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Whistler Morgan said no more, and he warned his friends to have no further talk upon the matter. After they got ashore, however, all four were much excited by the incident. "She was loaded to the Plimsoll mark when she passed us," Torry said. "What could she have done with her cargo in so short a time?" "I'd like to know," agreed Whistler thoughtfully.
After years of agitation by the friends of sailors the advance pay is now wholly abolished in the coastwise trade in America and the three months' advance cut down to one in the foreign trade, immensely to the benefit of the sailor and the discouragement of the ``crimp. The argument that without this system of bondage and ``crimpage'' it would be impossible to secure crews is fully answered by the experience of Great Britain since the passage of the Plimsoll Acts and in the United States since the recent acts of Congress.
Plimsoll was rightly convinced that unseaworthy vessels left port for the sake of insurance money on valued policies, that the lives of the seamen were thereby imperilled, and that the poor sailor had no redress before the law.
Luke went out and purchased the articles Mabel had asked him to buy. He then went to four different chemists, and at each one purchased a little oxalic acid, saying in each case that he wanted it to clean a straw hat. With his bicycle laden considerably above the Plimsoll mark, he pedalled wearily homewards.
An agitation distinctly humanitarian and domestic had been going on during the early years of this Ministry, which resulted in the passing of the Merchant Shipping Bill, intended to remedy the many wrongs to which our merchant seamen were subject, a measure almost entirely procured by the fervent human sympathy and resoluteness of one member of Parliament, Samuel Plimsoll; and other measures belonging to this period, and designed to benefit the toilers of the land principally, were initiated by the energy of the Home Secretary, Mr.
A glance told us that her sea-worthiness was questionable and that her over-burdening cargo pressed her Plimsoll mark close to the water line. We were to learn by degrees that her timbers were rotten, her plates rust-eaten and her engines junk. Her officers were outcasts from respectable seafaring, none too cordial in their relations with admiralty courts.
It is the same psychology which fifty or so years ago, before Samuel Plimsoll uplifted his voice, sent overloaded ships to sea. "Why shouldn't we cram in as much cargo as our ships will hold? Look how few, how very few of them get lost, after all." Men don't change. Not very much. It is the problem of decent behaviour.
And then the rest of the party trickled in, and we toddled down to dinner. Conditions being as they were at Brinkley Court I mean to say, the place being loaded down above the Plimsoll mark with aching hearts and standing room only as regarded tortured souls I hadn't expected the evening meal to be particularly effervescent. Nor was it. Silent. Sombre.
Plimsoll added: "I don't wish to disparage the rich, but I think it may be reasonably doubted whether these qualities are so fully developed in them; for, notwithstanding that not a few of them are not unacquainted with the claims, reasonable or unreasonable, of poor relatives, these qualities are not in such constant exercise.
A great quantity of shipping was in view, barques for the most part, Cape Horners, great, deep sea tramps, whose iron-shod forefeet had parted every ocean the world round from Rangoon to Rio Janeiro, and from Melbourne to Christiania. Some were still in the stream, loaded with wheat to the Plimsoll mark, ready to depart with the next tide.
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