This, of course, brought about many rearrangements. Some formerly successful lines went bankrupt. Many new and inexperienced lines disappeared. Many masters and mates found themselves ashore without work, forced to take employment at whatever tasks they could get. But new lines did make their way, and most of the experienced lines managed to hold on, even going into new fields, as the practical elimination of the German lines gave them some opportunity to do. And following the war, American ships became known in ports where the American flag had not been seen for a generation or more.
This probably means that America is on the seas to stay. No longer do internal developments take the attentions of the entire nation. The growth of manufacturing, the lack of wide public domains open to the “homesteader,” the widespread American interests overseas, all point to a permanent merchant marine, not, perhaps, so great as is Great Britain’s, because America is not so vitally dependent on the sea as is Great Britain, but great because America is great, and growing because America is still developing.
In this development shipping lines are the vital factors. Individual ships are merely pawns on a world-wide chessboard. A single ship can do nothing in the complex structure of modern commerce. Lines must maintain regular service. They must maintain home and foreign offices. They must know where cargoes are to be had and where they are to go. They must have armies of agents and brokers constantly in touch with them. Their ships must be able to voyage and return, voyage and return again, always filled, never idle, never at a loss for cargoes, else their costly structures will crumble, their finances wane, and they will find themselves faced with bankruptcy, disruption, reorganization or destruction.
Because of world economics shipping lines find it possible to develop or find themselves broken. Because the margin between success and failure is usually a narrow one shipping lines find it essential to seize upon every development that increases efficiency and decreases cost. Simple steam engines became compound, because shipping lines had to operate their ships with a smaller outlay for fuel in order to compete with sail. Iron gave way to steel, because greater strength was thus secured with less weight. The turbine has made its way against the reciprocating engine because of its increased efficiency and its consequent saving in expense. Oil is being more and more widely burned instead of coal, because its efficiency makes it cheaper through the use of fewer men, through increased steaming ability and less weight, as well as its cleanliness (on passenger ships) and the reduction in time used in coaling.
Shipping lines are very similar to railroads. A railroad train would be of no use to any one if it were owned and operated as a unit, even though it had all the tracks in a nation at its disposal. The train is practical only because the railroad company maintains freight and passenger stations, foreign and domestic agents, and all the detailed force that a modern railroad requires. Furthermore, it sends its trains over certain routes at certain specified intervals, ready to move freight and passengers as they are ready to be moved. So must a shipping line be operated. Ships must be where they are needed, else freight accumulates or is diverted to other lines. The huge investments ships require necessitate that there be no loss of time and consequently ships must not wait for freight to come to them. Because ships carry great amounts of freight and cannot lengthen or shorten themselves, as trains can, to accommodate fluctuating quantities, it is often necessary for freight to go in “tramp” steamers to ports which attract small amounts of freight. But cargoes must be waiting at those ports for shipment to some other or the ship loses time and the line loses money. Because of this agents are for ever busy, cablegrams are for ever being flashed through the ocean depths, or ships are diverted by wireless in order to take advantage of temporary conditions.
These are the duties of shipping lines, and the vast companies of the modern world of the sea are amazingly capable, brilliantly alert, for ever in touch with shifting channels of trade, alert to fill the needs of a busy world that pays them only for the service it demands.
Perhaps the fierce competition of to-day seems harsh, yet it is constructive. Perhaps it bears too heavily upon many deserving individuals, yet through it has come about the vast improvement that has marked the shipping world in the last hundred years—an improvement that has shortened voyages, limited the time between continents, reduced the very world until voyages around it are now almost commonplace summer holidays.
Without competition the old East India Company sent its ships from England to the East for 300 years, and served Britain little better at the end of that time than at the beginning. With competition the transatlantic voyage has been cut from forty days to little more than four. Giant ships plough every sea and offer their magnificence to every passenger who cares to pay the passage money. No longer do silks and spices fill the holds of the argosies of the deep. Iron ore or polished motor cars, bales of cotton or crates of textiles, toys or machinery, hides or shoes, lumber or furniture—it matters not. Given only a place of origin and another place overseas where buyers wish it delivered and ships there will be to carry it. There is not a single harbour between the eternal ice of the two polar seas that is not visited by ships. There is not a person of the billion and a half who inhabit the globe but is affected by them. The natives of Central Africa buy cotton goods made in England of cotton grown in Alabama. The Eskimos of the frozen north hunt for seals with guns made in Connecticut. Oil that gushes from the rocks of Transcaucasia is refined, and burned in motor cars as they roll along the Champs Élysées. Copper from the Andes is made into roofing for houses everywhere on earth. Toys made in Czechoslovakia or Japan fill the counters of the toy shops of Britain and America.
No longer do oceans divide the world. As shipping lines continue their development they cannot fail to weld the world into a vast economic unit, interdependent and friendly, useful to one another and to unnumbered generations of the future.
To-day we look back to the beginnings of the shipping lines and smile as we think of their trifling activities. In a hundred years they have grown from infancy to vigorous manhood, but their future will not be one of senility. Instead, as years go by, their growth will greatly continue, and a hundred years from now the point of view of our children’s children will probably be to the shipping lines of to-day what ours is to the lines of a hundred years ago.