IMPORTANT SHIPPING DECISION.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume IX, Issue 945, 21 May 1881, Page 3

IMPORTANT SHIPPING DECISION.

The owner of a tug undertook to tow a vessel in the Bay of Dublin, the vessel being in charge of a licensed pilot, as pilotage in Dublin Bay is compulsory. Whilst being tugged, the vessel ran aground ou a shoal, and her owners brought an action against the tug owner for damages. The claim was resisted on the ground that the vessel was guilty of contributory negligence in not cutting herself adrift when she found that by the

action of the tug she had been placed in danger. The Irish Court of Appeal decided in favor of the tug owner, and that the vessel had been guilty of contributory negligence. In reversing this decision, the Lord Chancellor is reported to have remarked that, when the immediate cause of the damage is

clearly the act of the defendant, it cannot be brought against the plaintiffs that they were guilty of contribu-

tory negligence because they had not in some earlier stage of the navigation taken a course themselves or controlled

the course taken by the tug in a way which would have avoided the danger.

The master of the vessel was entitled assume that the master of the tug knew what he was about. The tug mastor’s action in carrying the vessel across the bank was his own fault, and it was not contributory negligence in the vessel not to cut herself away from the tug. By such an act greater damage might have resulted, or it might have been represented more plausibly as an act of contributory negligence.