CHAPTER VI. DISPLACEMENT TONNAGE THE BASIS OF TOLLS UPON WARSHIPS. In fixing a schedule of tolls for the use of the Panama Canal and in prescribing rules to determine the tonnage upon which the tolls shall be paid, it is necessary to decide whether or not the same tolls and the same tonnage rules shall apply to warships and to vessels of commerce. The proclamation issued by the President, November 13, 1912, decided this question, in a preliminary way, by making the tolls upon warships 50 cents per displacement ton and upon merchant vessels with cargo or passengers $1.20 per net ton, with a reduction of 40 per cent in the rate for merchant vessels in ballast without cargo or passengers. The reasons for making displacement instead of net tonnage the basis of tolls upon warships need to be set forth in this report, and in order to carry out the President's proclamation it is necessary to stipulate which displacement tonnage for displacement tonnage has several meanings-shall be subject to the tolls that have been established. The Suez Canal Co. has but one schedule of tolls and but one set of measurement rules applicable alike to warships and to merchant vessels. This may be due to the fact that the Suez Co.'s tonnage rules were prescribed for the company by an international commission, whose set of rules, as formulated in 1873, the canal company has felt obliged to observe. The application of the Suez measurement rules to warships is a laborious task, and if the Suez Co. were obliged to measure the warships that apply for passage through the canal, it is probable that the company would seek to make displacement, rather than net tonnage, the basis of the charges upon warships. The measurement of warships, however, is performed by the officials of the Governments to which the several warships belong, and inasmuch as fleets of warships make but infrequent use of the Suez Canal, no country has thought it worth while to seek to have the Suez Co. substitute displacement for net tonnage as a basis of its charges. It is the practice of the British Government to issue a certificate of net tonnage to each vessel in its navy. The vessels of the British Navy enter foreign ports from time to time, and when they do so they are obliged to pay tonnage taxes, and possibly other port charges, based upon net tonnage. The general regulation of the British Government providing for the issue to warships of net tonnage certificates in accordance with the British and Suez rules is as follows: The register tonnage according to British rule is to be inserted in all pilotage certificates, and is to be the basis of all tonnage payments at foreign ports by His Majesty's ships, except when entering Port Said or the Suez Canal, in which case the tonnage according to the Danube rule is to be issued. The Board of Trade tonnage certificate, which shows the registered tonnage according to both rules, is furnished to all ships as they are commissioned at home ports. The weight in tons shown in the navy list is in no case to be used for the payment of pilotage, nor to be mentioned in pilotage certificates. The United States Navy Department does not regularly measure American naval vessels to ascertain their gross and net tonnage.. The Chief of the Bureau of Construction and Repair states that Certain types of American naval vessels which have been built under merchant rules have been measured for gross and net tonnage by the representatives of the Department of Commerce, but this practice is not extended at all generally. Many vessels, however, which have used the Suez Canal, and for which there are reasons to believe such provision was desirable, have been calculated, in the bureau, for gross tonnage and Suez tonnage, and certificates of Suez tonnage have been issued to these vessels. If Panama tolls upon warships were levied upon net tonnage it would be necessary for the vessels of war belonging to countries other than the United States to be specially measured— probably at the time of their construction-in accordance with the Panama rules. In order to keep an accurate account of the tonnage of ships using the Panama Canal, it will be necessary for American warships, though they may not pay tolls, to report their tonnage according to the rules; and if foreign warships are required to report net tonnage, American naval vessels would need to report the same kind of tonnage. Moreover, the trouble and expense of ascertaining gross and net tonnage of warships would be incurred to obtain figures for a tonnage that would not be a satisfactory basis upon which to lery Panama tolls. DEFECTS OF NET TONNAGE AS THE BASIS OF TOLLS ON WARSHIPS. All rules for the measurement and registry of vessels are formulated with reference to vessels of commerce and not with regard to warships. To apply the rules to warships is an arbitrary and cumbersome process, producing tonnage figures that have little significance. It is a misuse of terms to speak of the net tonnage of a warship, because the net tonnage of a vessel is the measure of its earning capacity, i. e., of the space within the vessel that can be used to stow cargo or accommodate passengers. Warships are not built