This spring, one of my classes is reading Richard Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. If you haven’t read it, you’ve missed out. The narrative follows Dana’s trip to California in the 1840s as a crew member on a sailing ship but the book is really about a lot of other things. It’s a coming of age story. It’s about cultural meetings. It’s about power and social structure in the small world of the ship. And it’s about risk. Dana describes in harrowing detail the dangers of sailing: clinging to the rigging during an icy storm in the Straits of Magellan; sliding down a cliff in California to rescue a stranded cow hide and then being chided by his fellow sailors for taking unnecessary risks; and, of course, the question of why anyone would choose to be a sailor given the hardships and the dangers of the profession in the 19th century.
I didn’t have much to say about ships in my book. It wasn’t because I wasn’t interested. But, to tell you the truth, many aspects of the history of risk-management with regard to sailing would have complicated my overall timeline and some of my generalizations. Shipping is one of the first activities to be commercially ensured. Two hundred years before anyone ensured an automobile, merchants routinely bought insurance for their cargoes. The availability of ship insurance influenced the design of ships and created a problem called “moral hazard” because it tempted unscrupulous or desperate shipowners to scuttle their ships and collect the cargo.
Because labor relations onboard ships were governed by a different body of law than railroads or factories, employer liability functioned differently. After Dana returned to Boston, he wrote another book called The Seaman’s Friend to inform sailors about their legal rights as workers. Captains also share risk with their subordinates in a very direct way. The manager of a steel mill is unlikely to be killed in his own plant.
The culture of risk also works in a familiar but also distinct way on ships because the careless or ignorant or malicious actions of a single individual can endanger everyone else on board. Ships are pre-modern complex socio-technological systems (to use the jargon of historians of technology) subject to cascading systems failures of the type described by Charles Perrow in Normal Risks. However, long after safety experts began to infiltrate risk management in other high-risk technologically intensive workplaces, ships continued to be managed through deeply vernacular means.
Or at least, I think so. I’d love to see someone else do the research or maybe point me towards work that’s already been done. Yes, I know about The Outlaw Sea and that TV show about commercial fisherman. But what about the centuries of sailing before the present?
I didn’t have much to say about ships in my book. It wasn’t because I wasn’t interested. But, to tell you the truth, many aspects of the history of risk-management with regard to sailing would have complicated my overall timeline and some of my generalizations. Shipping is one of the first activities to be commercially ensured. Two hundred years before anyone ensured an automobile, merchants routinely bought insurance for their cargoes. The availability of ship insurance influenced the design of ships and created a problem called “moral hazard” because it tempted unscrupulous or desperate shipowners to scuttle their ships and collect the cargo.
Because labor relations onboard ships were governed by a different body of law than railroads or factories, employer liability functioned differently. After Dana returned to Boston, he wrote another book called The Seaman’s Friend to inform sailors about their legal rights as workers. Captains also share risk with their subordinates in a very direct way. The manager of a steel mill is unlikely to be killed in his own plant.
The culture of risk also works in a familiar but also distinct way on ships because the careless or ignorant or malicious actions of a single individual can endanger everyone else on board. Ships are pre-modern complex socio-technological systems (to use the jargon of historians of technology) subject to cascading systems failures of the type described by Charles Perrow in Normal Risks. However, long after safety experts began to infiltrate risk management in other high-risk technologically intensive workplaces, ships continued to be managed through deeply vernacular means.
Or at least, I think so. I’d love to see someone else do the research or maybe point me towards work that’s already been done. Yes, I know about The Outlaw Sea and that TV show about commercial fisherman. But what about the centuries of sailing before the present?
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