“Safety First” should never become the slogan of the sea. It must not be allowed to. A larger view of safety as a whole should be striven for, lest emphasis be placed upon relatively unimportant parts to the detriment of the basic safety structure. This view of the question is held by a majority of intelligent seamen, but they do not speak about it. Many do not care to, and those who might are restrained by the difficulty and danger attending any attack upon accepted ideas. So only one well-known seaman, Andrew Furuseth, today holds the bridgehead. It is almost entirely due to the efforts of this one sick and aging man that seamen are not yet submerged by an idea which means good business in a large automobile factory, but which means disaster at sea.
In this the Navy could help, and indeed must do so sooner or later. Its officers are not at present subject, as merchant officers are, to outside pressure. Naval officers should not think that because there is no active Safety First campaign in naval ships they are not being undermined by the subtle force of advertising and the momentum of an uncontradicted idea. What if some day a call for volunteers for the whaleboat should reveal insufficient takers?
Safety First is improper for a man who calls himself seaman, because his “first” should be the safety of the passengers, if he be merchant; the service of his gun if he be naval. Can the average man who has had years of drilling in the idea of saving his own skin be wholly blamed for scurrying past a crowd of passengers to a lifeboat and climbing into it?
The seaman’s “second” should be the safety and service of his ship. This touches all of us, naval and merchant alike; for while the majority of us have never been in a great disaster or modern battle, we are all in direct contact with this “second. All of us, practically without exception, risk injury daily and on occasion life itself, in the service of our ship; without thinking much about it, generally, but often in cases of exceptional danger realizing the risk and taking the chance nevertheless.
This comes under the heading of duty, and instances could be cited running into the thousands. At one end of the scale a messboy will risk wet feet to get his dinner out. At the other end an engineer will risk his life pulling the fires with the water gone from his gauge glass. These things are routine and pass almost unnoticed. In a merchant ship an officer may occasionally comment that “So-and-So is a good man.” In a naval vessel only the exceptional case gets a citation. What if this were to stop?
Here the Safety Engineers at once protest: “We do not advocate thinking of personal safety when an emergency happens. We only recommend it in ordinary routine occupations of average life aboard ship.” This is true, naturally. The trouble with it is, that it is counter to all theories of training, including their own.
Safety cannot be pounded into a man’s consciousness day after day, month after month, year after year, without its doing something to him, and the chances are that he will react automatically to its demands. He will not, in the tenth year, on the night of the big accident, act instinctively in a highly unsafe but necessary manner. Hebe blamed for not so doing, but it is not his fault. The saddest, and at the same time most neglected, phase of a recent disaster was the president of a steamship company gripping the arms of his chair, hoping for some accounts of heroism or self-sacrifice; accounts that never came.
This manner of training is wrong. Instinctive reaction to duty is what we should require, be it safe or unsafe. To be specific, if a man is trained over a long period of time always to hunt for a safety belt and adjust it around himself—do not smile, you naval readers, it has come to the merchant service—before going over the side, how can he be expected to make the decision, which would of necessity be split-second, to slide down a rope end and seize a drowning woman floating past?
No; if safety must be taught, let it be third. Let us pick up, if we can, the pride of craftsmanship of the older seaman—the pride of the seaman who could go aloft blindfolded, the pride of the fireman who never missed his bell. This can be done. Seamen as a class are not much different from their predecessors. Instead of Safety First, let us endeavor to inculcate the idea of Duty First. If the insurance companies protest, let them analyze more closely their total costs, including disasters.
Accidents have happened and ships have been lost for thousands of years, sometimes through (mincing no words) cowardice. Ships will continue to get into trouble and will be lost again, sometimes through the same reason, but we must not encourage a growth in this percentage—it has always heretofore been low. The difference between a high regard for personal safety and cowardice is too fine a one for the traveling and shipping public to draw, so with ethical reasons aside it is not good business to educate our seamen to think of Safety First. We should not subject them to the pressure of a propaganda which has for its avowed purpose that of making them act instinctively for their own individual safety.
They are not told to take intelligent chances. They are flatly commanded to take none at all; and while as a class they do not as yet pay much attention to this, such is the force of advertising that some day they might. This will be an uncomfortable day for better-class seamen to think about. It will be a vastly sadder day for the ships, insurances, shipowners, and admiralties.
Perhaps this is an angle of the case which has not been sufficiently considered by the average person. Safety First as a slogan naturally gets no adverse publicity. All of the shouting in this affair comes from one side only: the army of men actively interested in reducing the costs of accidents happening on board ships. Insurances have get-together meetings. Government departments, the Navy included, send out circulars. National Safety Councils meet, and all unite in a chorus of praise for a campaign urging personal safety and more laws to make it so.
It should not be thought that these gentlemen are not sincere or that they are talking without reason. It is merely that the large number of trees obscures their view of the forest. The cost of accidents on board ship is certainly too high, but by saving on smaller ones they invite greater ones. It is most difficult to prove any theory at all against intelligent opposition, so the record of the increasing cost of accidents in the shipping world is offered for what it may be worth. Those interested might well peruse the report of the committee of the Secretary of Commerce, called for the purpose of looking into this accident business, dated December 18, 1935.
The principal causes of the increasing cost of accidents to and aboard ships— aside from the before mentioned argument of too much safety—are too complex to be unscrambled by any single person, or group of persons for that matter. However, the accepted procedure appears to be the gathering of a group or council (from which it may be observed in passing, seamen are conspicuous by their absence) and the analysis of many figures. This method would seem to be stern foremost, so to speak, for the figures are only final results of causes which often do not show. It is cause and not result with which we are concerned in a prevention campaign.
The figures, for example, indicate that wrenching of the back is a common accident aboard ship. Actually it is very doubtful if a good seaman, well satisfied with his job, ever seriously wrenched his back. The writer, casting back for 20 years, cannot remember a single bona fide case. However, because it is hard to disprove this type of alleged injury, the figures get into the records.
In fact, Safety First or Safety Last hasn’t much to do in an active sense with the problem of increasing accident costs to shipowners. Among the larger roots of the matter may be listed the deplorable spirit of indifference on the part of the men to the welfare of the companies; the equally deplorable spirit of indifference on the part of the companies to the welfare of the men; lack of any sort of continuous record of the men, who are thus enabled to mulct many lines or to represent themselves as capable men when they are not; lack of a compensation law for seamen’s accidents, which causes and invites them to expensive damage suits both real and fake; lack of a reasonable amount of shore liberty, caused by less time in port; lack of any sort of retirement program—a naan must retire on his accidents, if he can; general stagnation of promotion for officers; prevalence of drunkenness among the men and in many cases of the officers. This is not a pretty picture. It is not meant to be. The air is filled with high sounding nonsense concerning safety while our ships and our men deteriorate. What is the safety or the life of a man worth, against the destruction of our traditions of the sea? The costs of accidents are rising, certainly, but that is not to be summarily dealt with by more posters, new laws from Congress, or a renewed drive for Safety First.
There is no place in this article for remedies. Many of them are self-evident and many controversial, so that any gathering of steamship people generally produces as many ideas as there are men present. One thing is sure. It will do no good for new laws to be passed or stricter instructions given the men. Our accident toll will continue to be governed by the enumerated causes, varied by luck, until some or all of the causes are taken in hand.
The men, officers, unions, and companies do not appear to be able to do anything about them and there the matter rests unless the government itself takes a hand. These ships, officers, and men are the Navy’s second line; in time of war the Navy and the Nation cannot afford them if they think in terms of Safety First!