Canadian Coast Guard

Modern Marine Legislation

In reviewing the progress of marine safety legislation, attention has been directed, inevitably, towards disaster. It was disaster on a large scale which necessitated the first regulations, primitive though they were. In many ways conditions in sailing ships remained primitive, by modern standards, until the end, and it is hardly surprising that many of them came to grief in one form or another. In the steamers, absorption of ever increasing power and heat energy gave rise to a continuing process by which repeated calamity served only to introduce delayed remedial action. We have seen also how concerted effort on an international scale brought great improvements and how Canada, although not herself one of the large sea-carrying nations, played a part in this effort from the beginning; much of it was concerned with vessels in which Canadians were more likely to be shippers or passengers than owners.

SS Northern Ranger.

Launched at Paisley in 1936 by Mrs. Dalton of St. John's, Nfld., wife of Captain Dalton of Newfoundland Railway Steamships, the Northern Ranger makes her curtsy to the lady sponsor. After an arduous and successful career on the Newfoundland coast the Northern Ranger made her last run to the fishing ports of Labrador in September 1966 and has since been scrapped.

(Fleming & Ferguson)

But the emphasis on disaster, necessary though it is to explain progress, must not be allowed to distort the whole perspective. Credit must be given to the vast majority of steamships which, in the utmost decorum. Great Lakes freighters, a unique type including vessels which are by far the largest in the world to be handled without tugs, spent their entire lives navigating narrow channels with conspicuous success. In Newfoundland the coastal passenger steamers, operating under physical and weather conditions among the worst in the world, sailed in and out of a succession of tiny ports and reef strewn inlets, day after day, year after year, as they still do. Elsewhere powerful short run steamers on the east coast, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and on the west coast, maintained a year round service of communications. In seagoing passenger ships, of which Canada owned a surprising number until economic conditions drove them from the seas, a fine record of safety was established. Among these were the Canadian National vessels on the Montreal-Halifax-West Indies run with names prefixes by the title Lady, and the two beautiful Empresses of Canadian Pacific, the Russia and the Asia, largest passenger ships ever to sail under Canadian colours, which served the Vancouver-Japan-China-Manilla route. Of all these ships, as of most Canadian shipping, it can be said that their crews. There was then no substitute for manual effort; watches and visual lookouts were vigilantly kept, the furnaces tended, the ever turning bearings wiped and oiled, and the galleys and domestic areas faithfully guarded by conscientious men.

After the second world war air travel attracted the bulk of passenger traffic, and liners of all kinds decreased in number. At the same time freighters became more specialized and modern methods of maintenance brought changes to the duties of all at sea. During the war a large scale experience of ship casualties by enemy action had brought about the new science of 'damage control' and many freighters and tankers were snatched from the sea by improvisation amounting to near genius. In the matter of saving life it was noticed that survivors from ditched aircraft, once their rubber rafts, had a better chance than the sailors in their wood or steel lifeboats who were sometimes lost before they could get into them. Looking back to the Titanic for example, techniques of this kind, with modern internal communication, would have saved countless lives. Had modern damage control methods been in force it is certain that her engineers, who died in heroic devotion to duty, would have been ordered on deck in time to have some chance of escape even if the ultimate fate or vessel was beyond hope.

In this climate of continuing improvement, the inaugural session of the Inter-Governmental Maritime Consultative Organization (IMCO) met in London, in 1959, with a spirit of genuine co-operation to plan the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) which was due to be held in 1960. The scope of the Convention had widened since the original meeting of 1914, and 55 nations were represented when the 1960 Convention set about revision of its previous work. Subjects under review included the safety of cargo ships and tankers, radio, the influence of radar on ship operation, and the coming of the inflatable; resulting from this meeting changes were made in the International Rules for the Prevention of Collisions at Sea. Among other regulations subsequently modified, the rules for carriage of grain in bulk, which had been revised many times since the Canadian pioneering of the eighteen seventies, were brought up to date.

In passenger shipping, the 1960 Convention was influenced by the collision of two modern liners in 1956, the Italian Andrea Doria and the Swedish Stockholm, which once again focussed attention on that most fundamental cause of accidents, human error. Technically, this disaster involved fatal asymmetrical flooding of a damaged ship, a factor in stability which had been tragically prominent when the Empress of Ireland capsized nearly half a century previously. The 1960 Convention gave rise to measures for the control of flooding to avoid large angles of heel.

