Introduction. - Nature of a Great Seaport: Great seaports. Dependence on a hinterland. Equipment of a great port.
Channel to the sea. Harbor facilities. Contact between rail and ocean carriers. Facilities for transfer of freight between ship and inland barges. Railway lines to interior, inland waterways, ocean steamship lines. The utilization of this equipment. Harbor dues. Railway tariffs. Utilizing the waterway. Activity of merchants. Active extension of steamship lines. Place of seaport in national life. Hamburg’s equipment and her use of it. Similarity between her conditions and ours. Open basin type of harbor. Freight-handling machinery. Contact between rail and water carrier. Utilizing the Elbe. Suitability of a study of the port of Hamburg.
A great seaport is a country’s right hand extended to foreign lands, offering them our products and requesting theirs. It is the focus of a variety of lines of communication: ocean steamship lines engaged in the coasting and the foreign trade, inland waterways and railways. Its function is to bring these lines into contact and to enable them, with the least possible friction and loss of energy, to effect the exchange of their burdens. In a seaport are knit together the bonds that unite the nations in a network of ever increasing complexity; the seaport is the highest expression of that new phenomenon of the nineteenth century: world-wide trade. It is the great clearing house for the material goods of international commerce. It is the heart of a country’s commercial life, drawing off the sluggish flow of surplus inland production and sending back through the arteries of traffic the life-giving currents of foreign trade.
The first requisite for the existence of a great seaport, nowadays, is the existence of a hinterland interested in foreign trade. London is a last, waning example of the old order of seaport which throve primarily because it was the entrepot of nations and whose business consisted mainly in transshipment and re-exportation. Today these nations have their own trade connections with lands across the sea and need no entrepot to mediate for them. A modern port does not import for foreign countries nor does it import for itself, just as the heart does not draw through the veins blood for its own particular use. It imports for a hinterland. Similarly, it sends abroad the sum of the exports of inland points. The finest harbor in the world cannot become a great seaport if it is located on the coast of Norway or the island of Madagascar. London and Liverpool developed so much earlier than all other ports because England long remained the entrepot and workshop of the civilized world. The development of the port of Hamburg has been parallel with the growth of Germany’s foreign trade. Hamburg has caught up with London and Liverpool now largely because Germany is crowding England on the markets of the world. If once this basic condition is present — a hinterland eager for foreign trade — the port’s greatness depends on its equipment and the use it makes of that equipment.
By the equipment of a port, in the larger sense, we mean a number of things. It is first of all necessary to have a channel from the sea deep enough to let the largest vessels come up, if possible, even at low tide. Speed is life to the ocean liner and several hours every trip spent waiting at the harbor bar may mean the loss of half a trip a year and may result in loss instead of profit for the year’s work. To provide a channel for the mammoth vessels of today, expensive dredging is necessary. What a problem this channel dredging is becoming is apparent when we consider that most of the older seaports were located at that point where sea and river navigation met. The small mediaeval ships could penetrate far inland; for instance, Hamburg lies eighty-five miles up the Elbe.
Once the ship has entered from the sea, she needs a harbor space large enough for her to go to her berth without disturbing other vessels that are moving, at anchorage or at their piers. There must be enough piers to accommodate the regular hners and such free lances as may be expected to arrive. On the piers should be substantial sheds to shelter inbound and outbound cargo and there should be freight-handling machinery on the pier’s edge to expedite the loading and unloading of vessels. Warehouses should be at no great distance from the piers, especially the warehouses that shelter the goods likely to be re-exported. There must be shipyards and docks to rebuild, repair and overhaul ships that are in need.
Railroad tracks must run out on the pier so that goods can be sent inland by rail directly, without the expensive operation of draying them across the city to the freight- receiving station of the railroad. If there is more than one railroad serving the port, there should be a harbor belt line, owned by the city or by the railroads jointly, which would classify and deliver cars between any pier and any road. The art of transportation has nowhere progressed so slowly as in this matter of terminals: in the provision for a cheap, expeditious, frictionless transfer of goods from one vehicle of transportation to another. London is an exceptional case in that its huge population of seven and one half millions demands so much from abroad that the greater part of London’s imports are destined for this population or for re-exportation. Elsewhere, most of the freight arriving at a seaport goes inland, usually by rail, and therefore has to bear the burden of terminal charges that are often unnecessarily high. Under the competition now raging for every rich hinterland, the prime need of an aspiring competitor is to draw to itself combined rail and ocean transports by cheapening the transfer between boat and car. It is partly the intensity of competition for a rich territory that has forced Hamburg up to her present high efficiency. In the space of 300 miles, from Antwerp to Hamburg, there are five great seaports: Antwerp, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Bremen and Hamburg, all competing for the oversea trade of industrial central Europe. One might expect them to be the best built and managed ports in the world, and so they are.
