Canadian Coast Guard
<% else %>A History of the Canadian Coast Guard and Marine Services
by Thomas E. Appleton
Freeboard, Load lines and Subdivision
In relating the progress of steamboat inspection, and of the various measures to improve safety in the grain and timber trades, we have seen how legislation was introduced by the Department of Marine and Fisheries to cover specialized Canadian needs which had been brought to notice by a high rate of marine accidents. Meanwhile, ocean shipping throughout the world had suffered equally distressing ailments; the heart of the problem, of which the Canadian troubles were but a particular case, lay in the wider question of how deep to load a ship while yet ensuring sufficient reserve buoyancy to face the perils of the sea.
In England, a series of hard knocks had shaken public confidence. If the public were alarmed at maritime disasters, feeling in professional circles ran more deeply and, in 1860, John Russell, who was associated with Brunel at the time in the design of the Great Eastern, joined with others to form the Institution of Naval Architects. There was no lack of matters to discuss including, before long, the loss of a brand new battleship, HMS Captain, which capsized in a squall in the Bay of Biscay with the loss of her entire ship's company except for one or two. Stability became a prime topic with the new Institution.
In British merchant shipping, amounting to some six million tons in 1867, the loss for that year had been 356,573 tons from various causes. With this toll of shipwreck came terrible casualties, 2350 seamen and 137 passengers. As a matter of interest it had been a light year for passenger deaths, double that number having been lost in one shipwreck alone in 1866.
This grave situation, which had been boiling up for years, now came to a head and many reformers attempted to improve matters. Lloyds Register of Shipping and the underwriters of Liverpool drew up tables of freeboard, and the Institution of Naval Architects made a series of recommendations on ship construction. Meanwhile, to add to the problem, the annual deaths in shipping rose to nearer three thousand and Parliamentary interest was aroused. James Hall, a Tyneside ship owner, allied himself with Samuel Plimsoll, who had introduced compulsory draft marks in 1871, to bring in a bill for the regulation of ship loading.
Samuel Plimsoll, whose personal contribution towards the safety and well-being of seamen remains unchallenged, was elected to the Parliament of Westminster as member for Derby, in the Liberal interest, in 1868. Failing to gain immediate Parliamentary support, Plimsoll published a book called Our Seamen which made a great impression. Following this, and co-ordinating the work of all interested bodies of reform, he moved a resolution calling for a Royal Commission to enquire into the seaworthiness of ships, which was appointed in 1873. Owing to the diversity of interests, the Royal Commission could hardly have been expected to solve this highly technical question, but they recommended a strengthening of Marine Department of the Board of Trade and, while affirming that the culpable ship owner should be checked and punished, they felt that it was the owner's responsibility, rather than that of government, to keep a vessel seaworthy.
Plimsoll continued to belabour Parliament; his case was built on evidence that seaworthy and overloaded ships had been sailed to their doom, always well insured, and that Britain should cease immediately the evils of the 'coffin ships'.
Eventually, in 1875, a government bill was introduced. Plimsoll was by no means satisfied that it was adequate but, on the principle of 'half a loaf', he determined to support it from his opposition bench; when Disraeli announced that the government had decided to withdraw the bill, the member for Derby was so shocked and furious that he lost control of himself, flung the word "villain" to the Prime Minister and Government side, and shook his fist at the Speaker of the House of Commons. The uproar in the House was terrific, but before long it became obvious that the public shared Plimsoll's point of view; he apologized to Mr. Speaker, the bill was passed, and in 1876 it became compulsory for every foreign-going British ship to carry a maximum load line on her side. The Merchant Shipping Act was amended accordingly.
A tireless president in the cause better conditions for seamen, Samuel Plimsoll became president of the Seamen's and Firemen's Union. He later went to work on the scandalous conditions then prevalent in the conveyance of cattle in ships, and further reforms resulted. He died in 1898 but his monument had already been acknowledged on all seas, most ships. It is a white line, horizontally dividing a circle, called the 'Plimsoll mark'.
