Maritime Rules Born from Disasters
Much of today's maritime regulation grew out of disasters. Titanic led to SOLAS and Torrey Canyon opened the way to MARPOL.
Much of today's maritime regulation grew out of disasters. Titanic led to SOLAS and Torrey Canyon opened the way to MARPOL. The pattern was usually the same: a ship was lost, news of the dead or the fouled coast reached the public, and the text changed. Here is that sequence, from the oldest rule to the present.
The Lex Rhodia and the Price of Jettisoned Cargo
The oldest of these rules is about sharing money. With a ship about to founder in a storm, the master would order cargo over the side, which left the question of who should pay. The Lex Rhodia, attributed to the sea law of Rhodes, spread the loss of goods thrown over to save everyone among those whose property survived. The Roman jurist Julius Paulus recorded the rule at the start of the third century and it went into Justinian's Digest in the sixth.[4] Modern general average works on the same logic. Its first international text was the York-Antwerp Rules of 1890, last revised in 2016.[4] That is why cargo owners whose goods were untouched in a containership fire still get an average bond to sign. There is more in the piece on maritime law.
Lloyd's Coffee House and Ship Inspection
The next step came from underwriters adding up their losses. In the late seventeenth century Edward Lloyd's coffee house in London became the place where seafarers and insurers traded news. An underwriter who wanted to measure risk had to know the ship. In 1760 customers formed the Register Society, and in 1764 they printed the first register. Hulls were graded by letter and fittings by number, and the top rating, A1, first appeared in the 1775-76 edition.[5] Today's Lloyd's Register and the business of ship classification came out of this. Lloyd's also published loading tables in 1835, though they applied only to its own classed ships.[2] For crew deaths and third-party claims that hull insurance did not cover, shipowners formed mutual clubs that became today's P&I insurance.
Coffin Ships and Samuel Plimsoll
In nineteenth-century Britain insurance also had a perverse effect. Overinsured, overloaded old ships were known as coffin ships. When one sank the owner collected, and a sailor who refused to board went to prison. One inspector of prisons reported that nine of every twelve prisoners in south-west England's jails were seamen serving 12 weeks for refusing to sail in ships they thought unseaworthy.[2]
The man who turned this into a campaign was no sailor. Samuel Plimsoll was born in Bristol in 1824 and worked as a clerk at a Sheffield brewery. His London coal business failed in 1853 and left him destitute, which is said to be where his sympathy for the poor came from. He became MP for Derby in 1868.[3] From 1870 he investigated ship safety, and in 1873 he published Our Seamen. The argument produced a Royal Commission on Unseaworthy Ships.[2][3]
The government's bill of 1875 left out both deck cargo and a load line. On 22 July 1875 Prime Minister Disraeli said it would not pass before the recess. Plimsoll had a written protest ready, and his wife Eliza was in the Ladies Gallery with copies for reporters. He went far beyond his plan, accusing shipowning MPs and calling them villains. The Speaker asked him to withdraw the word, he refused, slapped his protest on the table and was persuaded by friends to leave the chamber. Eliza gave the text to the press and public opinion swung behind him.[1]
On 28 July the government hurriedly brought in a stop-gap bill, law by 10 August, that let surveyors stop unseaworthy ships. The Merchant Shipping Act of 1876 made a load line compulsory but left its position to the owner.[1][2] Plimsoll campaigned for 14 more years to have the Board of Trade set it, and Royal Museums Greenwich dates the position being fixed by law to 1894. In 1906 foreign ships using British ports came under the rule too.[1][2] He gave up his seat in 1880 and died at Folkestone in 1898. The line went into the International Convention on Load Lines in 1930.[3]
Titanic and the Lifeboat Sum
The load line protected the ship and did nothing for passengers once she was sinking. That gap showed on the night of 15 April 1912. Titanic was legally in order. The Board of Trade required ships over 10,000 tons to carry 16 lifeboats for 990 people, and she had 20 boats for 1,178. There were 2,208 people on board and about 1,500 died.[6] The rule tied lifeboats to tonnage, and new liners had long since outgrown the scale.
