistic programmes’ such as the eight-hours’ bill, trade union recognition and joint collective bargaining, and to encourage state intervention in industrial affairs. By 1898, however, it seemed all was well with the world. As The Times noted in December 1898 in its end of year report: ‘If 1897 closed amidst storm-clouds; 1898 ended in a very sunny and tranquil fashion.’57 According to John Lovell the years between 1898 and 1907 for trade unionism in general were ‘the quietest in the whole period from 1891’.58 The dockers, seamen, railwaymen and a host of other workers would have to wait for at least another decade before they witnessed a renaissance of trade unionism in Britain.59

57  The Times, 27 December 1898. 58  J.C. Lovell, British Trade Unions, 1875-1933 (London, 1977), p. 41. 59  Kenefick, Red Scotland, pp. 45-52.



Health and safety aboard British merchant ships: The case of first aid instruction, 1881-1908 Richard Gorski – University of Hull

i. Introduction During the nineteenth century loss of life was one of the principal causes of state intervention in the business of shipping and seafaring. When government turned its gaze toward the sea, as it often did in this period, its objective frequently was to protect the lives and property engaged on the world’s shipping lanes. Huge resources, whether calculated in money or man-hours, were directed toward the investigation and improvement of maritime safety. The front in this campaign was necessarily broad, for it encompassed issues as diverse as nautical design and construction, competent navigation and manning, proper cargo stowage and insurance arrangements.1 Steam propulsion added further peculiarities.2 Each of these matters was complex in its own right, but there were also intricate inter-relationships between them that were difficult to unpick. This made progress across the whole front difficult and unpredictable. Moreover, to these technical or ‘industry-related’ problems must be added other obstacles that were erected by interest groups within the ambit of shipping who resisted change. The progress of reform over the century as a whole was somewhat erratic, but there was an appreciable intensification of effort during the 1880s and 1890s in the wake of Plimsoll’s high-profile campaign for a compulsory load line.3 By this point safety at sea in one form or another was rarely absent from the parliamentary agenda – before a Select Committee of 1880 a senior Board of Trade official observed that ‘scarcely a year passes without some Bill about merchant shipping’4 – and in part it is this aggregation of effort that 1  The subject’s complexity was recognised as early as 1836. See D.M. Williams, ‘James Silk Buckingham, 1765-1855: sailor, explorer and maritime reformer’, Studies in British Privateering, Trading Enterprise and Seamen’s Welfare, ed. H.E.S Fisher (Exeter, 1987), pp. 99-119. Reprinted in Merchants and Mariners: Selected Maritime Writings of David M. Williams, comp. L.U. Scholl, Research in Maritime History, 18 (St John’s, Newfoundland, 2000), pp. 109-26. I am grateful to Dr Alston Kennerley for his comments on a draft of this paper. 2  J. Armstrong and D.M. Williams, ‘The steamboat, safety and the state: government reaction to new technology in a period of laissez-faire’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 89 (2003), pp. 167-184. 3  G. Alderman, ‘Samuel Plimsoll and the Shipping Interest’, Maritime History, 1 (1971), pp. 73-95. 4  ‘Select Committee on Losses of British Ships missing and foundered since the Passing of the Merchant Shipping Act, 1873’, British Parliamentary Papers [PP hereafter] 1880 (305) XI, ‘Minutes of Evidence’, p. 5, q. 85. Evidence of Thomas Farrer, then Permanent Secretary at the Board.

155

156

Richard Gorski

has drawn historians to consider the evolution of policy in this field. In this task they have been assisted, if not overwhelmed, by the prodigious Victorian appetite for statistics on the incidence of wrecks, collisions, accidents, deaths and injuries in the mercantile marine, and by the findings of official courts and parliamentary enquiries that were set up to deal with particular cases or issues. One should add to this the material produced by the permanent monitoring regime of the Marine Department of the Board of Trade, established in 1850, and its agencies in the ports, the Mercantile Marine Offices and Local Marine Boards. Together with the Registrar General of Shipping and Seamen, these bodies provided the nucleus of the system by which merchant shipping and seafaring were regulated. Our understanding of safety at sea has also benefited from its relevance to the long-running debate over the character of Victorian governance. The increasing frequency of state intervention in the last quarter of the century has been taken as clear evidence of a shift from laissez-faire administration towards collectivism, while analyses of the circumstances under which these interventions occurred have allowed historians to develop competing theories of government growth.5 In this way the administration of shipping – and particularly maritime safety – can be treated as one measure among many of the state’s willingness to interfere in social and economic relations, with factories, mines and railways ranking among the most obvious comparisons. One might question the direct comparability of seafarers with other workers engaged in industry or the transport sector, for even the lowliest tramp steamer was more than a mere factory at sea. Concern over preventable casualties was clearly an issue common to all of these contexts, however. Everyone accepted that sea travel entailed risk; but with shipping, as with railways, mines and factories, the obvious goal was to minimize such casualties whilst ensuring that the risks were not amplified by negligent employer practices. Safety at sea, the health of seamen and, more broadly still, the conditions in which the seagoing workforce laboured together provide a very rich seam of evidence which has been mined sufficiently to provide an outline of the reforms introduced and the remedial action taken in this sphere. A fair proportion of this work has concerned efforts to reduce mortality caused by wreck, stranding and collision (each had many potential causes and was difficult to 5  There is a large literature on the subject – with numerous specialist works on public health, industry, transport, and so forth – but a flavour of the debate can be found in A.J. Taylor, Laissez-faire and State Intervention in Nineteenth Century Britain (London, 1972). For a brief summary see P.W.J. Bartrip, ‘State intervention in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain: Fact or Fiction?’, Journal of British Studies, 23/1 (1983), pp. 63-83.



Health and safety aboard British merchant ships

tackle).6 This paper differs by offering an example from the parallel campaign to preserve life in the event of accident. It concerns very specifically efforts to promote ‘ambulance training’ (or first aid) among seafarers and therefore it might be viewed as a contribution to the study of occupational health at sea in the later nineteenth century. It will be argued that the Marine Department of the Board of Trade was very well placed to identify shortcomings in the provision of medical care at sea, and had access to exceptional networks through which to gather advice and opinion. Indeed, this paper as much concerns the evidence gathering process as it does the uses to which the information was put. Yet in seeking to improve the treatment of non-fatal accidents at sea, the diagnosis proved to be easier than the cure. Ambulance instruction for seamen on a systematic basis was first proposed in 1881. Not until 1908 did first aid training become a compulsory element in the certification of deck officers in the British mercantile marine. The reasons for the delay lie at the heart of this paper, and, as will be demonstrated, they are not wholly consistent with the institutional inertia or sectional resistance that seem to have dogged other efforts to improve living and working conditions for seamen. On this showing the Marine Department of the 1880s and 1890s was certainly cautious and exhibited an inclination towards penny-pinching, but its permanent officials were energetic in exploring the possibilities of first aid provision. If anything there was an over-abundance of opinion on the viability of the various suggestions put forward. Moreover, most of the Department’s objections against the proposed regimes of ambulance training were practical rather than ideological. This in itself reveals something about the prevailing administrative environment into which reforms were submitted. ii. Proposal and response: 1881-2 At the beginning of April 1881 Captain John Cressy RN wrote to Joseph Chamberlain, President of the Board of Trade during Gladstone’s second ministry, to suggest that certificated officers of the mercantile marine should voluntarily undertake ‘Instructions in Ambulance duties’, and that successful completion of a first aid course should be recognized by an official Board of Trade endorsement.7 Because of its subject matter, Cressy’s letter was passed 6  J.W. Bull, An Introduction to Safety at Sea (Glasgow, 2nd edn. 1981); and, more generally, A.G. Course, The Merchant Navy: A Social History (London, 1963). 7  The National Archives, Kew [TNA hereafter], Marine Department Papers. MT 9/470, M. 8425/1881 (File M.43841/1893). Cressy to Chamberlain, 1 April 1881. Cressy was persistent in his enquiries. See M.20359/1882 and M.10177/1886.

157

158

Richard Gorski

on to the Board’s Marine Department. Cressy in some respects was typical of the Board’s casual correspondents. He had been moved to write by personal experience – in this case of serious injuries and needless amputations that he had witnessed while at sea – and could speak with some professional authority, having latterly served as an Emigration Officer and Nautical Surveyor in the port of Glasgow. Now retired, he was one of the ‘grey army’ that favoured the authorities with its opinions on a variety of topics. The letter implies also that Cressy was conscious of the spread of first aid classes organized by the St John Ambulance Association. The notion of teaching civilians how to treat wounds sprang up in the 1870s from a group of military surgeons attached to the Woolwich Hospital, who were then instrumental in harnessing the charitable potential of the Order of St John and creating the infrastructure needed to reach a significant audience with lectures and classes. From its foundation in 1877, the progress of the St John Association was rapid.8 In 1887 the familiar uniformed Ambulance Brigade was established to assist at public events, but from its very inception the objective of the Association was to create ‘throughout the country the skeleton of a body which in an emergency might be called into action at the shortest possible notice’.9 Though ambulance classes attracted students from all walks of life, the military or ‘corporate’ origins of first aid – the Prussian ‘Erste Hilfe’ – were preserved in its application to public services (the Metropolitan Police Force, provincial Constabularies and Volunteer regiments)10 and to industry (particularly the railways and coal mining).11 In each case the impetus came from branches of the St John Association which arranged for instructors, rooms to hold classes, course materials, examination, and the certification of successful students. From 1882 Scotland was similarly provided for by the St Andrew’s Ambulance Association. The proposal to train seamen in ‘first aid to the injured’ must be 8  For more details see J. Clifford, For the Service of Mankind: Furley, Lechmere and Duncan, St John Ambulance Founders (London, 1971); and R. Cole-Mackintosh, A Century of Service to Mankind: A History of the St John Ambulance Brigade (London, 1986). 9  The Times, 7 February 1878. Comments of Sir E.A.H. Lechmere. 10  Metropolitan Police Force: The Times, 15 September 1879. Provincial Constabularies: ‘Reports of Inspectors of Constabulary to Secretary of State’, PP 1890 (35) XXXVI, p. 127. Volunteers: The Times, 23 November 1880. 11  Railways: TNA, Great Western Railway Company: Correspondence and Papers 1835-1949, RAIL 257/12 (1888); Great Western Railway Company: Special Reports 1845-1947, RAIL 267/197 (1892). Coal Mines: ‘Select Committee on Employers’ Liability Act (1880)’, PP 1886 (192) VIII, pp. 515-16; ‘Reports of Inspectors of Coal Mines, 1889’, PP 1890 [C.6015] XXIII, pp. 10-11. In his report on Nottinghamshire in 1889, Mr Stokes lauded ‘The valuable work done by ambulance men in this district… [M]any cases of excellent work and alleviation of pain have come under my notice, which, if recorded, would be most gratifying to the officials of the St John Association’. ‘Reports of Inspectors of Coal Mines, 1890’, PP 1890-91 [C. 6346] XXII, p. 13.



Health and safety aboard British merchant ships

placed into this context of expanding infrastructure and rising enthusiasm for ambulance work. Captain Cressy’s suggestion to the Board of Trade also keyed into the selfevident value of teaching seafarers the rudiments of first aid. Here, surely, was a straightforwardly compassionate proposal? As one of the founders of the Ambulance Association observed, ‘It was a most useful and beneficent work open to all, and neither political nor sectarian, but simply humanitarian in its objects – namely, to save life and to minimize pain.’12 Working aboard ship was a dangerous occupation, especially in the deep-sea trades where calls into port for proper medical assistance were not always possible. For vessels that sailed without surgeons – the overwhelming majority – medical matters were customarily left to masters who, whether in person or through delegation, treated wounds and illnesses in accordance with Dr Harry Leach’s Ship Captain’s Medical Guide (first compiled in 1868) using the medicines that were carried by law according to a Board of Trade scale.13 Official Logs frequently contain terse references to crew members having been ‘treated according to the medical guide’ since it was legally required of masters to record injuries, illnesses and treatments.14 These measures comprised a care system of sorts; but when it came to the prompt and effective treatment of injuries and flesh wounds, as distinct from the diagnosis and management of diseases, there was still an undeniable logic in encouraging seafarers to become proficient in first aid. Efforts were being made, independent of government, to set up classes for seamen, fishermen and labourers, but they were sporadic and localized.15 Working through official channels promised a much more effective means of promoting ambulance work among groups that were highly mobile and consequently difficult to reach. Within the Marine Department, Cressy’s suggestion of April 1881 brought about the Pavlovian response of a bureaucracy conditioned to the collection and evaluation of data. There began a protracted saga of consultation, paper

12  The Times, 23 November 1880. Comments of Major Francis Duncan. 13  The requirement to carry medicines can be traced back to 1844 (see Course, Merchant Navy). Books of instruction were introduced in the Merchant Shipping Act of 1867, 30 & 31 Vict. c. 124, §§ 45. These arrangements were confirmed in § 200 of the 1894 Merchant Shipping Act. Frank Bullen, a supporter of first aid training for ships’ officers, made some interesting remarks on the subject in his book Men of the Merchant Marine (London, 1900): ‘The present generation of shipmasters are greatly in advance of what smattering of leech-craft was possessed by their predecessors, but even now there is a plentiful lack of this most humane and necessary knowledge.’ (pp. 58-62) 14  For example, TNA, Ships’ Official Logs. BT 165/2, the 1902 voyages of the Ronda and Formosa. 15  Lady Brassey’s activities in and around Battle, Kent, offer a pertinent illustration. The Times, 12 December 1881.

159

160

Richard Gorski

shuffling and internal debate from which we can learn a great deal about the Department’s methods of policy formation and implementation, and a little about the hazards of working at sea towards the end of the nineteenth century. The circulation of Cressy’s letter among senior staff in the Marine Department brought a number of positive comments. Equally, from the outset, the minuted responses defined the limits of what could be done: It would be a good thing for all Masters to have these Instructions, but we can only recommend. There would be no obligation perhaps to publishing a notice on the subject calling attention to the importance of this knowledge in case of accident on board ship, and we might endorse certificates.16 Cressy’s was a voluntary scheme, and there were a number of virtues in leaving the initiative for take-up with individual officers and seamen. First, it entailed very little work for the Board of Trade, whose role would be to promote rather than enforce. The only clerical burden would be stamping the certificates of successful candidates. Second, voluntary completion of the St John’s course was consistent with the tenets of self-improvement. Third, a voluntary scheme was unlikely to offend anybody and therefore offered a wellbeaten path of low resistance. All of these advantages help to explain why, in the first instance, officials in the Marine Department energetically pressed the case for first aid. The Department’s role as facilitator was made easier by exploiting a fortuitous connection with John Furley, an executive member of the St John Association and its principal activist in London’s docklands. Furley was asked for his views on the purposeful extension of first aid classes to seafarers. In reply he ventured suggestions that rested uncomfortably with what the Board of Trade had in mind. First, he committed the sin of criticising the officially recommended medical handbook as being of dubious value for the treatment of wounds and physical injuries. Dr Leach’s Medical Guide was held by many, including some in the Marine Department, to be adequate in itself for the basics of sea medicine, and more than adequate when used in conjunction with some of the numerous other medical texts that were available.17 Implied 16  TNA, MT 9/470, M. 8425/1881 (File M.43841/1893). Minute of Monkhouse, 6 April 1881. Author’s emphasis. 17  There was no shortage of these texts, many of which were written by members of the St John Association. Earlier examples include: L.A. Weatherly, Ambulance Lectures; or what to do in cases of accident or sudden illness (London, 1880); W. Gibb, First Aid to the Injured. Ambulance Lectures (London,



Health and safety aboard British merchant ships

instead was the need for practical, hands-on tuition. More significantly, Furley argued that ambulance instruction should be given to all officers in charge of vessels that did not carry a surgeon, amounting in effect to a compulsory system. He also sought to encourage training among seamen more generally through free ambulance classes.18 By the end of May 1881 Furley had met to discuss these topics with Thomas Gray, the Assistant Secretary in the Marine Department and its most senior official. Gray was a renowned adherent of laissez-faire – as was his immediate superior Thomas Farrer, the Permanent Secretary at the Board of Trade – but it seems that Furley persuaded him of the need to promote practical instruction alongside theoretical knowledge.19 In fact there is a strong hint in the notes on this meeting that Gray was won over by recent mortality statistics (which were diligently noted down) as much as Furley’s humanitarian case.

Table 1 – Numbers and causes of death in the merchant service, 1875-1879 Cause of death 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 269 279 340 307 306 Accidents other than drowning 978 1,164 1,461 1,237 1,525 Drowning at wreck 1,023 922 1,077 1,033 987 Drowning at other casualty 155 216 161 234 124 Unknown causes 109 137 100 10 99 Apoplexy and other fits Source: TNA, MT 9/470, M.13881 (File M.43841/1893). Memorandum, 30 May 1881.20

The average death toll on merchant ships from ‘other accidents’ (2-300 per annum in 1870s and 1880s) was small in comparison to those who drowned by wreck or other cause (2-3,000 per annum). No explicit attempt was made to weigh the costs of policy change against the possible saving in human life, but some thought was given to the types of injury likely to be suffered at sea and the probability that some of these deaths might be prevented by basic first aid training. In addition, the presence of a trained first aider would almost certainly improve the treatment of less serious injuries neither adequately covered in the Medical Guide nor likely to be helped by the pills and potions in the captain’s Medicine Chest. The outcome of this meeting, and Gray’s reflections on it, was the very cau1886); Lt-Col. C.B. Paris, St John Ambulance Association. Aid-ology, or First Aid to the injured in its practical part, mechanical and mental (Liverpool, 1887). 18  TNA, MT 9/470, M.12516/1881 (File M.43841/1893). Furley to Marine Department, 16 May 1881. 19  TNA, MT 9/470, M.13881/1881 (File M.43841/1893). Memorandum, 30 May 1881. 20  For a longer run of printed statistics see the Appendix to this paper.

161

162

Richard Gorski

tious recommendation that candidates for Extra Master Certificates should be induced to pass an ambulance examination, and that the scheme should be tried out at London or Liverpool.21 In the interim Gray had already decided to consult with the Local Marine Boards, the Chamber of Shipping and the Mercantile Marine Service Association, and this was put into effect in early June.22 Consultation with ‘stakeholder’ organizations of shipowners and officers, and sometimes with insurers, seamen and other interested parties, was standard Marine Department practice. Contacting these pyramidal associations allowed the rapid collection of reasonably representative opinion, while the Local Marine Boards (composed in the main of owners, professional advisors, magistrates and local worthies) offered a decent sampling of attitudes from around the country’s ports. Consultations served a number of purposes. Some helped to fill gaps in the Marine Department’s knowledge, while others, one suspects, were designed to rubber-stamp policies already agreed to. Most, however, were consultations in the genuine sense – exercises to test the water on particular issues. From a historian’s point of view the replies gathered in by the Marine Department are a valuable, and under-used, storehouse of information. Furthermore, the Department’s analysis of these materials can be seen to have had an impact on policy making. This was certainly the case with first aid training for seamen. By mid-August 1881 most of the responses were in. The Board of Trade had asked two questions: if there should be a compulsory regime of ambulance examinations; and, if so, in what grades of the merchant service. The view of Sunderland’s Local Marine Board was representative of the majority. Compulsion would be ‘inexpedient’, the Board warned, but all seafarers should have access to a voluntary examination with success officially recognized by the Board of Trade.23 Variations on the voluntary option singled out different groups within the service, whether masters only,24 masters and mates,25 or ‘Superior Officers’.26 The members of Leith’s Local Marine Board were also sympathetic to a voluntary scheme, but raised the issue of cost, and added 21  TNA, MT 9/470, M.13881/1881 (File M.43841/1893). Memorandum, 30 May 1881. The idea was George Swanston’s. 22  TNA, MT 9/470, M.13881/1881 (File M.43841/1893). Minute of Gray, 1 May 1881; and draft letter to the Local Marine Boards and Chamber of Shipping, 7 June 1881. 23  TNA, MT 9/470, M.14804/1881 (File M.43841/1893). Sunderland Local Marine Board to Marine Department, 8 June 1881. Similar views were expressed by Liverpool (M.14974/1881), Glasgow (M.16461/1881), Greenock (M.16858), and South Shields (M.18867/1881). 24  Belfast (M.15333/1881). 25  Newcastle (M.16590/1881); Dundee (M.17035/1881). 26  North Shields (M.16841/1881).



Health and safety aboard British merchant ships

that the matter should be brought before shipowners ‘with a view to induce them to give a preference to Officers holding a Certificate showing that they have passed an examination’.27 Several Boards were openly hostile to the idea. London, for example, saw no place at all for ambulance training in the syllabus for mate or master: Medicine Chests and books of directions were quite adequate.28 Plymouth’s reply expanded on the same theme: the Local Board are of opinion that it is highly desirable that Masters of Foreign going Ships should make themselves acquainted with the ordinary mode of treatment of such accidents as are likely to occur, either by book or otherwise in addition to the information already required as to the use of a Medicine Chest.29 Aberdeen, at the other extreme, entertained the idea of compulsory instruction for all candidates for masters’ and mates’ certificates ‘in such of the elements of Surgery and Medicine as are likely to be required by them in case of accident or illness’.30 The final response to the Marine Department’s survey came back in March 1882 from the Council of the Mercantile Marine Service Association, the long delay having resulted from what was described as a full consultation with its membership. The Liverpool-based Association was sympathetic to the benefits of first aid training, and noted that many officers were already experienced in the subject; but it was strongly opposed to any compulsory examination, citing as its main objection ‘the present condition of supply over demand, together with the decreasing rate of remuneration in the Merchant Service, and the consequent diminished attraction for educated men’. Voluntary courses would ‘stimulate the better class of Master’ to enhance their ‘fitness for exceptional commands’.31 Self-improvement in its relation to the employment market was again the order of the day: the best berths would attract the best qualified officers, and a St John’s certificate was one means of distinguishing

27  TNA, MT 9/470, M.16354/1881, 22 June 1881. 28  TNA, MT 9/470, M.15001/1881 (File M.43841/1893). London Local Marine Board to Marine Department, 10 June 1881. See also the replies from Cork (M.17555), Bristol (M.20652) and Dublin (M.16597). 29  TNA, MT 9/470, M.15580/1881 (File M.43841/1893), Plymouth Local Marine Board to Marine Department, 16 June 1881. 30  TNA, MT 9/470, M.17579/1881 (File M.43841/1893), Aberdeen Local Marine Board to Marine Department, 6 July 1881. 31  TNA, MT 9/470, M.8167/1882 (File M.43841/1893), Secretary, Mercantile Marine Service Association to the Marine Department, 28 March 1882.

163

164

Richard Gorski

between officers in the marketplace.32 In early April 1882, the consultation process having run its course, the senior staff of the Marine Department reconsidered first aid provision in light of the opinions they had received. Thomas Gray had toyed with the idea of trialling an examination for the most senior officers of the merchant service, and this at least signifies a willingness on his part to bring about limited change. Analysis of the replies, however, caused even this most cautious of measures to be shelved, suggesting that in the Marine Department there was a deeply embedded culture of consultation that weighed against real progress by highlighting problems rather than solutions. On this occasion consultation merely confirmed that there was ‘not sufficient unanimity’ to warrant changes to the Board of Trade’s own examinations or the appointment of extra examiners, and it was left to another official, George Swanston, to salvage something from the exercise. Swanston forcefully argued that ‘good would result’ from working with the St John Ambulance to promote knowledge of first aid. Gray agreed, and in May 1882, with a nod of approval from Thomas Farrer, he reopened discussions with John Furley.33 Captain Cressy’s original scheme was thus given a new lease of life. In his dealings with the Marine Department Furley was invariably enthusiastic about the instruction of seafarers, and he seems also to have been instrumental in securing the co-operation of the Mercantile Marine Service Association during a visit to Liverpool in February 1883. The Service Association offered Furley the use of its rooms for first aid classes and grandiloquently declared that ‘in no branch of industry is the training…likely to be of more value, or more appreciated, than amongst the men who spend their lives amid the perils of the sea.’34 Between February 1883 and early 1884 three lecture courses were held in Liverpool, but the movement petered out for want of an organizing committee and ultimately died along with the doctor who led the classes.35 No further correspondence on the subject can be found in the Marine Department files until the early 1890s when a Liverpool member of the St John Association enquired about the endorsement of certificates of sea-

32  This was a rather hollow argument because the ‘first class’ liners carried surgeons. See the comments of Dr William Spooner in May 1899. TNA, MT 9/664, M.8692/1899. 33  TNA, MT 9/470, M.8167/1882 (File M.43841/1893), various minutes and draft letter to Furley, 1 May 1882. For further correspondence between Gray and Furley see M.21641/1882, M.3510/1883, and M.4470/1883. 34  Liverpool Daily Post, 10 February 1883. 35  TNA, MT 9/470, M.10177/1886 (File M.43841/1893), Liverpool Local Marine Board to the Marine Department, May-June 1886.



Health and safety aboard British merchant ships

men who successfully completed a first aid course. This promise, seemingly long forgotten, caused much scrabbling amongst the Marine Department’s archived papers.36 By the end of March 1893, the necessary procedures had been put in place with the Registrar General’s office to support a voluntary system of instruction and examination – a system that had been given the Board of Trade’s blessing no less than a decade earlier.37 iii. An issue revived: 1899-1901 The long interval between discussions of first aid at sea saw significant political changes that should be noted in passing. The Gladstonian Liberalism of the 1880s had succumbed to a Conservative stranglehold over government under the Marquess of Salisbury. Some key personnel changes had also occurred in the Board of Trade. Gray and Farrer had long since gone. They were succeeded in the 1890s by men who had a more interventionist attitude to industrial relations.38 First aid for seamen can be used to test this shift of emphasis for it was neither an issue of great political moment nor one that was likely to directly affect the business of shipping. Decisions hinged instead on the Board of Trade’s willingness to amend its own regulations, its ability to see past short-term logistical problems, and, perhaps, its readiness to deflect criticism from those within the industry who opposed the idea. This makes ambulance work a good, if limited, test of bureaucratic dynamism at the end of the century, but a commensurately poor one of the state’s resolve to push forward policies that were more divisive. In the following section it is argued that a shift of emphasis can be seen in the Marine Department from the laissez-faire days of the early 1880s. Instead of outright unwillingness to meddle with legislation, which anyhow is sometimes overstated, the main internal objections to the expansion of first aid training were inadequate infrastructure and likely expense. Pragmatism rather than dogmatism, one might say. Yet in its reluctance to commit staff or resources, and in its tortuous development of policy from the drawing board to the statute book, the Marine Department of the late 1890s still retained something of the outlook and methods of Thomas Gray’s day. The issue of first aid for seafarers was revived in May 1899 by a committee of physicians formed to revise the statutory Medical Scales for merchant 36  TNA, MT 9/470, M.4384/1893 (File M.43841/1893), Morgan to Marine Department, 7 March 1893. 37  TNA, MT 9/470, M.5221/1893, M.5546/1893 and M.6046/1893 (File M.43841/1893). 38  Changes at the Board have been attributed to Sir Courtenay Boyle who was appointed Permanent Secretary in 1893. R. Davidson, ‘The Board of Trade and industrial relations’, Historical Journal, 21 (1978), pp. 571-91.

