The Sun.
London, England, 1866-03-22 00:00:00

1.. w-.•

he would not send his son to sea in her. But there
was the evidence of a Board of Trade inspector, of
a Lloyd's Inspector, of an Emigration Inspector, all
the other way. All these Inspectors were perfectly
satisfied with the appearance and state of the ship
as she lay in dock, as she left the Thames, and as
she sailed from Plymouth. Sir John Pakington,
speaking on behalf of the public, is by no means
satisfied with these results, and he particularly com-
plains of counsel, retained by,relatives of the lost,
having been prevented from cross-examining the
official witnesses whose testimony was emphatically
contradicted by the survivors. The President of
the Board of Trade, who appropriately fills an office
of the necessity of which he has never been able to
persuade himself, and who is acquiring a positive
celebrity as a master of the art of inaction, derives
from the contrast between the fate of the London
and the reports of the inspectors upon her seaworthi-
ness, the consoling assurance that neither these in-
spections nor these inquiries are worth much, except
in relieving shipowners of the sense of responsibility.
He justifies the conduct of the inquiry of Mr. Trail'
(whose impartiality and whose conscientiousness
have never been impugned), and he reminds the
house that these Board of Trade inquiries are not in
the nature of prosecutions, but that their primary
object is to ascertain the cause of the loss of
the ship. In the case of the London, as Sir John
Pakington observed, there' could be no question
of certificates of officers 'because none but a
single midshipman survived. Mr. Milner Gibson,
however, speaks of the question of certificates as
merely an incident of such an inquiry, and he cites
instances in which these inquiries have done good,
in discovering errors of navigation, showing the
necessity of new surveys, or of new lights on dan-
gerous coasts, and so forth. The President of the
Board of Trade is officially satisfied with the un-
satisfactory report of the London inquiry, because
of the insufficiency of the evidence it elicited ; but
he is happily not quite satisfied with the state of
the law in respect to the mode in which these in-
quiries are conducted, and hopes before long to sug-
gest some improvements in it. Mr. Henley, who
speaks on the subject with the double authority of a
sometime President of the Board of Trade and of
his own honest good sense, bears witness to the
" Universal dissatisfaction" with which the existing
law is regarded by all who are concerned in its ope-
ration, and especially by the owners and masters of
the merchant service. A few weeks since we re-
ported a meeting of the representatives of the ship-
ping interest, at which resolutions were passed con-
demning the present system of inquiries by the
Board of Trade as contrary to the spisit of Eng-
lish law, and to the practice .of the naval courts.
The grievance appeared to us a just one, and when
it was suggested by a contemporary that to place
such inquiries in the hands of officers of the mer-
cantile service would be to deprive the public of
their only safeguard, we ventured to believe that a
court comprised of competent and qualified com-
manders of the merchant service, responsible to their
owners and to the public, might be trusted to con-
duct_an open and responsible inquiry into the loss
of a ship with -as uncompromising a severity as
officers in her Majesty's service engaged in a simi-
lar duty are wont to exercise. No number of
wrecks and casualties (according to Mr. Henley,
the proportion is increasing year by year) could
change our opinion of the substantial justice Of
the demand of the speakers at that meeting, or
of the advantage to the public of courts of
inquiry into the loss of merchant and pas'
senger ships being removed from the present
loose and anomalous jurisdiction of the Board
of Trade, and made analogous to those of the Royal
Navy. But assuredly nothing was farther from our,
intention than to facilitate the "white-washing " 01
shipowners or shipmasters. It may be that Air.
Henley's impression of the Wreck Returns is some-
what too gloomy, but it would be difficult to resist
his conclusion that the meddling legislation of the
last sixteen years has provoked discontent rather
than improvement. Any reconsideration of the
Merchant Shipping Acts might, perhaps, be judi-
ciously preceded by an authoritative and compre-
hensive inquiry into the state of the mercantile
marine. Such an inquiry would probably disclose.
many grave abuses and deficiencies, and witho.u!
attempting to provide any specific remedy, might
contribute at least by their exposure to their
self-reform. _