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In my opinion, many of the provisions of the bill have been framed by the Government to assist in improving conditions at sea. There may be one or two contentious clauses, but I have no doubt that when the Minister explains them honorable senators will realize that they will not be detrimental to the seamen themselves and that they have been introduced, in some cases, in an attempt to smooth things out. At a later stage, I propose to go through a few of the more important provisions, but I should now like to say something in a general way, even though, as I said, this is really a committee bill. Of all man-made creations, the ship probably more than anything else has the power of gaining a place in the innermost recesses of the heart, if I may so express it. Of course, it is possible for a young woman to find her way into those innermost recesses, but of the inanimate objects of wood, steel and what-have-you a ship does grow upon one. The longer a person stays on a ship, particularly if he is in command of her, the more she becomes part and parcel of him. I can recall seeing an old skipper in the old days pat the teakwood rail on the poop and say, " Up old girl, up old girl ", and she would come over the waves. It was as though he felt she was part and parcel of him. Perhaps it was easier to understand that feeling in the old sailing ship days when masters and crews used to sail for many years in the same ship. I have known masters who sailed in the same ship for 20 or 25 years. It is a very interesting commentary on shipping that even shipowners who had not a good name among sailors, but who in fact had the reputation of being very stonyhearted, were sentimental enough, towards the end of the sailing ship era, to keep those ships running until long after their economic life had ceased. Indeed, I imagine that in some cases the owners must have been losing money. I sailed in one of the last of the sailing ships,; she was still running in 1925. There were other ships like " Garthpool " and " William Mitchell " on which a brother of mine served. There was also the old " Mount Stewart " in which the present honorable member for Bowman (Mr. McColm) was born and lived his early childhood. In those days, shipowners were a little more sentimental than they are in these days of steam vessels. But the sailing vessels, which were called by the poets " the white-winged argosies ", have disappeared, and now we go to sea in floating townships which have lifts, swimming pools, lounges, and .everything else that people have ashore. A modern Atlantic liner generates sufficient electricity to illuminate a large London suburb or a small city. But it does not matter very much what kind a vessel is; if one is in command of her, she is the finest thing that sails the ocean. That attitude of mind will continue as long as we have ships and, as Senator Kennelly said, I suppose we will always have ships. Like all good stories, the saga of the sea must 'begin with what happened a long time ago. It is unfortunate that we have no very early records in this regard, but as one looks back one tries to picture the first people on this earth starting to think about crossing the oceans and one imagines how they devised some kind of vessel that would float and carry them from one place to another across a stretch of water - to begin with, probably across a river .or a similar stream. As we have no records of the very early days of sailing, we can only guess at what happened. Our records of what happened in the world of ships does not begin until about the 14th century. From that time onwards, records were kept of trade in the Indian Ocean where the Phoenicians, the Arabs, the Chinese and other races were very busy carrying cargoes from the spice islands, as they called them, or what we now know as Indonesia, to the Red Sea ports, into the Mediterranean and thence to Europe. The fact that the people of Europe could not do anything about it was very .galling to them. There was a recording a little earlier that Herodotus attempted to and did find a way from the Strait of Gibraltar, as we now know it, down around the Cape of Good Hope. But we have nothing very authentic about that.