Ferry Capsizes Off Guyana Coast with 116 People Onboard
A Capsized Ferry and the Limits of Excuses
When a vessel sinks under the care of public authority, the question is not misfortune alone but whether those who hold power on trust have failed in their first duty: the preservation of life.
A ferry with 116 passengers and crew has capsized off the coast of Guyana, between Georgetown and Port Kaituma. Local authorities say 53 persons have been rescued, and rescuers are racing to find the rest. The vessel, we are told, was equipped with life jackets, lifeboats, and other safety gear, and a search-and-rescue operation now occupies the coastguard and private ships, with a medical team sent toward the site. I do not know how the ship came to grief, what weather it met, what maintenance it had, or what rules governed its voyage. Yet even upon this scant account, one thing is evident: this is not only a maritime accident; it is a test of political trust.
When I once defined political power, in the Second Treatise, as the right of making laws with penalties only for the public good, I had chiefly in mind the protection of men’s property, taking that word in the large sense of their lives, liberties, and estates. A government that sets up a ferry on such a passage, or licenses one, thereby undertakes to order that traffic by known standing rules so that men may entrust themselves, their families, and their goods to it without entering a state of war with the elements and with one another. The sea itself is dangerous enough; the commonwealth is erected that human negligence and private greed need not add to that danger.
We are told this vessel carried numerous life jackets, eight lifeboats, and other instruments of safety. That suggests that some rules have been framed and some compliance at least professed. Yet a ship may be well furnished on paper and ill-governed in practice. The mere presence of gear does not show that the number of passengers was proportioned to it, that the crew were trained to use it, or that inspections were real rather than formal. Here the doctrine I drew from the law of nature applies: reason teaches that no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. If, through neglect of known precautions, rulers or their deputies expose men to mortal peril, they break this law whether or not they meant the harm.
In all such cases, two sorts of power are at work. First, there is the steady authority of the legislative, which ought to provide plain, public rules for seaworthiness, loading, staffing, and emergency response. Secondly, when disaster strikes and the common safety is at stake, there is prerogative: that discretion to act for the public good without a prior rule, or even beside it, so long as it is visibly directed to preservation. The ongoing search-and-rescue, the call of private vessels to aid, the dispatch of medical help, all appear to be instances of such prerogative. As I argued before, such power is tolerable, and even necessary, only so long as it is manifestly used to save, not to cover faults, and remains answerable afterward to the people’s judgment.
Yet the gravest questions will arise not in the spray of the present hour, but when the waters are calm and the dead, if any, are numbered. Then it must be asked, first, whether the rules for such voyages were adequate to what any reasonable man would judge necessary for so many souls; secondly, whether those rules were in truth observed, or winked at for speed or gain; and thirdly, whether the inquiry into these matters is carried out by an impartial judge, or by those who are judges in their own case. The burden here does not lie on grieving families to prove fault. Those who claimed authority to regulate this traffic must now show, openly and with evidence, that they used their power with due care.
If it should appear, after sober examination, that this loss sprang from a single, unforeseeable mischance, then the event, though tragic, does not necessarily impeach the foundations of authority. Men did not leave the state of nature upon a promise of perfection, but of reasonable security under known laws. But if there emerges a pattern—overloaded vessels, lax inspections, ignored warnings, a long train of abuses or omissions by offices set up to prevent just this evil—then the matter alters. Power so exercised is no longer the execution of a trust, but a kind of usurpation over men’s lives; and a people so governed has right to demand not condolences only, but reformation of rules, officers, and perhaps institutions that have shown themselves unfaithful.
I do not yet know which of these worlds we are in. I know only that every person on that ferry was, like every one of us, the workmanship of one Maker, not sent into the world to be casually risked for want of decent precautions. The test for the government of Guyana is therefore plain, though hard: to spare no effort now in rescue; to lay open, when that is done, a full and candid account of the causes; to provide an impartial reckoning of guilt or innocence; and to amend whatever in its own doing contributed to the harm. Where such accountability is refused, men are taught to look past their governors, and to make their appeal to heaven.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — The law of nature — reason — binds everyone, rulers included: no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.
- Second Treatise of Government — Prerogative as revocable emergency discretion — legitimate exactly as long as the public visibly benefits and no longer.