Two years later the first SOLAS text was adopted in London, setting lifeboat numbers, emergency equipment and a continuous radio watch. The First World War kept it from entering into force. Versions followed in 1929, 1948 and 1960. Amendment had become too slow, so a new convention was written in 1974, and it entered into force on 25 May 1980.[7]
Torrey Canyon and the Question of Liability
Titanic had put loss of life under rules, but for oil pollution there was nothing ready until 1967. The Liberian-flag Torrey Canyon was built in 1959 at 60,000 tons and enlarged in Japan to 120,000. She belonged to a Union Oil subsidiary and was on charter to British Petroleum. She left Kuwait with crude on 19 February 1967, bound for Milford Haven in Wales. Captain Pastrengo Rugiati was trying to make high water on 18 March, chose to pass between the Scillies and the Seven Stones, and put her on Pollard's Rock. There was also confusion over whether she was in manual or automatic steering.[8]
Between 94 and 164 million litres of oil went into the sea. Captain Hans Barend Stal of the Dutch salvage team died in the attempts to refloat her. Forty-two vessels sprayed more than 10,000 tons of detergent, which did further damage. On 28 March Royal Navy and RAF aircraft began bombing the wreck and dropping aviation fuel and napalm to light the oil. Close to a quarter of the first day's bombs missed. She sank the next day.[8]
Then came the legal problem. All that remained of the ship's value was a $50 lifeboat, and Liberian law gave no direct action against the owners. The British government served its writ by arresting the sister ship Lake Palourde at Singapore.[8] Two texts that came out of this are still in force. The 1969 Civil Liability Convention made owners strictly liable, and MARPOL, adopted in 1973, became the basic rule on pollution from ships.[8]
Amoco Cadiz and Port State Control
Eleven years later something similar happened off Brittany. On 16 March 1978 Amoco Cadiz's rudder jammed north of Ushant at 09:46. The tug Pacific got a hawser on at 14:00, and it parted about two hours later. A second tow was attached at 20:55, but at 21:04 she was on the Portsall rocks, and in all 220,880 tonnes of oil were spilled. A US court ordered Amoco to pay $85.2 million in 1988, and with interest the sum eventually reached $230 million.[9]
Four years after the wreck, on 1 July 1982, the Paris Memorandum of European states took effect.[10] It had come to be accepted that flag state inspection alone was not enough, and checks on foreign ships in port were placed under port state control.
Herald of Free Enterprise and Management Rules
The next great loss could not be put down to a technical fault. On the evening of 6 March 1987 the Townsend Thoresen ferry Herald of Free Enterprise left Zeebrugge at 18:05. The assistant bosun who should have shut the bow doors, Mark Stanley, was asleep in his cabin. The first officer who should have checked them, Leslie Sabel, did not, and Captain David Lewry sailed without knowing their state. She passed the outer mole at 18:24 and capsized about four minutes later. 193 people died.[11]
The inquiry under Mr Justice Sheen did not stop at the bridge. It traced the root cause to poor relations between ships and shore management and wrote of a disease of sloppiness throughout the company.[11] Technical fixes followed, including bow door indicators on the bridge and, through the 1990 SOLAS amendments, 125 centimetres of freeboard on new ro-ro ships in place of 76. On the management side IMO adopted the ISM Code in 1993, and it became mandatory through SOLAS on 1 July 1998.[11][12]
The ro-ro problem did not end there. On 28 September 1994 the ferry Estonia, on passage from Tallinn to Stockholm, lost her bow visor, flooded her car deck and sank in the Baltic. Of the 989 people aboard, 852 died. Investigators found that the visor and its attachments had not been treated as critical to safety and so had not been inspected as they should have been.[13]
Exxon Valdez and the Double Hull
On the pollution side the same pattern repeated. On 24 March 1989 Exxon Valdez grounded in Prince William Sound, Alaska, and spilled nearly 11 million gallons of oil. The US Congress answered with the Oil Pollution Act, signed on 18 August 1990, which set about retiring single-hull tankers.[14] IMO amended MARPOL in 1992 to require double hulls on tankers of 5,000 dwt and above ordered after 6 July 1993.[15] When Erika sank in December 1999 the schedule for single hulls was brought forward in April 2001, and after Prestige went down in 2002 it was tightened again in December 2003, with effect from 5 April 2005.[15]
Costa Concordia and the Timing of Drills
The latest case in this line is a passenger ship. At 21:45 on 13 January 2012 Costa Concordia left her planned track for a sail-by salute near the island of Giglio and hit a rock. There were 4,252 people on board and 32 died. Captain Francesco Schettino was sentenced to 16 years. About 600 passengers who had joined that day had not yet had a lifeboat drill, because the rule allowed 24 hours.[16][17] SOLAS III/19 was changed, and since 1 January 2015 the drill has to be held before departure or immediately on departure.[17]
Most of the checklists an officer fills in at port today rest on rules written after these losses. The list completed before bunkering is part of the ship's ISM system too.
Frequently asked questions
How did maritime rules develop?
Much of today's maritime regulation grew out of disasters. Titanic led to SOLAS and Torrey Canyon opened the way to MARPOL.
Why was SOLAS created?
The first SOLAS was adopted in 1914 after the loss of Titanic. The 1974 convention now in use entered into force on 25 May 1980.
What is the Plimsoll line?
It is the mark on a ship's side showing the loading limit. It became compulsory in Britain under the Merchant Shipping Act of 1876 and takes its name from Samuel Plimsoll.
Sources
- National Museums Liverpool. Commemorating an MP's Furious Outburst on Behalf of Seafarers.
- Royal Museums Greenwich. Samuel Plimsoll and Ship Safety.
- Wikipedia. Samuel Plimsoll.
- Wikipedia. General Average.
- Wikipedia. Lloyd's Register.
- Wikipedia. Titanic.
- Wikipedia. SOLAS Convention.
- Wikipedia. Torrey Canyon Oil Spill.
- Wikipedia. Amoco Cadiz.
- Paris MoU. History.
- Wikipedia. MS Herald of Free Enterprise.
- IMO. The International Safety Management (ISM) Code.
- Wikipedia. MS Estonia.
- Wikipedia. Oil Pollution Act of 1990.
- IMO. Tanker Safety, Preventing Accidental Pollution.
- Wikipedia. Costa Concordia Disaster.
- Skuld. Passenger Ship Safety Drills.
