The Box - Marc Levinson [14]
Neither type of vessel was designed for commercial efficiency. The interiors were cramped. The curvature of the ships’ sides meant that the five small holds on each vessel were wider near the top and narrower at the bottom, and more spacious toward the middle of the vessel than forward or aft. Longshoremen had to know how to fill these odd dimensions: for the shipowner, wasted space meant money lost. Each hold was covered by its own hatch, a watertight metal cover secured to the deck; cargo for the first port of call had to be loaded last so it would be near a hatch, available for easy unloading, while cargo for the final port on the ship’s itinerary was shoved to the distant corners of the hold. At the same time, every single piece of freight had to be stowed tightly so that it would not shift as the ship rolled at sea; a loose box or barrel could break, damaging the contents and other cargo as well. Experienced long-shoremen knew which items to push into the irregular spaces along the outside walls and which to weave into interior bulkheads, inter mingling cartons and sacks and lumber into temporary walls to keep the cargo wedged in place while still having it available for discharge when the ship reached port. Mistakes could be fatal. If a load shifted in an ocean swell, the ship could capsize.4
At journey’s end, loading for the next voyage could not begin until every bit of incoming cargo had been removed. Cargo in the hold was too tightly packed to be sorted, so longshoremen often piled things on the dock and then picked through them, checking labels and tags to figure out what should be moved to the transit shed and what was being picked up on the spot. If the ship was arriving from abroad, customs inspectors walked the pier prying open crates to assess duties. Buyers’ representatives came onto the dock to make sure their orders had arrived in good shape, and meat and produce dealers sent agents around to sample the new merchandise. The longshore workforce included a small army of carpenters and coopers, whose job was to repair broken crates and barrels once these various inspectors were done. At that point, noisy diesel trucks might back onto the dock to pick up their loads, while forklifts would move other cargo off to the transit sheds. Moving an incoming shipload of mixed cargo from ship to transit shed and then taking on an outbound load could keep a vessel tied up at the dock for a week or more.5
These waterfront realities meant that shipping was a highly labor intensive industry in the postwar era. Depression and war had sharply curtailed the construction of privately built merchant vessels since the 1920s, so ship operators had little capital invested in the business. In the United States, total private outlays for ships and barges from 1930 through 1951 amounted to only $2.5 billion, which was less than shipowners had invested during the decade of the 1920s. Ship lines could buy surplus Liberty Ships, Victory Ships, and tankers for as little as $300,000 apiece, so the carrying cost of ships that were sitting in port rather than earning revenue was not a major expense. Outlays for shoreside facilities were negligible. The big cost item was the