165

166

Richard Gorski

ships. The committee proposed to the Board of Trade that ships embarking on long voyages should carry at least one person properly qualified in ambulance work. The best means of achieving this, it was felt, was to require proof of qualification from mates aspiring to hold a master’s ticket. In effect this reiterated John Furley’s suggestion of 1881 that masters should have practical knowledge of treating injuries to augment the information in the Medical Guide.39 With a request for compulsory training again on the table, the Marine Department took stock of how its voluntary endorsement scheme had worked since 1893. Officials also looked into the frequency of workplace accidents at sea, so as to fairly compare the scale of the problem with the proposed action. This review is worth brief consideration for what it reveals about the Department’s approach to problem solving.40 Voluntary endorsement was found to have produced a very limited response: only 137 certificates had been stamped for first aid proficiency, the overwhelming majority of them belonging to masters or extra masters. Here was a strong indication of indifference, though by capturing only officers of a certain disposition (those inclined to secure recognition) it did not necessarily show the full extent of ambulance training in the merchant marine. The most recent figures for casualties at sea (presumably for 1898) revealed 1,231 deaths from accident on foreign-going vessels and an additional 2,644 non-fatal accidents: About half of the deaths were from drowning, and a number of the non-fatal accidents were of a trifling description, but there must have been a large number of cases requiring surgical aid. In 489 of the nonfatal accidents bones were fractured or dislocated. How likely was it that these serious injuries were properly treated? The prospects, mathematically speaking, were judged to be bleak since over 5,100 British-registered foreign-going vessels between them shipped fewer than 400 surgeons. This was taken to mean that only one in twelve casualties received qualified attention.41 Applying pure logic to the problem revealed a simple solution – to adopt the present recommendation – but this method was not so helpful in surmounting the problems of implementation. Having carefully worked through the statistics, the same clerk pointed to the lack of facilities 39  TNA, MT 9/664, M.8692/1899. Typescript extract from Medical Scales Committee, undated. 40  TNA, MT 9/664, M.8692/1899. Review of the Medical Scales Committee’s recommendation. 41  In 1893, according to Captain Froud of the Shipmasters’ Society, 425 foreign-going vessels carried surgeons, most of them large passenger steamers. This left some 5,600 vessels without surgeons. TNA, MT 9/664 File M.1458/1901 (M.11853).



Health and safety aboard British merchant ships

for ambulance instruction. There was no market for expensive private medical tuition, and it was unlikely that ports with Local Marine Boards, where Board of Trade examinations were held, had permanent St John Ambulance classes to cope with the enlarged demands of a compulsory regime. Without the necessary infrastructure it was wrong to recommend change. For some, this analysis of the situation was enough to deter further action.42 Significantly, however, the argument for compulsion seems to have won over an important supporter, namely Walter J. Howell, the Marine Department’s long-serving Principal Clerk and latterly its Assistant Secretary. In Howell’s opinion the infrastructure to deliver training to seafarers could be built up over three or four years, and any ensuing ‘hardship’ for officers would be lessened by the same period of notice of a change in the regulations.43 One wonders if this compromise could, or should, have been put into force without further discussion – in this way it might have passed under the radar of any likely opposition. Instead, on 5 June, Howell decided to canvass some of the more influential associations of shipowners and officers, using the recommendations of the Medical Scales Committee (a compulsory regime of instruction for prospective masters) as the basis for discussion. Perhaps Howell hoped to muster support and thereby strengthen his hand in the Marine Department; or maybe consultation was still the instinctive response to policy suggestions. Either way, the exercise yielded a predominantly favourable view. Only the United Kingdom Chamber of Shipping denied outright the need for first aid provision in the merchant marine.44 Two other bodies, the Liverpool Steamship Owners’ Association and the Mercantile Marine Service Association, acquiesced to the idea of promoting knowledge on a voluntary basis,45 while a third, the Merchant Service Guild, positively welcomed the requirement of an approved first aid certificate for future second mates (but not for masters and not to be applied retrospectively).46 The Shipmasters’ and Officers’ Federation approved in principle of compulsory training, so long as the facilities were in 42  TNA, MT 9/664, M.8692/1899. See minutes of Maxwell and Chalmers. 43  TNA, MT 9/664, M.8692/1899. Minute of Howell, 5 June 1899; Circular from Howell to Associations, 7 June 1899. 44  M.12376/1899. Chamber of Shipping to Marine Department, 30 June, 1899. 45  M.12867/1899. Mercantile Marine Service Association to Marine Department, 8 July 1899; M.14211/1899. Liverpool Steamship Owners’ Association to Marine Department, 1 August 1899. The former already had long-standing links with the St John Ambulance. 46  M.12383/1899. Merchant Service Guild to Marine Department, 30 June 1899. Enthusiasm for future candidates being proficient in first aid awakened the Department’s suspicion that the Guild saw the proposal as a means of limiting the supply of officers. The arguments were also rehearsed in the pages of the Merchant Service Guild Gazette – I am grateful to Dr Alston Kennerley for bringing this to my attention.

167

168

Richard Gorski

place to conduct it.47 Perhaps the most enthusiastic response of all came from Captain Albert Froud, Secretary of the Shipmasters’ Society in London. ‘Dear Captain Froud’, as Joseph Conrad remembered him, ‘was a man of indefatigable activity’ who ‘had very sound views as to the advancement of knowledge and status for the whole body of the officers of the mercantile marine’.48 Froud’s concern about the treatment of accidents at sea was informed by personal experience, which he recounted in his response to the Marine Department. He also provided information about practice in Germany, where first aid instruction (but not examination) was compulsory for officers who attended Schools of Navigation or Schools of Engineering and Science.49 With a further letter Froud enclosed the text of a lecture on ‘“First aid” to Sailors’ delivered by Dr Alexander Cato in January 1895.50 For Cato the rationale for extending knowledge of first aid among seamen was the same as it had been in the 1880s, namely that an occasional ‘dose of salts’ did not adequately cover the range of injuries that occurred aboard ship. Commonplace examples included the proper setting of fractures and the treatment of sunstroke by artificial respiration. More advanced medical expertise was therefore justifiable for ‘at least one or two persons on every ship’. Dr Cato’s scheme followed the model of the St John Ambulance lectures, with the possibility of slight expansion to take in the rudiments of ‘Second Aid’ and some of the less common conditions to which seamen were prone. Cato firmly emphasized the training’s practical value, bearing in mind the old adage that a little knowledge was dangerous: If more were attempted; if the subject were more deeply gone into, instead of the really useful body of men we now have, we should have a number of amateur physicians and surgeons…possessing all the confidence gained by a complete curriculum of five weeks, and none of the caution engendered by one of the ordinarily prescribed term of five years. Other observations made during the same meeting in 1895 suggest that the torch of first aid instruction for seafarers was borne in these poorly docu47  TNA, MT 9/664, M.18198. Shipmasters’ and Officers’ Federation to Marine Department, 10 October 1899. 48  J. Conrad, A Personal Record and The Mirror of the Sea, ed. M. Kalnins (London, 1998), p. 22. 49  TNA, MT 9/664, M.11853/1899. Froud to Marine Department, 20 June 1899. Enclosure of Dr Nocht’s letter to Froud, June 1899. 50  For this and what follows see MT 9/664, M.11853/1899. Froud to Marine Department, 28 July 1899; and Alexander M. Cato, “First Aid” to Sailors (London, 1895). Shipmasters’ Society Course of Papers, no. 36.



Health and safety aboard British merchant ships

mented years by the St John Association and the Missions to Seamen. On 31 July the question of first aid was raised for the first time in the House of Commons. The President of the Board of Trade, Charles Ritchie, reported that it was still under discussion.51 On the same day Howell authorized further consultation with the Local Marine Boards, and cynics might accuse him of deliberately prolonging the matter into the summer parliamentary recess.52 This cannot be proved. It is probably nearer the mark to suggest that Howell wanted to be absolutely sure of how things stood before recommending a course of action. In events that mirrored the earlier phase of discussion, the Local Marine Boards duly commented on the merits of compulsory ambulance examinations for would-be masters, and with striking results. To be sure, there were still some reservations and suggested amendments, but an overwhelming majority of Boards supported compulsion.53 The Boards at Belfast and Dundee approved in principle of the scheme but raised the spectre of adequate facilities.54 Aberdeen and Sunderland argued for a period of notice before the new regulations came into force.55 Bristol believed that the examination would be more appropriate for prospective first mates, and South Shields for second mates (both implying more far-reaching change than the current proposal).56 The remaining Boards – Cardiff, London, North Shields and Plymouth – simply expressed their support for the scheme.57 Taken together, these responses provided a strong case for change. It was not until early November that the Marine Department properly assessed the results of the summer’s consultation.58 From this one can consider two things: first, the extent to which the Department’s policy making was opinion-led; and second, the more fundamental question of how the Department understood its own regulatory and enforcement roles. Acknowledging the obvious – that there was considerable support for compulsory first aid – did not solve the old problem of delivery. It was ‘out of the question’ for the Board 51  TNA, MT 9/664, M.13924/1899. Notice of question to be put to the President of the Board of Trade by W. Johnston MP. A month later Johnston forwarded to the Marine Department a letter from the German government outlining its policy, together with a model syllabus of first aid lectures. M.14355/1899. For the question and response see The Parliamentary Debates, Fourth Series, vol. 75 (24 July-4 August 1899), pp. 850-51. 52  TNA, MT 9/664, M.8692/1899. Minute of Howell, 31 July 1899. 53  Several Boards were opposed: Glasgow (M.17838/1899); Dublin (M.16303/1899); Liverpool (M.14493/1899). Greenock argued against ‘chiefly in consequence of the difficulty of carrying the scheme into effect’ (M.16257/1899). Hull was evasive (M.14416/1899). 54  Belfast (M.16141/1899); Dundee (M.15506/1899). 55  Aberdeen (M.16895/1899); Sunderland (M.15418/1899). 56  Bristol (M.17838/1899); South Shields (M.15156/1899). 57  London (M.14572/1899); Cardiff (M.14764/1899); (M.14839/1899); North Shields (M.15937/1899); Plymouth (M.17838/1899). 58  TNA, MT 9/664, M.20032/1899. Minuted responses to the replies received on compulsory first aid instruction, November 1899.

169

170

Richard Gorski

of Trade to provide ambulance classes. An expanded syllabus for masters or mates would have to be catered for by approved schools, and here the growing market for tuition would create and sustain the necessary infrastructure. Competition would keep costs down and ‘make instruction in First Aid as cheap as it can be’. Delegation to the private sector allowed the Marine Department to maintain oversight without committing staff or resources to the scheme. The same solution was later applied to the training of cooks.59 There remained, however, strong cultural opposition to enlarging the medical responsibilities of deck officers. Within the Marine Department this belief was championed by Captain Alfred Chalmers, its Nautical Advisor. Chalmers’ contribution to the debate of November 1899 was a reasoned, but bitter, invective against the scheme. He conceded that knowledge of first aid was ‘not unreasonable’ in itself, but objected very firmly to its delivery through the professional examinations required by the Merchant Shipping Acts: it seems clear that in providing that masters should be compelled to hold certificates of competency…the intention of the Act was to secure a certain standard of professional knowledge and expertise in the duties peculiar to that position. So far, compulsion seems to be justified but the intention of the Act would appear to be unduly strained if to those duties were now added others which are not peculiar to the training of a seaman or navigator, and the reasonable performance which appears to be provided for in the fact that the Board have exercised the power given in Section 200 of the Merchant Shipping Act 1894 in issuing a ‘book containing instructions’ to masters for the medical treatment of illnesses and injuries, instructions which are very precise, and which every master is legally bound to follow. Chalmers also argued that treatment by the book, that is according to the Ship Captain’s Medical Guide, was far more effective and consistent than the ‘small modicum of knowledge’ likely to be acquired through first aid classes. To these objections he added a comment designed to derail any further progress: ‘Moreover, the opposition to the proposal on the part of the various bodies consulted is considerable, and it seems advisable to leave the present voluntary arrangement in force.’ Unanimity remained a sensitive issue. Chalmers was probably not the only critic of compulsory ambulance training within the Department, but he was the most vocal, and his rather misleading analysis 59  S. Mäenpää, ‘From pea soup to hors d’oeuvres: the status of the cook on British merchant ships’, The Northern Mariner, 11/2 (2001), pp. 39-55.



Health and safety aboard British merchant ships

helped to kill off the idea. His comments, by wrecking internal consensus, provided an excuse for the Marine Department to disregard the weight of external opinion and remain passive. In December Howell politely informed the Medical Scales Committee of the Board of Trade’s decision to take no further action in the matter.60 In the wake of this verdict there was no reason to expect any further discussion of first aid for seamen. Yet not long afterwards, in July 1900, the Marine Department had to react to the unexpected announcement by the Chamber of Shipping that it now supported compulsory examination for prospective first mates.61 Because the other variables are unlikely to have changed since December, this episode provides an excellent test of the Marine Department’s responsiveness to particular voices from within the shipping constituency. The Chamber of Shipping was the chief national association of shipowners and managers, and officials immediately concluded that this was ‘an important alteration of opinion’, and sufficient by itself to justify a rethink. Significantly, however, the Department’s instinctive reaction was to try to bring on board the remaining dissenters: complete consensus, seemingly, was the Grail of its policy making. Within a week of receiving the Chamber of Shipping’s memorial, Howell wrote to the Shipmasters’ and Officers’ Federation and the Mercantile Marine Service Association.62 These overtures were fruitless. Both bodies remained ideologically and practically opposed to the idea.63 The Service Association in particular did not wish to dilute the responsibility of the deck officer: It does not appear clear to this Association on what grounds even an elementary knowledge of surgery or Medicine can be demanded from Candidates for Certificates of Competency as Navigators and Seamen, but if such compulsory requirements are justified on the score of humanity, then the necessary qualification should not be confined to 60  TNA, MT 9/664, M.20032/1899. Howell to Medical Scales Committee, 15 December 1899. The letter cited ‘considerable opposition in many quarters’ as the reason for inaction. 61  TNA, MT 9/664, M.12353/1900. Chamber of Shipping to Howell, 5 July 1900. This volte-face seems to have been instigated by the North of England Shipowners Association. See J.S. Metcalfe, North of England Protecting and Indemnity Association: Suggestions to Managing Owners of Steamers and their Captains (Newcastle, 6th edn. 1901), pp. 69-70. The St John Ambulance was quick to renew its offer of support to the Board of Trade in expectation that something might happen. MT 9/664, M.12353/1900. Sir Herbert C. Perrott to C.T. Ritchie MP, President of the Board of Trade, 16 July 1900. 62  TNA, MT 9/664, M.12353/1900. Minute of Maxwell. Howell to Mercantile Marine Service Association and Shipmasters and Officers Federation, 11 July 1900. 63  TNA, MT 9/664, M. 13367/1900. Shipmasters and Officers Federation to Marine Department, 2 August 1900.

171

172

Richard Gorski

First Mates but should be extended to the Engine Room staff, where in large modern steamers the risk of accident is somewhat greater than on deck.64 To self-interest was applied a thin veneer of professional disapproval. It was enough to convince the Marine Department to persevere with a voluntary system, even though a majority of shipowners now supported compulsory first aid.65 Caution was still the watchword. These protracted discussions do not reflect well on the Marine Department’s capacity to innovate. Though Howell and his colleagues were capable of incisive analysis, this ability was shackled to a naturally passive outlook and an acute sensitivity to opinion. Each had the potential to paralyse the development of policy; together they were mutually reinforcing. Vacillation in this case was exacerbated by other factors. Internal sympathy with the critics, as exemplified by Captain Chalmers, discouraged action. So too did frequent reference to poor educational infrastructure. Faced with a choice between formal regulation and informal encouragement, officials in the Marine Department opted for the easier course. Stocks of medicines and other materials were far simpler to standardize and examine than seafarers’ knowledge and proficiency in using them. A further twist in October 1900 briefly revived the prospects for ambulance training and proved once again the importance of external opinion to the Board of Trade. The Shipping Federation, a major coalition of employers, announced that it was following the Chamber of Shipping in supporting ambulance examinations for first mates.66 Nothing else had changed since August, but Howell nonetheless felt obliged to reopen the file and this time he admitted that ‘Preponderance of opinion is very strongly in favour of compulsion’.67 In other words, Federation support was enough to tip the balance. The confidence brought by near-consensus at last freed Howell to take positive steps towards a new policy. The exact species of response was predictable, however. Optimistic that only practical (rather than ideological) obstacles remained, Howell ordered the gathering of detailed information from the St 64  TNA, MT 9/664, M.13978/1900. Mercantile Marine Service Association to Marine Department, 14 August 1900. 65  TNA, MT 9/664, M.13978/1900. Minutes of Maxwell, Chalmers, and others. 66  TNA, MT 9/664, M.18032/1900. Shipping Federation to Marine Department, 20 October 1900. In November the Federation also recommended that preference of employment should be given to officers qualified in first aid. M.19645/1900 Shipping Federation to Marine Department, 13 November 1900. 67  TNA, MT 9/664, M.19645/1900. Minute of Howell. Chalmers continued to oppose compulsion as unreasonable.



Health and safety aboard British merchant ships

John’s and St Andrew’s Ambulance Associations. The replies that came in were deemed insufficient, which led, in late November, to a second and more elaborate round of consultation that also took in the local histories of provision at Liverpool, Cardiff, Newcastle, Hull, Glasgow and Leith.68 For the historian this body of correspondence provides a wealth of information. From it can be seen local contrasts in teaching and broader differences in access to education between seafarers and other groups. There is too much detail to deal with here, but, in brief, the St John Ambulance tried its best to work around the inherent inflexibility and unpredictability of seafaring. For example, it suggested a condensed one- or two-week course instead of the usual five weeks’ of lectures. There was also the sensible idea of allowing men to accumulate lectures at different ports as they moved around the country. St John’s eagerness to accommodate seafarers, however, was tempered by the less positive reports of the Marine Superintendents. The underlying theme was the old one of matching supply with demand. Evidence was presented of successful co-operation between the St John Ambulance, the Missions to Seamen and a handful of Navigation Schools. Indeed, some considered the network of Missions to offer the best prospects for instruction that was consistent between ports. Demand among seamen, however, was volatile. Hull was one of several ports where men were ‘very indifferent’ to first aid lectures. This in turn meant that classes could not be guaranteed – a basic requirement for any compulsory regime tied into the certification of officers. The Marine Department’s final, pessimistic analysis was that there was ‘a certain absence of organization’ in the teaching of first aid.69 In spite of St John’s efforts, provision had hitherto depended on local initiative that was commensurate with uneven, but generally poor, demand. Compulsory examination could not be supported by the existing voluntary infrastructure, and substantive change could not happen unless this impasse was broken. Chalmers, though still opposed in principle, suggested in a lengthy and wellreasoned minute that the Board of Trade should give five years’ notice of the new regulations so that ‘the requisite knowledge should be both gradually and efficiently acquired under a system where “breaks” in the course would be permissible’.70 The Board’s refusal to create its own system of examination left this as the only viable solution. One can only speculate why, in mid-February 68  TNA, MT 9/664, M.20420/1900, M.20462/1900, M.21147/1900, M.21221/1900, M.21601/1900, M.22659/1900. 69  TNA, MT 9/664, M.1458/1901. Minutes of Baker and Chalmers. 70  TNA, MT 9/664, M.1458/1901. Minute of Chalmers.

173

174

Richard Gorski

1901, no clear plan was agreed to and the file put away.71 iv. The confirmation of voluntary encouragement: 1902-3 The issue of medical care at sea next came under official scrutiny in a rather congested Board of Trade Committee established by Gerald Balfour, as President, in January 1902.72 With the eminent lawyer Sir Francis Jeune in the chair, the committee’s main task was to consider the attractiveness (or unattractiveness) of seafaring to Britons in the light of concerns over manning and the strength of the Naval Reserve. First aid therefore had to compete for attention with a number of other issues including the employment of Lascars and foreigners, food, accommodation, desertion, and shipboard discipline. These other matters understandably overshadowed medical treatment, but enough was said about it to justify a brief discussion. The chief recommendation of the Jeune Committee was to certify seagoing cooks via a network of licensed schools.73 Comparisons between cookery and first aid are hard to resist because they required essentially the same infrastructure to make them viable. As far as ambulance work was concerned, however, the net result was a carefully stagemanaged endorsement of the existing voluntary arrangements. Frustration with the progress of shipping legislation under Lord Salisbury’s Conservative administration since 1895 is evident in the criticism levelled at the choice of committee members. The Merchant Service Guild specifically protested against the appointment of the union leader Havelock Wilson.74 The Irish peer Lord Muskerry went much further in his criticism. For him the Jeune Committee was ‘defective and unrepresentative’.75 He roundly condemned the selection of two Marine Department officials – Walter Howell and Alfred Chalmers – and a coterie of other committee regulars (or ‘prime favourites’) such as Wilson, William Milburn and Colonel John Denny. The Board of Trade was charged with institutional partiality and out-of-date attitudes. The demand was for fresh blood. It did not really matter that in venting his anger Muskerry actually confused two different committees set up at about the same 71  TNA, MT 9/664, M.3375/1901. 72  The Times, 14 January 1902. ‘Committee appointed by the Board of Trade to inquire into certain questions affecting the Mercantile Marine’, PP 1903 [Cd. 1607-9], LXII. The committee comprised: Sir Francis Jeune (chairman); W.F.G. Anderson; Captain H. Acton-Burke; Captain A.J.G. Chalmers; Col. John Denny MP; Walter J. Howell; Vice-Admiral R.M. Lloyd; W. Milburn; J. Havelock Wilson. 73  For details see Mäenpää, ‘From pea soup to hors d’oeuvres’, passim. 74  The Times, 3 February 1903. 75  Parl. Debates, Fourth Series, vol. 134 (29 April-16 May 1904), p. 726. Muskerry often spoke out on shipping matters. His favourite hobby horse in this period was the under-ballasting of ships, a subject over which he and Walter Howell clashed in 1903. The Times, 28 July 1903.



Health and safety aboard British merchant ships

time, for this was an attack on bureaucratic lethargy in general as much as any particular committee.76 Lord Muskerry’s criticisms were valid in as far as some of the committee members used the proceedings to push their own agendas, with medical provision being a good case in point. The issue was steered very carefully through the sittings and was condensed into one short paragraph of the final Report. Howell himself did not raise first aid at all, and as the committee’s opening witness he declined to give a verdict on the 1899 consultation.77 Otherwise, almost without exception, the matter was left in the hands of Captain Chalmers who sought relentlessly to extract opinions that accorded with his own: that seamen, through their ropecraft and sail work, possessed an innate aptitude for practical first aid;78 that exposure to medical knowledge might be hazardous;79 the usefulness of the Ship Captain’s Medical Guide;80 and the inequity of imposing compulsory medical examinations on masters and mates.81 The proceedings also revealed other interesting facets of Chalmers’ outlook. On the overriding question of state intervention Chalmers revealed himself as an adherent of laissez-faire, which is no great surprise.82 In his questioning of Frederick Shaw, the Superintendent of Mercantile Marine at Cardiff, he broached the hitherto neglected issue of responsibility for the costs and results of medical treatment aboard ship. The costs of treating injured seamen were customarily borne by the owners, but was there a danger, he asked, that new regulations might increase the responsibility of masters and make knowledge of first aid a burden rather than a blessing?83 Although Shaw dismissed this possibility, Chalmers’ line of questioning played on the fact that employer liability for accidents in the workplace had been a Pandora’s Box for the shipping industry ever since Joseph Chamberlain’s time at the Board of Trade in the 1880s.84 In his examination of another witness, Captain Charles 76  Parl. Debates, Fourth Series, vol. 146 (31 March-12 April 1905), p. 9. 77  For this and what follows see Jeune Committee, ‘Minutes of Evidence’. Evidence of Howell, pp. 4-5 (qq. 24-28). 78  Evidence of Mackenzie, p. 58 (qq. 1782-1784); Shaw, p. 63 (q. 1965). 79  Evidence of Henderson, p. 40 (q. 1094). 80  Evidence of Henderson, pp. 41-42 (qq. 1138-1146); Mackenzie, p. 44 (q. 1260). According to Chalmers the Guide was a ‘homely’ publication (q.1140), and ‘about the concisest and fullest compendium of minor surgery you can get’ (p.139, q.4634). Short first aid courses were ‘scrappy’ in comparison. 81  Evidence of Henderson, p. 40 (q. 1079); Munro, pp. 391-2 (qq. 12659-12665); Trenery, (p. 402, qq. 12972-12975); Stewart, pp. 441-42 (qq.14468-14478). 82  Evidence of Wilson, p.139 (q.4,267). 83  Evidence of Shaw, p.72 (qq. 2,387-2,399). 84  See G. Alderman, ‘Joseph Chamberlain’s attempted reform of the British mercantile marine’, Journal of Transport History, 1 (1972), pp. 169-84.