Also, 1960 saw the trials of an entirely new type of vessel which, in fulfillment of lengthy study, had at last come to the brink of reality. It had since been tried, if not continually used, on a commercial scale. With the advent of the United States nuclear merchant ship Savannah, first of its kind in the world, the time was ripe for international discussion on the rights of nations to impose conditions of entry of such ships to their ports, on radiation hazards, on the design and construction of nuclear marine power plants, and on the standards of operation to be met by personnel. These discussions produced the first tentative international rules on nuclear merchant ships.

Above: the ocean going package freighter Fort St. Louis, built by Davie Shipbuilding at Lauzon, Que. in 1963, passes the waterfront at Detroit. Of 466 feet in length, she is propelled by four oil engines connected to a single shaft by reduction gearing.

Below: the bulk carrier Murray Bay, designed for the ore and grain trades, is a 730-foot maximum Seaway type. Built in 1963 by Collingwood Shipyards, the Murray Bay is a single screw ship with geared turbine and water tube boilers.

Apart from laws dealing solely with the safety of ships and seamen, most nations are deeply concerned with pollution of the seas by oil, a modern danger to natural resources which has, at times, reached alarming proportions. Canada has co-operated to the full with the IMCO nations in prohibiting the discharge of oil and oily waste from ships in her own waters, and off her shores, and many vessels have been prosecuted under Canadian law for contravention of the Oil Pollution Regulations.

Much of the work of the Marine Regulations Branch concerns domestic shipping, particularly the large fleets of fishing vessels operating on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and , to a lesser extent, in the Great Lakes. Standards are laid down for fishing boat inspection and for the lifesaving equipment which they must carry. Of recent years the growth of pleasure boating has been most marked and, although yachts and motor boats are not subject to inspection, the Small Vessel Regulations define the various laws of operation and equipment which must be met.

The question of public safety in pleasure boats, now a matter which touches the lives of most Canadian families in one way or another, is a concept far removed from the original Canada Shipping Act. Strangely enough, one unexpected mention of pleasure yachts appears in an Order in Council of June 1889; this empowered the Minister of Marine and Fisheries to examine candidates and issue a Certificate of Competency as "Master of a Pleasure Yacht".

For a fee of $10, and on passing an examination of the same standard as master of a seagoing ship, a yacht owner could be granted a certificate which could be used only in command of his own yacht. Yachts are exempt from the requirement to carry certificated officers and, then as now, an owner could legally command his own yacht without certificate, but the examination did provide an academic distinction for those who wished to acquire it. At that period there were many large steam and sailing yachts on both sides of the Atlantic and, in an age when a background of the sea had a pleasing air of adventure and prestige, some distinguished yachtsmen did hold the certificate, mostly in England. Notable among these was Lord Brassey, son of Thomas Brassey who largely built the Grand Trunk Railway, who sailed round the world in the yacht Sunbeam in 1876. The sunbeam was a beautiful three-masted topsail schooner with auxiliary steam engine. The account of this voyage, written by Lady Brassey who, in all climates and countries visited, preserved a seagoing version of the charm and comforts of a Victorian drawing room and children's nursery, is one of the classics of sailing literature and one of the very few which deal with yachting in the grand manner.

The voyage of the Sunbeam and the prestige of Lord Brassey, who was a naval administrator and a Civil Lord of the Admiralty, made the yacht-master's certificate fashionable in a limited circle. The certificate was by no means common in England and it has long ago lapsed in Canada where there was little requirement. Today anyone who is a student of navigation can study for the various qualifications of the Canadian Power Squadrons, a training organization with high standards of achievement in all fields of pleasure boat operation. The Small Vessel Regulations, which are administered by the Department of Transport, make no provision for operator licensing in any form and cover such matters as rules of the road, safety equipment to be carried, and the recommended safe load and horsepower for the smaller types of boat. An annual publication, Safety Afloat, was first produced in 1956 and has since become widely known as the standard reference for all boat owners.