Sea Traffic.

Manawatu Herald, 1 February 1894, Page 2

Sea Traffic.

In a series of excellent papers in the Leisure Hour, W. J. Gordon discourses on the wp.v of the world at sea, and he tells us many things seldom heard of elsewhere, some of which we intend to reproduce irom time to time. The leading shipping company uudiii* the British flag is the Penin sula and Oriental, the celebrated P. and 0. It has now a revenue of 2^millions, and burns half a milliou tons of coal a year, costing as many pounds. During the past 20 years J it has launched a quarter of a million ! tons of shipping of the highest class at a cost of over 6£ millions of money. Next in number to that of the P. and 0., is the fleet of Elder. Dempster & Co., of Liverpool, who own, however, a large proportion of sailing ships ; equal to it in number is that of the Union S.S. Co., of New Zealand. The start of the celebrated Cunard line was the act of Samuel Cunard, in 1830 the East Indian Company's agent at Halifax. He had, since 1815 been carrying the mails be tween Boston, Newfoundland, and Bermuda. He needed capital and eventually joined Maclver and Burns, and. having raised a capital of £270,000, had four ships built. On the 4th July 1840 the first ship, the Brittania steamed out of the Mersey. The voyage was a triumph, and when she arrived in Boston with Samuel Cunard on board the inhabitants went nearly delirious, and conferred the greatest honor yet accorded to man by giving him no less than 1878 separate and distinct invitations to dinner ! The writer states that the New Zealand fleet of five steamers, are the handsomest and " shippiest " boats under the British flag. There are only thirty vessals as J yet in the world's mercantile marine whose speed exceeds nineteen knots an hour. Many a cargo to day will total up to 50,000 packages, and even more, and these have to be handled two or three times at least before. they are in the van or truck for their removal to their consignees. Given two working days you can take 4,000 tons of cargo out of a ship and load her again with 3,000 tons, besides throwing in 2,000 tons at the London docks. The cargoes inwards and outwards dealt with in English porti in ftjw

value out for Custom House purposes — always a low valuation — at 750 million pounds. It is stated that now-a-days it ig""* not easy to get half a sovereign a ton for homeward cargoes from t Calcutta, making a startling contrast to the time when the only cargo the P. and 0. people would carry westwards was specie, silk, and indigo ; the silk at £80 a ton, the indigo at £20. Twenty years ago the average tonnage of steamers was a little over 600, to day it is 840. The larger they get the more they hold, though it takes no more men to manage them. Twenty years ago it took four men for each hundred tons ; to-day it takes rather more than two * and a half.