Lloyd's:
When trade was spreading and ships were small and slow, enormous numbers of them were needed, and probably more merchant ships were afloat in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than in any other age. In the year after Trafalgar, in 364 STEAM spite of the war, there were nearly 6000 sailings of British merchant ships to foreign ports. ♦ These crowds of ships, on the verge of the century of peace, were protected by another British institution which was already revered and ancient: Lloyd’s. In England, the idea of spreading a shipowner’s risk went back to the sixteenth century, and an Act of Parliament in 1601 put the whole idea of insurance in a nutshell: ‘By means of . . . Policies of Assurance it comethe to passe, upon the losse or perishings of any Shippe there follow- ethe not the undoings of any Man, but the losse lightethe rather easilie upon many, than heavilie upon fewe.’ By 1688, men in this line of business had drifted together as customers of the coffee-house in Tower Street which belonged to Edward Lloyd. In the early days, shipowners took a slip of paper to the coffee house, showing the name of their ship, its captain and destina tion and the value of ship and cargo. One customer offered a rate for the voyage and underwrote the slip with his initials and the percentage of the risk he would take; and then the owner collected initials until the whole sum was covered. It has worked the same way ever since; and even now, with a premium income of hundreds of millions of pounds, and computers installed out of sight, Lloyd’s underwriters or their agents sit in apparent discomfort in boxes derived from the coffee-house seats, and merely initial the slips that brokers bring them. Lloyd’s survived and grew colossal through personal integrity, and through the competition that was inherent in its system. It is not Lloyd’s that insures a risk, it is individual underwriters, or syndicates of them; a broker can go from box to box until he gets the best rate, and each underwriter has always been responsible with all his possessions for the risks he initials. There have been a few traumatic occasions when individuals have come to grief, but the system itself has never failed, and could never conceivably dishonour its members' agreements. Self-Interest (Profit Motives):
£2,468, midshipmen £791 and seamen and marines £182 4s.9ld. A seaman’s pay at the time was about £14 a year...discomfort of life in wartime would have been much harder for seamen to bear. And without it, the navy would certainly not have fought so eagerly as it did against such heavy odds. Even their tactics and gunnery training were designed for the winning of prize money. The navy did not fight or shoot to sink the enemy’s ships, it fought to capture them and bring them home intact. No doubt British seamen were as patriotic as anyone else, but what they talked about when they sighted an enemy fleet was not the victory they might win for Britain, it was the prize money they could hope to win for themselves; they counted it and spent it in anticipation. Soldiers fought from a sense of military glory that was drilled into them, but in naval annals the thought of a glorious victory is far less often found than the thought of a profitable prize. And on the whole it was perhaps a healthier frame of mind; certainly naval wars were fought with less hatred and bitterness, and with more courtesy and compas sion, than wars on land.
Royal Sponsorship:
The Royal Society, which had sponsored the explorations of the eighteenth century, made use of these world-wide expeditions by sending scientists on the surveying ships. So the surveys produced a by-product of knowledge of the natural sciences. The 388 PAX BRITANNICA II most famous by-product of all was on the voyage of the Beagle, which was sent on a five-year routine survey of the coast of South America in 1831; for the young scientist on board, of course, was Charles Darwin, and the result was his life’s work on the origin of species. But the greatest of purely scientific naval voyages was the Challenger Expedition. The Challenger was a wooden steam corvette, and in 1872 she was put at the Royal Society’s disposal. The Society sent her out with her naval crew and a bevy of distinguished naturalists. For four and a half years, she sailed again and again across the Atlantic and Pacific, and incidentally became the first steamer to cross the Antarctic Circle; and all the way, the passengers made zoological, botanical and geological collections, took deep-sea soundings and samples of the bottom of the ocean, made meteorological and magnetic observations and measured the temperature and chemical content of the sea. The report of the voyage was published in fifty volumes, a solid monument to the patience of the navy and the Victorian passion for accumulating knowledge.
Maritime Law (Freedom and Institution, into play):
But the real essence of Pax Britannica on the seas was law. For hundreds of years the ancient Black Book of the Admiralty had been a sufficient summary of British maritime law. But the expansion of shipping demanded a new and enormous mass of legislation in a series of Merchant Shipping Acts. These acts were not meant to extend the British rule, or to bring foreign ships under British jurisdiction: Britain never claimed any legal authority over anyone else on the high seas, excepting the pirates and slavers. On the contrary, the last of the restricting Navigation Acts was repealed in the middle of the century, and the new Merchant Shipping Acts - or at least the first of them - were designed to protect sea-passengers and seamen against the possible wickedness of British shipowners. Like so much of the best of Victorian progress, the spate of new law was begun by a single passionate reformer. He was Samuel Plimsoll, a rather insignificant coal merchant who became a Member of Parliament in 1868. His passion was the suffering of seamen in what he called coffin-ships, unseaworthy or over loaded ships sent out by unscrupulous owners and heavily insured. He wrote a book about it and managed to get a royal commission appointed, and a Bill was introduced to bring the shipowners under control.
Innovative Line:
British were lacking in inventiveness: on the contrary, they were leading the world in invention at sea. But it was always the merchant navy that used the inventions first: the Admiralty still behaved, with every new idea, just as it had with steam. It seemed to want to shut its eyes as long as it could to anything that threatened to make the ships it cherished obsolete. The history of submarines was a case in point. The earliest submarines were American, and they began, under man-power, a surprisingly long time ago. One at least was used in the War of Independence, and in 1804 another was offered to the British by Robert Fulton, the American inventor who built some of the earliest steamboats. The First Lord of the time, the great St Vincent himself, rejected it - not because it would not work, but because it might. The Prime Minister, he wrote, was ‘the greatest fool that ever existed to encourage a mode of warfare which those who commanded the seas did not want and which, if successful, would deprive them of it.’
Heuristic Knowledgebases:
It is often said the British acquired an empire without intending to, and the same might be said of the freedom under law that they established on the sea. They may never quite have been conscious of what they were doing. Nevertheless, the sea now is safe from pirates, slavers, uncharted rocks and unpredicted currents. Everyone takes it for granted that ships of every nation, in times of peace, can go unmolested on it wherever they wish. But that is certainly not an ancient freedom. It is only a legacy of the hundred years when Britain controlled the seas, and conceived that this was how things ought to be.