175

176

Richard Gorski

Wilson of the London Port District, Chalmers expounded on the theme of ‘voluntary adjustment’ between seafarers and employers; in other words, if owners wanted medically trained men then they should pay extra for the privilege. Wilson simply countered that there were not enough of these men available in the first place.85 Sporadic defiance of Chalmers was offered by the handful of witnesses who came out in favour of compulsory first aid regimes;86 but the balance of opinion put before the committee favoured the official line. What went unsaid before the committee also influenced its final recommendations of May 1903. Little evidence came to light of suffering or even dissatisfaction with the medical treatment provided by masters under the existing laws. No representatives from the ambulance movement were called to give evidence (a curious oversight), but neither Havelock Wilson nor the seamen examined before the committee had a great deal to say about standards of care for the sick and injured. Complaints were rare. The existing laws and customs therefore emerged from the exercise with a reasonably clean bill of health – enough for the committee to keep faith with voluntary ambulance training. ‘Further than this we do not think it necessary or practicable to go.’87 The committee’s findings on sea cooks and food inspection were far-reaching in comparison, though these were the exceptional parts of an otherwise unambitious package of proposals which was accepted by Gerald Balfour at the Board of Trade. Those requiring new legislation were drafted into a Bill that was introduced to Parliament in March 1904, with ‘surprising and remarkable promptitude’ according to the ironic Lord Muskerry.88 Lord Brassey and other shipping authorities recognized the Bill’s limitations but it contained enough of merit to command cross-party support and it passed quickly through the Lords. In July it was referred back to the House of Commons where it seems to have foundered through lack of time before the August recess. The Bill’s main provisions were successfully revived after the crushing defeat of the Conservatives in the general election of February 1906. v. The establishment of compulsory instruction: 1906-8 The eventual decision to introduce a compulsory regime of first aid training for deck officers owed much to the persistence of a small group of peers in 85  Evidence of Wilson, p.139 (qq.4,619-4,635). 86  Evidence of Bullen, p. 643 (qq.20,704-20,710), Lubbock, p. 571 (qq.18,623-18,628); Laws, p. 687 (qq.21,858-21,873). 87  Jeune Committee, ‘Report’, pp. ix, xi. 88  Parl. Debates, vol. 134 (29 April-16 May 1904), p. 722. See pp. 726-28 for Muskerry’s scathing comments.



Health and safety aboard British merchant ships

the House of Lords. It followed on the coat tails of the Merchant Shipping Bill of 1906, which was an important element in the legislative programme of Campbell-Bannerman’s newly-elected Liberal government. Typically, however, the Bill made no mention of first aid. That concession had to be wrung out of the Board of Trade through intermittent sniping in the Lords that dragged on until the summer of 1907. Discussion of the 1906 Bill allowed a humanitarian ambush to be sprung by Lord Brassey and the Bishop of Bangor. In mid-December, threatening an eleventh-hour amendment, the Bishop proposed that all foreign-going vessels should have aboard at least one ambulance trained officer or seaman.89 Some in the House wrongly assumed that this suggestion – intended only ‘to save unnecessary suffering’– posed the usual political dilemma of either risking a clash with the shipowners or being seen to ignore oversights in maritime safety. Speaking for the government, and apparently working under this mistaken belief, the Earl of Granard rejected the idea of imposing any more burdens on the shipping industry. This brought angry responses from all quarters. For example, in voicing his support for the Bishop’s proposal, Lord Muskerry criticized the Board of Trade’s inactivity on first aid since its consultation of 1899. Lord Zouche of Haryngworth regretted very much the government’s refusal to deal with a question ‘of mere humanity’. Though sympathetic to the plight of shipowners, the Marquess of Salisbury admitted that ‘a rather weighty appeal had been made’. Other speakers correctly pointed out that first aid was neither a question of money nor a further imposition on shipowners. At this key juncture Lord Brassey diffused the situation and opened up a way forward. He declared himself ready to drop his own very similar amendment to the Bill on the understanding that the necessary regulation could be framed by the Board of Trade without parliamentary interference. Having extracted a promise from the government that this would be done, the Bishop of Bangor also withdrew his amendment. The promise was slow to be fulfilled. When the Merchant Shipping Bill came before the Lords again, on 14 December, the Bishop of Bangor reminded the government of its undertaking. Granard reassured the House that the new elements of the second mate’s syllabus would be ready in the New Year.90 Six months later, in June 1907, an incensed Lord Muskerry asked about progress.91 ‘But for the dilatory tactics – to use a very mild term – of the 89  Ibid. vol. 165 (Nov 15-Nov 27 1906), pp. 1378-79. 90  Parl. Debates, Fourth Series, vol. 167 (11-21 December 1906), pp. 75-78, 810. 91  Ibid. vol. 175 (30 May-13 June 1907), pp. 244-49.

177

178

Richard Gorski

Marine Department of the Board of Trade something would have been done long ago to alleviate the miseries of injured seamen.’ Granard’s reply was not very satisfactory. The matter was ongoing, he said, and the Board of Trade was conscious of limiting the costs of training for officers to a guinea or less, which required negotiations with the ambulance associations. When pressed further Granard promised to see what he could do to speed up the process. The documentary trail peters out after this, but the evidence of Marine Department correspondence and circulars confirms that the revised syllabus for master and first mate candidates was due to come into force at the beginning of April 1908.92 It was the product of almost thirty years’ of consultation and discussion. vi. Conclusion This paper has sought to illustrate the Board of Trade’s evidence gathering techniques and to relate them to a particular policy question, that is whether to compel officers in the merchant service to undergo first aid instruction. Faced with a choice between encouraging voluntary training and imposing a compulsory system, the officials responsible for policy in this area veered unerringly towards the former. There were occasions when the Board came perilously close to taking a more forceful line, but it seems that compulsory training for deck officers in the end was foisted on a reluctant Marine Department. The Department’s performance during this tortuous process was paradoxical. On this policy question, and probably many others, it operated in response mode. Ambulance work was not deemed important enough for the Department to innovate policy of its own, however the receipt of external proposals revealed a very different side to its operations. Each call for the introduction of first aid triggered exhaustive enquiries and a comprehensive assessment of the possibilities, and in the process generated some sympathy for the idea. Gathering and then digesting evidence from various ‘stakeholders’ was the standard methodology – to the extent that opinions or information brought to light by one questionnaire often required elaboration in a second or third round of consultation as the permanent officials of the Department edged towards their decisions. This approach was thorough, but it was hardly dynamic.

92  See, for example, TNA, Circulars to the Stockton-on-Tees Marine Superintendent, MT 26/13, p. 137. A copy of the original handbill advertising the changes was not preserved with the circular. The Marine Department’s registers of in-letters log a flurry of correspondence from the Ambulance Associations in February and March 1908. The letters dealt with a number of practical issues that were unresolved right up until (and indeed after) the syllabus revision (TNA, MT 85/243-245).



Health and safety aboard British merchant ships

Against this backdrop it must be borne in mind that ambulance training was not a typical health and safety issue. It was not politically delicate – in fact it hardly registered in Parliament before 1906 – but it nonetheless divided opinion in unusual ways. The cause attracted a persistent following from the 1880s and here one should reemphasize the broader enthusiasm for ambulance work cultivated by the St John’s and St Andrew’s Associations. Lobbyists reasonably argued that it was a strictly humanitarian proposal with negligible costs to the shipping industry and absolutely no bearing on the contractual relationship between seaman and shipowner. Most adherents of first aid proficiency saw it as an extra qualification to be earned in the normal course of promotion through the grades of the merchant service. Added to this was the undeniable logic of requiring seafarers to have some knowledge of how to treat injuries. Seamen, however, were unenthusiastic about first aid classes. Perhaps knowledge of first aid somehow violated the masculinity of work at sea. Attending a course also required an investment of time and money, though in this respect it is interesting that occasional efforts to subsidize the costs for seamen had little effect. This suggests indifference born of outlook as much as hardship or inconvenience. For seagoing officers the criticisms were essentially economic but embellished with professional annoyance at interference in the business of navigation and command. Nor should one imagine that there was a prevailing culture of learning or ‘improvement’ in the mercantile marine that could easily (or willingly) absorb a discrete set of new skills. The licensing of officers was for the most part based on narrow, ossified syllabuses that guaranteed minimum standards of competency rather than encouraging broad based education. Such education, one suspects, was tolerated rather than eagerly embraced.93 Shipowners are the third and final interest group worth discussing in this context. Research on the progress of other aspects of maritime safety after 1870 has tended to emphasize the obstructive role of owners, but in this case they gradually subscribed to compulsory first aid schemes of one sort or another. Thus, support among some of the most powerful shipowning associations undermines one conventional explanation for political inertia; and it places significant emphasis on the views and actions of the other interested parties, particularly officers, representatives of the ambulance movement (the likely providers of training) and, not least, the Marine Department of the Board of Trade. Indeed, the importance of the Marine 93  A. Kennerley, ‘Merchant marine education in Liverpool and the Nautical College of 1892’, International Journal of Maritime History, 5/2 (1993), pp. 103-134, especially pp. 123-25.

179

180

Richard Gorski

Department was heightened by its authority under the Merchant Shipping Acts to alter its own syllabuses and examination regulations. Merchant shipping generated a very crowded legislative agenda during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. First, this was the great age of the consolidating act. Most of the foregoing analysis deals with events that occurred after the Merchant Shipping Act of 1894 which rationalized the existing laws without adding anything new to them.94 A decade later ministers were still conscious that laws passed in the shadow of the 1894 Act were tinkering rather than innovatory, though this did not stem the flood of shipping Bills and enquiries that resulted in a huge workload for the staff of the Marine Department.95 Second, it must be remembered that first aid provision was but one small ingredient of shipping safety: even within the sphere of occupational health it struggled to compete with larger and more complex questions. Other priorities in this area arose out of the laborious Royal Commissions and Select Committees of the 1880s, for example. Ambulance training also overlapped to some degree with the divisive questions of employer liability and compensation for injuries suffered in the workplace.96 Administrative workloads and the allocation of resources probably account in part for delays in the Board of Trade’s development of a system of first aid training. Ultimately, however, they do not account for the Board’s continued reluctance to introduce one of the several systems that came before it for discussion. The tortuous pace of change in part must be attributed to failings in the Marine Department’s handling of the affair. In this respect the simplest, but least satisfactory explanation is persistent opposition from individual officials such as Thomas Gray and Alfred Chalmers. From a common belief in laissezfaire both Gray and Chalmers held that ambulance training, however desirable, was not something that the Board of Trade should impose on masters or mates. During the 1880s the prevailing philosophy of non-interventionism at the Board of Trade militated against the implementation of such schemes. 94  57 & 58 Vict., c. 60. 95  See, for example, the comments of Lord Ellenborough in 1904. Parl. Debates, Fourth Series, vol. 137 (2 June-13 July 1904), pp. 921-23. 96  These issues have not yet been properly explored in their relation to seamen. The following references give an indication of research carried out in kindred fields: E.A. Cawthon, Job Accidents and the Law in England’s Early Railway Age: Origins of Employer Liability and Workmen’s Compensation (Lampeter, 1997); E. Knox, ‘Blood on the tracks: railway employers and safety in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 12 (2001), pp. 1-26; R. Harrington, ‘Railway safety and railway slaughter: railway accidents, government and public in Victorian Britain’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 8/2 (2003), pp. 187-207; N. Doran, ‘From embodied “health” to official “accidents”: class, codification, and British factory legislation, 1831-1844’, Social and Legal Studies, 5 (1996), pp. 523-46.



Health and safety aboard British merchant ships

By 1900 this was not so clear-cut. Rising support for government interference is noticeable in the Marine Department’s consultations on ambulance training, and the changing tide of opinion eventually cut off the obdurate minority who felt directly threatened by the proposal. It was at this point, Chalmers’ objections notwithstanding, that Walter Howell seriously tested the viability of delegating first aid instruction and examination to the ambulance associations. The available infrastructure was found wanting. Now, in the autumn of 1900, the policy makers at Whitehall Gardens were excessively cautious. There were ways of reconciling an expanded syllabus with the desire to preserve the Marine Department’s purely regulatory role, yet Walter Howell and his colleagues pulled back from the brink and left matters alone. In conclusion, then, plans after 1880 to introduce ambulance training for officers of the mercantile marine stalled for four reasons. First, for a long time it was not an issue that generated much interest among politicians or mainstream lobby groups. Pressure from either might have speeded up the process, as eventually happened in 1906. Second, there was hostility to increasing the responsibilities of the Marine Department.97 This consequentially put pressure on the private sector and its capacity to deliver the necessary training. Third, with regard to its fixation with information, first aid brought out the Marine Department’s best and worst qualities. Through its large number of contacts, formal and informal, Whitehall Gardens was well informed from the beginning about the virtues of first aid, and quickly became acquainted with the problems of expense and delivery. Its officials were meticulous and logical in their analyses. Some showed compassion for the plight of injured seamen at sea. However, without real imperative for change, and with internal disagreements muddying the waters, the Department was prone in its decision making to caution and short-termism. Fourth, it is apparent from both of the major consultations on ambulance work discussed above that the Board was acutely sensitive to criticism. External opinion therefore must be regarded as a brake on progress. Because of its nature, first aid did not spark much conflict about the rights and wrongs of intervention. Instead the Marine Department was preoccupied with establishing the facts and defusing opposition. Information gathering exacerbated this, for thorough consultations were always likely to unearth critics. Inevitable differences of opinion in the world of shipping could be seen as a convenient barricade behind which hesitant officials hid. But perhaps it would be more charitable to regard disagreement 97  Alderman detected this hostility during the early 1880s (‘Joseph Chamberlain’, p. 172). It is unlikely to have diminished much thereafter.

181

182

Richard Gorski

as a contributory factor in the passive drift that marked much of the Marine Department’s work – a predisposition to neutrality characterized by one observer as ‘running with the hare and hunting with the hounds’.98

98 

Parl. Debates, 4th Series, vol. 144 (31 March-12 April 1905), p. 8. Comments of Lord Muskerry.



Health and safety aboard British merchant ships

Appendix Loss of life on British merchant ships 1871-1889 Year

Men emLost by Lost by Total lost Source (b) ployed (a) drowning accident PP 1884 [C.3875] LXXI 2,740 279 2,461 218,502 1871 ““ 3,462 327 3,135 222,838 1872 ““ 3,112 291 2,821 220,838 1873 ““ 3,599 282 3,317 220,962 1874 ““ 2,592 306 2,286 216,420 1875 ““ 2,990 307 2,683 215,670 1876 ““ 2,650 340 2,310 213,627 1877 ““ 2,332 279 2,053 212,534 1878 ““ 2,630 269 2,361 210,476 1879 ““ 2,973 291 2,682 210,026 1880 ““ 3,278 194 3,084 209,481 1881 ““ 2,832 286 2,546 212,343 1882 PP 1890-91 (150) LXXVI 2,899 210 2,689 191,110 1883 ““ 1,955 189 1,766 189,056 1884 ““ 1,850 192 1,658 195,717 1885 ““ 1,778 186 1,592 199,682 1886 ““ 1,994 218 1,776 196,679 1887 ““ 1,760 209 1,551 201,155 1888 ““ 1,647 236 1,411 207,741 1889 PP 1892 (342) LXXI 2,041 248 1,793 214,427 1890 PP 1894 (32) LXXVI 1,882 233 1,649 218,247 1891 ““ 1,835 228 1,607 219,560 1892 PP 1895 (212) LXXXVII 1,792 190 1,601 218,317 1893 PP 1895 (430) LXXXVII 1,859 232 1,627 217,794 1894 PP 1897 [C.8292] LXXVIII 1,842 240 1,602 218,224 1895 PP 1897 [C.8537] LXXVIII 1,489 216 1,273 219,233 1896 PP 1898 (285) LXXXIII 1,404 210 1,194 218,016 1897 PP 1899 (236) LXXXVII 1,352 218 1,134 219,383 1898 PP 1900 (339) LXXVII 1,708 205 1,503 221,107 1899 Notes: (a) Masters and Seamen combined; (b) All sources are in the series ‘Returns of Lives lost by Drowning or Accident in British Merchant Ships Registered in the United Kingdom’.

183

184



British merchant marine engineer licensing, 1865-192511 Alston Kennerley – University of Plymouth

i. Introduction When, two centuries ago, engines were first installed in ships, the promoters probably had little appreciation of the impact the new technology would have on ship manning. At a stroke a new and significant craft appeared aboard ships which would rival and outclass such long-standing shipboard skills as seamanship, sail-making, gunnery, cooperage, blacksmithing, shipwrighting and even, when a theoretical basis for ships’ engineering had been developed, navigation. Half a century after their introduction, ships’ engineers were licensed in the same way that mates and masters had been a decade earlier. By the end of the nineteenth century, marine engineers emerged as another of the sub-groups of increasing engineering specialization identified in the formation of professional institutions: Civil Engineering (1818); Mechanical Engineering (1845); Naval Architecture (1860); and Marine Engineers (1889).2 By 1900, engine room departments of engineers, firemen (stokers) and trimmers (coal passers) on ordinary merchant ships matched in numbers the deck departments of master, mates, and seamen, and on powerful liners greatly exceeded them. Yet merchant ship engineers have been little studied. They were almost invisible if the string of parliamentary publications concerned with shipping safety are to be relied upon, and the vast array of literature concerned with shipping also seems to have largely ignored them. Concern for safety aboard early steamships was evident in parliamentary investigations and statutes, while steam installations were also covered by general 1  The research for this paper was undertaken with support from the Nuffield Foundation, aid which is gratefully acknowledged. Earlier versions of this paper were presented: in abbreviated form at the Twelfth Conference of the Association for the History of the Northern Seas, Midddelburg/Vlissingen, Netherlands, 18-20 August 2005; in full at the Workshop on Maritime Labour in the Northern Hemisphere, 1750-1950, University of Hull, 12-13 December 2005. I am indebted to Professor Tony Lane for his comments on a draft of this paper. 2  Originally the term ‘Civil Engineering’ was used in distinction from military engineering, and embraced all forms of engineering for civilian purposes. Now the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) is concerned primarily with structures such as tunnels, bridges, roads, docks, dams, etc. Marine Engineering is really a specialised branch of Mechanical Engineering, the realm of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE). Naval Architecture, overseen by the Royal Institution of Naval Architects (RINA), is concerned with the design and structural aspects of ships. The Institute of Marine Engineers (IMarE) has recently been renamed Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology (IMarEST); see also B.C. Curling, History of the Institute of Marine Engineers (London, 1961).

185

186

Alston Kennerley

provisions, such as the investigations into boiler explosions.3 This is an important reminder that ship installations were closely related to power plant ashore in mines, factories and transport, especially the railways. Steamship engineers were equally employable in Britain’s burgeoning industries ashore, ensuring that ships were always in competition with a mass of industrial employers ashore for suitably qualified engineering manpower. In contrast to traditional seafarers who were largely locked into their employment afloat, ships’ engineers were always a part of the wider engineering employment scene, able to mix work ashore with that afloat. The early responsibility and leadership roles which came with sea employment made them attractive for responsible positions ashore. The employability of ships’ engineers ashore may also be reflected in the length of their sea careers. In the 1960s these were shown to be shorter than those of deck officers, and it seems likely that this was also true of earlier periods.4 The early history of commercial steam shipping lies in river services and then, in the 1820s, coastal services, with passengers and high value, small volume cargoes. With operational experience came technical development in both engines and boilers, but, despite some trans-Atlantic voyages in wooden paddle steamers, long distance oceanic operation only became an economic reality with the replacement of wooden hulls by iron, and paddle output by screw, together with boilers capable of higher steam pressures, compound engines and the development of a network of coaling stations. The oceanic steamship age really dates from the 1860s, the larger ships these advances allowed, and the associated improved reliability. The little seen body of ships’ engineers, able to run ships’ engines continuously for weeks on end, and to carry out quite major repairs without support from the shore-based engineering industry, must be counted amongst the factors making oceanic operation possible. Although engineers appear to have featured little in public discussion about

3  Examples include: ‘Bill for securing the Safety of Passengers in vessels worked by Steam’, 1817, 1818; ‘Select Committee on Steam Navigation’, British Parliamentary Papers [PP hereafter] 1831 VIII; ‘An Act for regulating the Carriage of Passengers in merchant Vessels 1842’, 5 & 6 Vict. c. 107; ‘Select Committee on the Commercial Marine’, PP 1844 VIII; ‘An Act for the Regulation of Steam Navigation, and for requiring Sea-going vessels to carry Boats 1846’, 9 & 10 Vict., c. 100; ‘Steam Navigation Act 1851’, 14 & 15 Vict., c. 79. 4  D.H. Moreby, ‘The Costs, Causes and Effects of Labour Turnover in the British Merchant Navy’, Journal of the Honourable Company of Master Mariners, vol. 10, no. 119 (July, 1969), pp. 515-30. See also A. Kennerley, ‘The Engineers in British Merchant Ships: Origins and Careers, 1850-1970’, Journal of Marine Design and Operations: Proceedings of the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology, Part B, No. B 10 (October, 2006), 3-13.



British merchant marine engineer licensing, 1865-1925

merchant ship manning, and though autobiographies and literary depictions are rare, like other merchant seafarers they are recorded in the official documentation of ship manning, and as with masters and mates, data about them survives in the records of the licensing system from 1862. At the heart of this paper is an analysis of data to be found in engineers’ applications to be examined for certificates of competency and the copy certificates retained by the Marine Department of the Board of Trade, held now at the National Maritime Museum.5 This analysis seeks to throw light on such basic questions as the ages at which engineers obtained their Second and First Class Certificates of Competency, their geographical origins, their preparation for those awards in terms of prior shore experience and sea service, and the proportion of engineers that did not progress from Class 2 to Class 1. This is supported through an examination of statutory publications, official regulations and departmental records in the National Archives, together with press and engineering institution comment. That the wider context of employment as a ship’s engineer is complex has already been hinted at. Before attempting the statistical analysis in the third section of this paper, it is necessary in the first section to examine in slightly more detail industry ashore which employed engineers, to discuss the progress of power propulsion in merchant ships, to consider what vocational education was available, and to address the maritime regulatory system into which the structures of engineer licensing were set. Then attention can turn in the second section to an examination of the regulatory and administrative framework for the certificate of competency examinations. In British popular culture the usage of the occupational descriptor ‘engineer’ was and remains problematical. It is used almost in the same breath to refer to someone like Brunel at the forefront of engineering design and innovation, and to someone with perhaps little theoretical or even practical knowledge of machines, such as an engine driver. Similarly the term ‘marine engineer’, which came into use in the later decades of the nineteenth century, can describe a ship’s engineer or a leading designer and manufacturer of

5  The Marine Department came into being as a result of the Mercantile Marine Act 1850 (13 & 14 Vict., c. 93), which formally placed upon the Board of Trade the superintendence of matters relating to the British Mercantile Marine. It was renamed the Mercantile Marine Department in 1922, and after several further changes during the twentieth century, its functions are now undertaken by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. In this paper the nineteenth century title will be used. See H.L. Smith, The Board of Trade (London, 1928), chapter 5, and P.G. Parkhurst, Ships of Peace: A record of some of the problems which came before the Board of Trade in connection with the British Mercantile Marine from the early days to the year 1885 (New Malden, 1962), pp. 17-18.

187

188

Alston Kennerley

ships’ engines. Acts of Parliament, Board of Trade regulations and certificates of competency use ‘engineer’, supplemented with Second Class, First Class, First Class Extra, chief, second, third, etc. Here the use of engineer, ship’s engineer and marine engineer all refer to engineers employed in merchant ships. ii. The wider context of merchant ship engineer employment Britain’s industrial mechanisation during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was based on steam power generated in boilers and transmitted to ‘engines’, single cylinders or multiples of cylinders, where steam energy did its work by producing reciprocating movement.6 For such plant to work the third primary component of the system was a supply of fuel, principally coal, and water. Through mechanical linkages the output from the engine could be applied to an endless variety of uses including pumps, steam hammers and saws, mills, factories, vehicles (rail, sea, road), cranes, and, in time, electricity generation. Fuel supply was always an important factor in the location and operation of mechanical engineering works. With the first initiatives dating from the beginning of the eighteenth century, one hundred years of development had taken place before the successful application of steam power in ships in the 1820s. This was time enough on land for the development of some specialism in the manufacture of steam engine plant in workshops which themselves would evolve into factories. In addition to engine design, a wide range of metalworking skills was needed combining those of the foundry where the individual parts of engines were cast, the workshop with the hand and machine tools where the parts were refined, and the assembly shop where the engine was built and tested. Clearly skilled labour was required. Such skills were acquired through experience, and the evolving engineering industry adopted the time-honoured approach of taking on youths for an apprenticeship which in theory provided for experience of all the different skills involved through understudying, that is working with a skilled, or journeyman mechanic. Periods of between four and seven years might be served, at the end of which journeyman status was granted to men by then in their early twenties, and they could begin to earn their livings. It is not difficult to speculate that when new steam plant was being installed for a customer, manufacturers’ own skilled craftsmen would undertake the installation and oversee the early operation, 6  This section is based on A History of Technology and Invention: Progress through the Ages, Vol. III, The Expansion of Mechanisation, 1725-1860, ed. Maurice Daumas (London, 1980), part I, chapter 2, ‘The Steam Engine’, part II ‘The Machine Industries’.



British merchant marine engineer licensing, 1865-1925

if necessary training the customer’s own employees. Once operational, the manufacturer could be called in when difficulties were encountered. From an engineering point of view equipping a ship with steam propulsion ought not to be that different from an installation ashore.7 The basic elements were the same: fuel, water, boiler, engine and output (initially the paddle wheel). The ship’s hull had to be strong enough to take the engine weight and the forces generated. While steamships were only operated in rivers and harbours with easy access to fuel supplies and maintenance support ashore, their engines could be managed in much the same manner as steam engines in industry on land. But once more distant sea passages were to be attempted, a range of factors came into play which were not otherwise significant. Although steamships carried sail assist until the end of the nineteenth century, it was evident early that engines were likely to be operated continuously for lengthy periods. The reliability of boilers and engines became critical in safety terms as well as economic terms. The amount of fuel which could be carried by a steamship was also critical, as was the ability to find fuel supplies at intended ports of call. It took many years for a worldwide network of coaling stations to become established, which were largely supplied from the British coalfields, for much of the nineteenth century by sailing ships, and then by tramp steamers. The efficiency of boilers and of the engines was also important, and the progression of the marine steam plant in particular throughout its history can be measured in increasing boiler pressures, higher temperatures, more efficient use of the energy generated (notably through ‘compounding’: passing it through more than one cylinder), and reducing fuel consumption. The output from the engine which actually moved a ship through the water also needed to progress. Paddles worked well in the relatively calm waters of rivers and harbours, but were much less successful in the open seas. The development and proving of propellers in the 1830s and 1840s provided the answer. It was well into the 1860s before all these factors came together and enabled steamships to undertake non-stop passages from Britain into the Indian Ocean, for example, and to find ports with supplies of coal. Initially steamship engines only propelled the ship. But it was not long before auxiliary uses for the power being generated were introduced, either as drives from the engine or by using steam from the boilers in small auxiliary 7  The following works have been consulted for the technical dimensions of steam ships: D. Griffiths, Steam at Sea: Two Centuries of Steam-powered Ships (London, 1997); The Advent of Steam: The Merchant Steamship Before 1900, ed. R. Gardner and B. Greenhill (London, 1993); P. Allington and B. Greenhill, The First Atlantic Liners: Seamanship in the Age of the Paddle Wheel, Sail and Screw (London, 1997).

