THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



W7 



With a real merchant marine demand- 

 ing several million tons of new shipping 

 yearly for growth and replacement, the 

 situation will be entirely different — we 

 will stop tinkering and jobbing and begin 

 manufacturing ships. 



OUR MERCHANT MARINE MUST BE WORTHY 

 OF 1 INDUSTRIAL, AMERICA 



Our supply ships today, despite the re- 

 markable way in which they are meeting 

 the war emergency, are nevertheless a re- 

 proach to us for past neglect of ocean 

 transportation. And when our new ships 

 materialize and are placed in service, em- 

 bodying modern features of design, they 

 will represent America's correction of 

 past neglect and point a way to a mer- 

 chant marine worthy of our national effi- 

 ciency in other industries. 



When our present shipbuilding pro- 

 gram has been carried out we will have 

 a merchant marine of the first order, so 

 far as physical equipment is concerned. 

 The present building program is laid out 

 to cover about two years. It calls for 

 more than 16,000,000 dead-weight tons of 

 new construction, comprising 2,249 con ~ 

 tract ships, 42 concrete ships, and 402 

 requisitioned ships. 



The transports can be converted into 

 passenger-and-cargo liners, running on 

 regular routes between this country and 

 Latin America, Europe, the British colo- 

 nies, and the Orient. Fast cargo ships, 

 refrigerating ships, and tankers will be 

 assigned to regular freight routes. 

 Tramp cargo-carriers will take their place 

 in the charter ocean traffic. 



America's facilities on the ocean 

 aeter tlie war 



America will have facilities on the 

 ocean for delivering her factory and farm 

 products, bringing home raw materials 

 from other countries, carrying her custom- 

 ' ers to her doors, and, what I consider to 

 be even more important, taking Ameri- 

 cans abroad as tourists and salesmen and 

 students and creators of international 

 good will, especially to Latin America. 



It is generally thought that we are 

 handicapped in the operation of ships by 

 higher American wages paid officers and 

 seamen and obsolete navigation laws. 

 Actually, our real handicaps have been 



lack of a large merchant marine cover- 

 ing American trade routes regularly, to 

 give us the benefit of quantity handling, 

 and lack of modern port facilities to give 

 us quick turn-around. 



In our other industries we have demon- 

 strated it as a principle that the way to 

 cut costs was not to cut wages, but to in- 

 crease the volume and the efficiency. War 

 is giving us a big merchant marine — a 

 basis for American inventiveness and 

 energy to work upon, developing new 

 methods. 



We have the best-developed petroleum 

 industry in the world, and will increase 

 the tonnage handled per man in ocean 

 transportation, as well as reduce costs and 

 eliminate much of the uncongenial work 

 aboard ship, by building vessels equipped 

 to burn oil either under steam-boilers or 

 in explosion engines. Moreover, we can 

 keep our ships at sea as many days in the 

 year as possible, and eliminate costly 

 waiting in port by rebuilding our ocean 

 terminals, linking them up to our rail- 

 roads, and turning our ships around in a 

 matter of hours instead of days, just as 

 we do with our big carriers on the Great 

 Lakes. 



AMERICA MUST BECOME SHIP-MINDED TO 

 WIN MARITIME POWER 



But it takes something more than phys- 

 ical equipment to make a merchant ma- 

 rine. We must have technical training 

 and morale, if you please. We must make 

 America ship-minded. We are so little 

 ship-minded today that it is chiefly the 

 difficulties of operation which occupy the 

 thoughts of those who are giving any 

 thought whatever to our merchant marine 

 of tomorrow. 



Our people still think of ships and 

 foreign trade with fear and doubt, con- 

 trasting ourselves with the more efficient 

 maritime nations. 



Their thought of ships today is approxi- 

 mately what their thought of war was a 

 year ago, when we were passing through 

 the difficulties and gloom of preparation. 

 These were dark months, and it seemed 

 as though we should never get anywhere 

 in stemming the advance of the Hun. 

 But we know what happened at Chateau- 

 Thierry, when two divisions of the new 

 American Army not only stopped several 



