It will scarcely be believed, however, that very many seas and shores in Europe have not been yet surveyed. Our readers who remember that the African and Asiatic shores of the Mediterranean were the earliest seats of civilisation, will be surprised to hear that we know nothing of them with any accuracy. The topography of the eastern seas, according to the dictum of the hydrographer of the Admiralty, is as little known as that of the mountains of the moon; is there any wonder, therefore, that we so often hear of fearful shipwrecks of large vessels in those regions. If, however, our want of scientific knowledge imperils commerce in the east, we fear that in the west, positive fraud is far more destructive.
The Florida Reef is now the head-quarters of wreckers, but it is a notorious fact that in a vast number of cases the captains of the American marine are in collusion with these villains. Thus it is a common thing for a Yankee skipper to put his ship wilfully in such situations of danger in these latitudes as to demand the services of these harpies, who then demand salvage, which they divide with the captain! Sometimes, however, this worthy does this villainous work all himself, that is if he is owner as well as commander, in which case he deliberately sails his ship to destruction for the sake of netting the insurance, but too often effected upon a cargo that has previously been surreptitiously removed. In other cases, when there has been no absolute fraud on the part of the captain, there can be little doubt that the system of marine insurance comes in to complete the destruction accident may have commenced. For instance, if a ship receives any damage, but is rescued from it by the exertions of the captain, he is certain to entail a direct loss upon his employer, inasmuch as the assured in such cases is obliged to bear one-third of the loss; but if the loss is “total” the assurance is paid in full.
The working of this absurd regulation, in the majority of cases, is to cause the captain to leave his ship to her fate whenever she gets damaged, in order not to risk the displeasure of his owner. There can be no doubt that if the insurers were to agree to pay the whole amount of the assurance, whether the ship were saved or lost, that a large number of vessels would be brought into port, that are now abandoned for the sake of saving the full assurance.
In order to counteract the villainies that are perpetrated with respect to assured property at sea, Lloyds and the other marine assurance offices maintain agents in nearly every existing port. Thus the insurers in London and other great ports are Argus-eyed, as it were, and handed like Briareus. For no sooner does a wreck occur, in any European water, at least, than the fact is instantly reported to Lloyds. Here the nature of the calamity is posted into a large volume, termed the Loss Book, which remains open in the long room of this establishment.
To this portentous folio the merchant makes his way in the morning, possibly to find that his argosy was lost during the night on some far-off reef in the Mediterranean; to this book, with still greater concern, the underwriter, makes his way, perchance to find half the earnings of the year sunk on some hidden rock! But if the telegraph is thus swift to tell of disaster, it is also swift to bring succour. Thus the underwriters no sooner learn that a ship in which they have an interest has just touched the shore, than the steam-tug is sent to her rescue, and what otherwise would have been a “total” is mitigated into a partial loss. Thus interest counteracts interest, and, in a rough way, fair dealing is maintained. The ramification of telegraphic wires over the seas and along the coasts of the habitable globe will, year by year, tend to the preservation of voyaging ships and their hardy crews, for no spot will be hereafter beyond the call of powerful corporations and associations banded together to save life and property.
In the wreck chart which we opened before our readers at the beginning of this article, besides the black dots strewn around the coast, indicative of the sites of marine disasters during the past year, certain red characters, are seen which mark the stations of our life-boats and mortar and rocket apparatus. Where the black dots are thickest, there also the red dots crowd. On the east coast, especially near the fatal Yarmouth sands, these red spots form quite a thick rash upon the seabord. Where the chief danger is, there these means of rescue jostle each other to rush to it. No less than 158 life-boats watch by night and day around our coasts, and are ready to put off in storms, through which no other light craft could for a moment live, to the assistance of the drowning mariner. Besides these gallant boats, rocket and mortar apparatus are posted in 216 stations along the coasts of the United Kingdom and Ireland, and these instruments of salvation are in the trained hands of the coast-guard service, and, together with the life-boats, were instrumental, during the last year, in saving the lives of 551 fellow-creatures. If we compare the state of our coasts at the present time with their condition a hundred years ago, we shall find two pictures which most forcibly illustrate the humanising tendency of the age. In the former period, the object of the people on the coast was to make wrecks, rather than to prevent them; large numbers of our seafaring folks used to eke out their means of subsistence by plundering vessels that, in many cases, they had lured on shore by hanging out decoy lights. At the present moment there is not a dangerous headland, a treacherous sand-bank, or a sunken rock, but there also is to be found the gallant boat’s crew listening for the minute-gun through the storm, or the patient coast-guard with ready match, prepared on the instant to speed the fiery rocket or the round shot laden with the life-line to the stranded ship. Whilst Nature fights against the mariner, and hurls him on the coast with relentless fury, Art, from the land, hurls forth her cunning engines, and wrestles with her for the stake of human life. Who that has seen a lifeboat put forth in the very fury of a storm but has watched this fight with the elements with intense excitement! Who that has seen the same boat return, laden with rescued human life, but has felt a sublime emotion such as we experience only by