The Titanic is in the news again, for no good reason, as the news hounds fill the pages or screens available to us with information about the loss of the submersible which was being used to dive onto the wreck, for what can only be described as “tourist purposes”. 

However it does something to focus our minds on the sea. It is not a safe environment, and those who trifle with it can easily find themselves in trouble. Over a hundred years ago the Titanic found itself in just such trouble and sank with a large loss of life, and the other day the Titan submersible imploded at a considerable depth with the loss of five lives. Apparently subsequent to the disaster, the latest one, information has emerged that indicates that many experts in this particular narrow field had got in touch with the head of the company who owned the Titan, OceanGate, telling him that it was not safe, and that he told them to stuff off, even threatening legal action.

The Polar Prince - in its Coastguard Colours.

It appears from the photographs available that the submersible was towed out to the launch site on a sort of raft, by a former Canadian coastguard buoy tender, Polar Prince, built in 1959. This hardly makes sense. They were going out into the North Atlantic, one of the most forbidding oceans in the world, one which has taken lives in the past apart from the Titanic, with a raft. Without even submerging the passengers would have had to transfer from the ship to the raft and get into the Titan. Maybe safe enough on a millpond, but out there on the North Atlantic?

So it is with these thoughts in mind I am going to say a few words about “The Day of the Seafarer”, yes, it’s today. At this very moment, and it does not matter when you are reading this because it is happening all the time, many hundreds of ships are churning their way across the oceans of the world carrying goods, liquids and passengers in the pursuit of trade and leisure. At present they all have to be manned by people, although in the future who knows, maybe they will all become autonomous. 

But let’s assume that all these craft are being operated safely, and that they have been constructed and maintained in a professional and efficient way keeping the crews, and passengers if they are that sort of craft, safe. We also have to assume that the flags under which they are registered are responsible, ensuring that they are constructed and maintained suitably and the wellbeing of the crews has been considered. Is this all beginning to sound a bit unlikely? And if it is, what will the day of the seafarer do to improve matters. Forgive me if I put forward the view that it will do absolutely stuff all. Indeed it is unlikely that the population as a whole will be aware of the day, so it will pass mostly without comment.

The people who make the news are asking some interesting questions about the submersible. Bits of it have been found on the seabed by an ROV, and in time it is possible that some sort of a chain of events night be constructed, but who will carry out any investigation? The media has variously named the US Coastguard, the American National Transport Safety board and the Canadian Transport Safety Board, members of which have been photographed boarding the support vessel. But it is all really closing the door after the horse has bolted.

You might wonder what the International Maritime Organisation, the IMO, might have to do with this, and what is it anyway. The IMO, for non-mariners who might be visiting this site, is an amalgam of all the flag states who register ships, and all of them have a say in what it does. They meet more or less consistently and now and again passing resolutions which will improve things for those at sea. But what does it take to be a flag state, and therefore a member of the IMO, with influence over its activities?

There are a lot of flag states. And more and more emerge out of the woodwork, since the business of being a flag state can be remunerative. The usual technique is for a group of businessmen, who have the expertise required to set up a register, to go to the government of a state and offer their services. The lesser known states are favoured because they are cheaper and being part of their registry tends to be less onerous. So everybody will make money. Some favourites are Vanuatu, the Marshall Islands and the Cook Islands. But of course the guys operating the registry have no desire to actually live in these states so the organisation is set up somewhere else, America, Singapore and Switzerland are favourites. 

Some years ago I became concerned by the lack of attention paid to a shipwreck in the Arabian Gulf, with the loss of over 30 lives. The ship had been registered in St Vincent and the Grenadines. No investigation was undertaken into the loss, and despite some effort on my part I was unable to get any response about it from either the government of the country, which did not even seem to have a ministry of transport, or the registry, whose headquarters appeared to be in Switzerland. 

But to move on. Many ships today are multinational. The Costa Concordia when it ran into the rock of Giglio had 38 different nationalities on board, only 138 of whom were Italian which was the official language on the ship. The different nationalities of the crew members are there because shipowners employ crewing agencies in many countries. They don’t mind where they get the crews from as long as they are cheap. Possibly the most popular crews have been up to now, Filipinos, although the helmsman on the Costa Concordia was Indonesian. And doubts have been suggested about the qualifications of the Filipino crews. Certainly in the case of one ship I commanded with a Filipino crew, none of the sailors knew how to steer. This would seem to be a big gap in their training, but they were willing and smart, so I taught them.

What I am trying to get at is the fragmentation of crews. There have been apprentices from Uk serving on British registered ships where they were the only people on board whose native language was English.

So we have these thousands of ships, making their way across the oceans of the world, crewed by the least number of people their employers can possibly manage (something I have written about elsewhere) and possibly not really being able to speak to each other when they very occasionally meet, maybe at change of watch. 

I am going to briefly contrast this situation with the one that existed in 1939. In that year one third of all the merchant ships in the whole world were British registered, and they sailed under the auspices of the 1894 Merchant Shipping Act, which covered everything about being at sea you could possibly think of. Once more, I have written about this act elsewhere. Even after 4700 of them were sunk by the Germans there were still a lot left, but it took the Thatcher government with her focus ion the “free economy” to inflict the ultimate damage on the fleet, resulting in what was little less than a free for all. Even the captains of British ships could be foreigners. Make no mistake, shipowners are businessmen, most having the objective of making as much money as they can, and accountants see the presence of human beings as a weight which must be lightened if humanly possible. And of course rather than being out there facing the many dangers which seafarers have to deal with, they are snug in their offices in Leadenhall Street and elsewhere. Hence the proliferation of irresponsible registries, ruthless crewing agencies and difficult working conditions for seafarers. Giving them their own day is just a poor joke, but who knows, maybe 2024 will be better.