The legislation successfully introduced by Plimsoll in 1876 had one serious weakness --- the position of the compulsory load line was left to the judgment of the ship owner. Naturally enough there was a strong conflict of interest here and ship owners, Canadian as well as British, made strong objections when the Load line Committee of the Board of Trade framed load line rules based on sound technical principles. However, in 1890, it became compulsory to have the load line positioned according to these rules and Canadian ships, along with other British ships, were then subjected to measurement and marking before obtaining clearance from a British port.
Protests broke out anew, particularly from Canadian ship owners who claimed that, unlike their British counterparts who built in steel, their vessels made of wood for buoyancy and carrying capacity to the detriment of speed. To read some of the speeches of this period one would think that such vessels were safest when they has so little freeboard that decks were awash. There was, as usual, a commercial interest at stake in the competition which undoubtedly had to be faced in foreign vessels to which the law did not apply. To be fair, not all ship owners were unmindful of their responsibilities and it has always been difficult to recognize the necessity for reform in advance of a general acceptance. Matters of this kind should be viewed against the background of the times; in fact the progress of our marine legislation showed that the country was not unmindful of safety at sea and, from 1891, compulsory rules for the placing of load lines were put into effect in Canada.
The coming of the Plimsoll mark, a victory in the legislative battle for safety of life at sea, can be appreciated by anyone who has ever stepped into a rowboat. The associated questions of stability and subdivision, difficult for the non-technical mind to follow, are equally fundamental. As the nineteenth century drew to its close and as shipping laws became more comprehensive, so did the size and complexity of ships increase. At sea, the trans-Atlantic liner became the highest symbol of luxury and power which the age could produce: in the Great Lakes, the old wooden steamboats with their cord-wood burning boilers and low pressure steam, had given way to magnificent vessels with huge dining rooms, mirrored and furnished to reflect the pattern of life on board. Failure to appreciate the principles involved, tragic as it was in the grain and timber ships, was to shock the senses of those who thought that size alone would lessen the eternal dangers of the sea.
Before the time that the first Canada Shipping Act was passed in 1906, the laws resulting from Plimsoll's work in England had long ago been adopted in our statues, but the Act combined them with regulations which had been evolved to meet the specialized needs of Canadian shipping. The term "steamboat" remained in use in connection with inspection but, as Canada moved away from the era of river steamboats to that of large inland freighters, the phrase "steamship" inspection was introduced at last in the Act of 1934. Meantime, between the passing of the Acts of 1906 and 1927, two shipping tragedies were to have great influence on the laws of safety at sea, particularly on the question of subdivision.
The first one shocked the world. At 2.20 a.m. on April 15, 1912, the Titanic, largest ocean liner in existence and on her maiden voyage, hit an iceberg when steaming at 22 knots and sank. This remains the heaviest peacetime disaster in the history of merchant shipping. Of 2,224 souls on board, 1,513 were drowned in that starlit night of calm and icy horror. A month later, and but two years before her own untimely end, the Marine and Fisheries Ship, Montmagny was still searching the coast for bodies from the Titanic, the sinking having taken place well to the eastwards of Newfoundland.
Two judicial inquiries resulted, one under Senator Smith and a Committee of Congress which met in New York soon after the survivors were landed, and the other under Lloyd Mersey of Toxteth, who presided over the Board of Trade Commission which met in London a few weeks later. For sheer drama, no shipping investigation has ever equalled these two. Not only the magnitude of disaster, but the source and nature of the testimony gripped the world. The master went down with the grip, the senior surviving officer was the second mate, and every one of the Titanic's engineer officers perished on duty as their ship went down with dynamos running and pumps working. The chairman of the owning company was prominent in a passenger list which included society names on both sides of the Atlantic and, with few surviving officers, the testimony of rich and influential passengers alternated with evidence from seamen, firemen and stewards.