Besides harbor lightering, which provides for the collection and distribution of small shipments between ocean and inland carriers and the transshipment of cargo from one vessel to another — for instance, from ocean-going liner to coasting vessel — there should be provided contact between the seaship and whatever inland craft ply on the river above our port. If the seaship brings cargo which is to be discharged solely into up-river barges, the ship need not take up room at a pier; she can tie up to mooring posts in midstream or wherever else she will be out of the way, and there discharge into the barges. Barges having to do with ships lying at piers should be compelled to exchange all small shipments with them by means of lighters; it is impracticable to tow into the slip every big barge that has twenty to thirty tons of cargo to get from the liner. Capacious basins must be provided in the port for the river barges and tugs where they can lie undisturbed and undisturbing while waiting for their ship to come in or while waiting for an upstream tow to form.
All this is recognized as a port’s equipment. But in the larger sense this equipment is far more. It includes a great network of railways strctcliing across a continent and collecting treasure to enrich the port. Its equipment includes the river on which it lies, with all its tributaries and connecting canals, affording for bulk goods such cheap transportation as the railroads cannot give. Lastly, the equipment of a great seaport includes a vast system of lines on the ocean: transoceanic steamship lines, steamship and barge lines that ply coastwise and to nearby foreign countries. The more numerous these lines of communication are, the greater is the transfer of goods between them, the greater is the volume of trade that flows through the seaport.
Yet a great seaport is not a mere passive tool, a sort of international freight yard where goods are switched about. It is more like a living organism, with a mind and will of its own to use in the struggle for existence. As important as the technical equipment of a port is the use that the port makes, or is allowed to make, of the equipment. Even if the channel and the harbor are perfect, their usefulness may be curtailed by the attempt to collect channel and harbor dues high enough to cover not only the cost of maintenance but also interest on all money expended on them. That is, these expenditures may be considered as an investment which must be made to pay rather than as public improvements designed to promote the free flow of commerce and create wealth that can be better taxed at another point. The latter point of view is the farsighted one. If the port chooses, it can even go so far as to remit all channel and harbor dues for ships engaged in commerce with countries where its merchants or steamship lines are laboring to get a foothold.
The services rendered the port by the railroads that enter it are not measured by the length of their tracks but rather by the policy they pursue: the rates they give. Low rates for long hauls can extend the hinterland of the port; special rates for raw materials imported and manufactures exported can build up in that hinterland industries and an industrial population dependent on constant connection with oversea. Railroads and their allied steamship lines can prorate and give especially low tariffs for export to foreign markets where international competition is intense.
Perhaps more important than in the preceding cases is the use to which internal waterways are put, as distinct from the mere existence of those waterways. There can never be a heavy traffic on a waterway that carries merely the goods to be exchanged between a seaport and points on the waterway. A heavy traffic can arise only when these river points collect and distribute the foreign trade of a large territory. The Mississippi can never have more than a desultory river trade if it carries only the goods exchanged between New Orleans and Vicksburg, St. Louis, Memphis and St. Paul. It can have a very large river trade if Memphis can collect and distribute oversea shipments for all Tennessee, St. Louis for all Missouri, St. Paul for all Minnesota. That would give ample cargo for barge trains for the seaboard. Hamburg and New York would never be first-class seaports if dependent on the exchange of goods with each other; they collect and distribute each for a wide hinterland. Nothing but a similar activity can make a great river port or a great river traffic. This is a fundamental truth in waterway transportation that is too often neglected.
If waterways arc to render this service of providing cheap transportation between a large territory and the seaboard, there must obviously be cooperation between them and the railways, for waterways do not, at best, reach more than a small number of the destinations of imported goods or of the sources of exports. To attain this end, two conditions are necessary. First of all, there must be physical connection between the rail and water carriers. The railroad car must be brought alongside the pier where the river boat lies, just as it comes alongside the pier Avhere the seaship lies. Lack of this connection means the expense of draying between the railroad’s freight station and the river craft and this expense is usually sufficient to induce freight to stay in the car until it reaches its destination at the seaboard.
