For Britain, this is an interesting example of how uneven technological advances, old laws and bad economics can greatly affect workers.

The burgeoning economy of the Industrial Revolution resulted in a great increase in ships being built. However, as commodities and manufactured goods became cheaper, profit margins for commercial vessels became thinner, as shipping fees were based on a percentage of the value of the cargo. These profits could have been greater, if it had been possible for the tonnage and speed of the average ship to increase in scale to match the increased production, but it lagged. Wooden sailing ships had upper limits as to size and speed. Brunel’s Great Eastern was a fluke, and unsuccessful. Most shipping was being done with schooners and brigs, not giant ships. British shipowners and their dockside clerks quickly realized that most of the cargo was merely paying the expenses: the actual profits were, typically, in the last 10% of the load. This created a great incentive to put another 10% on top of that- to overload the boat. At the same time, the narrow profit margins made it more advantageous to skimp on maintenance and repairs. Hard bargaining by those ship owners also made boatyards more willing to make their profits by doing shoddy work. One prime example of that would be using a lot of copper bolts for the planking and frames that were only heads, or had iron shanks that could corrode. In the decade of the 1860’s, there were about 3,000 wrecked vessels, and it was found that bad weather and accidents only accounted for 45 to 68% . The rest were due to overloaded or shoddy boats, which were dubbed “coffin ships”.

In theory, insurers could have stepped in to demand standards be kept, but the structure of the British insurance business didn’t give the underwriters too much authority. Shipowners found that it was relatively simple to over-value even a dangerous ship for insurance purposes, overload it, and make a good profit from insurance if it went down with all hands.

In this, sailors were little more than pawns. In many ways, they were the most vulnerable of all employees. Any millworker could leave the factory, refuse commands and quit his job if he thought it was unsafe, or simply refuse to work. But the moment a sailor signed on to be crew on a ship- even one he hadn’t seen, in a different port- he was legally obligated to serve. In at least one instance, an entire crew refused to serve on a ship they saw was overloaded and in terrible condition. Police were summoned, the crew was rounded up and forced back on board, and the ship sailed- and went down with the loss of all hands. One of the policemen later ruefully stated that, if they had been simply put in jail, at least the crew would have lived. A sailor also had few rights once at sea. At sea, the captain was king: all had to follow his orders, and revolting against his authority was mutiny. Working under a tyrannical captain, or a captain with a tyrannical mate, could mean not only hard labor but constant physical abuse, something well documented in American Richard Henry Dana’s 1840 Two Years Before the Mast. Between 1840 and 1843, perhaps as many as 600 sailors were lost each year around the coast of England. By the 1860’s that had grown- estimates varied widely ( they included not only well-documented large commercial shipping but badly-documented small fishing boats), but it was between 800 and 2,000 per year. It was very much a national scandal.

In the 1860’s, MP Samuel Plimsoll campaigned vigorously for better regulation of the maritime industry, His book Our Seamen catalogued abuses and cited statistics showing how dangerous it had become. He also asked for regulation of how much a ship could be loaded. Shipowners protested that they could scarcely afford any such regulation, and the government, pleading the virtues of “laissez faire”, resisted. The Merchant Shipping Act of 1876 made the "Plimsoll line" or load line compulsory. But because there were so many varieties of ships, such small profit margin for the ship owners and boat builders, and so much complexity to the maritime industry as a whole, the British government found that regulations for ship building and commerce were immensely complex, both hard to write and hard to enforce. There were two attempts to unionize both seamen and dock workers in the 1880’s, but both unions pretty much failed.

Real significant reforms happened with the very comprehensive Merchant Shipping Act of 1894, which gave specific rights to sailors’ working conditions as well as load limits. But by this time there had also been a technological advance in shipbuilding. Iron and steel hulls and better steam engines created safer ships, and a bigger economy of scale was also created with larger ships. The more profitable industry could make less resistance to reform.

Plimsoll, S. (1873). Our seamen: An appeal. London: Virtue & Co.. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000962963/Home

LACROIX, S. (1995). LES NAUFRAGES DANS LA MARINE MARCHANDE BRITANNIQUE, LE TOURNANT DE 1854 A 1873. Histoire, Économie et Société, 14(4), 567–593. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23612022