Merchant Marine
When the development of German ship-owning during the last hundred years is examined, it will be noticed that at the outset of that period it was suffering from artificial retardation, that it made its decisive step forward under the influence of a morbid stimulus, and that in its most recent phase it can hardly be regarded as quite normal and healthy. Like all other forms of industrial and commercial activity in Germany, shipowning was, until the foundation of the new Empire, most prejudicially affected by the territorial divisions and political convulsions which for centuries had hampered every manifestation of the national life.
No port was hit harder by the Napoleonic wars and the Continental blockade upon the German mercantile marine than Hamburg, which by 1900 was the chief shipping center on the European Continent, and owned nearly three-fifths of the sea-going tonnage of Germany. From 1804 to 1813 there is a gap in the official returns of the sea traffic to and from the Hanse town, and in the place of the usual figures the following note appears : "During these years there was no shipping traffic, as the French occupied the left bank of the Elbe, and the blockade on the part of England came into force. Only on June 8, 1814, was shipping reopened." It is also very significant of the low ebb to which the mercantile marine of Prussia had sunk, that, when Further Pomerania was handed over to that State at the general peace, a number of vessels belonging to the ports of the transferred province continued to fly the Swedish flag, as affording them greater security than that of their new country against the ravages of the Barbary pirates.
In fact, German shipping had lapsed into a condition of coma, from which recovery was possible only by slow degrees. A certain amount of stimulus was imparted by the Treaty of 1824, under which Prussia secured exemption from the provisions of the British Navigation Acts. The policy embodied in these statutes, which had been borrowed from the Venetians by the Hanseatic League and copied from the latter by England, had long, by a curious irony, proved a great obstacle to the progress of German shipping. Treitschke goes so far as to describe the Treaty of 1824 as the "first real blow struck at the bulwark of British sea supremacy since the restoration of peace."
It is, however, in the emigration of her people to the United States that the main cause of the development of Germany's mercantile marine is to be sought. In the early days of this migration the settlers crossed the Atlantic almost exclusively in British ships, and this necessitated a voyage over the North Sea and a railway journey from one side of England to the other. The advantages of direct shipment from German ports were too obvious to be overlooked, but it is a significant fact that it was a man of English birth who first clearly appreciated in Germany the latent possibilities of the passenger traffic from the Continent to the United States. In 1836 Robert Miles Sloman started the first regular line of German sailers between the Elbe and the Hudson ; and in 1850 he made another new departure by placing a steamer in this service. The vessel, however, did not remain afloat very long, and her loss seems for a time to have discouraged him from further experiments with mechanical propulsion.
In 1847, a year in which the German emigration to the United States had already assumed colossal dimensions, a number of Hamburg firms decided to make an attempt to capture and exploit this rapidly growing traffic. With the modest capital of $15,000 was formed what became the biggest individual shipping undertaking in the world - the Hamburg-Amerika Paketfahrt Gesellschaft. The original partners in this concern were not individuals but firms, and that at the outset practically the entire business of the line, both passenger and freight, was placed in the hands of brokers.
The Hamburg-America line did not venture on the purchase of a couple of steamers till 1856, so that the field was still fully open for enterprising competition when, in 1857, the Norddeutscher Lloyd was started at Bremen as a purely steam line, for the purpose of disputing with the older company the profits of the emigrant traffic. By a bold and far-sighted policy, the Bremen concern succeeded in attracting to its boats a very large proportion of the German emigration. Further, by accepting return cargoes at merely nominal freights, and treating cotton and tobacco substantially as ballast, it made Bremen the chief Continental emporium for these articles, and thus deprived Liverpool and London of much of their transit trade.
In the mid-19th Century the spinners of Chemnitz obtained the entire supply of their raw material from Liverpool, but by 1910t Bremen ranked second among the world's cotton-importing towns, they had become quite independent of the English middleman. The tobacco manufacturing trade of Bremen showed traces of its origin, for its products were packed in the English fashion, bear English names (sometimes of an unintentionally grotesque character), and are sent out under labels and wrappers printed in the English language. Hamburg had been the pioneer of the German transatlantic passenger traffic, but now found itself in danger of being outdistanced by Bremen. This menace spurred the shipowners of the Elbe to fresh efforts, and the subsequent history of the German mercantile marine was practically synonymous with that of the two leading lines of Hamburg and Bremen respectively.
