The ballasting of the merchant ships was done either by the navigating officer or else under the direction of a committee composed of this officer and representatives of owners and merchants. But when once the vessel had been properly ballasted, it was forbidden to remove any ballast except for necessity in entering port, or with the consent of the merchants or committee, though certain heavy articles, such as lead, were permitted to be substituted for ballast. The heavy goods were, of course, placed as low as possible, though such articles as wrought silks and other light goods were allowed to be stowed on the upper deck, where also food, carpenter’s tools and armour could be placed. The owner of the ship was also at times her master, but when the owner did not himself go to sea and himself appointed the master, he contracted to carry the passengers and cargo, purchased the tackle and engaged the seamen. Right down to Elizabethan times the navigation of the ship was not necessarily carried out by the captain, but by the pilot, though in the early days of Mediterranean merchant shipping the masters seem to have been navigators as well, or, more accurately, pilots. If the ship got wrecked there was, according to an old constitution of A.D. 380, a practice of obtaining the true facts of the incident in a manner far more drastic than a modern Board of Trade Inquiry; for certain members of the crew would be selected as witnesses, and they were then tortured until they should speak the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The communal idea even went to the length of having sometimes several skippers on the same ship, in order that no one should act without the consent of the others; and what with the interfering advice and remonstrances of the merchants and the not too disciplined crews, no mercantile officer of to-day would find mediæval seafaring endurable. The mariners could only be kept in check by the drastic law. Thus, if one of them injured another, the first was to pay his wages to the other during the whole time that the sick man was out of employment recovering. Conversely the captain was prevented from maltreating his men, and had to look after them. For instance, if the ship’s long boat with some of the crew in it should break adrift from the ship, the captain had to pay the lost men’s representatives their wages for a whole year, in those cases where the men were in receipt of wages instead of a share of the profits.