Equally important with this physical connection is the rate policy of the railroads, expressing a willingness to, or a determination not to, cooperate with the river and thus allow a large territory to enjoy the advantages of cheap rates to the sea. The railroads may not only refuse to prorate with the waterway as they do with other railroads, but they may apply high rates for their acts of feeding and distributing for the river, while they put their lowest tariffs on services parallel to it. Then, no matter how perfect the river port’s contact between water and rail, it will be and remain cheaper for all inland points not on the waterway to communicate with the seaboard by rail direct rather than by transshipment into a barge at a river port. The railroad rate policy deter- mines how large shall be the hinterland that the river is allowed to serve. Many a product remains on the farm, in the mine or unmanufactured because it is refused sufficiently cheap transportation to the sea. Many a needed foreign product cannot bear the cost of rail transportation inland.
The merchants of a great seaport are not mere impassive middlemen through whose hands pass in automatic flow the surplus products and necessary imports of the country back of them. They are constantly finding new markets for the farms and industries inland and are constantly finding new sources of supply for foreign foodstuffs and foreign raw materials that are needed by the domestic population and factories. The seaport merchants are continually enlarging their transshipment trade to the coastal points and the nearby foreign countries whose foreign trade is too small for them to have direct lines of their own.
Lastly, a great seaport does not sit quietly by until enough indirect trade has grown up between it and a foreign land to make certain the success of a direct steamship line. Enterprising shipowners, with or without subsidies, establish coasting and oversea lines to develop trade. The merchants, exporters and importers of the port and the manufacturers inland unite to support the line and soon the trade is there. There are constantly being added to the port’s equipment new coasting lines which, beside acting as collectors and distributors of foreign trade, carry goods in domestic commerce more cheaply than the railroads can. Similarly, the shipyards of the port may do their part to help its progress. In close cooperation with the steamship lines, they may be the pioneers in the designing and constructing of new ship types, so economical to operate that they increase the profits or the radius of action of the lines to which they belong, or so comfortable and so luxurious that they attract and hold the lucrative passenger and emigrant trade.
The seaport in this broader sense is the most important part in the mechanism of foreign trade. It is more than an interesting device; it is a living organism, or rather an essential part of that organism which we call the state, and has a vital function to perform. Its function is to call into life and handle the streams of foreign commerce and coastwise trade, to find for farms, mines and factories the markets and sources of foreign supply that they need, to organize and develop coastwise domestic trade. It is a function that is of increasing importance as the commercial bonds uniting nations become closer, the national and international specialization of production more complete, the volume of international exchange greater and the competition on the world’s markets more severe.
Considered from this point of view it is apparent that the equipment and working of the leading seaports are a matter of great economic interest as bearing on the future of the nations they represent. Such is the justification for a study of the port of Hamburg. It has been among the primary factors contributing to the swift rise of Germany, since her rebirth in 1871, to a position of great economic power; it is one of the most valuable assets of the Empire today.
Hamburg has a perfect technical equipment, permitting the most expeditious, the smoothest possible passage of freight between sea and inland carriers. It has a net-work of waterways at its command and a railway system converging upon it from all parts of central Europe. Steamship lines give it probably a larger number of direct connections with foreign countries than any other port enjoys. Moreover, this equipment is utilized as it should be. Port and channel dues are low. There is a heavy use of the Elbe inland and good cooperation with it on the part of the railways. The latter give their lowest tariffs to aid Hamburg against its foreign rivals or to further German exportation. Finally, the methods that Hamburg has pursued are most instructive for us because our ports are most like Hamburg.
This is evident when the type of harbor which Hamburg represents is considered. The other great north European ports beside Hamburg — London, Liverpool and Antwerp — are all, with the exception of a portion of the harbor at Antwerp, ports with closed docks. The difference between high and low tide at these ports is fifteen to thirty feet, such a difference that the construction of simple piers projecting out into the river was impracticable. Every tide Avould drop a foot of mud into the slips between such piers; no amount of dredging could keep them clear. A vessel rising and falling twenty feet with the tide, twice each day, would be most embarrassing to make fast, to load and unload. Moreover, the erection of deep-founded quay walls, deep enough to afford the vessels at their berths sufficient depth of water at low tide, high enough to carry pier sheds well above the high water mark — this would entail a prohibitive cost, though Antwerp has assumed a similar cost in the construction of a straight river quay of this sort three and one half miles long, alongside which many of the liners lie. The rest of the harbor at Antwerp and the entire harbor at both London and Liverpool, of which we hear so much, are pure closed-dock harbors. The principle of their construction and operation is one which, happily, has no practical significance for us. Their docks are entered through locks which at best are open only a few hours at high tide. That means that a ship may have to wait hours after entering the port before she can go to her berth or may have to wait hours after she has finished loading before she can leave her berth. This was a slight hindrance to sailing ships which sailed on no schedule and were so long at sea, so long loading and unloading, that a delay of a few hours in port was immaterial. But our liners today are on hard and fast schedules. A delay in getting to their berths is as serious as a slackening of speed at sea. Whoever sees the big Cunarders lying anchored in the Mersey, waiting to go to their berths, may admire the skill with which natural difficulties were overcome but cannot envy the English their dock system.