189

190

Alston Kennerley

steam engines. An early use was in bilge pumps. But as steamships grew in size and important functions such as steering and weighing anchor exceeded manual capability, so steam powered steering engines and windlasses were introduced, and winches for cargo handling. By the end of the nineteenth century all tramp ships were equipped in this manner. But the evolution of cargo and passenger liners promoted the installation of a wide range of additional facilities which were driven from the engine room. Such services included cabin services such as hot and cold running water, and heating. Refrigerated food storage improved the quality of meals served to passengers, and the introduction of generators allowed electric lighting to be installed. By the end of the century pumping systems had enabled bulk petroleum cargoes in tankers, and refrigeration of cargoes of meat. Although there were major differences between tramp ship engine rooms and those of the large passenger liners, merchant ships’ engine rooms generally were of increasing complexity and sophistication. Originally sea-going steamships had demanded sufficient boiler and engine manning to keep the main engine operational continuously. Firemen, aided by trimmers, tended the fires.8 The engine itself was managed by the duty engineer with responsibly for varying the engine speed, starting and stopping, governing and for lubrication. With the latter he might be aided by a greaser or oiler. But he was in overall charge during his watch. A tramp ship at the end of the nineteenth century might carry three or four engineers, all of whom dealt as needed with any of the ship systems. A large passenger ship might carry thirty or forty, with two or three each of the three on watches and the others on day work tending the various auxiliary systems.9 Two sub-specialisms, in particular, emerged – ships’ electricians and refrigeration engineers. The term chief engineer to describe the head of a ship’s engineering department appears to have come into use quite early in steamship development. While practical experience in mechanical engineering through the apprenticeship and journeyman stages in workshops ashore was all important in the background of future ships’ engineers, educational experience of theoretical principles underlying engineering design was not entirely neglected. Indeed as professional consciousness developed demand grew for improved engineering education as an underpinning to responsible positions in engineering employment. Interest in theory had developed early in the nineteenth century 8  A. Kennerley, ‘Stoking the Boilers: Firemen and Trimmers in British Merchant Ships, 18501950’, International Journal of Maritime History (forthcoming). 9  Kennerley, ‘Engineers in British Merchant Ships, 1850-1970: Origins and Careers’.



British merchant marine engineer licensing, 1865-1925

through the spread of the mechanics’ institutes movement which had originated in Scotland.10 By 1825 institutes offering lectures and evening classes in scientific and technological principles had spread throughout the country and were particularly strong in industrial areas. By the 1860s the Department of Science and Art (1853) was promoting classes in subjects such as mechanics and running an examination system offering certification. By the 1890s this approach was coalescing in the emergent technical colleges and increasing numbers of engineering apprentices were attending evening classes on a regular basis.11 Undoubtedly the introduction of Certificates of Competency for merchant ship engineers under the Merchant Shipping Acts Amendment Act, 1862, boosted the provision of vocational education ashore for ships’ engineers, though largely through private schools specializing in preparing candidates for the examinations and through the production of textbook guides to the examinations.12 Towards the end of the century university level institutions were beginning to offer engineering subjects and a few of those students went to sea as engineers. It is likely that from the start most ships’ engineers had at least some basic literacy; but those with a better secondary education and ability were able to rise more rapidly to the position of chief engineer. In that role the responsibilities ranged beyond the simple driving and maintenance of boilers and engines to the selection and social management of engine room staff, the ordering of fuel and engine room stores and to the issuing of technical instructions to engineering businesses ashore for the repair or replacement of engine parts, for major engine overhauls, and in dealings with government engine surveyors, all tasks which demanded literacy, mathematics and technical drawing ability. The introduction of statutory examinations made further demands on such educational attainments. The introduction of Certificates of Competency brought ships’ engineers firmly within the British state regulatory framework relating to ships and seafarers. Of course on going to sea engineers became seafarers (technically they became seamen), and were subject to the prevailing regulatory regime. The regulation of commercial shipping and seafarers has a very long history, but 10  For a local overview of developing vocational educational provision see A. Kennerley, The Making of the University of Plymouth (Plymouth, 2000), chapter 2, ‘Education in the Three Towns, 1815-1914’. 11  ‘The Development of the Alternative Entry Scheme for the Education and Training of Marine Engineers, 1932 to 1952’, a paper presented at the History of Education Society Annual Conference, Cambridge, 12-14 December 2003. 12  25 & 26 Vict., c. 40.

191

192

Alston Kennerley

during the nineteenth century it was to become the most regulated of all industries in Britain.13 The navigation acts from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries had sought to preserve British trade for British ships and to reserve employment in those ships for British subjects. The eighteenth century saw the introduction of ship registry and the nineteenth numerous state regulations relating to construction, equipment and periodic survey. In addition to the navigation acts (repealed in 1849) the regulations relating to seamen included formal crew agreements, the registration of seamen, the regulation of sea apprentices, the introduction of certificates of competency for mates and masters, and a range of social measures including repatriation, savings banks, medical provision, and accommodation. It may be easy enough to devise regulations but administering them and financing that work is another matter. Until 1850 there was no central administration and enforcement was inevitably haphazard. The levying of fees for the state’s requirements might produce income, but there was a tendency to create petty administrations for each requirement or to add the duties to those of some existing body. Thus ship registration was handed to the Customs and Excise whereas the Registry of Seamen (1835) was placed under the Admiralty. In both cases those concerned had to cope with unforeseen difficulties and make provision for dealing with them. For the inspection of steamships and their engines (1846) reliance was at first placed on the ad hoc employment of local engineers and shipwrights for undertaking the surveys and making the reports. The need for a unified administration had been recognized for two decades when the Marine Department came into being in 1851.14 The Marine Department provided the central administration in London, while the regional administration was placed in the hands of newly created Local Marine Boards. Two key activities relying on this arrangement were the tightening up of the arrangements for crew engagement and discharge through appointing shipping masters and opening local shipping offices, and the establishment of arrangements for the examination of masters and mates. The Local Marine Boards administered the provision locally, making the appointments of shipping office staff and of the examiners of masters and mates (subject to central approval), while the Marine Department provided the guidelines for the operation of shipping offices, decided the certificate of competency awards, drew up the syllabus and arranged for the recording and issue of certificates. Thus 13  The size and scope of the Merchant Shipping Act 1894 (57 & 58 Vict., c. 60), a consolidating act with 748 clauses, illustrates this point. 14  Parkhurst, Ships of Peace, chapter 3.



British merchant marine engineer licensing, 1865-1925

when Certificates of Competency for Engineers were introduced in 1862, there existed ten years of administrative experience and a model which could be followed. iii. Engineers’ examinations and certificates of competency Prior to the introduction of compulsory mates’ and masters’ examinations and certificates of competency, there had been a long period of debate and a short lived voluntary scheme (1845-50). The debate was informed by the practice in the East India Company and in the Royal Navy of examining for lieutenants’ appointments. But the genesis of a system for the mercantile marine as a whole lay with the investigations and recommendations of the Select Committee on Shipwrecks, 1836, which went into the matter in some detail.15 In 1842 Captain Robert FitzRoy, RN, promoted an unsuccessful bill for the introduction of a system of examinations which set out proposed arrangements in considerable detail.16 Nevertheless, the bill offered a model for the voluntary system of examination introduced in 1845.17 From 1851 the compulsory system set the lowest possible standards and provided for the examination of second mates, first mates and masters of foreign-going ships.18 The requirement was extended to mates and masters of home-trade passenger ships in 1854, but, significantly, not to any other British ships trading within home trade limits.19 Against this background it is not difficult to see how a system for engineers’ examinations and certificates might have been devised and operated along

15  PP 1836 XVII, ‘Report’ paragraphs 31 and 32. The Committee also recommended the formation of a Mercantile Marine Board (paragraph 25). The work of this Committee is discussed in D.M. Williams, ‘James Silk Buckingham; sailor, explorer and maritime reformer’, Studies in British Privateering, Trading Enterprise and Seamen’s Welfare, 1775-1900, ed. S. Fisher (Exeter, 1987), pp. 99-119. Buckingham was the Committee’s chairman and prime instigator. The 1843 ‘Report of the Select Committee on Shipwrecks’, PP 1843 IX, also recommended the introduction of examinations. 16  ‘A Bill for Requiring and Regulating the Examination of Masters and Chief Mates of Merchant Vessels’, PP 1842 III, p. 229. See also J. and M. Gribbin, FitzRoy: The Remarkable Story of Darwin’s Captain and the Invention of the Weather Forecast (London, 2003), p. 195. 17  The ‘voluntary system’ was introduced by an Order in Council, of 19 August 1845. PP 1847 LX, p. 526: ‘Arrangements and regulations for examining masters and mates in the Merchant Service, voluntarily offering themselves for examination’. See also A. Kennerley, ‘The Education of the Merchant Seaman in the Nineteenth Century’. Unpublished MA thesis, University of Exeter, 1978, pp. 50-51, 200. 18  ‘Notice of examinations of masters and mates established in pursuance of the Mercantile Marine Act, 1850’ (London, 19 December 1850). See also Kennerley, ‘The Education of the Merchant Seaman in the Nineteenth Century’, pp. 54-62, 200. 19  Merchant Shipping Act 1854. 17 & 18 Vict. c. 104. Home Trade limits included the coasts of Britain and Ireland, and the near continental coast between the River Elbe and the port of Brest.

193

194

Alston Kennerley

similar lines. However, such an initiative still depended on the need being recognized and promoted by those keen to see such a development. What is curious is the apparent lack of any preliminary debate. A detailed trawl of surviving Marine Department files in the National Archives has not revealed any prior discussion. Parliamentary comment on the provisions for engineers’ examinations during the passage of the bill is limited to the argument that it interfered with free trade and the fear that the wider engineering industry might be subjected to similar provisions (see Appendix 1). The shipping press contented itself with reporting the provisions in the act and the subsequent regulations issued by the Marine Department. Curiously, the Shipping and Mercantile Gazette contains numerous lengthy commentaries on other provisions in the bill, such as limitation of liability and pilotage, but is devoid of significant observations on such a seminal measure impacting on the status of ships’ engineers generally and in relation to mates and masters.20 Mitchell’s Steam Shipping Journal, however, offered a comment appearing to support the argument for chief engineers having equal status with masters:21 In steamships the engineer is one of the most important, perhaps the most important member of the ship’s company. The safety of the lives of all on board, and of the property committed to the masters’ charge, depends more or less on the competence, skill and steadiness of the engineer. The difficulty which shipmasters have occasionally to contend with, and the additional amount of responsibility cast upon them by the incompetence and misconduct of engineers, are very serious. It is obvious, therefore, that the men who have such important functions to discharge, should be subject to the test of sufficiency already established for masters and mates. A rare letter on the impact of certification argued that the requirement of experience in more powerful ships disadvantaged typical, good, practical ships’ engineers.22 The writer refers to: the injustice suffered by Engineers who wish to obtain certificates as to their efficiency... The man who can make, keep in repair, drive and 20  Between 26 March and 20 June 1862 the Shipping and Mercantile Gazette published 27 items on aspects of the Bill of which only two mentioned the examination and certification provisions, doing little more than to recite the proposals. An editorial of 23 March 1863 listed the regulations arising from the act. 21  Mitchell’s Steam Shipping Journal, no. 138 (4 April 1862), p. 216. 22  Ibid., vol. 5, no. 205 (9 July 1863), p. 457. The letter is signed ‘WCT’.



British merchant marine engineer licensing, 1865-1925

understands an engine thoroughly, and who has been to sea some years in the Coasting Trade stands no chance for a certificate unless he has been employed in a vessel with engines of 110 hp or more. The law on this point does not take into consideration that there are as good engineers in some of the smaller as in the larger steamers; but what is worse, many who have no claim whatsoever to the title of Engineer further than having been promoted to that position from firemen, obtain first-class positions as Engineers. They might most certainly become engine drivers, but to call them Engineers is a misnomer. But such a recommendation as a first class certificate from the Board of Trade is a dangerous agent in the hands of men whose knowledge of engineering extends to only firing a boiler… In case of a breakdown at sea what is to become of a steamer that carries a certificated engine driver? Theory is of little use in such cases. Practical men are wanted at sea. The argument may be muddled but it points to tensions between engineers who qualified through their training ashore as apprentices and journeymen and those who took advantage of the provision in the regulations designed to allow men with ample seagoing experience and demonstrated ability with ships’ engines to progress to chief engineer. Similar arrangements allowing able seamen to attempt the second mate’s examination and thus offering the chance to progress to master, were referred to as ‘coming up through the hawse pipe’. The primacy of practical experience over theoretical knowledge would be constantly argued in deliberations about ships’ engineers in the century from 1863. Both the assertions just quoted are ‘after the event comments’, but what triggered the inclusion of examinations in the 1862 Act? The answer will have to await further research. However one can point to two developments which may have had a bearing. In 1837 the Royal Navy gave some recognition to the engineers it had engaged for its steamships classing them as Third, Second or First Class. At that time the Navy was still recruiting its engineers from the civilian industry ashore and initially did not really fit them into naval manning. Classification in 1837 gave engineers warrant officer status, but below carpenters in the hierarchy, and a career structure within the Navy, though for social reasons officer status would not be considered for many years.23 23  An Admiralty Memorandum, 24 July 1837, and an Order in Council, 5 July 1838, created engineers’ appointments by warrant in first, second and third classes subject to initial examination and further examination prior to upgrading. ‘Regulations as to the Qualifications and Examination

195

196

Alston Kennerley

The second initiative would turn out to be the root of the engineer surveyor section of the Marine Department of the Board of Trade. In 1839 two advisors were appointed to the Board of Trade on preventing accidents to steam vessels. Then the Steam Act, 1846 imposed the duty on the Board of approving surveyors of passenger ships, and empowered it to enquire into accidents.24 Thus the Board appointed its first inspector, Capt. Denham, RN. The act also required a license to be issued at six monthly intervals on evidence of survey and declaration of sufficiency in hull and engine condition. Following the act a first list of approved surveyors was issued.25 The arrangements were rather loose, but were tightened up by the Steam Navigation Act, 1851.26 The appointment and employment of surveyors was added to the duties of the Board of Trade’s Marine Department.27 Surveyors had powers to inspect machinery, boats, equipment and articles on board ships, and in all cases of accident or damage could make inquiries, call witnesses for interrogation under oath, and make reports. The 1862 Act added examining candidates for certificates of competency to the duties of the engineer surveyors, and included certificated engineers with masters and mates in the provisions for cancellation or suspension of certificates.28 The senior surveyors in post during the drafting of the bill must have influenced the detail of the provisions, and subsequently must have been involved in drafting the regulations which initially appeared as an addendum to the mates’ and masters’ regulations.29 The 1862 Act, which set a pattern for engineers’ certificates of competency which lasted until 1980, contained some significant details differing from the wording adopted in an early draft of the preceding bill. The sections of this of Engineers in Her Majesty’s Service’, offered an indicative syllabus and other criteria. An Order in Council of 27 February 1847 designated three divisions: Inspectors of Machinery Afloat, Chief Engineers and Assistant Engineers. Following this, engineers were admitted to the wardroom. Chief Engineers and Assistant Engineers were to be divided into First, Second and Third Classes. See Navy List (1841), pp. 168-69; Navy List (1852), p. 215; and G. Penn, Up Funnel, Down Screw! The Story of the Naval Engineer (London, 1955), chapters 4 and 5. 24  ‘An Act for the Regulation of Steam Navigation and for requiring Sea-going Vessels to carry Boats 1846’, 9 & 10 Vict. c.100. 25  The development of the shipwright and engineer surveyor section of the Board of Trade is discussed by Parkhurst in the unpublished typescript of a further volume of Ships of Peace in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich [NMM hereafter], PKT 13/1, pp. 1-10, and PKT 4/2, passim. 26  14 & 15 Vict. c. 79. 27  Ibid. See for example sections 2, 3, 31, 32. The Act, following the Mercantile Marine Act 1850, actually uses the title ‘Naval Department’. However this title soon dropped out of use and was replaced by ‘Marine Department’. 28  Sections 5 to 9, 23. 29  The National Archives, Kew [TNA hereafter], Marine Department Papers, MT9/24/W1538/65, Board of Trade, Notice of Examinations of Masters and Mates under the Merchant Shipping Act, 1854, and of Engineers under the Merchant Shipping Act Amendment Act, 1862 (London, 1863), Form Exn. 1.



British merchant marine engineer licensing, 1865-1925

draft bill on the naming of the award read:30 5 Engineers Certificates shall be of Two Classes; viz: (1.) Certificates entitled “Chief Engineers Certificates” which shall be deemed appropriate to the Grade of First Engineer in Ships exceeding Five hundred Tons Burden: (2) Certificates entitled “Engineers Certificates”, which shall be deemed appropriate to the Grade of Second Engineer in Steam Ships exceeding Five hundred Tons registered Burden, and to the grade of First Engineer in other steam ships. 6 The Board of Trade shall from Time to Time cause Examinations to be held of Persons who may be desirous of obtaining Certificates of Competency as Engineers: For the purpose of such Examinations the Board of Trade shall from Time to Time appoint and remove Examiners… 8 The Board of Trade shall deliver to every Applicant who is duly reported to have passed the examination satisfactorily, and to have given Evidence of his Sobriety, Experience, Ability, and general good conduct on board ship, a Certificate of Competency, as Chief Engineer or as Ordinary Engineer, as the Case may be. Amending the Merchant Shipping Act, 1854, by insertion, Section 5 as enacted in 1862 read: Certificates for Engineers (Part III of Merchant Shipping Act, 1854) 5. On and After the First Day of June One Thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, every Steam Ship which is required by the Principal act to have a master possessing a certificate from the Board of Trade shall also have an Engineer or Engineers possessing a certificate from the Board of Trade as follows; that is to say, (1.) Engineers Certificates shall be of Two Grades, viz. “First-class Engineers Certificates”, and “Second-class Engineers Certificates”: 30 

TNA, MT9/16 contains this draft bill.

197

198

Alston Kennerley

(2.) Every Foreign-going Steam Ship of One hundred nominal Horse Power or upwards shall have as its First and Second Engineers Two Certificated Engineers, the first possessing a “First-class Engineers Certificate”, and the second possessing a “Second-class Engineers Certificate” or a Certificate of the higher Grade: (3.) Every Foreign-going Steam Ship of less than One hundred nominal Horse Power shall have as its only or First Engineer and Engineer possessing a “Second-class Engineers certificate” or a certificate of the higher Grade: (4.) Every Sea-going Home Trade Passenger Steam Ship shall have as its only or First Engineer and Engineer possessing a “Second-class Engineers’ Certificate”, or a Certificate of the higher Grade: 8. The Board of Trade shall deliver to every Applicant who is duly reported to have passed the Examination satisfactorily, and to have given satisfactory Evidence of his Sobriety, Experience and Ability, a Certificate of Competency, as First-class Engineer or as Second-class Engineer, as the Case may be. Section 6 was substantially unchanged as was the provision for Engineers Certificates of Service, issued without examination on production of evidence of service at sea in the appropriate capacity to ships’ engineers already having significant experience, especially with respect to the power of the engines. However, such certificates, though legal, did not carry the same status as a certificate of competency and some holders of service certificates later chose to attempt the examinations. So far no authority for or discussion about the changes in the titles to be used for engineers’ certificates of competency, or for reduction in the engine power from 500 to 100 nhp has been identified.31 The reduction in nhp clearly brought many more steamships within the scope of the Act (see Table 7 below). Indeed, at that date it seems likely only the very largest ships would have been covered. With respect to the titles, that of Chief Engineer impinged on usage in the Royal Navy and it seems possible that pressure from the Admiralty might have effected the change. 31  Nominal horse-power (NHP) was a calculation using for condensing engines the formula D²xN/30=NHP, where D is the diameter of the cylinder and N the number of cylinders. A more complex formula was used for compound engines. Board of Trade, Instructions to Emigration Officers (London, 1883).



British merchant marine engineer licensing, 1865-1925

The statutory provisions in the 1862 Act were of course built into the new examination regulations of 1863, but in a most convoluted text.32 In many respects provisions for engineers emulated those for masters and mates. For example, in addition to the Second Class Engineer’s Examination and the First Class Engineer’s Examination, provision was also made for an Extra First Class Engineer’s Examination, not mentioned in the Act, a voluntary qualification ‘intended for such persons as wish to prove their superior qualifications’.33 The conditions for admission to the examination allowed for four years service at sea in the engine room to qualify, as indicated above, but there is little doubt that the preferred background was an apprenticeship to an engineer ashore of not less than three years or the equivalent without being indentured in a factory or workshop plus a year at sea in the engine room. In the 1890s the Board of Trade canvassed opinion amongst shipowners and the engineering institutions as to whether it should raise the minimum period of the apprenticeship set in the examination regulations.34 Opinion in the majority of those consulted certainly favoured an extension to five years, but the Board, temporising, settled for four years. At the same time there was agitation for the introduction of a Third Class Certificate, partly to cater for the large number of uncertificated, permanent third engineers. Despite the use of this grade in some colonies, the Board of Trade resisted its introduction in Britain. The minimum age was set at 21 years to allow for the period required from the mid teenage years. A Second Class Certificate of Competency plus a year at sea following successful examination, and a minimum age of 22, gave admittance to the First Class examination. Similarly, a First Class Certificate of Competency gave access to the Extra First Class examination without any additional requirements. The examination fees, specified in the Act at £1 for Second Class and £2 for First Class were quite substantial, but were the same as for masters and mates. The examinations were initially offered at Bristol, Glasgow, Greenock, Hull, Liverpool, London, Newcastle, Shields, Southampton, and Sunderland only, though later other ports were added to the list, and candidates could even be examined on board their ships. At Liverpool and London they were offered each week and elsewhere fortnightly or monthly. 32  Board of Trade, Notice of Examinations of Masters and Mates under the Merchant Shipping Act, 1854. 33  Ibid. Form Exn. 1, 1863, paragraph 36. 34  TNA, MT 9/574/M6183/97, ‘Qualifications for Marine Engineers’; MT 9/599/M15370/98, ‘Marine Engineer Apprenticeship: proposal to increase term to five years’. Of those consulted 54 engineering firms approved, 5 objected; 4 associations approved, 5 objected; 15 shipowners approved, 2 objected.

199

200

Alston Kennerley

The actual examination comprised a viva voce examination (known as orals or verbals) followed if successful by a written examination for which up to five hours was allowed. There was considerable emphasis on a candidate’s practical knowledge of ships in which he had served. For the period under discussion here the examiners chose their written questions from a bank of a large number of questions which were published as guidance. Indeed in the 1880s the Chief Examiner of Engineers issued a quite detailed guidance for candidates on how to prepare for and approach the examinations.35 Samples of student written answers from this period survive, which show that local examiner had to write out the selected questions in manuscript leaving the rest of the page for the candidates’ answers (see Appendix 2). Explain how the tightness of brasses is adjusted and what is used to show the amount of slack? They are fitted so as to work free by the hand were [sic] they can be tried in that way if not by means of lead strips put on the bearing a [sic] screwed down to ascertain the Amount of metal to be taken off the brass. [marked correct] What is vacuum? When we say vacuum is 20 inches by the gauge what do we mean and what is then the pressure in the condenser? Vacuum is the atmospressure [sic] caused by pumping air and water out of the condenser. The pressure is 10 lbs in the condenser when the gauge is 20 inches. [marked wrong] It seems likely that the examiners were most tolerant of candidates’ often limited literary attainments. Adding questions to the list allowed the syllabus gradually to be extended, as was always the intention. In the 1880s some grouping of the written questions into elementary engineering knowledge, arithmetic and drawing had been introduced and failures in these ‘subjects’ were being identified. The Regulations (Exn.1) were greatly elaborated in the light of experience in operating the examination system, nevertheless the general pattern in the early years of the twentieth century was much as described here, after which major revisions were introduced as candidates came forward with better secondary education and the benefit of more widely available vocational classes. 35  TNA, MT 9/235, Board of Trade, Examination of Engineers: Memorandum on Examinations (London, 1885).



British merchant marine engineer licensing, 1865-1925

iv. Engineer certification 1865-1925: Data analysis So far this paper has been concerned with the wider context of engineer licensing, with issues surrounding its introduction and with aspects of a developing system. This final section addresses engineers themselves drawing on random samples of data they provided on their applications to be examined and on the certificates that were issued. Sample years were selected at fifteen year intervals, limited by the collection in the National Maritime Museum which only extends to the 1930s.36 Subsequent copy certificates are believed to have been destroyed. Within each selected year a sample in excess of 200 applications was taken spread across the year. The documents are stored in order of certificate number which run chronologically. For 1865 data from every other application and certificate was recorded; in 1880 and 1925 every third, and in 1895 and 1910 every fifth. For men passing the Second Class examination up to seventeen categories of information were noted, and for those also achieving the First Class certificate of competency, a further nine.37 Missing data accounts for variations in the category totals. The 1925 sample is seriously devoid of data owing to the applications not being retained with the certificates, and to the practice of retaining the same certificate number and preserving all applications and Board of Trade duplicate certificates together having been abandoned at some time between 1910 and 1925. It should also be noted that in 1865 the examination system still had to settle down. Many engineers at sea held certificates of service, rather than certificates of competency, of whom a significant proportion only held the Second Class and who, if they progressed, would first turn up in the examination records attempting the First Class. In order to achieve more homogeneous samples, a number of certificate numbers were eliminated from the sequence so that only men who were awarded the Second Class certificate following examination in the sample year were included. Eliminated were replacement certificates for lost or stolen certificates, and First Class certificates in the sequence with a date in the sample year whether replacements or awarded to men holding Second Class colonial certificates of an earlier date.

36  Unless otherwise stated all information derives from the application forms and duplicate certificates seen when sampling the selected years. 37  The categories were: (a) Personal: surname, Christian name, date of birth, place of birth. (b) Work ashore: name of works in which employed, apprenticeship period, journeyman period. (c) Sea time: number of ships, number of voyages, range of nominal horsepower, ranks held. (d) Certificates: certificate number, residence, examination port, certificate issue port, official certificate date (not date of issue). (e) Supplementary data: cause of certificate loss, cause of failure, other items of interest.

201

202

Alston Kennerley

Table 1 – British merchant ships’ engineers Summary data on shore experience, sea time, award ages, and period between awards, 1865-1925 1865

1880

No.