The essence of the disaster lay in the fact that men were mesmerized by sheer size. They thought that nothing could possibly happen to the largest ship at sea which, in anticipation of the worst conceivable collision, had been designed to remain afloat with any two compartments flooded. But the berg had been sighted dead ahead at less than half a mile and, as the Titanic swept past under full helm with the engineers frantically attending to the order "full astern", this giant chisel of inert ice had flooded four compartments and the forward boiler room. From the moment of that inconceivable longitudinal gash, nothing could have saved the Titanic.
On the lifesaving equipment side, an equally unimagined spectre had arisen. The Titanic carried 20 assorted boats, a number in excess of those required by law in proportion to her tonnage, which could accommodate between them 1178 persons, of little more than half the total passengers and crew. In two hours of unbelievably calm sea 19 boats got away to save 711 lives, many of them directly from the water.
In delivering his judgment that the Titanic was lost in collision with an iceberg, "brought about by the excessive speed with which the ship was being navigated", Lord Mersey recounted the slow progress of the lifesaving regulations which, since last amended in the Merchant Shipping Act of 1894, had hardly been charged. Making allowances for some doubt as to whether additional boats would have served in this particular case, he commented:
"The outstanding circumstance ... is the omission, during so many years, to revise the rules of 1894... The gross tonnage of the vessel is not, in my opinion, a satisfactory basis on which to calculate the provision of boat accommodation."
The recommendations of the Titanic inquiry, briefly stated, were that the Board of Trade should be empowered by legislation to approve the design of ships before construction, particularly as regards bulkheads and subdivision, and that sufficient boats should be carried for all on board. The first was a technical matter which would only be resolved by years of debate and experience on the part of naval architects. Strange it is that the second, which lay at the roots of man's anxiety for years, and which had worried Risley and the Toronto Globe so long before, is simple and remained for centuries undefined in law.
The impact of this tragedy had immediate effect on marine regulations. The Attorney General of England announced that it was proposed to call an international conference to discuss lifesaving appliances. In January 1914, as a direct consequence of this resolve, 16 nations sent their marine experts to London to attend the first International Convention for the Safety of Human Lives at Sea. Reflecting a world which was about to shatter, the preamble announcing the various heads of state commenced with:
"His majesty the German Emperor, King of Prussia, on behalf of the German Empire; His Majesty the Emperor of Austria, King of Bohemia and Apostolic King of Hungary; His Majesty of Belgium... His Majesty the Emperor of Russia ..." etc., etc.
The British representatives, including many of those prominent in the Titanic inquiry, were headed by Lord Mersey himself. From our point of view the Convention of 1914 marked a definite stage in the marine history of Canada. Invited to attend, this country sent the Deputy Minister of Marine and Fisheries, Mr. Alexander Johnston.
The 1914 Solas Convention affirmed and widened the conclusions of the Titanic enquiry and introduced concepts such as 'Convention ship', 'criterion of service' and 'floodable length' which became familiar to steamship inspectors as the principles of naval architecture were applied to the law of the sea. Unfortunately this pioneer work was held up by the war, but before the outbreak of hostilities another sad reminder of marine dangers took place.
It happened not long after the Deputy Minister had returned to Ottawa from his attendance at the Convention in London. In the early hours of May 29, the liner Empress of Ireland dropped her pilot at Father Point and settled down for the long run to Liverpool. It was a fine night, although with patches of fog, and the captain was on the bridge as the ship steamed out from the pilot station at 18 knots and altered course to head down the St. Lawrence Estuary. Not as large as the Titanic, the Empress was a 14,000 ton passenger vessel built in 1906 to the highest standards of the day; of her six deck officers, four had master's certificates. Below decks, 1,057 passengers were asleep in their cabins, as were all but those on duty of her 420 crew. As it was a fine night, many cabin scuttles were open.
Shortly after altering course, Captain Kendall sighted the green light of a steamer on his starboard bow; although the stranger was drawing clear, she was occasionally obscured by fog patches and the captain stopped his engines and rang down "full astern". The awful example of the Titanic was fresh in the minds of all liner masters, and the Empress lay stationary in the water, listening and exchanging sound signals with the passing ship. Soon afterwards a vessel emerged from the fog at full speed and rammed the Empress on the starboard beam. Not more than 15 minutes later, the Empress of Ireland had sunk; 1,012 persons were drowned, killed by the impact of collision, or were missing.