Fortunately, nothing of the sort is necessary in America. New York, for instance, has a difference of six feet between high and low water, Boston of nine and one half feet. Therefore we can use the same system that Hamburg, with her difference of six and one half feet between high and low tide, uses: piers and slips opening directly into the river. In New York, where the river is wide, piers were built out into it; in Hamburg, where the river is narrow — Hamburg is eighty-five miles from the sea — slips had to be cut into the land, leaving solid piers projecting. In the case of Hamburg, as here in America, it is possible to have open basin harbors whose piers can be approached at all tides. Then, if the channel is so dredged that the largest vessels can come up even at low tide, delay to the liners in reaching their berths has been abolished.
It is fully as important to shorten the unproductive stay of the steamer in port by expediting her loading and discharging by the use of freight-handling machinery.
This is a respect in which Hamburg has led the way and one in which we have unfortunately followed the older English ports, with their use of human labor instead of cranes for handling cargo. Though labor is dearer in the United States than in Germany and hoisting machinery cheaper, though on the Great Lakes we have developed the most perfect machinery for dealing with bulk cargoes, we have been unwilling on the Lakes and in our seaports to follow the lead of Germany in adopting machinery for handling package freight.
Moreover, the great English ports were built up before the days of the railroads. When the latter came upon the scene, it was not possible to lay tracks through the city to the centrally located docks. As a result, these are without adequate railway connection. We have already seen the importance of this connection for all ports dependent on trade with their hinterland and not, like London, primarily interested in re-exportation by sea or in supplying the needs of a local population as large as that of the three Scandinavian monarchies combined. Hamburg is dependent on the country behind it, as our ports are. In American ports, at least for all extensions, there is the possibility of creating that smooth contact between water and rail carriers which distinguishes Hamburg.
Finally, Hamburg has a river like the Mississippi and uses it in a manner that could be transplanted directly to the Mississippi system. Much of the eulogy bestowed on foreign waterways by trippers returning from Europe is expended on canals and ditches in Holland and Belgium.
These canals, like the little used English canals, if set down in America would be soon closed by the competition of American railways. Better canals have already fallen into disuse here. It is doubtful whether even the great network of canals serving Antwerp, which carry 300 to 400-ton barges to all parts of Belgium and France, could meet our American rail rates. The expenses of transportation attendant on delay in locks and limited speed in canal levels are so great that the days of the cross-country canal — even if it is toll-free — appear to be numbered throughout the railroad world. The future of inland water transportation lies in the use of free rivers like the Mississippi, the Rhine and the Elbe, these rivers collecting and distributing for a large territory. That this form of transportation is best exemplified today by the Rhine and the Elbe cannot fail to be the judgment of those who study waterways.
On the course of the Elbe, notably at Magdeburg, Torgau, Riesa and Dresden, are harbors which in tech- nical excellence of construction, in providing for cheap transfer between river barge and car or dray, rival the works at Hamburg. Cranes, elevators, etc., facilitate this transfer exactly as at the seaport. On the river ply long, low, powerful side-wheel tugs, each having in its wake a train of barges of 600 to 800 tons average capacity. River transportation is in the hands of large, responsible companies which quote season rates, make deliveries as they promise to and, in conjunction with the steamship companies, give through bills of lading to all foreign lands. The steel construction of barges and tugs, the excellent condition of the river, the regulation of river traffic and the nature of river terminal facilities all work to keep the insurance on water transportation low. By the use of the Elbe and the waterways connected with it, Hamburg extends her influence far into eastern Germany and Austria and brings to herself shipments that would otherwise go via Stettin or Trieste. It is the Elbe that has given Hamburg the supremacy over Bremen in Germany, for Bremen had only the short Weser to aid her — and the Weser goes nowhere and connects with nothing. To her rational use of the waterways at her disposal, more than to any other one cause, Hamburg owes her position today.
Hamburg has a superb equipment, partly the gift of nature, partly of her own creation. She uses this equipment in the most scientific and efficient manner to enhance her own prosperity but still more to further the development of the country she serves. The Germany of today is unthinkable without Hamburg, which is the symbol of German persistence, thoroughness, care of details, appreciation of opportunity and nice adaptation of the means to the end in view. The equipment of the port and the use of that equipment have been made under conditions similar to our own. Therefore a study of the port of Hamburg has more than the theoretical interest that attaches to a consideration of the construction and operation of any perfect thing. It has the practical interest that follows those achievements which show us the way to the removal of our own imperfections.