Min.

Mean

Max.

No.

Min.

Mean

Max.

Shore apprenticeship

61

3

5.25

8.58

58

1.75

4.96

7

Shore journeyman

26

0.42

3.72

9.5

24

0.71

2.47

9

80

0.58

5.45

11.5

79

9.22

5.75

10.5

Sea-time prior to Class 2

157

0.8

2.4

11.8

219

1

2

9.7

Age awarded Class 2

153

21.37

29

48.9

215

20.9

27

46.22

Total shore experience

Sea-time prior to Class 1

90

1

3

15.5

137

0.6

1.8

5.1

Age awarded Class 1

90

24.29

33

53.1

134

22.66

28

45.08

Period between awards

90

0.42

4

18.08

136

1.22

3

7.07

No.

Min.

Mean

Max.

No.

Min.

Mean

Max.

Shore apprenticeship

190

1.25

5.03

7.8

207

1.09

5.08

7.61

Shore journeyman

126

0.25

2.09

15.97

157

0.02

1.74

10.83

Total shore experience

202

3.02

6.13

20.97

219

3

6.07

17.09

Sea-time prior to Class 2

203

1

2.1

13.5

217

1

1.9

21

Age awarded Class 2

195

20.7

25

45

212

21.1

25

34.6

Sea-time prior to Class 1

139

1

2.1

8

138

0.9

1.7

4.4

Age awarded Class 1

137

22.81

28

39.3

142

22.9

27

37.4

Period between awards

141

1.01

3

10.7

144

0.1

3

25.2

No.

Min.

Mean

Max.

233

20.74

26

36.4

1895

1910

1925 Shore apprenticeship Shore journeyman Total shore experience Sea-time prior to Class 2 Age awarded Class 2 Sea-time prior to Class 1 Age awarded Class 1 Period between awards Source: Random samples from engineers’ application forms and Board of Trade duplicate certificates held at the National Maritime Museum. Data for 1925 derives from Second Class duplicate certificates only, application forms being missing.



British merchant marine engineer licensing, 1865-1925

203

Table 2 – Ages at which Board of Trade second and first class engineers’ certificates of competency were awarded, 1865-1925 Engineers’ ages 20-24 No. Second class 34 1865 91 1880 121 1895 138 1910 100 1925 First class 1865 1880 1895 1910 1925

5 15 26 37

%

25-29 No.

%

30-34 No.

%

35-39 No.

%

40-44 No.

45-49

%

No.

No.

%

%

22.7 43.5 61.7 65.1 42.9

72 84 55 64 108

48.0 40.2 28.1 30.2 46.4

24 32 12 10 23

16.0 15.3 6.1 4.7 9.9

16 1 6 2

10.7 0.5 3.1 0.9

3 1 1

2.0 0.5 0.5

1 1

0.7 0.5

150 209 196 212 233

5.6 11.2 18.8 26.1

25 84 23 94

27.8 62.7 16.7 66.2

38 28 66 9

42.2 20.9 47.8 6.3

12 5 14 2

13.3 3.7 10.1 1.4

7 1 9

7.8 0.7 6.5

3 1

3.3 0.7

90 134 138 142

Source: As Table 1.

Some basic career-related data can be found in Table 1. Unlike mates and masters who had almost invariably gone to sea direct from school (at between 14 and 16 years of age), ships’ engineers worked ashore during those formative years, probably near where they were born. The period recorded for apprenticeships varied from three to over eight years, with a consistent mean of five years between 1865 and 1910 (see Table 1). The irregularity of apprenticeships may be due to indentures being cancelled early or to differing periods being served with different masters. Service with up to three masters is not uncommon, and may reflect collaboration within the engineering industry, perhaps on an exchange basis, to give apprentices a varied training. Many ships’ engineers record periods following the apprenticeship of a year or two working as a journeyman. If this is added to the apprenticeship term, experience ashore in engineering workshops before going to sea approaches a mean of six years. It was possible for engineers to complete an apprenticeship in their twentyfirst year, but often they were well into their twenties before going to sea, and clearly at least a year older when they first attempted the Second Class engineer examination. Then they were likely to spend some two years accumulating the requisite sea time. In 1865 the mean age at which the Second Class certificate was awarded was 29, falling to 25 in 1895 (Table 1). A further three years passed before engineers achieved the First Class certificate. In 1865 the

Cl. 2

60 64 70 67

204

Alston Kennerley

Table 3 – Origins (by birth) of engineers awarded second class certificates, 18651925 1865

1880

1895

1910

1925

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

Northeast

30

19.5

66

30.8

60

29.7

46

21.1

53

22.4

Northwest

15

9.7

19

8.9

26

12.9

31

14.2

53

22.4

Southeast

14

9.1

17

7.9

24

11.9

19

8.7

28

11.8

Southwest Ireland

6 3

3.9 1.9

3 6

1.4 2.8

6 6

3.0 3.0

8 6

3.7 2.8

8 6

3.4 2.5

81

52.6

84

39.3

58

28.7

57

26.1

65

27.4

Wales

5

3.2

13

6.1

12

5.9

24

11.0

19

8.0

Overseas

0

0.0

6

2.8

10

5.0

27

12.4

5

2.1

England

Scotland

Totals

154

214

202

218

237

Source: As Table 1.

mean age was 33, reducing to 27 in 1910. Thus it took at least twelve years to produce a fully qualified merchant ship engineer. Table 2 shows that by 1895 very few engineers were over 30 when they were awarded the Second Class certificate and in 1895 and 1910 two thirds held that award by the age of 24. That 46 per cent were in the next age bracket in the 1925 sample may perhaps be attributed to the distorting effects of the First World War and to the Board of Trade raising standards. For those achieving the First Class Award, the pattern is more mixed. In 1865 and 1895 over fifty per cent were aged over thirty, while in 1880 and 1910 two thirds are aged 25-29. From an inspection of the tabulated data in the sample, a correlation is apparent between the place of birth of engineers and the location in which their time in industry ashore had been served. This might be expected. However there are certainly cases of men whose time was served well away from their homes in different parts of the country, and of some whose apprenticeship was divided between locations. The size of the sample is not large enough to allow analysis even on a county basis, so in Table 3 the grouping is by home country with England divided into four regions. The Overseas group included some men who were foreigners, such as Germans or Greeks, but the majority were clearly the offspring of British ex-patriates. The dominant regions of birth for engineers holding certificates were Scotland and the Northeast of England. Within Scotland, the industrial area along the Glasgow/Edinburgh



British merchant marine engineer licensing, 1865-1925

205

Table 4 –Ports at which engineers in the samples were examined 1865 No.

1880 %

No.

1895 %

Hartlepool West Hull Shields North and South Sunderland

No.

1910 %

No.

11

7

1925 %

No.

11

8

8

6

4

8

49

42

33

36

11

10

1

4

7

Newcastle

10

Total NE ports

40

Liverpool

41

Total NW ports

41

25.3

67

25.9

41

30.3

62

18.6

26

41

30.5

50

12.8

49

26

22.6

47

22.2

68

49

London

21

38

38

24

33

11

2

2

9

3

Total SE ports

32

20.3

40

18.1

19.7

2

Plymouth 0.0

8

Belfast

1

Cork

1

14.9

36

15.2

2.7

0

0.0

3

1.3

2

4 0

33

1 3.6

2

1.0

6 3

Dublin

8

Londonderry

1

Total Irish ports

0

Aberdeen

6

0.0

2

0.9

6

8

3.9

7

4

1.8

4

4

Dundee

1

2

5

3

5

Glasgow

23

27

21

29

45

Greenock

15

17

8

15

Leith

10 45

28.5

62

Total Welsh ports

0

0.0

1

Totals Source: As Table 1.

158

Total Scottish ports

28.7

3

Falmouth Total SW ports

40

4

19.8

68

Southampton Bristol

%

Cardiff

6 28.1

47

0.5

18

1 221

7 23.2

58

8.9

21

18 203

8 26.2

62

9.5

21

21 221

26.2

21 237

8.9

206

Alston Kennerley

axis is predominant. In Northeast England concentrations are apparent in the mining areas and the industrial river valleys of the Tyne and Tees. Scots are most numerous in all sample years, and the data lends support to the traditional characterization of the ship’s engineer being a Scot, as in Kipling’s poem M’Andrew’s Hymn.38 The steady rise in significance of the Northwest of England should be noted. Where ships’ engineers chose to be examined was of course governed by other factors. The certificates of competency show the place of residence at the time of the examination, the port at which the examination took place and the port at which the certificate was issued. Where these three are the same as birthplace the engineer is likely to have been studying on unpaid leave at home between voyages. There was no paid leave throughout the period under discussion. Where birthplace is in one place but all the others are in another port a significant distance away, migration in the interest of employment suggests itself, as in the cases of Scottish-born men sailing regularly out of Liverpool (see Appendix 3 for examples). Where all four are different, the examination might have been fitted in while the engineer was still on articles aboard his ship and the certificate forwarded for collection at the next port of call. This pattern seems to have been quite common during the nineteenth century. Table 4 gives data for ports at which engineers were examined. Scottish and Northeastern ports again show strongly. In Scotland, Glasgow and Greenock were linked and were where most examinations took place. In the Northeast, North and South Shields, Newcastle and Sunderland are so close as to be considered as a single unit. The importance of London and Liverpool cannot be ignored, however. They were the predominant foreign-going commercial steam shipping ports. A more detailed view of where engineers were being examined is available from Board of Trade returns for 1900 (Table 5). This data includes failed and successful attempts at the examinations in each grade. There was no limit on the number of attempts which might be made, or on how frequently unless an examiner imposed some restriction which might be in the form of serving additional sea time or simply to allow additional study time. Thus some of the men who passed will have previously failed in the same or earlier years, while the numbers failing will include previous failures in 1900 but not earlier. Glasgow, Liverpool, London and North Shields stand out as the principal examination centres, with Cardiff fifth in importance. This table demonstrates the real examination load in 1900 with over 3,000 examinees. The overall 38 

R. Kipling, ‘M’Andrew’s Hymn’, in Kipling, The Seven Seas (London, 1896), pp. 31-46.



British merchant marine engineer licensing, 1865-1925

Table 5 – Numbers of examinations attempted by engineer candidates in 1900 and their results Ex 1st class Pass Aberdeen Belfast Bristol Cardiff Cork Dover Dublin Dundee Falmouth Glasgow Greenock Hartlepool West Hull Leith Liverpool London Londonderry Plymouth Southampton Shields North Sunderland Totals

2

Fail

0

2

2

2

1

7 12

6 7

1 1 7 0 34

0 1 10 1 28

1st class Pass

Fail

38 2 2 83

15 1 2 46

8 11 3 125 45 30 27 38 139 142 1 1 13 137 34 873

1 11 1 109 38 24 22 18 75 91 1 4 5 78 14 556

2nd class

Total

Pass

Fail

Pass

Fail

34 8 3 106 2 3 19 22 4 151 40 42 41 38 187 179 1 2 9 167 31 1,089

26 2 0 37 0 2 6 14 2 104 31 15 30 9 91 117 0 1 4 132 25 648

72 10 5 191 2 3 27 33 7 278 85 72 70 70 333 333 2 4 23 311 65 1,996

41 3 2 83 0 2 7 25 3 215 69 39 53 27 172 215 1 5 10 220 40 1,232

Fail rate % 36 23 29 30 0 40 21 43 30 44 45 35 43 28 34 39 33 56 30 41 38 38

Source. TNA MT 9/673. Certificate of Competency Returns for 1900. Note: the data include repeat attempts by candidates who had previously failed. Numbers examined equals the number of applications in the year.

failure rate, approaching 40 per cent, is in keeping with a safety qualification where giving a wrong answer which could be disastrous in real life, could lead to failure. As the application system was refined, candidates were required to state previous failures on their applications. While the numerous questions on knowledge of engines could easily lead to failure, as could the open-ended oral examination, there was throughout the period addressed particular weakness in mathematical calculations and in engineering drawing. Apart from being able to operate a ship’s engine in the fullest sense a first class engineer had to be able to instruct a shore-based engineer when ordering replacement parts. While drawings of draftsmen’s standards were not expected, drawings had to be clear in engineering terms, in labelling, measurements and relationship of sections.

207

208

Alston Kennerley

Table 6 – Numbers of certificates of competency issued by the Board of Trade, 1863-1920 Year

Ex 1st Class

1863-1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 Totals

885 29 34 13 3 5 1 16 31 1,017

1%

31,806 927 963 400 527 503 369 653 567 35,995

43%

42,900 1,351 1,330 574 752 635 496 579 655 49,272

57%

74,871 2,307 2,327 987 1,282 1,143 866 1,248 1,253 86,284

18

1%

621

42%

850

57%

1,488

Ann. Av.

1st Class

2nd Class

Total

Source. TNA BT 317/8. Certificates of Competency Registers. For comparison, the total numbers of foreign-going Extra Masters, Masters, 1st Mates and 2nd Mates Certificates of Competency issued 1850-1920 was 205,467, an average of 2,894 per year. A quarter of holders of 2nd Class Engineers’ certificates did not achieve 1st Class.

The retention of the data analyzed here, together with a large number of index volumes, was designed both to prevent fraud and to facilitate cross checking when applications for replacement certificates were received. Casualties to ships (founderings, collisions, groundings, fires, and war sinkings) were the major causes of certificate losses. But there was also a trickle of losses through carelessness and robbery (Appendix 4). The First World War caused a significant increase in the number of losses. Thus numerous precautions were taken. Applications had to be supported with testimonials and discharges to support the service claimed. The administration called in Second Class certificates when the First Class was issued. Sea time was checked against a man’s entries in Crew Agreements and affidavits might be called for where mistakes were discovered. Additionally, printed records of every certificate cancelled were widely circulated as a check on fraudulent applications. Though the number of engineers’ certificates issued between 1863 and 1920 was only some 40 per cent of the number for mates and masters it still exceeded 86,000 (Table 6). Bearing in mind that the engineers’ examination regulations gave primacy to service in foreign-going steamships, the service sampled for the years between 1880 and 1925 was predominantly in foreign-going ships which were progressively larger and more powerful. The 1865 sample included a larger proportion of service in home trade steamships which were generally smaller than foreign-going vessels. The data has already allowed the discussion to point to the average ship’s engineer at the time of taking his examinations in terms



British merchant marine engineer licensing, 1865-1925

209

Table 7 –Sea service of engineers, 1865-1910: Ships, horse power, voyages and capacities Ships Min. no. For Class 2

Mean no.

Max. no.

Ships’ NHP Mean range

Voyages

Capacities

Min. no.

Mean no.

Max. no.

A/J

4

3

2

1

1865

1

3

9

165-260

1

5

80

15

30

69

107

25

1880

1

3

9

158-241

1

7

28

26

59

152

95

10

1895

1

2

10

231-390

1

7

41

19

102

144

25

5

1910

1

2

10

432-670

1

6

22

74

146

96

13

0

1865

1

3

12

137-237

1

5

19

2

1

8

71

50

1880

1

3

10

161-246

1

7

28

3

11

42

120

36

1895

1

3

10

255-398

1

7

30

4

26

93

103

7

1910

1

2

9

390-655

1

7

55

15

48

116

39

2

For Class 1

Source. As Table 1. NHP: Nominal Horse Power. A/J: Assistant or junior engineer; includes engineers numbered higher than 4. Service of an engineer in more than one rank is included in the data for capacities.

of age and place of birth. Typically engineers produced evidence of twice the required one year’s service in an engine room watch-keeping capacity on applying to sit the Class 2 examination and a slightly lower excess prior to Class 1 (Table 1). Of course there were engineers who applied with the minimum period. It is possible that some engineers had sea experience in excess of that recorded, perhaps owing to loss of testimonials and discharge certificates. It must also be borne in mind that service in home trade vessels was judged less valuable than that in foreign-going ships. To achieve this service, engineers typically served in two to three different ships, involving about six or seven separate engagements (voyages)( Table 7). This table also gives the ratings in which engineers served. Most declared service in two or three capacities before each of the examinations, progressing upward from assistant (or junior) engineer to fourth, or from fourth to third prior to the Second Class examination, and from third to second engineer perhaps prior to the First Class examination. It will be noted that the dominant rating for Class 2 in 1865 was Second Engineer and in 1910 Fourth Engineer, and for Class 1 Second Engineer in 1865 and Third Engineer in 1910. By 1910 it was extremely rare for a candidate to have served as First (Chief) Engineer. Several factors underlie these trends. In 1865 there was much more service in lower-powered, smaller vessels which only carried two engineers, and more service in home trade ships. Larger, more powerful foreign-going ships car-

210

Alston Kennerley

ried more engineers. There were more junior engineers and for employment as second or first engineer certificates of competency were required. In larger passenger ships much longer periods of service with steamship companies became the norm, and even a second engineer might be expected to hold a First Class certificate. On the other hand, except in periods of depression, a newly qualified engineer easily found employment in the capacity of his certificate in tramp ships. The trend to more powerful vessels is apparent in the range of ships’ nominal horse power (nhp) recorded on the applications. In 1865 engineers served in ships with engines rated at about 200 nhp, while in 1910 the mean figure was about 500 nhp. Not shown in the table are extremes ranging from 65 to 10,000 nhp. v. Conclusion The licensing of British merchant ships’ engineers from 1862 is undoubtedly a measure of their growing significance in merchant ship manning. Coming in the same decade in which power-driven ships achieved world-wide operational capability and in which the Suez Canal opened (1869), it may be seen as another element coinciding to bring the steamship into its own as the mode of sea transport for the future. Licensing was also significant in vocational terms. Without perhaps realizing it the Government had created a national vocational qualification which found acceptance in the engineering world ashore. Although unproven it seems probable that many men obtaining certificates of competency spent the minimum time at sea before seeking shore employment superior to their work before having gone to sea. The wastage between Class 2 and Class 1 may in part reflect this. Licensing was also a step in the direction of the professionalization of ships’ engineers, giving their leading representatives, such as Board of Trade surveyors, engineer and marine superintendents of shipping companies, a say in the formulation of professional standards for the occupation. The statistical analysis provides insights into ships’ engineers’ careers and attainments, and inter alia reveals something of the examining role which was placed on Board of Trade engineer surveyors over and above the extensive demands that increasing legislation imposed on their primary role of survey. There can be little doubt that the Board of Trade surveyors were influential in the introduction of certification, though the evidence for the promotion of the measure has yet to be established. This is a first essay into the subject, and undoubtedly further work will enlarge on both the origins and the development of a structure which largely remained unchanged until 1980.



British merchant marine engineer licensing, 1865-1925

Appendix 1 – Extract from Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, vol. 166 (1862) Mr Ayrton wished to ask on what principle the proposal with respect to engineers was based. It was the first time…that the Crown had undertaken the singular duty of determining the efficiency and qualifications of any body of persons engaged in carrying on their own private business. Not only were engineers who were candidates for service on board merchant steamers required to undergo an examination, and to be certified, but the whole operation was to be under the absolute control and discretion of the Board of Trade. The proposal involved so great a departure from recognized principles, that the Right Honourable Gentleman was called upon to give some explanations as to the grounds of the change. Mr Milner Gibson…the proposal rested on the same principle as the existing regulations with respect to the examination of the masters and mates of merchant vessels. Engineers had important duties to perform; life and property were entrusted to their care, and it was desirable that there should be some test of their competence. He believed there was no objection on the part of engineers to the proposal, which had this advantage that in the case of misconduct, drunkenness or neglect of duty on the part of any engineer, there would be the power of withdrawing their certificate… all concerned had expressed their approval of the proposed change in the law. Mr Horsfall considered the proposed examination for certificates of competency as one of the most important provisions of the Bill. No injustice was done to the engineers by the change… Mr Monkton Miles. A similar provision had been in operation in some of the colonies with the best results and no objection had been made to it. Mr Ayrton. [repeats his objection.] [It was a new principle.] First time for the Crown to have power on carrying out its own business. It was anti free trade. There was no reason for not applying it also to engineers of railways, mines and engineers in general. If it was the opinion of shipowners that engineers be raised to the standard of a professional class, a clear explanation ought to be given.

211

212

Alston Kennerley

Mr Henley. There was a difference between the cases of masters and mates and engineers. The former learned their business at sea; but engineers learned theirs from the mechanics’ shop.



British merchant marine engineer licensing, 1865-1925

Appendix 2 – Transcript of questions set in the 1880s in Engineers’ Certificate of Competency Examinations, and their written answers Explain how the tightness of brasses is adjusted and what is used to show the amount of slack. They are fitted so as to work free by the hand were they can be tried in that way if not by means of lead strips put on the bearing a screwed down to ascertain the amount of metal to be taken of the brass. [marked correct] What is vacuum? When we say vacuum is 20 inches by the gauge what do we mean and what is then the pressure in the condenser? Vacuum is the atmospressure caused by pumping air and water out of the condenser. The pressure is 10 lbs in the condenser when the gauge is 20 inches. [marked wrong] With a jet condenser the rose outside had got covered with weeds or something similar, how would you try to clear it supposing you could not get at it outside? Shut my discharge valves fasten my snifting valves and blow steam through the injection cocks sometimes there is a copper pipe fitted to the steam trunnion for that purpose and likewise if the pipes get frosin. [marked correct] What engine defects have come under your notice when at sea and how were they remedied and what caused them? One of the bolts of connecting rod broke we had not got a spare one so we had to disconnect one engine and proceed with the other the feed valves have become broken and I have taped a temporary bolt in its place which kept the boilers fed up by means of the donkey engine. If my go ahead bee strap was to break I should take my go astern in its place and lash the link up. It sometimes happens that a crank pin may brake down if it is the after one and there is no spare crank pin I should drill hole through it and put a strong bolt through it and try to keep it together but it was fore one I could work with my aft engine in paddle boats if one engine breaks down you can work the other. [marked correct]

213

214

Alston Kennerley

What boiler defects have come under your notice when at sea and how were they remedied? What caused them? We have had tubes give way were they have been expanded headed have expanded the tube by hammering it well with a riveting hammer on the inside of the tube the depth of the thickness of tube plate. Have had the corners of the take up plates give way have dovetailed the hole and dovetailed a piece into the hole caulked it and put a patch plate over the corner of plate red and white lead joint. Have had the tubes give way and pluged them up with wooden plugs or tube bolts with a round cast iron collar on each end one part fitting in the tube and the other against the tube plate. Have had stay tubes give way and had to cut them off flush with tube plate and pass a stud 1⅛ dia screwed at each end through to strengthen tube plate and prevent it bulging. [marked correct]



British merchant marine engineer licensing, 1865-1925

Appendix 3 – The earliest Board of Trade Certificates issued to marine engineers and other examples The Merchant Shipping Act Amendment Act, 1862, provided for examination and certification of marine engineers in foreign-going ships and home-trade passenger ships. The Marine Department published the regulations in 1863 and the first certificates by examination appear to have been issued in the spring of that year. Engineers who could prove satisfactory sea experience in the certificate capacity before the regulations came into force could be issued with Certificates of Service as First Class Engineer or as Second Class Engineer. All others had to be examined as well as proving appropriate workshop and sea service for Certificates of Competency as First or Second Class Engineer. Those wishing to prove superior knowledge could be examined for the voluntary certificate as Extra First Class Engineer. Certificates of Service were numbered from 1 to 5,999. Certificates of Competency were numbered from 6,000 upwards. Within these series, blocks of numbers were used for the different classes. Lost certificates were replaced, subject to an acceptable explanation, such as a shipwreck. The port in which certificates were issued was often the place of examination, but not necessarily. Certificate of Service No 1 was issued to John Isbister, born at North Shields, Northumberland, 1828. His Certificate as 1st Class Engineer was issued at London on 5 Dec 1862. Note: certificates 1 to 399 were all 1st Class, and 56 of these were later examined and received certificates of competency. Certificate of Service No 400 was issued to Henry Ainley, born at Thorne, York, 1836. His Certificate as 2nd Class Engineer was issued at Hammet Street, London on 28 April 1863. This was the first 2nd Class Certificate of Service to be issued. Certificate of Service No 709 was issued to John Phipps, born at Rye, Sussex in 1932. His Certificate as 2nd Class Engineer was issued on 14 April 1863. Note: his certificate was thrown overboard from Agamemnon by mistake by the engineers’ steward on 7 December 1876, whilst he was serving as 4th Engineer. It was renewed with certificate No. 2449. Note: 339 holders of 2nd class Certificates of Service were later examined and received 2nd Class Certificates of Competency.

215

216

Alston Kennerley

Certificate of Competency No 6000 was issued to Thomas Thaw, born at Glasgow, Lanarkshire, 1831. His Certificate as 1st Class Engineer was issued at Newcastle on 13 Apr 1863. His Certificate of Service (No 796) had been issued at Newcastle on 7 April 1863. This was the first 1st Class Certificate of Competency issued. Certificate of Competency No 6002 was issued to James Gribble, born at Illogan, Cornwall, 1821. His Certificate as Extra First Class Engineer was issued at Southampton on 21 April 1863. He served in SS Seine (ON 28736 1863-66) This was the first Extra First Class Certificate to be issued. Certificate of Competency No 6003 was issued to Archibald Brown, born at Stranraer, Wigtownshire, 1821. His Certificate as Second Class Engineer was issued at Southampton on 21 April 1863. His certificate as 1st Class Engineer was issued at London on 2 September 1869. This was the first certificate as Second Class Engineer to be issued. Certificate of Competency No 6990 was issued to James Currie, born at Leith, 1842. His Certificate as 2nd Class Engineer was issued at Greenock on 29 Dec 1864. His Certificate as 1st Class Engineer was issued at Greenock on 9 July 1868. In 1865 he served as 2E in Robt Lowe (ON 9965) to Alexandria and Malta. Between 1866 and 1869 he was 2E in St David (ON 48994) to Portland/NY/Quebec and Montreal. Between 1869 and 1870 he was 1E in Damascus (ON 16248), Prussian (ON 60403) and Nestorian (ON 56165) to Portland/Montreal/Quebec. In the years 1871-2 he was 1E in Nestorian, and in 1872 to 1873 he was 1E in Sarmation. The last service entry is dated 6 October 1873. Certificate of Competency No 6314 was issued to William Kirkup, born at Belford, Northumberland, 1825. His certificate as 1st Class Engineer was issued at Sunderland on 28 Sept 1863. He was killed in the street in Plymouth on 7 December 1896 when serving as Asstistant Engineer in Roslyn (ON 77218). Certificate of Competency No 12131 was issued to George Johnson, born Aberdeen 1838. His certificate as 2nd Class Engineer was issued in North Shields on 2 December 1874, and his 1st Class at Sunderland on 27 August 1879. In 1884 a note reads: 1E 84889 Black Prince, engaged 30/9 foreign at



British merchant marine engineer licensing, 1865-1925

Shields. 1/10 dispute at Newcastle for neglect of duty. 23/11 he deserted at Newcastle. Entry marked with two black stars and note: logbook entries. In pencil ‘“Watch this man’. Certificate of Competency No 15791 was issued to J. H. Klintwort, born in Hamburg in 1856. He passed his 2nd Class examination at North Shields in 1880, and his 1st Class at Cardiff in 1882. He also held a 1st Class Engineer’s certificate from Hamburg dated 1880. Certificate of Competency No 30935 was issued to Frank Fraser was born in Forres, Morayshire, on 1870. He first entered his papers in for the 2nd Class Examination in 1894, but his ship sailed before he could sit. He passed Class 2 at Glasgow in 1895 and Class 1 there in 1896. Certificate of Competency No 50791 was issued to John Hay, born Belfast 1887. He was apprenticed to Workman Clarke, Belfast. His certificate as 2nd Class Engineer was examined and issued in Belfast on 30 September 1910, and his certificate as 1st Class Engineer was examined and issued in Belfast on 3 June 1912. In 1917 his ship Saxon Monarch was sunk. His certificate was reported stolen in 1920, and reported lost in 1950.

