AN INTERRUPTED VOYAGE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20354, 10 March 1928, Page 10

AN INTERRUPTED VOYAGE.

It is little enough of the intercolonial shipping service we see in the port of Otago, and yet on the occasion of two out of her last three visits to Dunedin en route for Melbourne the Manuka has been the subject of an exasperating hold-up. That which occurred on January 27 resulted, it is true, in a delay of a few hours only, but the atti-

tude of the ship’s ■ crew came near to preventing the vessel from sailing till the following day. The cause of the trouble was a trivial objection on the part of the crew respecting the engagement of a substitute in the place of an incapacitated fireman. But the experience of this week by reason of which the Manuka, which was to have sailed for the Bluff on Thursday evening, is still in port, has been much more deplorable in its consequences. It must mean most serious inconvenience to between two and three hundred passengers and intending passengers—for a considerable contingent was to join the vessel at the Bluff—in the dislocation of their plans and the upset of carefully-laid travel arrangements. Passengers who joined the vessel at northern ports have presumably to choose between the alternatives of returning to the north by rail in pursuance of an entire revision of their plans and remaining here meanwhile in the hope that the hold-up may, not be protracted. A ship full of passengers and without a crew presents, indeed, a sorry spectacle and soon becomes, of course, an untenanted vessel. There is nothing novel in the fact that the origin of the trouble has been the stokehold. A fireman was given notice to sign off the ship’s articles. The remainder of the *crew took exception to this, and the shipping company found itself unable to secure the services of a man to fill the vacant place, though apparently not for any lack of firemen ashore at this port. The company’s announcement that if another fireman could not be obtained the crew would be paid off failing to remove the impasse, it was given effect to, with the result of the indefinite delay of the vessel’s departure. More or less similar episodes have become exasperatingly common, though happening more frequently in the Commonwealth than in New Zealand, and the “ regular movements ” of shipping have in consequence become marked by a disconcerting amount of irregularity. Appeals to reason seem to be useless in. the case of crews which are in the mood to discover a grievance and believe that they can take command of the situation. Such a course of action on their part may produce inconvenience, loss, and hardship, but what ultimate good to anybody concerned ever came out of it we have yet to learn. The spirit which dictates the tactics which interfere so much with the movements of shipping appears seriously to infect the maritime unions, and is deeply to be deplored. The shipowners naturally resist the attempts at dictation and at the assertion of “job control,” and thus ships are held up, and the interests of the public suffer. The interruption of the voyage of the Manuka is the more unfortunate because the vessel was to call at Milford Sound.