A great seaport is a country’s right hand extended to foreign lands, offering them our products and requesting theirs. It is the focus of a variety of lines of communication: ocean steamship lines engaged in the coasting and the foreign trade, inland waterways and railways. Its function is to bring these lines into contact and to enable them, with the least possible friction and loss of energy, to effect the exchange of their burdens. In a seaport are knit together the bonds that unite the nations in a network of ever increasing complexity; the seaport is the highest expression of that new phenomenon of the nineteenth century: world-wide trade. It is the great clearing house for the material goods of international commerce. It is the heart of a country’s commercial life, drawing off the sluggish flow of surplus inland production and sending back through the arteries of traffic the life-giving currents of foreign trade.
The first requisite for the existence of a great seaport, nowadays, is the existence of a hinterland interested in foreign trade. London is a last, waning example of the old order of seaport which throve primarily because it was the entrepot of nations and whose business consisted mainly in transshipment and re-exportation. Today these nations have their own trade connections with lands across the sea and need no entrepot to mediate for them. A modern port does not import for foreign countries nor does it import for itself, just as the heart does not draw through the veins blood for its own particular use. It imports for a hinterland. Similarly, it sends abroad the sum of the exports of inland points. The finest harbor in the world cannot become a great seaport if it is located on the coast of Norway or the island of Madagascar. London and Liverpool developed so much earlier than all other ports because England long remained the entrepot and workshop of the civilized world. The development of the port of Hamburg has been parallel with the growth of Germany’s foreign trade. Hamburg has caught up with London and Liverpool now largely because Germany is crowding England on the markets of the world. If once this basic condition is present — a hinterland eager for foreign trade — the port’s greatness depends on its equipment and the use it makes of that equipment.
By the equipment of a port, in the larger sense, we mean a number of things. It is first of all necessary to have a channel from the sea deep enough to let the largest vessels come up, if possible, even at low tide. Speed is life to the ocean liner and several hours every trip spent waiting at the harbor bar may mean the loss of half a trip a year and may result in loss instead of profit for the year’s work. To provide a channel for the mammoth vessels of today, expensive dredging is necessary. What a problem this channel dredging is becoming is apparent when we consider that most of the older seaports were located at that point where sea and river navigation met. The small mediaeval ships could penetrate far inland; for instance, Hamburg lies eighty-five miles up the Elbe.
Once the ship has entered from the sea, she needs a harbor space large enough for her to go to her berth without disturbing other vessels that are moving, at anchorage or at their piers. There must be enough piers to accommodate the regular hners and such free lances as may be expected to arrive. On the piers should be substantial sheds to shelter inbound and outbound cargo and there should be freight-handling machinery on the pier’s edge to expedite the loading and unloading of vessels. Warehouses should be at no great distance from the piers, especially the warehouses that shelter the goods likely to be re-exported. There must be shipyards and docks to rebuild, repair and overhaul ships that are in need.
Railroad tracks must run out on the pier so that goods can be sent inland by rail directly, without the expensive operation of draying them across the city to the freight- receiving station of the railroad. If there is more than one railroad serving the port, there should be a harbor belt line, owned by the city or by the railroads jointly, which would classify and deliver cars between any pier and any road. The art of transportation has nowhere progressed so slowly as in this matter of terminals: in the provision for a cheap, expeditious, frictionless transfer of goods from one vehicle of transportation to another. London is an exceptional case in that its huge population of seven and one half millions demands so much from abroad that the greater part of London’s imports are destined for this population or for re-exportation. Elsewhere, most of the freight arriving at a seaport goes inland, usually by rail, and therefore has to bear the burden of terminal charges that are often unnecessarily high. Under the competition now raging for every rich hinterland, the prime need of an aspiring competitor is to draw to itself combined rail and ocean transports by cheapening the transfer between boat and car. It is partly the intensity of competition for a rich territory that has forced Hamburg up to her present high efficiency. In the space of 300 miles, from Antwerp to Hamburg, there are five great seaports: Antwerp, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Bremen and Hamburg, all competing for the oversea trade of industrial central Europe. One might expect them to be the best built and managed ports in the world, and so they are.