217

218



Transatlantic fishers: New England and British trawlermen, 1960-1972 Colin J. Davis – University of Alabama at Birmingham

i. Introduction During the 1960s the respective working worlds of New England and British trawlermen were undergoing a painful transition. Fears of foreign competition were rampant, and there was increasing dissatisfaction with safety aboard ship. How each group perceived their changing circumstances says much for a universal appreciation of work across international frontiers. A transnational focus on Atlantic fishers has much to commend it. On a daily basis fishing vessels from Europe and the United States shared the same work space. The Atlantic Ocean was a shared platform, but during the 1960s the Atlantic fisheries were also under intense threat and undergoing change. As fishing technologies improved, and stiffer competition developed, both sets of workers experienced dramatic changes in their work. For New England fishers, foreign competition highlighted their already weakened position. Their fishing fleet was already old. Fifty per cent of the large trawlers fishing out of New England were more than twenty years old. There was a steady decline in the numbers of fishing trawlers: in 1947 there were 117 trawlers but by 1962 the total had declined to 57. There was a concomitant decline in fish landings because of the old age of the ships.1 British fishers were experiencing a different phenomenon of being excluded from fishing off Iceland, Norway, and the Faroes; but much of their concern was over safety at sea. A series of disasters in the 1960s where trawlers were lost with all hands highlighted the precarious nature of fishing. It had always been a dangerous occupation, fraught with peril. A steady decline in recruitment epitomized an extraordinary shift away from the industry. Correspondingly, the workforce was getting older and those that did enter the industry were migratory workers not necessarily connected to the industry by familial relations. To grasp the challenges that the fishers in New England and England faced, I will profile who these men were, their origins, their work life, particularly their age and accident records, and what concerned them during the 1960s. 1  Statement by James Ackert. Hearings before the Subcommittee on Fisheries and Wildlife Conservation, U.S. House of Representatives, 88th Cong., First Session, pp. 14, 94.

219

220

Colin J. Davis

What is clear is that each work group confronted obstacles to their respective livelihoods. Each in their own way came to terms with these different threats by calling on governments for support and help. For the New England fishers it was the call for government protection from invading fishing fleets from Europe and Japan. The British trawlermen, instead, demanded safer fishing vessels, union representation aboard ship, and increased payments for their work. ii. The characteristics of the fishing populations in the 1960s Both groups of fishers were engaged in an industry that was rapidly expanding and changing. Catch levels throughout the world were rising and it was this stiff competition that continually influenced their working world. In 1968, a new world record was reached with a total catch of 64 million metric tons; the previous year it had stood at 60.7 million tons. The following table highlights fishing catches by nation.

Table 1 – Catch of fish by nation, 1968 (metric tons) Nation Catch (mt) Nation Catch (mt) Peru 10,520,000 India 1,526,000 Japan 8,669,800 Spain 1,503,000 USSR 6,082,100 Canada 1,490,000 China 5,800,000 Chile 1,376,000 Norway 2,800,100 Indonesia 1,175,000 USA 2,442,000 Thailand 1,088,000 South Africa 2,000,000 UK 1,040,000 Denmark 1,633,000 Iceland 600,700 Source: Commercial Fisheries Review, 32 (January, 1970), p. 65.

The total national catch does not necessarily reflect technological or market dominance. By far the best indicator of this is the size of trawler fleets. These national fleets tended to have more sophisticated technology to locate large shoals of fish, they fished in a fleet style, and were at sea were for long periods, stretching in some cases to months on end. The largest fleets of trawlers were those of the Soviet Union with 2,604, followed by Japan (2,067), Spain (1,289), and Great Britain (578).2

2  Commercial Fisheries Review, 32 (March, 1970), p. 48. For the fishing activity of the Soviet Union and other nations in the northwest Atlantic see Commercial Fisheries Review, 21 (January, 1966), pp. 40-43.



Transatlantic fishers: New England and British trawlermen, 1960-1972

For all its technological advancement the industry was beset with labour recruitment problems and an aging workforce. If age is counted as an important indicator of the health of the industry, then fishing seems to have been in serious trouble. When it comes to age, there are clear differences between the two workforces, however. Data for the 1960s clearly show that on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean the workforce was an aged one, but it was the New England fishers who were older still. Using the men of Grimsby as a British comparison, one can see a wide array of ages compared to occupation classification (Table 2).

Table 2 – Estimated population of Grimsby trawlermen in 1963, by age and occupation Age group Skippers/Mates Bosuns/Deckhands Engineers Cooks Under 20 0% 19% 0% 37% 21-30 9% 32% 13% 19% 31-40 27% 22% 26% 13% 41-50 33% 15% 31% 13% 51-60 22% 8% 24% 11% 61-70 9% 4% 6% 7% Source: The National Archives, Kew [TNA hereafter], Board of Trade Papers, BT 149/66, ‘Evidence from the British Trawlers Federation’, Board of Trade Inquiry (Holland-Martin).

One can see that a large section of the younger workforce was engaged as cooks. Over a third was under 20. This high number of young cooks partially reflects the use of apprentices and ‘deckie’ learners as galley helpers. The relative youth of fishers is clearly seen in the deckhand category where over fifty per cent of men were under 30. The officers – the skippers, mates and engineers – are distributed evenly over the 31-50 range.

Table 3 – Boston trawlermen in 1965, by age and occupation Age group Skippers/Mates Deckhands Engineers Cooks Under 25 0% 2% 2% 0% 25-44 11% 22% 9% 9% 45-54 16% 17% 20% 17% 55-64 58% 38% 52% 29% 65+ 15% 21% 17% 45% Source: V. Norton and M. Miller, An Economic Study of the Boston Large-Trawler Labor Force-Circular 248 (Washington DC, 1966), p. 8.

221

222

Colin J. Davis

A different pattern emerges for the New England fishers, however, even allowing for slightly different methods of grouping the cohorts (Table 3). In the cook category the absence of young men was very pronounced. Only nine per cent were under 44, while about three-quarters were aged 55 and over. In the Boston fleet the job of cook clearly was dominated by older men, and this reflects the process whereby aged fishers reserved the easier job of cook for themselves. This hegemony is also apparent with the deckhand class. While in Grimsby over half of all deckhands were under 30, in Boston only two per cent were under 25. This ageing of the workforce is replicated in the captain/mate categories. Almost three quarters (73 per cent) were above the age of 55, while in Grimsby only 31 per cent were older than 51. The relative older age of the Boston fishers is reflected in comparison with the US work force as a whole (Table 4).

Table 4 – Age structure of Boston trawlermen and the male US workforce in 1965 Age group Male labour force Under 25 20% 25-34 21% 35-44 22% 45-54 20% 55-64 13 65+ 4% Source: As Table 3.

Boston fishermen 2% 10% 9% 17% 41% 21%

Captains tended to retire earlier than deckhands: only 5 per cent were over 65, but for mates the figure was 18 per cent, for cooks 50 per cent, and for deckhands 20 per cent. Educational achievement is another useful variable from which conclusions can be drawn about the fishing workforce (Table 5, below). Most of the Boston fishermen did not finish High School, and of those that did an insignificant number attended College. Their military experience, however, was pronounced. Captains, mates and engineers respectively served in the armed forces for relatively long periods (Table 6, below). The overall percentage of fishers with some form of military service was relatively high; for captains it was 21 per cent, for deckhands 36 per cent, for cooks 13 per cent, and for engineers 26 per cent. Not surprisingly, perhaps, captains of fishing vessels had most often served in the United States Navy. More precise information about the service histories of these individuals was not recorded, and it is therefore



Transatlantic fishers: New England and British trawlermen, 1960-1972

unclear if they were active during the Second World War or in Korea; but the relatively advanced age of the group suggests that most were veterans of the former conflict. As well as their relative age, another very distinctive feature of the Boston men was that a majority of them were foreign born. Overwhelmingly they came from the Canadian Maritime Provinces (Table 7, below). No less significant was the fact that most had a familial relationship with their job. In other words it was very common for Boston fishermen of the 1960s to have had relatives who were also fishermen (79 per cent overall), whether fathers (68 per cent), brothers (59 per cent), and others (37 per cent).3

Table 5 – Educational profile of Boston fishermen, 1965 Education achievement

Male civilian

Boston offshore

Attended college

labour force 23%

fishermen 6%

Did not attend college

77%

94%

With High School diploma

54%

19%

Without High School diploma

46%

81%

With some High School attendance

73%

37%

With no High School attendance

27%

63%

Source: As Table 3.

Table 6 – Boston fishermen, 1965: Prior experience with the armed forces Veteran of: Army Navy

Capacity: Captain

Mate 7%

17%

Engineer 17%

Cook 6%

Deckhand 10%

10%

7%

5%

Marines

5%

Coast Guard Air Force Total veterans Highest rank:

9%

2%

4% 21%

3% 7%

36%

13%

26%

57%

50%

68%

43%

50%

29%

CO NCO Enlisted

3% 100% 100%

Source: As Table 3 (p. 41).

3 

Norton and Miller, Economic Study of Boston Large-Trawler Labor Force, p. 35.

223

224

Colin J. Davis

Table 7 – Distribution of Boston fishermen by place of birth Birthplace Canada

Captain 83%

Mate 83%

Engineer 56%

Cook 77%

Deckhand 61%

All 64%

Newfoundland

65%

67%

12%

61%

51%

49%

Nova Scotia

18%

16%

44%

16%

10%

15%

USA

13%

7%

39%

23%

33%

31%

Massachusetts

0%

0%

22%

3%

26%

22%

Other NE states

13%

0%

3%

10%

4%

5%

Other states

0%

7%

14%

10%

3%

4%

Europe

4%

10%

5%

0%

6%

5%

Source: As Table 3 (p. 34).

In the British case most fishers originated from the town or county in which they fished. For the purposes of analysis and categorization, and in contrast to New England, the British fishers were divided by the distance they had to travel at sea to fish (Table 8, below). There were three discrete categories: the distant water fleet (with fishing grounds off Greenland, Canada, Iceland, North Norway, and Bear Island), and the middle distant and near fleets (fishing off the Faroes and the British Isles, including the North Sea). Each fishing port, in turn, focused its effort on particular fishing grounds. As well as the location of the fishing grounds, accident rates are also key indicators of work life. Fishing has traditionally been perceived as a very risky enterprise. The work site was like no other. The fishing vessel traversed a strange and perilous realm. The trawler had multiple functions as workplace, shelter, and home. Although deck work was the main platform where fishing took place, the engine room and galley were also sites of labour. In fact when looking at work accidents and deaths the location is spread from the deck down to the engine room (Table 9, below). Statistics drawn from the British fishing effort reveal that the engine room was a most dangerous location. For the period in question (1958-67) the total number of injuries that occurred there was 1,532 or 13.5 per cent of all injuries. Working around moving engine parts could therefore be hazardous, as was the sudden and violent movement of the fishing vessel. Not surprisingly, however, deck work was by far the most hazardous occupation: with a total of 7,997 injuries, it represented 70 per cent of the total.



Transatlantic fishers: New England and British trawlermen, 1960-1972

225

Table 8 – Distribution of British deep sea trawlers, 1967 Port Hull

Near

Middle

Distant 104 (( (1)

Total 104 (15)

Grimsby

22

57

60 (7)5 (

139 (15)

Fleetwood

14

36

11 (1) (1

61 (15)

15

1 (15)))

109 (15)

Lowestoft

93

Milford Haven

20

North Shields

1

4

3 (3) (1

8 (15)

Aberdeen

42

61

2 (15) (

105 (15)

Leith

11

8

Other ports Total

20 (15)

19 (15)

7 210

181

1 (1) (1

8 (15)

182 (27) (

573 (27)

Source: TNA, BT 149/2 Note: Freezer and factory vessels are indicated by parenthesis.

Table 9 – The British case: Non-fatal injuries on side trawlers, 1958-67 Type of injury Engine room Falls Deck accidents Went overboard Other causes

1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967

Total (%)

89

171

214

154

154

126

140

141

176

186

1,532 (13.5)

0

7

4

19

20

4

15

7

20

21

117 (1)3.5

402

702

762

792

803

956

858

915

664

843

7,997 (70) 5

0

3

5

2

2

8

4

0

2

2

28 (.002)3

35

110

113

135

125

92

100

103

156

134

567 (5.5) 3

Cause not stated Total Source: TNA, BT 149/9, ‘Appendix B –Statistics on Accidents and Casualties’.

567 (5.5) 3 11,348 (.002)

226

Colin J. Davis

Table 10 – Non-fatal accidents aboard ship: Deck work, 1961-66 Cause of accident Slipped, fell

1961 29%

1962 31%

1963 29%

1964 32%

1965 32%

1965 29%

1966 29%

Total 31%

9%

9%

10%

13%

13%

13%

11%

11%

Caught or wedged in ship’s equipment

12%

17%

13%

15%

14%

17%

16%

15%

Other accidents

38%

27%

31%

26%

26%

19%

21%

28%

Cause of accident not stated

11%

16%

16%

14%

14%

22%

23%

15%

Struck by ship’s equipment

As percentage of 4.7% 4.8% 3.7% 5.2% 4.6% 4.9% NA labour force Source: TNA, BT 149/9, ‘Appendix B—Statistics on Accidents and Casualties’.

Table 11 – Deaths registered as having been caused by accidents 1962

Vessel casualty 19

1963

5

4

6

5

4

0

24

1964

8

3

7

1

9

2

30

1965

24

4

7

1

4

5

45

Year

Killed on deck 2

Fell over 14

Washed over 7

Missing/ Drowned 2

Other

Totals

0

44

56 13 34 14 19 7 Totals Source: TNA, BT 149/9, ‘Appendix B—Statistics on Accidents and Casualties’.

145

When it comes to explaining how British fishermen were injured, deck work obviously entailed a number of different risks and hazards (Table 10). When combined, the three more common types of accident (falls and the various incidents involving equipment) accounted for 57 per cent of the total. Given the dangers of working on the deck of a fishing vessel it is not surprising that fatalities were also relatively common (Table 11). These data clearly show that while the total of deaths related to the loss (sinking) of vessels was high, the everyday exercise of work claimed far more fishermen’s lives. Thus while disasters at sea caused widespread alarm, the daily grind of work took an even greater toll. For the New England case there is not so much information on deaths at work, and nor is the location of the work site necessarily clear. There is no explicit information, for example, about the whereabouts of onboard accidents; but from the available data one can presume that as in Great Britain, on New England trawlers the deck was the most hazardous area.



Transatlantic fishers: New England and British trawlermen, 1960-1972

Table 12 – Injuries sustained by New England fishermen, 1968 Falls-on deck 96 23% Falls-elsewhere 19 7% Hit by objects 86 20% Hit by sea 29 8% Winch injuries 22 8% Hand injuries 16 4% Knife wounds, fish bone in hands, burns, and eye injuries 117 32% Source: Commercial Fisheries Review, 30 (June, 1968), p. 47.

Working on the deck was by far the most dangerous job. If one aggregates falls on deck, hit by objects, hit by the sea, and winch injuries, the total reaches 59 per cent. This figure compares well with the British figure of 57 per cent. Perhaps the catch-all category of ‘Knife Wounds, etc’ (32 per cent) might somehow relate to the Table 10 figure of 28 per cent for ‘other accidents’ in the British trawling fleet, and the 15 per cent of accidents where the cause was not stated. Fishers’ work injuries surpassed those of most other occupations. Using the measurement of injury frequency rate and average days lost, deep sea fishermen were clearly handicapped by their work conditions. Working on the open sea made for an insecure existence and a greater opportunity for serious injury. The perilous situation resulted in high medical and life insurance payments. Compared to other industrial workers, fishers faced higher work dangers and a corresponding loss of income due to injury. As Table 13 clearly shows, the New England fishers confronted a potentially bleak future.

Table 13 – Work related injuries (New England case) Industry group Boston fishermen Manufacturing Coal mining Metal mining Construction Transportation and warehousing Wholesale and retail trade Source: As Table 3 (p. 35).

Injury frequency rate 40.3 11.9 43.5 23.8 28.6

Average days disability per year 47 18 NA NA 18

31.3

17

12.2

14

227

228

Colin J. Davis

iii. Analysis and conclusions The foregoing statistics, though only snapshots, demonstrate that the transatlantic fishers of the 1960s shared a hostile and dangerous work environment. There remained important differences between the two workforces, however. Their immediate preoccupations – as articulated in the form of complaints and evidence to official investigations – were not the same. For New England fishers the primary concerns were a disintegrating fishing fleet and foreign competition, while for the British fishers it was workplace safety. In the United States’ case it was the aged fishing fleet that was seen as the principal problem. A law of 1792 made it illegal for an American skipper to land fish with a foreign-made vessel. The inability to buy cheaper foreign manufactured fishing boats ensured that by the early 1960s the New England trawler fleet was showing its age. As Manuel Lewis of Gloucester Fisheries stated, ‘It has been said that a man with his hands tied cannot defend himself. And that just about sums up the predicament of the domestic fishing industry in regard to vessel construction.’ The oldest vessel still fishing was over one hundred years old and had been built ‘during the administration of President Abraham Lincoln’. Lewis’s contentions were supported by Donald L. McKernan of the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries when he stated to the Senate that the American fleet was ‘the most obsolete in the world’.4 The New England fishermen’s trade unions echoed this concern. The men on the New England trawler fleet were represented by two trade unions. Those who fished out of Boston and Gloucester were represented by the Atlantic Fishermen’s Union, while those from New Bedford were represented by the New Bedford Fishermen’s Union. The two unions pressed hard to modernize the fleet but they were constrained by the mercantilist law of 1792. Howard Nickerson, Secretary Treasurer of the New Bedford Fishermen’s Union, argued before Congress in 1963 that if the owners could buy on the free market then the current poor state of the fishing fleet would be remedied. As Nickerson stated, ‘it is strange, but only in America are fishing vessels as aged as ours allowed to go to sea’. Few foreign countries would allow such outdated ships to go fishing: ‘They would be condemned’.5 4  Testimony of Manuel Lewis on ‘Fishing Vessel Construction’. Hearing before the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Subcommittee, Committee of Commerce, U.S. Senate, 88th Cong., First Session, p. 67. Testimony of Donald L. McKernan on ‘Fishing in Territorial Waters’. Hearings before the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Subcommittee, Committee of Commerce, U.S. Senate, 88th Cong., First Session, p. 88. 5  ‘Fishing Vessel Construction’. Hearings before the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Subcommittee, Committee of Commerce, U.S. Senate, 88th Cong., First Session, p. 90.



Transatlantic fishers: New England and British trawlermen, 1960-1972

The main impetus for trade union support of the construction of new fishing vessels was foreign competition. For centuries the New England fishers had trawled the George’s and Brown’s banks off the Massachusetts coast. George’s Bank was the centre of operations and is approximately 150 miles offshore, or a 15 to 16-hour trip. Boston was the leading port for haddock, which accounted for two-thirds of domestic landings. In 1961 Soviet fishing vessels were sighted on the George’s Bank, and in the following year a Soviet fleet of 219 vessels was fishing for herring. Within two years the Soviet ships were joined by vessels from Norway, East and West Germany, Poland, Spain, and even Japan. As these foreign fleets switched to haddock and cod in the mid-1960s, the New England fishers were hopelessly outmatched and outclassed. Their otter trawlers were no match for the foreign factory ships and stern trawlers. The New England landings of haddock, cod and herring plummeted correspondingly.6 Part of the problem for the New England fishermen was that they were literally being forced off the fishing grounds. James Ackert, President of the Atlantic Fishermen’s Union testified that ‘There have been several incidents of harassment of our boats by the Russian fishing fleet.’ They fished using ‘a new checkerboard system… they take areas and block then off, which shows a military standout, in my mind. In other words, this has been planned by military men and they keep cris-crossing areas, like an area they will both go horizontal, all across the area, until it is completely swept clean of fish.’ Other than having to fish competitively alongside foreigners, there was the constant danger of being rammed by larger vessels. Ackert testified that in one incident a Soviet patrol ship had steamed toward the New Englanders ‘and completely forced our fleet off the bank. We had to haul back and get the devil out of there. It was impossible for us to fish, they harassed us so bad.’ Boston otter trawlers were no match for the more powerful and larger vessels such as factory ships, stern trawlers, and military ships. As Ackert explained, ‘You take a [Soviet] vessel that is 200 feet in length and you are in a vessel 90 feet in length, you know might is right!’7 6  L.G. Bouchard, ‘Overall View of Soviet Fisheries in 1963, with Emphasis on Activities off U.S. Coasts’, Commercial Fisheries Review (November, 1964), pp. 15-18; Report of the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, 1967, pp. 19-24; Commercial Fisheries Review (January, 1966), pp. 40-41; Commercial Fisheries Review (February, 1966), pp. 25-26; Commercial Fisheries Review (March, 1966); Commercial Fisheries Review (May, 1966), pp. 83-84; Commercial Fisheries Review (May, 1967), pp. 10-25; Commercial Fisheries Review (January, 1968). For reductions in fish landings see ‘Food and Fish Situation’, Annual Review, U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, May 1968; May 1969, pp. 22-37; and June 1970, p. 21. 7  Statement by James Ackert on ‘Fishing Vessel Construction’ and ‘Fishing Vessel Subsidies’. Hearings before the Subcommittee on Fisheries and Wildlife Conservation, Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, U.S. House, 88th Cong., First Session, p. 62.

229

230

Colin J. Davis

Just as infuriating for the trade union representatives and fishery officials was the use of illegal fishing nets by foreign vessels, the legality being determined by the gauge or mesh size. If this was too small then nets captured smaller, younger fish with serious consequences for future stocks. Thus the foreign fleets were perceived as devastating the New England fishery – an interesting environmental twist to what essentially were problems of economic and operational uncompetitiveness. James Ackert argued that the Soviet ‘smaller mesh twine…will deplete our fishing grounds’. Ackert gave the example of the trawler Massachusetts which hauled up a Russian trawl net in August 1963. A supposed herring net was found in an area where no herring gathered. Manuel Lewis of the Gloucester Fisheries Commission stated that ‘only a cigar could get through’ the Soviet nets. Hastings Keith, a Massachusetts Democratic Representative, declared that ‘The most telling comment on their thoroughness is that you never find seagulls following their ships. There’s nothing left even for the birds.’8 Even the fishermen’s wives got involved in the issue. Testifying to Congress, the United Fishermen’s Wives Organization of New Bedford declared that foreign competition was unfair. The New Englanders fished for between a week and ten days before heading back home to port. After several days they would return to sea. But the foreign fleets stayed out ‘at least six months or more and dwarf the American fleet with their catches’. ‘Let’s wake up to the fact that we can no longer give our natural resource to the rest of the world.’ Wives in Gloucester also urged Congress to subsidize the New England fleet just like their European counterparts did. Grace Parsons of the United Fisherman’s Wives Association (Gloucester) argued that foreign subsidies had ‘broken the back of the U.S. fishing industry’. Justifying her stance, and those of other female supporters, Parsons declared ‘We who are wives, widows, and daughters know the problems facing our fishermen. We work to help them because we know their jobs are skilled, independent, proud and honest.’9

8  Testimony of Manuel Lewis and Keith Hastings, Hearings on ‘Fishing in Territorial Waters’. Subcommittee of Merchant Marine and Fisheries Subcommittee, Committee of Commerce, U.S. Senate, 88 Cong., First Session, pp. 98, 41. 9  Written Statement by New Bedford United Fisherman’s Wives Organization, ‘Interim Fisheries Zone Extension and Management Act of 1973, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Oceans and Atmosphere, Committee of Commerce’, U.S. Senate, 93rd Cong., Second Session, pp. 922-23. Testimony of Grace Parsons, United Fishermen’s Wives Association (Gloucester), ‘Fisheries Legislation, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Energy, Natural Resources, and the Environment’, U.S. Senate, 91st Cong., Second Session, p. 195.



Transatlantic fishers: New England and British trawlermen, 1960-1972

For the New England fishers the solution to the problem was clear. Either enforce existing regulations concerning mesh size or extend the United States’ territorial limit to protect the fishery. In the British case, trade union agitation focused on the safety of their members at sea, and demands for shop stewards to be aboard ship. A series of trawler disasters especially in 1967 and 1968 drove the trade union, the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), to call for fundamental change in the industry. The number of deaths and accidents of fishermen had been high. As Jack Jones of the TGWU stated to the Holland-Martin Inquiry, ‘the price has been far too high, for far too long’. The TGWU proposed a ‘Fisherman’s Charter’ which advocated: regular 12 hours’ rest at sea; longer rest periods in port; wages based on a 40-hour week; a registration scheme; training; a 17 year old minimum for such work; crew representatives onboard; shore safety committees; a mother ship; and free protective clothing. However, the full force of the union’s anger was directed at crew fatigue. Skippers were also blamed for unnecessary risk-taking. The TGWU alleged that skippers continued to fish in bad weather and that many of them were drunk during fishing operations.10 The union contentions were vigorously attacked by officials of the White Fish Authority (WFA). C.I. Meek, the Chief Executive of the WFA, countered that ‘fatigue as a factor had been overemphasized as a threat to safety’. ‘Statistics on accidents suggested that the highest rates occurred at the beginning of trips when the crew was settling down and when alcohol might be a factor.’ This contention was supported by the Hull Trawler Officers’ Guild. The Guild lamented that ‘Everyone has gone safety mad’ and argued that the TGWU was out of touch with the views of the trawlermen. Meek of the WFA also argued that providing too much rest aboard ship would actually increase accidents, and shop stewards at sea ‘might tend to undermine the skipper’s authority and were probably undesirable’.11 Independent fisheries scientists were sympathetic to the union contention that fatigue was a problem, however. Professor Arnold Schilling, who witnessed at first hand fishing in the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean, found in the 1968 Trawler Inquiry that it was ‘reasonable to suggest that trawlermen are likely to have more injuries because of fatigue.’ When fishing 18 hours at a stretch with only 6 hours to recover before commencing fishing again, the men were 10  TNA, BT 149/58, ‘Evidence of TGWU to Board of Inquiry’. 11  TNA, BT 149/1, ‘Testimony of C.I. Meeks, WFA’; BT 149/59, ‘Evidence from the Hull Trawler Officers’ Guild’. The Trawler Officers’ Guild supported the idea that fatigue was not a problem. Carelessness among fishermen, however, was a real cause of accidents. ‘Accidents [are a] result of carelessness rather than fatigue’.

