The mariner's lot has never been an easy one, but it was worse in olden days. As Dr Samuel Johnson described it in 1759: "No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail, for being in a ship is being in a jail, with a chance of being drowned. A man in jail has more room, better food, and commonly, better company."
And things had barely improved by the middle of the last century. It was common practice for owners grossly to overload their badly maintained vessels; the cargo was insured for many times its real value, and they worried little if a ship and all aboard were lost. The sailors' saviour was one Samuel Plimsoll, born in Bristol in 1824. A reforming member of the British parliament, Plimsoll took a particular interest in maritime matters, and in 1872 published a famous pamphlet called Our Sea- men. Its impact was immediate and dramatic: it resulted in the Merchant Shipping Act of 1876 that obliged all vessels to display a "high water mark " to indicate their maximum permitted loading.
The mark was called the load line, or as we still know it popularly today, the Plimsoll mark.
Now a laden boat will settle into the water until it has displaced an amount of the liquid equivalent in weight to the boat and cargo combined. But cold water is heavier than warm water, and salt water is heavier than fresh water, so a ship can safely carry more cargo during the winter months than it can in summer, and more cargo over a salty ocean than in a freshwater estuary. Given that most ships moved from one part of the world to another, and sailed in a variety of climatic conditions, a whole set of load lines was necessary for all eventualities.
The load lines were a series of horizontal lines painted on the side of the ship, each with an appropriate label: WNA, for example, was "Winter North Atlantic" and TF was "Tropical Fresh Water". And ships going to and from the Far East had a load line labelled IS for "Indian Summer", which indicated the maximum permitted loading for a vessel plying the Indian Ocean in the summer time. There are those who say - although I don't believe it - that the hot dry weather associated with the use of this particular Plimsoll line had something to do with the popular adoption of the term "Indian Summer". Be that as it may, mariners everywhere have reason to be grateful to Samuel Plimsoll, who died exactly a century ago today, on June 3rd, 1898.