Besides harbor lightering, which provides for the collection and distribution of small shipments between ocean and inland carriers and the transshipment of cargo from one vessel to another — for instance, from ocean-going liner to coasting vessel — there should be provided contact between the seaship and whatever inland craft ply on the river above our port. If the seaship brings cargo which is to be discharged solely into up-river barges, the ship need not take up room at a pier; she can tie up to mooring posts in midstream or wherever else she will be out of the way, and there discharge into the barges. Barges having to do with ships lying at piers should be compelled to exchange all small shipments with them by means of lighters; it is impracticable to tow into the slip every big barge that has twenty to thirty tons of cargo to get from the liner. Capacious basins must be provided in the port for the river barges and tugs where they can lie undisturbed and undisturbing while waiting for their ship to come in or while waiting for an upstream tow to form.
All this is recognized as a port’s equipment. But in the larger sense this equipment is far more. It includes a great network of railways strctcliing across a continent and collecting treasure to enrich the port. Its equipment includes the river on which it lies, with all its tributaries and connecting canals, affording for bulk goods such cheap transportation as the railroads cannot give. Lastly, the equipment of a great seaport includes a vast system of lines on the ocean: transoceanic steamship lines, steamship and barge lines that ply coastwise and to nearby foreign countries. The more numerous these lines of communication are, the greater is the transfer of goods between them, the greater is the volume of trade that flows through the seaport.
Yet a great seaport is not a mere passive tool, a sort of international freight yard where goods are switched about. It is more like a living organism, with a mind and will of its own to use in the struggle for existence. As important as the technical equipment of a port is the use that the port makes, or is allowed to make, of the equipment. Even if the channel and the harbor are perfect, their usefulness may be curtailed by the attempt to collect channel and harbor dues high enough to cover not only the cost of maintenance but also interest on all money expended on them. That is, these expenditures may be considered as an investment which must be made to pay rather than as public improvements designed to promote the free flow of commerce and create wealth that can be better taxed at another point. The latter point of view is the farsighted one. If the port chooses, it can even go so far as to remit all channel and harbor dues for ships engaged in commerce with countries where its merchants or steamship lines are laboring to get a foothold.
The services rendered the port by the railroads that enter it are not measured by the length of their tracks but rather by the policy they pursue: the rates they give. Low rates for long hauls can extend the hinterland of the port; special rates for raw materials imported and manufactures exported can build up in that hinterland industries and an industrial population dependent on constant connection with oversea. Railroads and their allied steamship lines can prorate and give especially low tariffs for export to foreign markets where international competition is intense.
Perhaps more important than in the preceding cases is the use to which internal waterways are put, as distinct from the mere existence of those waterways. There can never be a heavy traffic on a waterway that carries merely the goods to be exchanged between a seaport and points on the waterway. A heavy traffic can arise only when these river points collect and distribute the foreign trade of a large territory. The Mississippi can never have more than a desultory river trade if it carries only the goods exchanged between New Orleans and Vicksburg, St. Louis, Memphis and St. Paul. It can have a very large river trade if Memphis can collect and distribute oversea shipments for all Tennessee, St. Louis for all Missouri, St. Paul for all Minnesota. That would give ample cargo for barge trains for the seaboard. Hamburg and New York would never be first-class seaports if dependent on the exchange of goods with each other; they collect and distribute each for a wide hinterland. Nothing but a similar activity can make a great river port or a great river traffic. This is a fundamental truth in waterway transportation that is too often neglected.
If waterways arc to render this service of providing cheap transportation between a large territory and the seaboard, there must obviously be cooperation between them and the railways, for waterways do not, at best, reach more than a small number of the destinations of imported goods or of the sources of exports. To attain this end, two conditions are necessary. First of all, there must be physical connection between the rail and water carriers. The railroad car must be brought alongside the pier where the river boat lies, just as it comes alongside the pier Avhere the seaship lies. Lack of this connection means the expense of draying between the railroad’s freight station and the river craft and this expense is usually sufficient to induce freight to stay in the car until it reaches its destination at the seaboard.
Equally important with this physical connection is the rate policy of the railroads, expressing a willingness to, or a determination not to, cooperate with the river and thus allow a large territory to enjoy the advantages of cheap rates to the sea. The railroads may not only refuse to prorate with the waterway as they do with other railroads, but they may apply high rates for their acts of feeding and distributing for the river, while they put their lowest tariffs on services parallel to it. Then, no matter how perfect the river port’s contact between water and rail, it will be and remain cheaper for all inland points not on the waterway to communicate with the seaboard by rail direct rather than by transshipment into a barge at a river port. The railroad rate policy deter- mines how large shall be the hinterland that the river is allowed to serve. Many a product remains on the farm, in the mine or unmanufactured because it is refused sufficiently cheap transportation to the sea. Many a needed foreign product cannot bear the cost of rail transportation inland.