The other ship turned out to be the Norwegian collier Storsand which, like the vessel which sank the Montmagny in September of the same year of 1914, was bound from Nova Scotia with a full cargo of coal for Montreal. She suffered no casualties and relativity little damage and, aided by the pilot tender Eureka, Captain J. B. Belanger, from Father Point, and the cable ship Lady Evelyn, Captain Pouliot, from Rimouski, 465 survivors were picked up by boats.
This time, it was the Minister of Marine and Fisheries, the Hon. J. D. Hazen, who was faced with the prospect of an inquiry into a major sea disaster. As Lord Mersey was by now the best known Admiralty jurist in the world he, together with the Hon. Ezekiel McLeod, Chief Justice of New Brunswick, and Sir Adolph Routhier of Quebec, both Judges in Admiralty of the Exchequer Court of Canada, were appointed by warrant, under the Canada Shipping Act, to inquire into:
"... a shipping casualty which I, the said Minister, consider to be of extreme gravity and special importance..."
These three commissioners, aided by four assessors, and in company with fourteen legal counsel representing the interests of all parties, then held the accident inquiry and delivered their report from the Chateau Frontenac at Quebec on July 11.
Captain Kendall was among the survivors and the testimony was clear. The cause of the accident was found to lie in the action of the Storstad in that the mate, who was on watch at the time, was wrong in altering course in the fog after having sighted the Empress as he did, and he was also blamed for failing to call his captain when visibility decreased. These were simple, if tragic, human errors. The other question to resolve lay in the rapidity of sinking.
The gash caused by the collision was immense, running vertically from almost the bottom of the Empress to some 25 feet above the waterline. The position of impact was established with certainty as a cabin nameplate was found embedded in the Storstad. In effect, a hole of 350 square feet in area was penetrated 7 feet in such a way that two adjacent boiler rooms, with a combined length of 175 feet, were opened to the sea. Even with this frightful damage, the court considered that the Empress would have remained afloat had not watertight doors above the main deck been left open. In addition, the bunkers were divided by fore and aft bulkheads and, as the starboard bunkers filled, the vessel heeled over on that side and, immersing the open portholes in passenger cabins, rolled over and sank.
Some of the lessons of the Titanic had been learned. The Empress of Ireland carried boats to accommodate a total of 1860 persons, considerably more than her entire complement. But with the rapid list to starboard the boats on the port side could not be launched and, all things considered, the crew did well to get six boats afloat and clear before the ship capsized.
The suggestions presented at this enquiry dealt with the closing of watertight doors and side scuttles and the placing of rafts on deck. On the publication of the commission's report, the experts went their various ways, and Lord Mersey sailed for England. In the course of his long career as president of the Admiralty Probate and Divorce Division of King' Bench, later in the House of Lords and then in the three marine tribunals of 1912-14, Lord Mersey must have considered more evidence from masters, mates, engineers, ship owners and naval architects than any man alive, and must have been deeply aware of the frailty of human and technical effort in the safety of the trans-Atlantic ferries. Then in his seventies, one wonders whether , in the solitude of his luxurious stateroom, His Lordship enjoyed the untroubled sleep of less well informed passengers.
Although the 1914 Convention was not ratified at the time, the nations met again in 1929 to continue and revise the standards of construction and equipment then proposed. The 1914 Convention had suggested that the very largest types of passenger ship should be designed to remain afloat with three compartments flooded and, with some adjustments, this was adopted. When the Titanic was lost, the flooded compartments filled more or less evenly and the vessel did not heel over before she dipped by the head to take that last agonizing vertical plunge in which survivors could hear the boilers crashing down through the bulkheads. For this reason the 1914 Convention was concerned with symmetrical flooding rather than with stability. But the Empress of Ireland did heel over rapidly, with terrible results, and the 1929 Convention led to a requirement that technical information on stability be provided for the use of the master.
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