a language. One may have many things to
tell the other, but at least the two should,
as it were, exchange cards, and each should
carry into port a memorandum of the names
of all the vessels spoken with; stating whereabouts
and in what state each had been seen.
When ships' names are to be made out only
by a complex and tedious process,
misapprehension will be frequent, or the
signalling will often be neglected altogether;
very imperfect then will be the record—and
it is now an imperfect record—which ought
to bring nearly the whole broad ocean within
range of sight.

Two years ago the Registrar General of
Seamen made a representation to the Lords
of the Committee of Privy Council for Trade,
founded upon the fact that from the date at
which he wrote, there was to be an official
number set upon every registered ship, to be
entered upon her certificate of registry, and
permanently marked upon her mainbeam.
Vessels at sea were thus to be identified by
their numbers as clearly as cabs in the Strand.
If, instead of simply saying number ninety,
we had to specify a cab as Hansom cab
the Swift (there being two hundred Swifts),
and add, to complete the specification, built
at Bermondsey in eighteen hundred and fifty,
first of the stand near Hackney church, then
plying from the Southwestern Railway Station,
now of the Strand, near Saint Clement's
church; we should, as to the identity of
cabs, be as confused as we were concerning
the identity of ships, till the official number
was invented.

To turn the official number to the best
account, and to make use of its establishment
as an opportunity for reconsidering the
language of ships, when they talk to each other
far at sea, was the object of the letter written,
two years ago, to the Lords of the Committee
of Privy Council for Trade by the Registrar
General for Seamen. New means would be
required to enable ships to signal readily
their numbers to each other: the opportunity
therefore for a revision of the whole system
of signals at sea was too good to be lost.
The thing to be sought for was an universal
code, and means of making the ships' tongues
speak at the mast-head an universal language,
the same signs representing always
the same ideas to Englishmen or Frenchmen,
to the Spanish and the Dutch.

The proposal of the Registrar General of
Seamen, Mr. J. H. Brown, having been
approved of by their lordships, the
opinion of the chief mercantile bodies was
asked, and was of course in favour of some
further action in the matter, whereupon
there was appointed a committee to inquire
into a report upon the subject of a code of
signals to be used at sea. Of this committee
three members, Admiral Beechey, Captain
Robert Fitzroy, and Mr. J. H. Brown, were
named by the Board of Trade; one member,
Admiral Bethune, was named by the Admiralty;
an Elder Brother, Captain Bax, was
appointed as a member by the Trinity House;
Mr. W. C. Hamett and Captain Halsted,
secretary of Lloyd's, were the members
named by Lloyd's committee, while the
Liverpool Shipowners' Association and the
General Shipowners' Society, each by the
nomination of a member, had a voice in the
discussion.

After deliberating for more than a year,
this committee sent in a report last Michaelmas,
together with the matured scheme of an
amended code of signals. The report, and
the signal-book by which it was accompanied,
proved that the committee-men had
not been wanting either in wit or in the
will to work. They began by examining
the thirteen codes already published for the
use of the Navy and of the British or Foreign
Merchant Service, also by examining some
local codes and reading all suggestions sent
to them. It appeared to them that some
use could be made of the old codes in
inventing a new system.

Then they proceeded to lay down for
themselves the conditions which they held it to
be important that a new method of talk for
ships ought to fulfil. It should admit of a
great many things being said by signs; should
be cheap, simple, and little capable of being
half-perceived or misinterpreted. Thus it
was decided that four flags ought to be the
greatest number used for making any signal,
and that these flags never should be hoisted
some on one mast, some on another. Former
systems had generally attempted to multiply
the power of speech by the use of this kind
of cloven tongue. Let us have, said the
committee, every signal made complete in one
hoist in one place, and let there never be,
under any circumstances whatever, a second
meaning to one form of signal. Let us
have the most important signals made in
the most iinmistakeable way with the fewest
flags. Let the fact of there being two flags
in a hoist always give warning that the signal
is one of danger or urgency. Four-flag signals
might almost be dispensed with, if there
were not a large range needed to express the
great number of geographical names, and a
necessity, owing to the extent of our marine,
for giving means to designate not less than
fifty thousand ships.

Finally, it was decided that the code ought
to be one that could be used by men of every
language, and that the signal-book should be
arranged as a dictionary in which the meaning
proper to a signal, or the signal proper to
a meaning, could be looked out as easily as
one looks out for the Latin to English, or the
English to Latin in a common dictionary.

The plan of signalling devised by the
committee appears really to satisfy all these
requirements. The planners of it had not been
satisfied by former systems, among which that
known as Captain Marryat's is the one most
used. There is also a French code by Captain