British maritime low in the nineteenth century
Taking Britain as an example, in the mid-nineteenth century there were few
rules and regulations and virtually no construction or safety standards for
merchant ships. Many ships were sent to sea badly built, ill found, grossly
overloaded and often overinsured. These ‘coffin’ ships ‘frequently took their
unfortunate crews to the bottom of the oceans of the world’.14 As a result of
the agitation for reform from a member of Parliament called Samuel Plimsoll,
the ‘Plimsoll Act’ became law in 1876 and the Board of Trade was empowered,
as the responsible government department, to survey ships, pass them fit for
sea, and have them marked with a load line indicating the legal limit to which
they could be submerged.
In due course other laws were introduced as they became necessary, and Great
Britain built up a body of maritime law, which was specifically geared to tackling
the problems that arise when a nation state operates an extensive merchant shipping
fleet. Other countries developed their own laws on a piecemeal basis though,
because Britain dominated the maritime scene, it was common for countries with
a developing maritime interest to adopt British law as a basis for drafting their
own legislation. Thus, British rules and regulations came to apply much more
widely than in the United Kingdom..