The merchants of a great seaport are not mere impassive middlemen through whose hands pass in automatic flow the surplus products and necessary imports of the country back of them. They are constantly finding new markets for the farms and industries inland and are constantly finding new sources of supply for foreign foodstuffs and foreign raw materials that are needed by the domestic population and factories. The seaport merchants are continually enlarging their transshipment trade to the coastal points and the nearby foreign countries whose foreign trade is too small for them to have direct lines of their own.
Lastly, a great seaport does not sit quietly by until enough indirect trade has grown up between it and a foreign land to make certain the success of a direct steamship line. Enterprising shipowners, with or without subsidies, establish coasting and oversea lines to develop trade. The merchants, exporters and importers of the port and the manufacturers inland unite to support the line and soon the trade is there. There are constantly being added to the port’s equipment new coasting lines which, beside acting as collectors and distributors of foreign trade, carry goods in domestic commerce more cheaply than the railroads can. Similarly, the shipyards of the port may do their part to help its progress. In close cooperation with the steamship lines, they may be the pioneers in the designing and constructing of new ship types, so economical to operate that they increase the profits or the radius of action of the lines to which they belong, or so comfortable and so luxurious that they attract and hold the lucrative passenger and emigrant trade.
The seaport in this broader sense is the most important part in the mechanism of foreign trade. It is more than an interesting device; it is a living organism, or rather an essential part of that organism which we call the state, and has a vital function to perform. Its function is to call into life and handle the streams of foreign commerce and coastwise trade, to find for farms, mines and factories the markets and sources of foreign supply that they need, to organize and develop coastwise domestic trade. It is a function that is of increasing importance as the commercial bonds uniting nations become closer, the national and international specialization of production more complete, the volume of international exchange greater and the competition on the world’s markets more severe.
Considered from this point of view it is apparent that the equipment and working of the leading seaports are a matter of great economic interest as bearing on the future of the nations they represent. Such is the justification for a study of the port of Hamburg. It has been among the primary factors contributing to the swift rise of Germany, since her rebirth in 1871, to a position of great economic power; it is one of the most valuable assets of the Empire today.
Hamburg has a perfect technical equipment, permitting the most expeditious, the smoothest possible passage of freight between sea and inland carriers. It has a net-work of waterways at its command and a railway system converging upon it from all parts of central Europe. Steamship lines give it probably a larger number of direct connections with foreign countries than any other port enjoys. Moreover, this equipment is utilized as it should be. Port and channel dues are low. There is a heavy use of the Elbe inland and good cooperation with it on the part of the railways. The latter give their lowest tariffs to aid Hamburg against its foreign rivals or to further German exportation. Finally, the methods that Hamburg has pursued are most instructive for us because our ports are most like Hamburg.
This is evident when the type of harbor which Hamburg represents is considered. The other great north European ports beside Hamburg — London, Liverpool and Antwerp — are all, with the exception of a portion of the harbor at Antwerp, ports with closed docks. The difference between high and low tide at these ports is fifteen to thirty feet, such a difference that the construction of simple piers projecting out into the river was impracticable. Every tide Avould drop a foot of mud into the slips between such piers; no amount of dredging could keep them clear. A vessel rising and falling twenty feet with the tide, twice each day, would be most embarrassing to make fast, to load and unload. Moreover, the erection of deep-founded quay walls, deep enough to afford the vessels at their berths sufficient depth of water at low tide, high enough to carry pier sheds well above the high water mark — this would entail a prohibitive cost, though Antwerp has assumed a similar cost in the construction of a straight river quay of this sort three and one half miles long, alongside which many of the liners lie. The rest of the harbor at Antwerp and the entire harbor at both London and Liverpool, of which we hear so much, are pure closed-dock harbors. The principle of their construction and operation is one which, happily, has no practical significance for us. Their docks are entered through locks which at best are open only a few hours at high tide. That means that a ship may have to wait hours after entering the port before she can go to her berth or may have to wait hours after she has finished loading before she can leave her berth. This was a slight hindrance to sailing ships which sailed on no schedule and were so long at sea, so long loading and unloading, that a delay of a few hours in port was immaterial. But our liners today are on hard and fast schedules. A delay in getting to their berths is as serious as a slackening of speed at sea. Whoever sees the big Cunarders lying anchored in the Mersey, waiting to go to their berths, may admire the skill with which natural difficulties were overcome but cannot envy the English their dock system.
