This year we celebrate the birth of Samuel Plimsoll, born two hundred years ago and whose lasting legacy of the load line, or Plimsoll Line, continues to save countless lives at sea today.
Together with his wife Eliza, Plimsoll – then Member of Parliament for the UK city of Derby – led a decades-long legal, social, and political battle for justice against the dangerous practice of overloading of ships. Overloading impacts crews' ability to operate vessels safely, and before the introduction of the load line during the 1870s, sailings often resulted in fatalities.
Despite the optional use of the ‘Lloyd’s Rule’ introduced in 1835, that required three inches of freeboard per foot of depth, transatlantic ships leaving UK ports were often loaded as deep in the water as canal boats. One contemporary report given by a sailor’s widow during an enquiry after the loss of her husband’s ship, explains how, after saying farewell onboard, she stepped up, rather than down, from the deck to a rowing boat that lay alongside.
The issuance of international load line certificates is an enduring part of the Plimsoll legacy, but was a long campaign met with resistance along the way.
Whilst the load line became compulsory for all ships entering British ports from 1876, owners could position the line themselves. Rules governing the line were finally fixed by independent authorities in 1890. Load lines were governed in this way until 1966, when sixty nations adopted the International Convention of Load Lines (last amended in 2019). Since then, the number of signatories to the convention has grown to 162.
It is hard to quantify just how many lives may have been saved over the years by the tireless work of Eliza and Samuel Plimsoll. We know from Board of Trade reports that in 1871 a total of 856 ships went down within 10 miles of the British coast in conditions that were no worse than a strong breeze. Overloading and unseaworthiness caused some 500 seamen a year to drown. We can only extrapolate from those 500 British lives a year the impact of a global load line measured over 134 years.
During his campaigns, Plimsoll suffered vilification and libel cases – some from fellow MPs – which almost ruined him, but he earned the support of the nation, while Eliza’s catalytic work was recognised with tributes in several British cities and abroad. One characteristic testimonial in praise of Plimsoll from seamen in Hamburg, as featured in Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s groundbreaking Rewriting Women into Maritime project, refers to ‘your dear wife to whom we look with reverence as your untiring coadjutor in your great and ennobling work trying to prevent shipwrecks and loss of life, widows’ tears and orphans’ cries’.
The load line continues to be challenged despite the proven success. The pressure is always to increase cargo – and therefore profitability – either by adjusting the line (as happened in 1906, when the Winter North Atlantic level was removed, to be later reinstated for vessels 328 feet or less in length), or by flouting the rules. European and Canadian authorities reported 3,197 breaches of the load line regulations internationally as recently as 2005.
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