Biggest Shipman

The race of life goes seldom to the fleet of foot. More often it is won by some innovator who procures a motorcycle and rides to victory amid envious shouts of "Unfair!" Such an innovator is tall,* big-boned Baron Kylsant of Carmarthen, never a seaman but the world's greatest shipman. He towered to international fame (TIME, Dec. 6) when the Royal Mail Line of which he is Chairman bought the White Star. Last week correspondents enthroned him as a personage by cabling to the world's ends a speech which he made in London before the Institute of Marine Engineers. The speech would not have mattered had it not been so very typical of Baron Kylsant. Because he came to shipping not from the sea but from Newton College, South Devon, he has not the mariner's longing to do everything in "the good old way," but sees ships, as landsmen do, chiefly as a means to get men, food and merchandise from one dry place to another.

Since he bought his first ship in 1889 Owen Cosby Philipps, now Lord Kylsant, has pioneered in everything that would get ships faster across the damp places and keep their human cargoes warm and dry, and their cargoes of foodstuffs dry and cold. He pushed the adoption of a twin propeller drive. He was ahead with refrigerator cargo ships, reaping millions from frozen Argentine beef. All his life he could have said with Kipling's shipmaster of his competitors: They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind, And I left 'em sweating and stealing a year and a half behind.

At present Lord Kylsant is leaving his competitors behind with a fleet of some 50 motors ships under his control, the largest in the world. Naturally his speech last week turned to the motor ship; the ship with an engine running by explosions like those in an automobile motor, instead of by the push of expanding steam as in a locomotive.

Engineers have long ago proved theoretically and by individual test the superiority of the motor ship; but the old salts of the sea are still suspicious, as they were once of steam. "Sails," they said, "are safer than expanding steam." "Steam," they say, "is safer than exploding oil." Lord Kylsant, director of some 488 steamships and some 50 motor ships, said last week : "The experience of ship owners who have operated motor vessels is . . . contrary to expectation . . . that they are both reliable and dependable . . . cheaper to run . . . can carry larger cargoes. . . . Our motor ships have covered 7,500,000 miles."

*Six feet, seven inches.