RULES AND REGULATIONS FOR FREEBOARD. 125 
tions considered equally effective. For purposes of reference, the provisions of 
the British Merchant Shipping Acts of 1894 and 1906 relating to load lines have 
been given in Appendices II and III. 
It may be worthy of mention here that under the regulations made by the 
Board of Trade, by virtue of the authority granted under Section 443, Paragraph 2, 
of the Merchant Shipping Act, a vessel must be maintained in good condition to 
continue to hold a freeboard certificate. Freeboard certificates, in the case of 
classed vessels, remain in force as long as the original class is maintained, except 
in the event of structural alterations being carried out to deck erections, etc., 
which may have affected the freeboard assigned. In the case of unclassed vessels 
freeboard certificates are issued for a period not exceeding four years, depending 
on the age and condition of the vessel. In the event of a vessel’s class being can- 
celled or alterations made to the hull structure which affect the freeboard and 
where the time for which a certificate was granted has expired, the freeboard 
certificate must be handed in for cancellation and application made for a new 
certificate; otherwise the Board of Trade officers may notify the collector of customs, 
who has power to refuse clearance of a vessel on this account. A freeboard cer- 
tificate is issued only after the markings have been verified and permanently cut 
in on a vessel’s sides. The particulars on the certificate must be entered in the 
official log and the freeboard certificate framed and kept aboard the ship. 
The 1885 Load Line Committee’s freeboard tables, which in 1890 became 
the legal regulations, were based on Lloyd’s 1882 Tables modified to agree with the 
views of the Board of Trade with regard to the value of erections, provision for 
the height of platform in the larger vessels, and the differences in freeboard for 
season of the year and trade, 7. e., summer, winter and winter North Atlantic. 
The table freeboards for flush deck steamers and sailers were based on reserve 
buoyancy; varying from 22 per cent in the case of a steamer 120 feet in length 
and of standard proportions, to 35 per cent for a steamer 408 feet long, the effect 
of the length corrections and coefficients of fineness given in the tables being to 
give the same percentage of reserve buoyancy to vessels of the same length. The 
awning and spar deck table freeboards were determined on a basis of the strength 
of the Lloyd’s Rule awning and spar deck vessels of that date. Figs. 1 and ta, 
Plates 53 and 54, show the 1885 table freeboards for steamers and sailers, respec- 
tively, in comparison with the original Lloyd’s 1882 and Board of Trade free- 
boards, these early British freeboards having been reproduced from a similar 
diagram in Mr. Foster King’s paper read before the Institution of Naval Archi- 
tects in 1906, entitled “Notes on Freeboard.”’ 
The standard of strength laid down for use with the tables was Lloyd’s 1885 
Rules, in which definite scantlings were tabulated for full scantling spar deck and 
awning deck vessels on a basis of numerals. Owing to the improvement in dis- 
tribution of materials which came into vogue about the time the first British 
Corporation Rules were issued in 1893, so-called spar deck vessels were being built 
relatively as stong as the 1885 three-deck vessel and were assigned minimum free- 
boards on the basis of a strength comparison. A similar situation exists today 