231

232

Colin J. Davis

always at risk of injury. Interestingly, this pattern of work seemed to affect near water fishers more than distant water men. This was largely due to the small amount of time to recover. Lowestoft men could work 18-hour days for 10 days at a stretch. The short trip back to port gave them little time to recover, and within 48 hours they were back out to sea again. One Lowestoft fisher described the work routine as ‘savage’. Schilling’s observations were supported by medical officials. Dr Moore, who treated Hull trawlermen and had travelled aboard their boats, had seen ‘signs of fatigue’ and testified that many cases he treated on shore had not been reported by the skippers. Another supporter of the idea that fatigue was the essential problem for understanding the high rate of accidents and death on board fishing vessels was Rear Admiral Leslie. Leslie had commanded the Fishery Protection Squadron of four small frigates in the Atlantic Ocean between 1961 and 1962. He concluded that ‘Fatigue was a major hazard to safety since the crews worked up to eighteen hours out of twenty-four when fishing was in progress.’ Trawler owners were ‘ruthless’ on skippers who failed to bring in good catches so it was natural that skippers, particularly young ones, ‘might take risks to get the fish.’12 A further concern of the TGWU was the young age of recruits. Generally speaking the starting age for apprentices or deck learners was 15 years. The loss of such young men at sea was an emotional topic. There was a growing sense that the hazardous working world of fishermen should push up the entry age, and the TGWU accordingly argued that an age limit of 17 years should be set. They also lobbied for more training at local Technical or Further Education Colleges, and shorter beginner trips. Retention figures were deployed to reinforce the union’s pessimistic view of the industry’s attractiveness, for it was indeed problematic that 85 per cent of these young men left after their first fishing trip. The trawler owners, represented by the British Trawlers Federation, vehemently disagreed with this proposal, and wanted to continue getting boys ‘straight from school’. Enforced delay until the age of 17 would starve the industry of recruits who in the meantime might find alternative employment, and it would therefore be ‘difficult to recruit sufficient labour’.13 From the 1960s the recruitment of fishermen became an increasing problem on both sides of the Atlantic. As traditional fishing communities tended 12  TNA, BT 149/2, ‘Report of Trip on Two Distant Water Trawlers-by Professor Schilling’; BT 149/3, ‘Report of Dr. Moore’; BT 149/2, ‘Discussion with Rear Admiral Leslie’. 13  TNA, BT 149/2, ‘Discussion with TGWU’; BT 149/66, ‘Evidence from the British Trawlers Federation’.



Transatlantic fishers: New England and British trawlermen, 1960-1972

to dissolve, youthful recruits were difficult to find. The continuing high accident and death rates on trawlers and other fishing vessels also made fishing an increasingly peripheral industry. Thus the strenuous and dangerous work was acting as a brake on recruitment. As educational and work opportunities improved throughout the 1960s, so did resistance to going to sea. On both sides of the Atlantic, then, each group of fishers responded to challenges that affected their work. In the British case it was more a fundamental question of survival on the high seas. Expectations had shifted from the fatalistic acceptance of one’s lot to direct calls for immediate and effective reform. The draining of fishing communities had left the industry in flux as young men from around the British Isles turned away from the work of their fathers, and instead turned to the land and greater job opportunities. For the New Englanders it was a question of whether their industry would survive. Foreign competition was destroying the New England fishery. The New England fishery had met the challenge of recruiting young fishers by becoming dependent on migrants to maintain their labour force, but that labour supply was shrinking as the workforce got older. With few local men attracted to the work and their fishing vessels largely decrepit, by the 1960s foreign competition was slowly strangling the American industry.

233

234



Masters and chiefs: Enabling globalization, 1975-1995 Tony Lane – Cardiff University

i. Introduction In the mid-1970s the shipping companies of Western Europe and Japan were predominant in international seaborne trade, their ships flying the flags and engaging crews congruent with the companies’ national locations. Twenty years later, Western European and Japanese shipping companies were still predominant but far less frequently flew flags signifying the national location of their operational centres. Even less frequently did they employ full crews of own-nationals. By the mid-1990s, after a decade and a half of depressed international trade, European and Japanese shipowners had adopted, in imitation of their North American counterparts, the recourse of flag of convenience ships crewed by seafarers who were neither of the same nationality as their ships’ owners, nor of the nation represented by their ships’ flags.1 In this new and much larger wave of flagging out companies’ assets (ships) were attached to such ‘offshore’ states as Panama, Liberia, Bahamas, Malta, Cyprus, and Europe’s surrogate offshore states in the form of Norway’s International Ship Register, the United Kingdom’s Isle of Man and Bermuda, France’s Kerguelen Islands, and Portugal’s Madeira. Operational headquarters mostly stayed ‘at home’ (in the UK, Greece, Germany, Norway, Japan, etc). For their part, seafarers became itinerant workers. The shipping industry’s resort to a new national dress for its ships and the engagement of itinerant labour crews effectively mimicked the expedient adopted by the textile, clothing and footwear industries’ pursuit of significantly lower production costs through a mass exodus to locations abroad in the 1960s and 1970s.2 As with more recent industrial migrations – the ‘white goods’ industry is a good example – ownership and/or control has remained significantly with companies in Europe and Japan who operate overseas factories, licence local producers, or are quasi-monopoly buyers of output.3

1  R.P. Carlisle, Sovereignty for Sale (Annapolis, 1981). 2  F. Froebel, J. Heinrichs and O. Kreye, ed., The New International Division of Labour (Cambridge, 1980). 3  See J. Henderson, The Globalisation of High Technology Production (London, 1989); A. Amin and N. Thrift, ‘“Living in the global”’, Globalization, Institutions, and Regional Development in Europe, ed. Amin and Thrift (Oxford, 1994) pp. 1-22; S. Newton, The Global Economy 1944-2000 (London,2004).

235

236

Tony Lane

When compared with the migrations of other industries, the overseas shift for shipping was simpler and cheaper. The shipping industry did not need to relocate its ‘production units’. Ships were mobile and could therefore be readily ‘located’ to another national site. The signing of documents and the payment of an accompanying fee was enough to re-assign a ship’s national identity.4 Since it was as easy to discharge crews as it was to change flag, it was common enough in the 1980s for ships to arrive in a port flying a European flag with a European crew and then to sail a day or so later flying, say, the flag of the Bahamas or Cyprus and with a crew of European officers and Filipino/ Pakistani/Korean ratings. From the late 1980s seafarers and especially officers were being recruited in Poland and Yugoslavia and from the early 1990s from the ‘balance’ of the old Soviet-bloc, especially from Russia and the Ukraine. In the UK the event which conclusively signified the end of a substantial labour market for British seafarers came in the mid-1980s. BP Tankers, uniquely in the UK, was a shipping company where almost all managers from senior to junior were former officers. This was a company which took training very seriously and was even one where a shipmaster might end as managing director. In 1986, however, a company run by ex-seafarers told its serving officers that BP was to flag out its ships (to Bermuda and the Isle of Man), would progressively make redundant their British ratings and replace them with Filipinos and would cease direct employment of their officers by offering new contracts with an offshore company based in the Isle of Man and wholly owned by a German company, the Schulte Group. This bundle of decisions exactly duplicated those previously made and others soon to be made by other shipping companies across North-western Europe and Japan. BP Tankers was one of the very few British companies continuing to recruit cadets and offer continuing employment as junior officers thereafter. Elsewhere in the UK, although cadets were still recruited – albeit in diminishing numbers – subsequent opportunities for employment as junior officers steadily diminished. The result of course was a steady increase in the average age of British senior officers and rapidly shrinking numbers of them because there were no juniors available for succession. Much the same process of displacement of ratings and reduced numbers of suitably skilled officers occurred in Japan and across Western Europe. 4  ‘If the grant of a maritime flag is the function of government, the flying of the flag on the high seas or the territorial waters of the maritime states of the world is an undoubted attribute of sovereignty.’ N. Singh, Maritime Flag and International Law (Leyden, 1978). Quoted in Carlisle, Sovereignty for Sale.



Masters and chiefs: Enabling globalization, 1975-1995

The very mobility of the ship meant that shipping companies hiring crews abroad did not need to put down any local roots or get involved in any way with the social and institutional networks of local labour markets beyond identifying agencies capable of finding crew members and arranging their delivery to a designated ship and port. By the mid-1990s a not untypical order to two separate agencies, one in the Ukraine, the other in the Philippines, might specify deck and engineer officers from the former and cook, messman, deck and engine ratings from the latter. So, where clothing factories went to their labour forces, shipping’s labour force travelled from various parts of the world to its ‘factories’. Encounters with groups of seafarers became a regular feature of airports close to the world’s larger ports. It was in this way that the shipping industry, uniquely, created for itself a global labour market. The creation of a global labour market was, so to speak, the aggregate outcome of a large number of similar and sequential but uncoordinated shipowners’ decisions. Although all of these decisions were similarly carried through and had the final shared consequence – the existence of a global labour market – this was nevertheless an unforeseen and unintended consequence. In virtually all cases the only intended consequence of flagging out was an immediate reduction in costs.5 The trend to a globalized labour force only became apparent when a sufficient number and range of decisions to flag out and recruit labour from hitherto unused sources had been carried through to the point at which there were observable structural effects. At this point – in the early 1990s – the industry’s decision-makers began to understand the ramifications of their earlier actions and to look to their established associations and international organizations for policies to regularize their new creation. The prior intelligence which brought shipowners to this moment of reflection could only have come in any volume from those with continuous daily experience at the ‘point of production’ and experienced in running ships, namely shipmasters and chief engineers.6 The shipboard management of the transition to a global labour market was the responsibility of ships’ senior officers who were themselves obliged to become itinerant workers if they wished to continue their seagoing careers. It is their experiences which fundamentally inform this paper of two parts. The first part, based upon a programme of 70 tape-recorded interviews with serv5  ILO, The Global Seafarer (Geneva, 2003). 6  Other intelligence came from hull and machinery underwriters who, having experienced a casualty, had their surveyors’ reports and also from the industry’s Protection and Indemnity Clubs – insurance mutuals covering claims for accidents to persons, ships and their cargoes.

237

238

Tony Lane

ing British and German senior officers in 1994-95, examines the effects of a globalizing labour market on their careers and reports their assessments of the impact of the globalizing process on the exercise of their shipboard responsibilities.7 The second briefer part of the paper discusses the emerging structures and institutions of the global labour market and the critical part played by ships’ officers in influencing industry-wide debates and regulatory policies, thus high-lighting the critical role of ‘technocratic functionaries’ in globalization generally. ii. Masters and chiefs The eight ‘annotated’ work histories summarized below (four from the United Kingdom, four from Germany) were selected by three criteria. First there are respondents by age: masters and chiefs who began their seagoing careers respectively in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Second, there are respondents with variations in the extent of career disruption as measured by the number and type of changes of employer. Third, respondents have been selected for their directness and discursive commentary. bill mcfee8, chief engineer In 1959, Bill McFee aged 17, joined a tramp subsidiary of P&O as an engineering cadet. In 1992, aged 51, he became chief engineer with one of the world’s largest and most reputable tanker companies, based in Vancouver. His account and his commentary on his work history covered 36 years, in which time he experienced some of the best and some of the worst that the world shipping industry could offer its seafarers. Bill McFee was employed aboard UK and Bermudan-flagged ships until 1986 when his employer Canadian-Pacific was selling ships and making officers redundant. By this time he had been chief engineer for 16 years, first appointed chief aged 30. ‘That was a very good company, [Canadian Pacific], excellent personnel, excellent technical side. For me it was a job for life and I saw no problems for the future. [Redundancy] came as a bit of a bombshell…’

7  Interviews were taped and proximate verbatim transcripts subsequently sent to respondents for editing and for indication of restrictions on use. The interview format was the same for all persons. The UK interviews were conducted by the author, the German interviews by the author’s then research assistant, Torsten Schroder. Respondents were asked to recount their work histories since the beginning of their sea careers and to comment upon their experiences with crews of various nationalities. The programme of interviews was funded by the Nuffield Foundation whose support is gratefully acknowledged. 8  This name, like all others of seafarers, is a pseudonym.



Masters and chiefs: Enabling globalization, 1975-1995

His ensuing career as a participant in the rapidly developing global labour market began in his local library where he found addresses of UK-based crewing agencies and shipping companies, writing to some thirty of them. Replies came from half, none of them wanting chiefs. After four months jobless and then through an acquaintance, he took himself to Lord Penrose’s 100-ton yacht based in Turkey – he disliked it, and left after five months. After six weeks an agency found him a job as second engineer rising to chief on a Liberian-flagged tanker, but he had to leave prematurely after two months with marital and medical problems. After four months at home without work he was getting desperate when an agency came up with a job as second aboard a Libyan-owned tanker. He joined in Augusta, Sicily, in March 1987. It was a pretty miserable time. The officers were British, the crew Sri Lankan. A very good crew but abysmally paid – when they got paid. There were times when my salary did not go into my bank and this caused all sorts of problems. I went home after eight months probably worse off than when I went away. I was only home for three weeks when I got offered a job on an oil rig tow from Gabon in West Africa to the Persian Gulf. There were just five of us on the rig being towed and it took five months, with just a two-week stop in Cape Town for repairs to the rig’s ballast pumps. I hadn’t been home long before an agency found me a job as chief on the Coral Rose then thought to be the world’s biggest OBO [OreBulk-Oil. A bulk carrier also capable of being used as a tanker]. It had been sold by its Greek owners for scrap but someone who had bought it wanted to run it. The ship was about 23 years old and in terrible condition. I joined in Fujairah where she was loaded and due to sail for a Red Sea port to discharge. We went in the next morning to take on water when all the main engine bearings wiped. The ship didn’t go any further. It took about a month to discharge the cargo into a small tanker because a boiler was collapsing, the cargo pumps were collapsing, the whole ship was a nightmare. We had a mixed crew of British senior officers, Indian juniors. The ratings, Filipino. Eventually we were towed to Singapore and the ship was sold back to the Greeks who had previously owned it. That was June 1989.

239

240

Tony Lane

My next job was just relieving on a bulk carrier trading between Chile and Japan. The captain was Irish and everyone else Filipino. It was a pretty hectic trip because the engineers were not very experienced and I had to spend a lot of time in the engineroom. This and the OBO really gave me an eye-opener into working with foreign crew engineers and ratings. My next ship was another bulker and I was there for five months. I joined in France and left in Japan. I relieved an English chief and I was relieved by an Indian. The engineers were Singaporeans, Filipinos and Sri Lankans, deck officers Singaporean and Sri Lankan and the crew Burmese and Singaporean. The salary wasn’t bad and the run was good. I then had a couple of fill-in jobs in the Gulf – one on a dry-docked tug, another on a big tanker which was being cleaned up before going for scrap. After being at home for three months an agency called with a chief’s job on a 45,000 ton bulker. The owner had a lot of ships. He wasn’t British but he was London-based. I had to pack quickly and fly out to South Africa. Apart from me there was the captain, first engineer and chief mate because the top four on the ship were all being sacked. The ship was an old Panamanian-flagged OBO and when we joined the officers were Romanian, Bulgarian, Polish, Yugoslav, Hungarian and the crew were all Turkish. We had all sorts of problems, mechanical problems, weather problems, crew problems, I could write a book about this ship. When we joined, the ship was in for emergency repairs being done by shore labour. We sailed for Singapore and on passage were advised that before we docked there would be several surveyors coming aboard to interview the captain and myself because the ship was overdue and there was a dispute between the owner and the charterers. When we got to Singapore we anchored off the port limits and up came the ‘owners’ agents. Several surveyors visited the ship making enquiries regarding performance, breakdowns, etc that would have accounted for the delays on passage. Following advice from the owners some rather unethical procedures were carried out to explain away the delays, i.e. ‘amendments’ to ship’s papers.



Masters and chiefs: Enabling globalization, 1975-1995

The next voyage was to South Africa to load coal and shortly after leaving Richard’s Bay we went out into horrendous weather and one morning at about 7 o’clock it seemed to be getting decidedly worse. I went up on to the bridge and then things happened very fast. The captain was complaining about the steering so I went down to the steering flat and found that the steering gear had failed. The first engineer, a Polish guy, was knee-deep in oil, chemicals and water because we had taken a sea over and it had broken open the steering flat hatch where all the drums were rolling about. The situation was grave. The two of us, me and the first with the help of a Turkish fireman managed to find a seal, stop the leak and replenish the oil. As I recall, the captain had been on the phone to London to explain the situation and helicopters from Port Elizabeth were standing by. He made that call while the steering was gone but I was able to report as I rushed into the radio room that it was on again but three more times that day we had the same problem. It was a really horrendous experience. There was a lot of damage all over the ship. Portholes were smashed, there was flooding in the accommodation and after several days when could assess the damage on deck we found that sounding pipes to the fresh and boiler water tanks had been smashed and gas bottles were adrift. In retrospect there was only myself and the first engineer who saved that ship. We had consistent problems in the engineroom and the Polish first had his work made very difficult with the other Eastern Europeans and I spent many hours with him in the engineroom. When we got back to the UK an owner’s representative came aboard and I was able to talk to him about the condition of the ship and problems with the crew. He seemed pleased to hear an honest view and said he would act on my comments. I received a cash bonus and so did the first engineer. Several months later I was asked to join another of that owner’s fleet and when I knew I would be with the same captain and a British first engineer I reluctantly agreed. We didn’t have the weather problems but we did have very big mechanical problems. At one stage we were down to running on one generator and we even went into port with the pilot on board just with the emergency generator running. I learned

241

242

Tony Lane

an awful lot on those two ships where I did things which I would never even have thought about before. At one time the first engineer came to me saying he had had enough and wanted off at the next port because two of the engineroom crew were flatly refusing to work. I managed to persuade him to stay but when we got back to the UK I told the company that I didn’t mind the mechanical side of the work or even the hours we worked but I was not prepared to put up with the aggravation coming from the crew. My ships for the next three years were TK tankers whose head office was in Vancouver. I was very happy in that period. Captains and chief engineers were a mixture of British, Indian, Croatian and German. First engineers and chief mates the same, all other officers mostly Filipino but also some Indian. With TK, like the other ships I had been on since I left Canadian Pacific, I found I was working far more physically than I ever had before. The typical reaction in TK was, ‘what the bloody hell is the chief doing in the engineroom?’ Having sailed with good British officers, qualified guys who did not need to be told what to do, the big thing I found different was the change in the ability of the officers, their physical ability and their ability to troubleshoot. Although many of them were willing to work long hours it was necessary for me to be there all the time to advise and tell them what to do. I still found this problem with TK. I’m sure the captains also find this. Watchkeeping on the bridge, going in and out of port, most of the masters get very frustrated with the lack of knowledge of the officers they have to contend with. They are badly trained. Although very willing to work, they just have not got the knowledge. In British ships there had often been crew problems and on occasions there was an awful lot of resentment between officers and crew but a lot of this was a result of the way officers treated the crew. The fact was though that when it came to the crunch everybody was there, they knew what to do and you didn’t have to run around checking. You had this comradeship which just does not exist in foreign-flagged ships. On the other hand I have been told on many occasions by Filipino crew of captains and chief engineers who have shouted and sworn at them, who have not treated them with respect. On this I have had big problems with Croatians in TK. They had a bad attitude towards the crew and treated them with disrespect. On every TK ship, five I think it is, I have had to call the first engineer into my cabin to tell him how to talk to the crew – these are people who are almost as old as me and sometimes older.



Masters and chiefs: Enabling globalization, 1975-1995

The Croatians are very difficult people to work with, I shan’t miss sailing with them, that is for sure. The McFee work history has been presented here at some length. This is not because it is typical in all aspects in its sequence of ‘moments’, but because in the range of types of employment and shipboard social relations it comes very close to capturing the collective experience of masters and chiefs who elected to stay with ships in the transition from a multiplicity of national labour markets to one which was becoming global. The précised work histories which follow confirm and amplify McFee’s account. helmut lenz, shipmaster Helmut Lenz retired early in 1995, aged 57, after 40 years at sea, 20 of them as master. ‘Because of my health and because the responsibility of working aboard ships with foreign crews keeps on getting worse. I am not willing any more to take on the responsibility being put on me by people who only want to make a profit, run everything from a safe position and don’t want to take on their part of the responsibility’. Lenz first went to sea in 1955, aged 17, as a cadet on the square-rigged sailing ship Pamir. This was effectively an induction into the elite of the ships’ officers and foreshadowed future employment with the more prestigious German shipping companies regarded by their officers more as national institutions than as commercial enterprises. And so Helmut Lenz spent the next 25 years sailing in well-found ships flying the German flag. But in 1984 ‘the ship was dramatically flagged out: I received a telex saying that in the next port, the Portuguese ratings and the German junior officers were to be paid off and a Filipino crew would come aboard. I was told that the Filipinos and the Portuguese were not to meet and so I was told to send the Portuguese from the ship first. When the Filipinos came aboard the German flag had been removed and the Consul for Antigua had given me documentation to change the ship’s registration to Antigua. When we sailed the only Germans were the captain (me), the chief mate and the chief engineer. This was a container ship where the berth times are short only. It was a massive problem to train the Filipinos, to show them where everything is. I mean they didn’t speak German but all the signs around

243

244

Tony Lane

the ship were in German, naturally. So we were running around applying little signs in English. OK, they knew the things on the bridge the radars and so on but that’s international, it’s everywhere the same. But the firefighting system, the bulkhead-closing system, the signs in the radio room, valves in the engineroom. After a certain time they were familiar with it. After a year or so aboard it was possible to send them somewhere to do something and they would do it. But…how shall I put it: they weren’t like skilled German personnel in connection with the feeling of responsibility. The Filipinos needed to be told what to do and although they had a certificate saying they could speak English, very often they weren’t able to. They’d say, ‘yes, yes’ but in fact they hadn’t understood. If one didn’t pay attention they would go and do something totally wrong. As time went on it got worse because the men coming aboard weren’t as well trained as before. My opinion is that the qualificational standard got so much worse because the demand for Filipino ratings and officers was much higher than the capacity to produce them. jem hurst, shipmaster One of a younger generation, Jem Hurst began his sea career at a time when the British liner companies were fast disappearing. In 1978, as an 18 yearold, Hurst began as a deck cadet with the Furness Withy Group (Shaw, Savill; Prince Line, Manchester Liners, Royal Mail, Pacific Steam, Houlder Brothers, etc). At that time the Group still owned more than one hundred ships but he reckoned they were down to 20 or so ships by 1982 when he got his Second Mate’s certificate: ‘professionally speaking [I had been fortunate as a cadet] because I went on every type of ship – tankers, bulkers, cargo ships, container ships, reefers and I also went round the world and so I saw every run and how its was organized. On the Furness ships it was always London on the stern and with a white British crew.’ C.Y. Teung of Hong Kong had taken over Furness Withy by the time Hurst was ready for his first third mate’s job – which he found in Hong Kong aboard ‘a two-years old gleaming container ship.’ That was 1982/1983 and I have been with them ever since. They promoted me to mate in 1989 and master in 1994. I’ve been master now for six months and I’m 34. [My ships] can be any flag – Liberian, Hong Kong, Taiwan – and the other masters could be Hong Kong Chinese, Singaporean, Malaysian, British, Taiwanese and the other officers of



Masters and chiefs: Enabling globalization, 1975-1995

the same nationalities, although we have a training programme with the nautical colleges in Cork and St Johns, Newfoundland where we take deck and engineer cadets. So now filtering up we have second and third mates and third and fourth engineers who are Irish and ‘Newfie’. The company wants competence. If you look at the container shipping industry the ships are generally run by competent people. [One of our competitors is Evergreen] and although their ships are split between the Liberian and Taiwan flags, they cream off the best from the Taiwan Nautical College for their officers. Ratings on our ships are all Filipino and there are also some Filipino junior officers but they are on the company’s tankers and bulkers. A shipmaster’s greatest concern is with the all-round competence of his deck and engineer officers. For me, of course seamanship begins and ends with bridge watchkeepers. On my last ship the bridge ability of my three guys was excellent. In fact the senior one, the Mate, was probably the worst and he needed a bit of coaching. But the next ship I go to could be awful. It’s a bit like riding a motor-bike where you have to assume that every one else is an idiot – you don’t rely on other ships to follow the collision regulations because you cannot assume general competence. Competence is way down. I am probably defending what shipowners have done in the past when they changed from employing well-trained people to employing idiots. But I have to put up with them if I want to keep my job. All I can do is train them myself. stephen mowat, chief engineer A chief engineer in 1995, then aged 37 years, Mowat began as a 16-year old engineer cadet with P&O in 1974 and stayed on in the P&O container fleet until 1985 when he was then second engineer although he had a chief’s steam ticket. After working ashore in Australia for six months and then ashore in the UK for another six, he went back to sea as second engineer in a Zim Line container ship. Once there he found that he ‘was a second class citizen. If you weren’t Israeli you were cheap labour. Israelis did three and a half months and three and a half off, we did 7 months on and two months off and an Israeli doing the same job earned twice as much as me! While I was on that ship P&O offered to take me back but to accept meant getting off in Panama which was

245

246

Tony Lane

our next stop, paying my own flight back home as well as paying Zim for the cost of sending out my relief.’ ‘I was back with P&O containers for two years when I decided to have another go at working ashore.’ This quickly failed and so did his attempt to get back into P&O – ‘they had a policy of not re-employing senior officers. Now it was agencies, a job aboard a Norwegian-owned tanker and redundancy after four months. Back to another agency, sailing aboard a Canadian firm’s container ships to Montreal from the UK. After 18 months the Norwegians invited him back and within two years he was sailing as chief on crude oil tankers of 150,000dwt (VLCCs). ‘We were spot-market trading so we never knew where we might be going next, but seven times out of ten it’s West Africa to East Coast U.S. or the U.S. Gulf. It’s a six weeks’ trip and I do four months and four months off.’ On P&O ships all the officers were British. On these tankers most senior officers are Norwegian, British with a few Poles and Greeks and one Spanish master. Most electricians are Poles and junior officers are Filipino but they will never be allowed to rise above second mate/second engineer. The funny thing is they seem to accept this. To be honest I would not like to see them as first engineers or chiefs, not the ones I have sailed with. They are generally conscientious and fairly good but to my mind most of them have reached their limit. They seem to have difficulty with anything technical. They are very good at routines, they learn a lot from experience rather than working things out but then I have not actually seen them doing a senior’s job so maybe that is not a fair comment. I might be surprised but having worked with them you can be quite disappointed at times at how little somebody [knows] who you thought was a really excellent engineer, or does not know why he is doing a certain thing, he doesn’t fully understand the reason for a certain problem and why he is doing what he is doing. It can be a bit disappointing really because in many ways they are a delightful people to work with, conscientious and hard-working. You would like to think that they could follow the same career path as we could. It is very hard to pin-point it, whether it is a cultural thing or what. There must be some somewhere who could do a chief engineer’s or master’s job well, there must be. There are that many Filipinos going to sea, there must be some who are well qualified.