The concentration of so large a share of the German merchant navy under the management of these two concerns has aggravated the disproportionate development of the two Hanse towns in which they had their respective headquarters at the expense of the other German ports. Up to 1854, the mercantile tonnage of the German ports on the Baltic was larger than that of those on the North Sea, but after that date the positions were reversed, and the tendency which produced the change continued with gathering force. It manifested itself not only in a greater rapidity of growth on the part of the merchant fleet of the North Sea, but also in the actual absolute decline which that of the Baltic experienced for many years. In 1875 the shipowners of the German Baltic ports owned 2,109 vessels, of an aggregate of 470,914 tons net, but by 1900 these numbers had sunk to 840 vessels and 218,750 tons. In the thirty years which had elapsed since the foundation of the Empire the German Baltic littoral had actually lost more than half of its merchant shipping.
There were three principal ship types in the merchant marine: the pure freighter, the express steamer and the combined freight and passenger type. The pure freighter is either a tramp or a liner, the other two types belong solely to the regular lines.
The typical freighter is of about 6,000 gross register tons and has a carrying capacity of about 8,000 tons. The entire ship is utilized for cargo, with the exception of crew quarters, engine room and enough coal to carry the vessel eight to eleven knots an hour.
The pure express steamer is designed to carry only passengers, their baggage, the mails and a very limited amount of valuable package freight. She has her entire carrying capacity full of cabins, steerage quarters, crew quarters, huge, powerful engines, boilers and bunker coal; she runs twenty knots and more per hour. Five hundred to one thousand tons is all the cargo one of these racers can carry. One of the best of the German express steamers is the "Deutschland" of the Hapag. She is of 16,500 register tons, carries no cargo, 800 cabin passengers, 300 in the steerage and a crew of 552. She runs at the rate of twenty-three knots an hour. These steamers are only profitable if they have a full passenger list, which limits them to the North Atlantic service. They count on postal receipts and a passenger patronage which desires speed and which accommodates itself to the sailing dates of the racers.
The combined type carries a great deal of cargo. Amidships, and particularly in the towering superstructure which this type of vessel carries, are the passenger accommodations. As compared with the freighter, the portion of her capacity which the ship can utilize for cargo is limited by the need of many rooms for elaborate passenger accommodations, larger quarters for the larger crews which the passenger steamer demands, larger engines and more bunker room to give the greater speed which passengers require. She runs twelve to twenty knots an hour. A typical example of the combined type is the "Pennsylvania" of the Hapag. She is of 13,333 register tons, carries 400 cabin passengers, 2,400 in the steerage, a crew of 200 and 14,300 tons of cargo. If freight is scarce, such a steamer can make expenses by its passenger service alone ; out of the passenger season, income from freight alone is profitable; when both freight and passengers are moving, a double profit is realized. Indeed, this is the principle of the combined type.
The Hapag and the Lloyd have pursued different policies in the ship types they have chosen. The Hamburg-American Line had built only one pure express steamer, the "Deutschland." She was put on in 1900 and held the "blue ribbon of the ocean" until the "Mauretania" and "Lusitania" came on the scene. The Lloyd, on the contrary, had on the North Atlantic service four steamers of over twenty-two knots ; with them a weekly express service is maintained between New York and Bremerhaven. So in other parts of the world.
Of the 2,903,570 net tons of mercantile shipping registered in the Empire at the commencement of 1912, no fewer than 1,604,415 tons, or considerably more than half the total, were owned at Hamburg, and 859,064 tons at Bremen. In fact these two free towns between them contribute very nearly 85 percent of the total tonnage of the German mercantile fleet.
Gross Register Tonnage Hamburg- America 1,160,424 Norddeutscher Lloyd 739,741 Hansa Company 289,873 Hamburg-South America Company 221,859 German-Australian Company 199,757 Kosmos Company 153,324 Levant Line 121,043 East Africa Line 103,703 Woermann Line 98,134 German- American Petroleum Company 84,219 TOTAL 3,172,276
In the forty years from 1870 to 1910 the shipping of the United Kingdom increased from 1 million to 10 million tons, while that of Germany increased from 80,000 to 2.4 million. In some circumstances this might mean a great deal, but percentage growths cannot alter the essential fact, that whereas in 1870 the United Kingdom owned only 1,031,000 tons more steam shipping than Germany, her superiority had increased by 1910 to over 8,000,000 tons. Nor does it signify very much that the share of the United Kingdom in the world's steam mercantile fleet sank in the ten years 1901 to 1911 from 53.3 to 49.8 percent, while that of Germany rose simultaneously from 10.6 to 11 percent. If all the factors of the economic history of the past fifty years were taken into consideration it must astonish, not that the British proportion has declined, but that its downward movement should have been so insignificant in extent. It is really an astounding phenomenon, that a State with forty-five million inhabitants should own half the merchant shipping in a world with two thousand millions.
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