Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 5.djvu/644

 632  FEDERAL REPORTER.

the best possible stowage; but the libellants claim that the cotton ties were improperly stowed with reference to the chemicals, and particularly with reference to the bleaching powders, in that they were placed on the same deck with a space of not more than three feet between them.

Bleaching powder (chloride of lime) is well known to be a destructive chemical, which quickly corrodes iron when it cornes in contact with it. It is shipped in lightly-made casks, each containing about a ton in weight, and, on a rough voyage across the Atlantic, it is a common occurrence for heads of the casks to be broken, and even when the casks are not broken the contents will sift out between the staves from the working of the casks one against the other; as one of the witnesses said, "the beating of the casks together raises a dust and scatters it about." With so large a quantity of these chemicals filling all the middle of the ship, and with so much vacant space over them, between them and the main deck in which the particles could be wafted about, I am constrained to think that it was not proper to have put the cotton ties within three feet of the chemicals, so near that if any of this injurious substance sifted out it was almost certain to fall upon and greatly injure the iron. The dunnage between the cotton ties and the casks did nothing more than prevent them from shifting, and was of but little use to prevent the particles of the chemicals from falling on the ties if they got free. There was no bulkhead or covering of any sort.

That the bleaching powder did get on the iron and did seriously corrode a large part of it is fully proved. The white substance was found on the corroded iron, and the chemical analysis of it proved conclusively what it was. The corrosive and destructive effect of the bleaching powder was well known, and also the peculiar liability of the hoop iron to be injured by it, but no precautions were taken at all adequate to guard against the danger. It is admitted that bleaching powder is commonly carried as part of a general cargo from Liverpool to Baltimore, but no evidence was produced to show that it was customary, or that experience had proved it to be