goods were not contraband of war. She, however, reserved the right of blockade; a reservation by which I may remind my readers, her Majesty's subjects were, commercially, by far the greatest sufferers.[1]
Great increase of ship-building and high freights. The extraordinary demands for shipping on the outbreak of war led to their production with still more extraordinary rapidity, and furnished, at the same time, the most convincing proofs that we had within ourselves resources far beyond all other nations for meeting the emergency of war, without the necessity of keeping up a large and expensive standing navy, especially as such a navy must always be in a state of transition. The high rates of freight then offered for transports, ranging from 20s. to 30s. a register-ton per month for sailing vessels, and from 35s. to 65s. per gross register-ton for steamers,[2] produced not merely all the vessels required for our own transport service,[3] but, also, for the wants of France, whose armies without our aid could not have been conveyed to the Crimea.[4]*
- ↑ See ante, vol. ii. note, page 312.
- ↑ Timber freights from Quebec rose from 30s. per load, the ordinary rate, to 55s. Coal freights to Constantinople advanced from 20l. to 70l. per keel of twenty-one tons four cwt.; and freights from India, which had previously ranged from 50s. to 80s., ran up as high as 180s. per ton.
- ↑ The new law of admeasurement, which came into operation on the 1st of January, 1855, while it produced great improvement in the models of our ships, had the important advantage of creating very little difference in the gross tonnage of the Empire, on which so many dues are levied, and thus rendered unnecessary any change in the long-established scale of charges, which in many cases would have been altogether impracticable. For instance, 1100 vessels, large and small, which were taken promiscuously, measuring under the old law 248,842 tons, were found under the new law to measure 231,277 tons, showing a difference of only 7 per cent.
- ↑ My own firm had somewhere about 100,000 tons of shipping (a large proportion of which consisted of steam-vessels) under our management
