SAFETY AT SEA.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIX, Issue 30, 27 May 1914, Page 4

SAFETY AT SEA.

“No fi hip is absolutely safe,” was the keynote of a speech delivered in Glasgow recently by Colonel John Denny, whose great Clydesdale firm has built many of the fine vessels engaged in the New Zealand trade. Colo nel Denny explained that in order to be perfectly safe a ship would have to be so heavy as to float unloaded at her winter freeboard. She would have so many bulkheads that she would have the minimum of conifort and pro duce the ruimimum of revenue, and she would have so any boats that there would have no room to move' ’about hei decks. He also declared that the “temptation” to “yield to popular clamour” was one which should be resisted by shipbuilders and surveyors of registration societies. This, of course, is the shipbuilder’s and ship-owner’s peculiar point of view. It is not difficult to follow Colonel Denny in his argument that it is practically impossible to remove every peril from the great waters. Something must be left to chance. The traveller must take a certain amount of risk when he embarks for a voy rage across a stormy ocean. But this risk should be reduced to a minimum, and it is futile for the shipbuilder or the steamship company to rail against “popular clamour.” It i s popular clamur, remarks the “Lyttelton Times,” that has given us one reform after another in the building and manning of ships, and both the passenger and the seaman would be infinitely worse off than they are to-day were the builder and owner freed form the restrictions which public opinion has imposed iipon them.