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The Disciplining of German Seamen

During the 1822 shipping season the crew of a Swinemiinde vessel noticed at Helsingor that the master did not intend to return directly to their home port but rather to detour to Memel. Since they had been hired for a voyage to Stockholm, they felt they had the right to force the captain to stick to the original voyage plan. This particular master, however, was unwilling to follow the custom that a route change required the crew's consent. Instead, he believed that it was in his power to amend the voyage plan according to the state of the freight market; he also thought that his crew had to obey. He therefore tried to have the crew punished for disobedience. Back in Swinemiinde he complained first to the local authorities and finally to the criminal court in Stettin. On 27 April 1823, the judges of the royal criminal court decided that since there was no relevant criminal statute to cover this situation, the seamen could not be punished. 1 A few years later the royal court in Memel had to deal with a similar case. In March 1827 the crew of a ship from Konigsberg lying in a foreign port refused to continue a voyage because they feared for their safety. Their vessel had been damaged during a storm and, although it had been repaired and declared seaworthy, the seamen did not agree. In this case the court decided that the crew's only offense was a breach of obedience, which was not a criminal offence. According to section 1604 of the Allgemeines Landrecht, the general law of the kingdom, the master could have punished this disobedience by administering what was imprecisely called a "mild form of beating."! For many years it was not only judges in Memel and Stettin but also high officials throughout Prussia who refused even to consider treating seamen differently than other subjects, repeatedly pointing out that a labour contract was a private affair and that problems of shipboard discipline were not within the