“I apprehend that is the case, Captain,” said Plimsoll.

So ended an interview which is memorable to at least one person; and not least notable for the friendship Mr. Plimsoll showed towards his would-be executioner!  The story was told to me about two months after the interview occurred by the captain himself.  It is very odd that even one man, especially a shipmaster, should have been found disagreeing with a reform that was to be of so much benefit to all classes of seafaring men.

Up to that time vessels were sent to sea scandalously overladen.  There was no fixed loadline as there is now.  Cargoes were badly stowed; no bagging was done.  The fitting of shifting boards was left pretty much to the caprice of the master, who never at any time could be charged with overdoing it, but rather the reverse.  I am speaking now more particularly of steamers, though to some extent the same reckless disregard for human safety existed among sailing vessels.  It was necessary, however, that commanders of “windjammers” should be more painstaking in the matter of having their cargoes thoroughly stowed, and that adequate bulkheads and shifting boards should be fitted; for the shifting of a sailing vessel’s cargo was accompanied with the possibilities of serious consequences.  Sailing vessels cannot be brought head-on to wind and sea, as steamers can, and the weather may be so boisterous as to make it impossible to get into the holds; and even if these are ’accessible, the heavy “list” and continuous lurching prohibit the trimming of the cargo to windward.

But the great loss of life was not altogether caused by allowing rotten, leaky, badly equipped sailing vessels to go to sea, nor by the neglect of commanders of both sailers and steamers to adopt reasonable precautions for the purpose of avoiding casualty.  At the very time when the whole country was ablaze with excitement over the harrowing disclosures that investigation had brought to light, Lloyds’ Classification Committee was allowing a type of narrow-gutted, double-decked, long-legged, veritable coffins to be built, that were destined to take hundreds of poor fellows to their doom.  Their peculiarity was to capsize, or continuously to float on their broadsides.  Superhuman effort could not have kept them on their legs.  Neither bagging transverse or thwartship bulkheads were of any avail.  Scores of them that were never heard of after leaving port found a resting-place, with the whole of their crews, at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.  They lie there, unless enormous pressure has crushed them into mud; and their tombs, could they be revealed, would give ghastly testimony to the incompetence of naval architects.  No amount of precautionary measures could have made this type of craft seaworthy.  They were not shaped to go to sea.  My own impression is, apart from the crankiness of these rattletraps, there was a vast amount of overloading which was the cause of many vessels being sent to