Committee on shipwrecks of 1836. been done to the safety of life and property at sea. No doubt she had been ever mindful of her seamen and, from the earliest records of her history, a just pride has been felt in those who protect her sea-girt homes; but it is only in recent years that any organised system has been adopted to reduce the disasters of a naturally hazardous profession, or that the Legislature has seriously devoted itself to the provision of measures whereby the proverbial dangers of the sea may be lessened. Very little attention, indeed, had been paid to this important subject until 1836, when a Committee of the House of Commons was appointed to inquire into shipwrecks, the result being that certain facts were, for the first time, brought prominently under public notice in a practical manner. These facts are interesting and instructive, especially when viewed by the light of subsequent experience.
There being then, however, no reliable statistics of the extent of the loss of life and property at sea, the Committee were obliged to depend on information from other than official sources; hence, it was only from the records of Lloyd's, supplemented by estimates of their own, that they were able to compare the casualties of 1816-18 with those of 1833-35, the three years previous to their inquiry. Nor was this comparison complete. To make it so, it would have been necessary to compare, not merely the actual amounts of loss at the two periods, but the proportion the amounts bore relatively to the amount of life and property exposed to danger. There were, however, then no means of obtaining these with accuracy, as the returns were imperfect as regards the number of vessels, their sizes, and the number of persons they