Masters and chiefs: Enabling globalization, 1975-1995

I can think of one Filipino cadet who had a Filipino engineering degree. He was a clever bloke, keen to learn and seemed to me to be capable of going as far as he wants – and this was somebody who had just come from the catering side where he had been a mess boy and yet it would be a couple of years before he could even sail as an oiler! robert stevenson, master Aged 41 in 1995, Robert Stevenson joined Clan Line as a cadet, aged 18, in 1971 where he sailed mainly from the UK to East Africa on cargo ships. People began leaving in large numbers in the mid-1970s, going foreign-flag where there was quicker promotion but I stayed until 1982 when I got made redundant while I was at college, half-way through my master’s [examinations]. Although this wasn’t unexpected it still came as a shock so I ended up as mate of a northeast coast firm’s 3,000-ton bulkers which were chartered to a Norwegian. It was a bit of a culture shock after dressing for dinner with the old Clan Line. It was damned hard work, working 14/14/16 hours a day, carrying two or three cargoes a week around the Norwegian coast, but I stuck it for two years working four-on, four-off on these Gibraltar-flagged ships. In 1985 I went to an Italian-Saudi company running old reefers into Jedda and the Gulf carrying bananas from the Philippines, citrus from South Africa, chicken from Brazil, etc. I stayed seven years – and was promoted master in 1989 when I was 35 years old. I left in 1992 because the ships were so ancient, falling to bits and budgetary constraints all over the place. Then I signed on with a dozen or so agencies and one of them came up with a job with a German ship management company. When I contacted them by ’phone they seemed ready to give me a job without even seeing me. I actually insisted on an interview. There is a prevalent feeling that runs through things now that if you have got the relevant bit of paper you must be OK. This is a bit disturbing. Having satisfied each other as to our professional capabilities, I got a job as master of a small Irish-flagged reefer for four months and then as mate of an American-owned Bahamas-flagged reefer. Within a matter of months I was sailing master and have stayed with these ships. I’ve been with them almost two years now.

247

248

Tony Lane

With crews in Clan we had either Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi. Most of the Indian crews had a history of working for British companies. They knew what they were there for and knew why they were there. Every body knew what they were supposed to be doing and just did it. I don’t really remember there ever being any problems. And when you were on the bridge you assumed that the guy on the other ship that was on a collision course with you probably knew his job as well, it would be rare if he didn’t. Nowadays it is the exact opposite, you assume that he doesn’t know what he is doing. When I was on the Saudi-flagged ships British junior officers began to be replaced by Filipino and Bangladeshi juniors. On the deck side they were mostly Bangladeshi and Filipino in the engineroom so I had more to do with Bangladeshis. You had to be much more precise with these guys than the British. You had to explain a lot more which took more time and they were very unwilling to tell you that they didn’t understand something and I still find this sort of thing a problem. They will smile and say ‘yes, sir’ but you are never really sure if they have understood what you are getting at, which in certain situations can be a bit nerve-wracking. I guess it is one of these things you just adapt to. I think I probably do explain things a lot more than I used to. We were brought up to question everything and to say ‘are you sure this is what you want?’ You don’t tend to get this with a lot of Third World officers, they won’t pull you up if you make a mistake. I find myself teaching junior officers a lot more than, say, masters I sailed with teaching me when I was a junior officer. I would have been extremely affronted if he had had to teach my anything, it would really have gone against the grain. If I find these guys have certificates and know the basics then fair enough but there are a hell of a lot of wrinkles they don’t know. Again it is a culture thing, I think. I don’t speak Tagalog so I am not entirely sure what they talk about when they are amongst themselves but I’m pretty sure it is not the job. I think it is more just a job for them where for us who stayed at sea it was always just a little bit more than job.



Masters and chiefs: Enabling globalization, 1975-1995

hermann mann, chief engineer; pitt sturmthal, shipmaster; torsten brecht, shipmaster Hermann Mann, aged 38, had been at sea for thirteen years and has a certificate which only allows him to sail on smaller ships as a chief engineer. If he sails on larger ships it must be as second or first engineer. He depends on agencies and personal contacts to find work. His last contract lasted eight months and aboard a ship which, had it been a ‘car it would have been scrapped’: Human lives were endangered there. Eighteen men were aboard. The owner obviously is a really bad guy. He personally is well off financially but his ships suffer. There isn’t a penny. No provisions, no bunker bill is paid. When the ship comes to Europe you don’t know whether it will be allowed to leave port because of the firms wanting their money. The ship was on a time charter, a general cargo ship from the Netherlands to Spain, Cuba, Canada and back to the Netherlands. On that ship we had Poles, Filipinos and Germans. The Poles were engine fitters because the ship was in a catastrophic condition. The engineroom was supposed to be automated so that it didn’t need to have watchkeepers but I was twenty-four hours on watch from the first day because everything was broken and the spare parts we had ordered simply didn’t come. It was OK to go on watch because there were three of us engineers but then the other second engineer quit and, ‘naturally’, no new second got sent. So, for the last four months the chief and I had to do six hour watches in turns for four months. Asked by his interviewer how often in his last ship had they done safety drills – in well-run ships these are weekly events and taken seriously – Hermann Mann replied: ‘As you can read in the list of defects of that ship, there were none during the last voyage where previously we had done them every fortnight. We had noticed that some of the Filipinos hadn’t had any experience with the breathing apparatus. It was catastrophic. If a fire had happened before we started the drills we would have been lost. We trained them. I must say it was fun to do so. But then a new captain came aboard and then new days were set for drills but the captain said there was too much work to do on deck. After a few complaints the contact between deck and engine people was interrupted totally. He simply didn’t talk to us any more.’ Looking back over the ships he had sailed on, Mann concluded that ‘in general’ there were ‘more positive than negative cases. It got really bad only in the last few years. These old ships were tried to operate as cheap as possible. One captain said to me,

249

250

Tony Lane

“Well, and you are the one to pull us out of the shit?” That’s the way you feel very often but there weren’t really bad ships, only bad companies.’ Pitt Sturmthal, a shipmaster, aged 47, went to sea when he was fifteen and in 1995 had been at sea for 32 years and had sailed as master since he was 30. The earlier period of his career was of course with German shipowners, German crews and ships flying the German flag. Since 1975 he has occasionally sailed aboard German-flagged ships but most of his ships have been flagged in Panama, Liberia, Cyprus and Antigua and he has found work through agencies. This interviewee had strong views about shipowners, agencies and especially about poorly trained crews. His comments on the latter subject continually surfaced throughout his interview where they would reappear whenever the interviewer tried to steer him back into the flow of chronological and thematic questioning, which served only to trigger additional recollections about crews. The interview transcript is punctuated with comments whose disjuncture is in truth more apparent than real. The first agency I worked for was in Cyprus and I cannot describe what kind of people they were – they were like horse-dealers. They had set up an agency in the Philippines and provided my crew. Perhaps there were one or two seamen amongst them in the beginning but there were more by the time me and the chief left! It was the same on other ships. We trained these people. We taught them how to do everything right. Everything, including navigation, correcting the charts, to do everything as good as required. Torsten Brecht had been at sea in 1995 for close to 18 years. He was then a 38-year old shipmaster. His last ship, a feeder container ship running a scheduled service between Japan and Thailand, had a crew of 17. There were three senior officers, all of them German. All other crew members including junior officers were Filipino. Brecht had had an uncomplicated career. His first ten years at sea were with a German company whose ships were crewed by Germans. After redundancy he found employment with a German company with mainly flagged-out ships. He has sailed under just three flags – Germany, Cyprus and Malta – and, unusually, has a permanent contract. When asked about his experiences with German and Filipino crew he spoke at some length. You cannot compare with German crews at all because the standard of a German Schiffsmechaniker [a rating trained to work both on deck



Masters and chiefs: Enabling globalization, 1975-1995

and in the engineroom] is much higher than that of a Filipino. The educational possibilities are much worse for the Filipinos and so are the standards in their schools. Because of that you cannot compare a German and a Filipino crew. Eight or nine years ago the educational standard of the Filipino was much better, the men themselves as well. But because the demand for Filipinos is much higher now, more Filipinos are hired and sent on board. The owners tell you: ‘Now start to train them’. You have to train them because otherwise you couldn’t work the ship properly. That is the weak point nowadays. The weak point is that fifty per cent of the men are not trained. I can see that from the sea-time they have. If I see that someone has been sailing for 9 or 10 years I can be sure the man has knowledge. Not a knowledge gained through an apprenticeship but through experience. But the training gets worse and so are our working conditions. Because I haven’t got a fitter any more because they need more hands in the engineroom the chief mate or the captain have to do any welding on deck. So we are doing work which originally we were not expected to do. It used to be that the mate planned the work schedule and then the bosun would supervise. If the weather turned bad the bosun would say ‘OK men, we are having a break for the moment’. Today it has to be the captain or the mate who’d say it was going to rain and the men should stop work. A week’s schedule is hardly possible and a monthly plan is possible only on paper. The chain of command today starts and ends with me if I have a Filipino mate who is not that good. In any case I do my rounds on deck to supervise and make sure that the men won’t get lazy or inaccurate in their work. In the past the Old Man [captain] wouldn’t do anything but receive reports from the Chief Mate. He, the mate, would work out the work schedule and the bosun would take care of the realisation. One can forget that today. The substantial points made in these reports from masters and chiefs require no further explication. It might be useful, though, to comment upon the respondents’ frames of reference since woven into their responses were phrases and vocabulary suggesting they took it for granted that their interlocutors ‘spoke their language’ – that is to say shared implicit meanings and the framing structures of the collective memory. All of the interviewed masters and chiefs, British and German, younger and older, began their careers with an expectation of working up a promotion lad-

251

252

Tony Lane

der and continuous employment either with the same shipowner or with others offering comparable working conditions. Their training, education and experiential learning were seamless. Wherever they were – with teachers and lecturers, with fellow students, with shipmates aboard ship, with other crews of other ships in foreign ports – they were in the company of other seafarers. In and through their immersion in this occupational community they internalized the normative meanings and requirements of the collective memory of their occupation; they learned the historic and the current requirements of ‘being a seafarer’ expressed both in the custom and practice of everyday life and formal occupational knowledge. The outcome of this collective sharing of formal knowledge and experience of practice was a powerful sense of belonging to a community of professionals and professionalism which nevertheless lacked any of the formal apparatus of a profession.9 By the time of promotion to master or chief these were people who had very definite ideas about the right ways of doing things. Of course there was scope for idiosyncrasy, but everyone shared and adhered to the knowledge of what constituted good practice and accordingly knew what could reasonably be expected of fellow practitioners, as much in the case of those more junior as those who were peers. So, when we hear our masters and chiefs talking of the general loss of loyalty to employers and professional shortcomings of newcomers to the labour market from ‘non-traditional’ sources it is because the ‘profession’ into which they had been initiated was no longer shaped by a consensus of practitioners as to what constituted good practice. And no longer so widely available was the possibility of a lengthy career with one company. For our masters and chiefs, the chance of career progression and the content of good practice was formed out of their historic experience in national labour markets. In the new circumstances of a global labour market, the institutional and organizational experiences which had formed their mentalités no longer existed as an ensemble available to new entrants, especially those from such countries as the Philippines with no modern history of international shipping. However, our masters and chiefs had so much confidence in the superiority of what had ‘made’ them, that their sense of professional integrity, their sense of the proper way of doing things, left them normatively obliged to ‘save’ as much as was feasible of the ‘proper way’ by requiring it of crew members, such as Filipinos, who had not and could not have undergone the same process of occupational immersion. 9  See T. Lane, Grey Dawn Breaking: British Merchant Seafarers in the Late Twentieth Century (Manchester, 1986).



Masters and chiefs: Enabling globalization, 1975-1995

iii. The global labour market The oil shocks of the mid-1970s and the subsequent downturn in world trade left the shipping industry in economic turbulence until the early 1990s. It was in this fifteen-year period that the seafaring labour market became global in the sense that networks of organizations were created enabling the recruitment of crews from around the world. A necessary pre-condition for this development was the re-registering of ships away from national regulatory regimes which limited the employment of foreign nationals to other less limiting jurisdictions, commonly known as ‘flags of convenience’.10 At least in the short term this was an infallible and instantaneous method of making large savings on voyage labour costs. In the longer term, and safely assuming diminishing possibilities of finding cheaper labour sources, the advantages of flagging out would be exhausted. Except for the oil majors and most of the liner companies, flagging out also entailed opting out of involvement in the training and certification process. By the mid-1990s, as we have seen above, the world’s largest merchant fleets were attached to the flags of such micro-states as Panama, Liberia, Bahamas, Cyprus, and Malta. Of these only Panama had a nautical academy and this was dedicated effectively to training Panama Canal pilots. While the governments of established maritime nations continued to support their relatively advanced administrations and training and certification regimes, the fleets attached to their flags were, in terms of seafarer nationality, increasingly crewed in ways strikingly similar to those of flag of convenience shipping. The Peoples’ Republic of China was the only country with a large nationally-flagged fleet where training and certification practices and standards looked remarkably like those of the established maritime nations of the 1970s. The shift to crews from relatively low wage countries was extremely rapid. In 1987 alone, the employment of Filipino seafarers in European-owned ships increased from 2,900 to 17,057 persons. Translated into crews, this meant that the number of European ships with a substantial Filipino contribution went from approximately 200 to 1,130 in just 12 months. Almost all of the displaced seafarers were citizens of Western European countries. This sudden 10  Nationality restrictions although universal varied considerably. On the one hand were nations such as France, Italy and Spain which required all crew members to be nationals. Others, such as the UK, the Netherlands and Norway, had restrictions on officer nationality but few or none on the employment of ratings. The British registry was the most open to the employment of non-nationals. Nationality restrictions were everywhere steadily reduced through the 1980s and 1990s except in the USA. In the UK restrictions were finally abolished in the late 1990s with the introduction of the tonnage tax.

253

254

Tony Lane

switch to employing seafarers, most of whom had little if any previous experience of ocean-going ships, unavoidably entailed a reduction in standards of competence.11 Only when seafarers became available from the countries of Eastern Europe were employers able to crew their ships with well-trained and educated but low wage personnel. Eastern Europe, while becoming a significant source of seafarers and especially of officers, did not supplant the Philippines which by the mid-1990s was providing approximately one-third of seafarers employed aboard the world’s internationally trading ships. Hong Kong and Singapore in the 1960s were virtually the sole sources of Southeast Asian seafarers. They continued to be centres of high training and regulatory standards, but by the 1990s had ceased to be significant suppliers of seafarers much below the rank of master and chief engineer. Where in 1964 Hong Kong had some 45,000 seafarers there were only 2,088 in 1992, even though the Hong Kong-flagged fleet had grown to 1,233 ships. The same applied no less to Singapore in terms of both numbers of seafarers and ships. In each case substantial increases in real wages and greatly enlarged job opportunities ashore strangled both supply of and demand for their seafarers. The ‘new labour supply countries’ as they came to be known by employers were very new indeed in Southeast Asia. In the International Labour Organization’s report to its second Asian Maritime Conference in 1965, Korean seafarers received no mention whatever and Indonesians and Filipinos were reported as working only aboard inter-island ships. Small numbers of the latter nationalities had in fact worked on a few Dutch, Canadian and U.S.-owned ships but not on a scale sufficient to provide the basis for a rapid and large expansion into international shipping. A similar situation applied to Koreans – small numbers of them, domiciled in Japan, had for many years sailed on Japanese ships. And yet by 1988 there were estimated to be 50,000 Korean seamen, half of them working aboard Japanese-owned ships, many of them managed from Hong Kong and flagged in Panama. By the later 1990s the rapid rate of economic growth in South Korean industry saw Korean seafarers disappearing from the labour market, just like their Hong Kong and Singaporean counterparts. Flagging out not only led to the recruitment of large numbers of inexperienced crew members from the new labour supply countries in Southeast Asia. It also and inevitably resulted in a substantial decline in nautical training and education in the established maritime nations and a growing dependence on the under-resourced, and often inexperienced and poorly regulated training

11  ILO, The Global Seafarer (Geneva, 2003), chap. 3.



Masters and chiefs: Enabling globalization, 1975-1995

and educational institutions in the new labour supply countries.12 The gap in technical and administrative standards between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ sources of seafarers was large. Seafarers’ training, education and certification became increasingly prominent issues from the mid-1980s as underwriters, insurance and class surveyors, shipmasters, maritime administrators, shipowners and trade unions all questioned the adequacy of the new world regime of maritime training and education training and education. Confidence was not enhanced when the maritime authority of Indonesia said in 1990 that approximately fifty per cent of Indonesian seafarers had had no formal training. In the same year Shell announced that from then on it would be expecting the owners of ships chartered by them to commit themselves to proper training programmes for staff and crew and to have a clear policy regarding navigation and watchkeeping. In 1991, the Hong Kong maritime authorities refused to recognize holders of Philippine licences for employment on Hong Kong-registered ships: A dramatic fall in the pass rates recorded by the Philippines maritime training schools has followed a thorough overhaul of the previously corrupt system of examination. Pass rates as high as 100 per cent were being regularly recorded in the early 1980s by some of the 70-odd schools and, although the rates dropped to a more realistic 40-50 per cent in 1986, by the late 1980s they were once again in the 90 per cent and above range. Cheating, bribing and fixing in the exams were endemic… It was well known for some time both inside and outside the Philippines that licenses could be bought, but the biggest impetus for change came in 1991 when the Hong Kong authorities refused to recognize Philippine licences for employment on Hong Kong-registered ships… Elaborate security measures [introduced in 1992] resulted immediately in the overall pass rate falling to 15 per cent. In May [1993] the pass rates for master mariners were 12 per cent, chief mates 17 per cent, second mates 11 per cent and third mates 3 per cent. Foreign employers of Filipino seamen are still concerned that the exams, although now ‘tamper-proof and leak-proof’, are still of a generally low standard.13 The ban was lifted in 1993 but not without what turned out to be wellfound reservations. A report commissioned by the International Maritime 12  In 1979-80 the British shipping industry recruited 1,745 new entrant boy ratings. Just three years later, in 1983-84 the new intake was negligible at 274 new boy ratings. 13  Lloyd’s List, 28 April, 1994.

255

256

Tony Lane

Organization (IMO) on fraudulent certification generally found that the problem was greatest in South and Southeast Asia where the research team itself negotiated the purchase of forged certificates.14 Coinciding with the presentation of the report to the IMO, the general secretary of the International Transport Workers Federation was photographed showing a genuine First Mate’s certificate in his name, corruptly issued by an official of the Republic of Panama. The holder had never been a seafarer of any rank. These sorts of issues were ‘known’ in shipping industry circles in the 1980s but did not surface in public discourse until the early 1990s. In 1993 the Norwegian shipowner, Andreas Ugland, then president of the International Tanker Owners Association (INTERTANKO), complained of the wide variation in standards required for certificates of competence, ranging from high to dangerously low. Ugland called for higher certification standards, enhanced enforcement by flag states, better training and education, and Port State Control inspections to ensure compliance with the IMO convention, Standards of Training and Certification of Watchkeepers (STCW). The eventual result of the public airing of issues which had long been heard anecdotally was an amended STCW whose main sponsor was the international shipowners’ organization, the International Chamber of Shipping, and its subsidiary concerned with labour matters, the International Shipping Federation. Promulgated in 1995 the new convention, STCW95, was to be implemented in 2000 in order to give the marine administrations of the new labour supply countries time to create appropriate jurisdictional structures. IMO officers and various national delegations went to considerable lengths to assist the national administrations, such as that of the Philippines, in complying with the new convention’s requirements. By 2001 there was, in the public domain, a reasonably accurate list of the world’s training and education institutions but it was not a list of equals in respect of curriculum content, pedagogic standards and dependable certification practices. Despite its commitment to promoting uniformly high standards of training and unimpeachable certification, the IMO itself did not then and does not now have the means to ensure the realization of the intentions embedded in STCW95. This structural incapacity underlined the difficulties facing the shipping industry. Just as it had to contend with growing pressure from globally networked port state control agencies to enforce high levels of ships’ structural and safety standards, the shipping industry had too disorganized a labour market to 14  IMO, A Study on Fraudulent Practices Associated with Certificates of Competency and Endorsements (London, 2001).



Masters and chiefs: Enabling globalization, 1975-1995

reliably train and certificate sufficient seafarers with high average levels of professional competence. Thus, the consequences of the labour market’s deficiencies were left for shipmasters and chief engineers to deal with. In this paper they were British and German. They could equally have been from anywhere else in Europe and Japan. Masters and chiefs were on their own when at sea but they were not without influence. Given that it was almost unknown for managers to sail aboard their ships, and impossible for trade union officers, it could only have been the intelligence offered by masters and chiefs that in the mid-1990s led to substantially enhanced roles for the IMO and ILO in the regulation of the global labour market. Whether in the daily running of ships or through the intelligence they passed on, the global labour market and its emergent international regulatory regime was substantially enabled by the shipmasters and the chief engineers of the ‘old order’, the frontline technocrats of world shipping.

257

258

About the contributers

About the contributors

Sean T. Cadigan is Associate Professor of History at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. A native of Newfoundland, Cadigan completed a PhD thesis at Memorial University on the social and economic relations of the nineteenth-century Newfoundland fishery in 1991. Since then he has published widely in the fields of ecological culture of coastal communities, pulpand-paper diversification in Newfoundland, forestry and ecosystem health in coastal communities, community-based marine resource management, and fisheries co-management. Colin J. Davis is professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the United States of America. He works in the field of U.S. and international labour history with an emphasis on transnational relationships between government, trade unions, and workers. Though currently working on the fishing industry, his publications include Waterfront Revolts: New York and London Dockworkers, 1946-61 (Champaign, IL, 2003) and Power at Odds: The 1922 National Railroad Shopmen’s Strike (Champaign, IL, 1997). He is also coeditor of It Is Union and Liberty: A History of Alabama Coal Miners (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1999), and A Comparative International History of Dock Labour, 1780-1970 (Aldershot, 2000). Heide Gerstenberger held a chair in Theory of State and Society at the University of Bremen, Germany from 1974 until 2005. She has also worked extensively on the social history of German seafaring as well as on seafaring labour in the age of globalization. Richard Gorski is lecturer in maritime history at the University of Hull, UK. His most recent research has been concerned with the administration of British seafaring during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though he has also worked in the related fields of shipping and fisheries history. William Kenefick lectures in Scottish and British History in the School of Humanities, University of Dundee, UK. He has published widely on Scottish maritime and labour history, the impact of the First World War and the Russian



About the contributers

Revolution on the Scottish working class, and Irish and Jewish relations in Scotland from c.1870 to the present. His latest book is Red Scotland! The Rise and Fall of the Radical Left, c.1872 to 1932 (Edinburgh, 2007). Alston Kennerley was an apprentice and deck officer in the ships of the Blue Funnel and Glen Lines in the 1950s. Having passed his Master Mariner’s examination, he read history at University and thereafter developed his teaching of maritime history to undergraduates. He retired from the University of Plymouth, UK, in 2000, but continues to be active in research and conference presentations. He has published widely, especially on maritime education, training and seamen’s welfare. He is a Fellow of the Nautical Institute and past Chairman of its Education and Training Committee. He is currently jointly editing a Maritime History of Cornwall, and completing a series of papers relating to merchant ships’ engineers. Tony Lane converted from 2nd Mate on tankers to historical sociologist in the 1960s via Ruskin College and Liverpool University. Director of the Seafarers International Research Centre from 1997 to 2003, he is now Professor Emeritus at Cardiff University and working on a new study, ‘Seafarers, Shipowners and the State since 1860’. His books include: Grey Dawn Breaking: British Merchant Seamen in the late Twentieth Century (Manchester, 1986); The Merchant Seamen’s War (Manchester, 1990); Liverpool, City of the Sea (Liverpool, 1997); and The Global Seafarer: Living and Working Conditions in a Globalized Industry (ILO, 2003). Jelle van Lottum is ESRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, UK. His current project involves a comparison between migration within, into and out of England and the Netherlands between 1600 and 1900. He is the author of Across the North Sea: The impact of the Dutch Republic on international labour migration, c. 1550-1850 (Amsterdam, 2007). Jan Lucassen is senior research fellow at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and professor of International and Comparative Social History at the Free University in Amsterdam. He has published very widely in the fields of comparative global labour history, including labour migrations, craftsmen’s and journeymen’s guilds, labour relations and the monetization of wages.

259

260

About the contributers

György Nováky holds a position at Uppsala University, Sweden. His professional interests include the use of e-learning in higher education, while his personal research ranges widely in the fields of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Dutch and Swedish history. David J. Starkey is reader in maritime history, and director of the Maritime Historical Studies Centre, at the University of Hull, UK. His research interests embrace all aspects of past interactions of humans and the maritime environment, especially shipping, seafaring and fisheries history.