“I mind I once seed in Cardiff the crew of an overloaded ship--leastways she weren’t overloaded, only a fatherly old gentleman with a white beard and an umbreller came along the quay and talked to the hands. Said as how it was crool hard to be drownded in winter just for the sake of a few pounds more for the owner--he said. Nearly cried over them--he did; and he had a square mainsail coat, and a gaff-topsail hat too--all proper. So they chaps, they said they wouldn’t go to be drownded in winter--depending upon that ’ere Plimsoll man to see ’em through the court. They thought to have a bloomin’ lark and two or three days’ spree. And the beak giv’ ’em six weeks--coss the ship warn’t overloaded. Anyways they made it out in court that she wasn’t. There wasn’t one overloaded ship in Penarth Dock at all. ‘Pears that old coon he was only on pay and allowance for some kind people, under orders to look for overloaded ships, and he couldn’t see no further than the length of his umbreller. Some of us in the boarding-house, where I live when I’m looking for a ship in Cardiff, stood by to duck that old weeping spunger in the dock. We kept a good look out, too--but he topped his boom directly he was outside the court.... Yes. They got six weeks’ hard....” The coast of California, near which I live, is a favored lurking place of the stealthy Nemesis. The entire coast is a line of jagged rocks, with very few harbors, and vessels continually strike upon the rocks and are pounded to pieces. Sometimes they are great passenger steamers, and hundreds of people are in danger and have to be taken off on tugs; the newspapers give us hourly bulletins of what is happening, and their correspondents perform prodigies of daring and speed to get us photographs of the disaster in the first editions. The public reads of these tragedies, and is awed by the spectacle of man struggling in vain against the stealthy Nemesis. What is the fact about this matter? It is very simple: the Nemesis here consists of the fact that the Pacific Coast from Seattle to San Diego makes a convex curve; so ships of all sorts, the great lumber schooners, the little salmon steamers, the great passenger liners, have to go a few miles farther out to sea in order to be safe. But that additional distance at sea means so many million dollars a year out of the pockets of the owners. It means not merely that more fuel has to be burned, it means that more of the ship’s time has to be taken, and more wages paid to officers and crew; in the case of the great liners it means that several hundred passengers have to be fed an additional meal!