But the great loss of life was not altogether caused by allowing rotten, leaky, badly equipped sailing vessels to go to sea, nor by the neglect of commanders of both sailers and steamers to adopt reasonable precautions for the purpose of avoiding casualty. At the very time when the whole country was ablaze with excitement over the harrowing disclosures that investigation had brought to light, Lloyds' Classification Committee was allowing a type of narrow-gutted, double-decked, long-legged, veritable coffins to be built, that were destined to take hundreds of poor fellows to their doom. Their peculiarity was to capsize, or continuously to float on their broadsides. Superhuman effort could not have kept them on their legs. Neither bagging transverse or thwartship bulkheads were of any avail. Scores of them that were never heard of after leaving port found a resting-place, with the whole of their crews, at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. They lie there, unless enormous pressure has crushed them into mud; and their tombs, could they be revealed, would give ghastly testimony to the incompetence of naval architects. No amount of precautionary measures could have made this type of craft seaworthy. They were not shaped to go to sea. My own impression is, apart from the crankiness of these rattletraps, there was a vast amount of overloading which was the cause of many vessels being sent to the bottom; so many, indeed, that it became a common saying among seamen who were employed in the Baltic trade that if the North Sea were to dry up it would resemble a green field, because of the quantity of green steamers that had perished there. Perhaps the phrase was merely a picturesque figure of speech, as the North Sea makes no distinction as to the claim it has on its victims, and the colour of paint does neither attract nor repel its favour. Notwithstanding the startling evidence which proved that there was something radically wrong in the design and construction of what was known as the "three-deck rule" type, Lloyds' Classification and the Board of Trade officials adhered to the idea of their superiority over every other class. The Hartlepool Well-decker became the object of hostility. It was pronounced by dignified theorists to be unsafe. The long wells combined with a low freeboard lacerated their imaginations. They could not speak of it without exhibiting strong emotion. "Suppose," said they, "a sea were to break into the fore well and fill it, the vessel would obviously become overburdened. Her buoyancy would be _nil_, and she would succumb to the elements."