SHIPPING: Hog Islanders

Year before World War I got going, tall, dignified Albert V. Moore, socialite, and squat, jib-nosed Emmet J. McCormack, ex-tugboat captain, tossed $5,000 into the pot and founded the shipping firm of Moore & McCormack (now Moore-McCormack Lines, Inc.). Two years later the shoestring firm bought its first ship for $90,000 (cash: $15,000), christened it the Moormack, put $185,000 worth of repairs into its hull and went after business. From that time on the history of Moore-McCormack is the history of most of today’s U. S. merchant marine.

Riding the wartime shipping boom, the firm bought ten more ships, sometimes had as many as 50 more under charter and Government allotment. At war’s end it sold the Moormack for $400,000, later snapped up the Government’s offer to take its huge merchant marine off its hands at dirt cheap prices of $10 to $15 a deadweight ton. The advent of World War II found Moore-McCormack big and respectable (capital: $5,000,000), in hock to the Government and worried over what to do with the surplus ships that the provisions of the Neutrality Bill may take out of service. Last week it found an answer.

For a down payment of $1,200,000 and a balance of $2,300,000 to be financed later (probably by the U. S. Export-Import Bank), President Moore and Treasurer McCormack sold 14 of their old (19-21 years) Hog Island cargo ships to the Brazil Government. For Brazil it was a good deal. It stepped up her Government-owned Lloyd Brasileiro Line fleet to 62 ships, gave her urgently needed bottoms for carrying her coffee and raw materials overseas now that war has swept most belligerents’ ships from the seas.

For Moore-McCormack the deal was even better. Under U. S. Government charter and direct ownership the firm operates American Republics Line’s passenger-freight service to South America. For that line, by late 1940, Moore-McCormack will have 14—$40,000,000 worth—new 9,000-to 12,000-ton, 16½-to 18-knot passenger-freight ships, constructed under the Maritime Commission’s program for rebuilding the U. S. merchant marine. Seven of the new ships have already been launched. Faced with the loss of its Scandinavian-Baltic trade (American Scantic Line) for the duration of the war, Moore-McCormack might well get rid of all the old ships it can. So might the rest of the U. S. merchant marine. By 1948, 500 of the Maritime Commission’s new ships will be off the ways. Within three years 1,300 of the 1,400 ocean vessels flying the U. S. flag will be 20 years old. Only once in a generation can any nation’s merchant marine count on selling its obsolete equipment at fancy prices, thanks to war.