for the transportation of cargoes and passengers. They are fighting machines, the entire capacity of the vessel being used for the purposes of the vessel as an instrument of war. The results obtained by British admeasurers in applying the British and Suez measurement rules to five representative warships are summarized in the following table. The normal displacement of a British vessel, as is explained on page 104, is the displacement of the warships with "legend" or designated weights of stores, coal, fuel oil, and water aboard. A vessel's normal displacement is the weight of a ship when equipped for the ordinary purposes for which the vessel is intended. It is a somewhat arbitrary statement of the vessel's displacement, but is an approximate expression of the ship's displacement when at sea. TABLE IX.--Displacement, and gross and net tonnage, British and Suez measurements, of five British warships.1 Table IX states the percentage which net tonnage, British and Suez measurements, is of the normal displacement of the two battleships and the three.cruisers for which figures are given. The percentage which net tonnage is of gross tonnage is also stated. It will be observed that the Suez rules make net tonnage a lower percentage of normal displacement and also of gross tonnage than do the British rules, whereas in the case of merchant vessels the Suez rules make the net tonnage a higher percentage of the gross tonnage than do the British rules. This indicates that the application of gross and net tonnage rules to warships is artificial and arbitrary. Some years since, it became necessary for the Bureau of Construction and Repair of the Navy Department of the United States Government to apply the Suez measurement rules to a number of ships in the American Navy. The experience of the bureau in calculating the net tonnage, Suez measurement, of our naval vessels illustrates the difficulty of making such measurements. So many questions arose as to the definition of spaces and as to the application of the rules to particular portions of warships that the bureau was obliged to compile a detailed book of instructions for the guidance of the draftsmen who were assigned the task of calculating the net tonnage, Suez measurement, of American warships. The book of instructions that was compiled is printed as Appendix XVII of this report. Table X compares the normal displacement of 22 American naval vessels of different types with their gross and net tonnage as determined by applying the Suez rules to their measurement. The table is especially instructive. It shows a very wide range in the ratio of net tonnage to normal displacement, the net tonnage of the gunboat Helena being over 66 per cent of its normal displacement, while for the armored cruiser Maryland the percentage is less than 29 and for the monitor Monadnock less than 25. The ratio of gross tonnage to net tonnage, as shown in Table X for warships of different types, has such a wide range as to indicate that the net tonnage of a warship is a very arbitrary expression of the size or capacity of the vessel. It will be noted, for instance, that the net tonnage of one of the cruisers of the third class is but 45 per cent of the gross tonnage, whereas for one of the other cruisers of this class the net tonnage is nearly 63 per cent of the gross. For one of the gunboats the net tonnage is 58 per cent of the gross, while for another it is more than 67 per cent. The details contained in Tables IX and X are a strong argument in favor of basing Panama tolls on warships upon their displacement tonnage. TABLE X.-Normal displacement, and gross and net tonnage, Suez measurement, of different types of American warships. Unless there are special reasons why the tolls upon warships should be levied upon net tonnage, it is desirable to avoid the large amount of labor required to apply gross and net tonnage rules to the measurement of warships. As a matter of fact, the calculation of gross and net tonnage of warships would require a great deal of labor to secure results that are not satisfactory. In testifying before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce of the House of Representatives, January, 1912, Mr. R. H. M. Robinson, Naval Constructor then connected with the Bureau of Construction and Repair in the Department of the Navy, made the following statement in regard to the "instructions and regulations" prepared by the bureau for a guide in applying the Suez rules to American ships: "I attempted to formulate a set of definite instructions that I could hand to the draftsman and tell him how to do these things, and I found that there was an enormous number of questions that might be considered a dozen different ways, so we wrote a letter, through the Secretary of the Navy, to the Suez Canal authorities, in order to get their ruling on these questions. About a year and a half later we found that we still had a lot of questions we did not understand, and we wrote again, and, as a result of that, we have gotten up a book that would be of assistance to us in calculating the registered tonnage of a warship. It was a huge job." (H. R. Doc. 680, 62d Cong., 2d sess., p. 484.) |