Fortunately, nothing of the sort is necessary in America. New York, for instance, has a difference of six feet between high and low water, Boston of nine and one half feet. Therefore we can use the same system that Hamburg, with her difference of six and one half feet between high and low tide, uses: piers and slips opening directly into the river. In New York, where the river is wide, piers were built out into it; in Hamburg, where the river is narrow — Hamburg is eighty-five miles from the sea — slips had to be cut into the land, leaving solid piers projecting. In the case of Hamburg, as here in America, it is possible to have open basin harbors whose piers can be approached at all tides. Then, if the channel is so dredged that the largest vessels can come up even at low tide, delay to the liners in reaching their berths has been abolished.
It is fully as important to shorten the unproductive stay of the steamer in port by expediting her loading and discharging by the use of freight-handling machinery.
This is a respect in which Hamburg has led the way and one in which we have unfortunately followed the older English ports, with their use of human labor instead of cranes for handling cargo. Though labor is dearer in the United States than in Germany and hoisting machinery cheaper, though on the Great Lakes we have developed the most perfect machinery for dealing with bulk cargoes, we have been unwilling on the Lakes and in our seaports to follow the lead of Germany in adopting machinery for handling package freight.
Moreover, the great English ports were built up before the days of the railroads. When the latter came upon the scene, it was not possible to lay tracks through the city to the centrally located docks. As a result, these are without adequate railway connection. We have already seen the importance of this connection for all ports dependent on trade with their hinterland and not, like London, primarily interested in re-exportation by sea or in supplying the needs of a local population as large as that of the three Scandinavian monarchies combined. Hamburg is dependent on the country behind it, as our ports are. In American ports, at least for all extensions, there is the possibility of creating that smooth contact between water and rail carriers which distinguishes Hamburg.
Finally, Hamburg has a river like the Mississippi and uses it in a manner that could be transplanted directly to the Mississippi system. Much of the eulogy bestowed on foreign waterways by trippers returning from Europe is expended on canals and ditches in Holland and Belgium.
These canals, like the little used English canals, if set down in America would be soon closed by the competition of American railways. Better canals have already fallen into disuse here. It is doubtful whether even the great network of canals serving Antwerp, which carry 300 to 400-ton barges to all parts of Belgium and France, could meet our American rail rates. The expenses of transportation attendant on delay in locks and limited speed in canal levels are so great that the days of the cross-country canal — even if it is toll-free — appear to be numbered throughout the railroad world. The future of inland water transportation lies in the use of free rivers like the Mississippi, the Rhine and the Elbe, these rivers collecting and distributing for a large territory. That this form of transportation is best exemplified today by the Rhine and the Elbe cannot fail to be the judgment of those who study waterways.
On the course of the Elbe, notably at Magdeburg, Torgau, Riesa and Dresden, are harbors which in tech- nical excellence of construction, in providing for cheap transfer between river barge and car or dray, rival the works at Hamburg. Cranes, elevators, etc., facilitate this transfer exactly as at the seaport. On the river ply long, low, powerful side-wheel tugs, each having in its wake a train of barges of 600 to 800 tons average capacity. River transportation is in the hands of large, responsible companies which quote season rates, make deliveries as they promise to and, in conjunction with the steamship companies, give through bills of lading to all foreign lands. The steel construction of barges and tugs, the excellent condition of the river, the regulation of river traffic and the nature of river terminal facilities all work to keep the insurance on water transportation low. By the use of the Elbe and the waterways connected with it, Hamburg extends her influence far into eastern Germany and Austria and brings to herself shipments that would otherwise go via Stettin or Trieste. It is the Elbe that has given Hamburg the supremacy over Bremen in Germany, for Bremen had only the short Weser to aid her — and the Weser goes nowhere and connects with nothing. To her rational use of the waterways at her disposal, more than to any other one cause, Hamburg owes her position today.
Hamburg has a superb equipment, partly the gift of nature, partly of her own creation. She uses this equipment in the most scientific and efficient manner to enhance her own prosperity but still more to further the development of the country she serves. The Germany of today is unthinkable without Hamburg, which is the symbol of German persistence, thoroughness, care of details, appreciation of opportunity and nice adaptation of the means to the end in view. The equipment of the port and the use of that equipment have been made under conditions similar to our own. Therefore a study of the port of Hamburg has more than the theoretical interest that attaches to a consideration of the construction and operation of any perfect thing. It has the practical interest that follows those achievements which show us the way to the removal of our own imperfections.
Dieses Kapitel ist Teil des Buches The Port of Hamburg.