The Daily News. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 1913. BRITISH SHIPPING.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 217, 1 February 1913, Page 4

The Daily News. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 1913. BRITISH SHIPPING.

No one sunly can read without a thrill of pride and wonder the amazing story of the development of British shipping as told in a wonderful London Times Shipping Supplement. And the pride need not be due to an inflated nationalism, but to admiration of what man has achieved with his hands and brain—the progress he lias made in industry and in the control of the .sea. One chapter in the Times begins with the days of Bede, and (races the development of the mercantile marine down to the present time. But the progress made during the past hundred years is held to be as great as all that had occurred before, for the advance from the first ship in which the Phoenicians traded to {he British Isles to the hist sailing ship which held its own against steam and steel is not greater than that of Bell's tiny •'Cornel/' of 1812 to the .50,000-ton liners now building at home and ahroad. While during the past rpiarl.er of a century the net increase in the combined fleets of the six leading foreign maritime nations has amounted to seven and a-half million tons., the net increase in the mercantile marine of the United Kingdom has been over eight and three-quarter million tons, and the value of the foreign trade of the

period the efficiency of the British tonnage has enormously improved, yet, taking into account the vast amount of tonnage now building, the conclusion is reached that, so far, the supply does not exceed the demand. The present tonnage exceeds by over 50 per cent, that of the next six leading maritime nations combined. We know something of the determination with which Germany has of late years set herself to build up a great commercial fleet, of the energy and enterprise of Japan, and of the wonderful progress made by certain other nations. Yet the British tonnage is more than four times that of Germany, more than nine times that of France, and more than fourteen times that of Japan; and to the shipping of these three countries may be added that of Norway, which exceeds that of France, and Italy and Holland, and the aggregate of the six, less than thirteen million tons, is but two-thirds that of Britain. There is good reason, moreover, for believing that in character and efficiency British superiority is considerably greater than in mere tonnage. At a time when so much is being said of the inroads which other countries are making on British commercial supremacy—when from so many quarters we are being told that, as a nation, we cannot stand the price of modern competition—it is worth while pausing for a moment to consider these figures (says the Times). Commercially, our merchant shipping is of the first importance to us. But, beyond that, it has another vita! function to perform, in keeping us in touch with all parts of the scattered Empire and in carrying the foodstuffs necessary to the life of the, British Isles. It must be a sluggish imagination which is not quickened by the sight of a vessel unloading; the ordered tumult, the ropes and swarthy faces, the strange crates and frails and coses, and the pungent sea smell and ship smell of brine and tar and oil, and cargo redolent of the musky tropics. What visions does it not call up of heaving blue seas flecked with floating islands of sargasso weed and flying fish scuttering over the heaving water—of long curved beaches where coeoanut palms lean out over the very margin of the sea—of harbors faced by white-walled towns where queer craft—kayaks, catamarans, sampans, and what not—crowd around the new arrival, and stripped bronze bodies glisten in the sun as they stand erect upon the thwarts or dive or roll, as much of fire and phosphorescent spray; visions too, of tropical nights when the sky is spangled indigo and the black water breaks from the ship's sides in ripples ol fire and phosphorescent spray; visions of great northern mists and white breakers along leagues of rocky coast. "They . .. . that do business in great waters, these shall see the works of the Lord and His wonders in the great deep." Sailing ship or battered steam cargoboat with rusty plates, it does not matter; it is not tlie ship itself, but the significance of it, the things it sees and does, the wild wide roads it travels in its voyaging from shore to shore, bearing not the products only, but the speech and thought and civilisation of one continent to another. No age, happily, can foresee the achievements of a later generation; for if Columbus and Hudson and Cabot could have known the great liners of the twentieth century how is it conceivable that they would have dnred to tempt the perils of unknown seas in open caravels of some 50 tons, like the "Pinta" and "Nina" of Columbus, or such a cockle-shell as Hudson's •Hopewell," under the keel of which we read, "a whale came and made her heel, but by God's mercy we had no harm"? The truth is that to the men of their day these were noble craft, "good ships" and "stout ships," the last word, as it were, in naval architecture, such as any man might be proud to go to sea in. But the writer of this picturesque article does not believe that any "wonder of other days was comparable in beauty and significance to the wonder that uould be revealed to one of the old seaworthies could he see the stately ships that now go up and down our Channel, the crowded wharves and docks, and the ceaseless weaving of the great shuttles that play across the warp of all the seas. Noble though it was in the imagination which conceived and the courage which grasped it, what was the trade of Carthage or Venice to the trade of London or , Hamburg or Liverpool of to-day ?"