This book gives brief accounts of the shipping industry and the place of tramp shipping in it, of shipbrokering and tramp agency, of the law of agency, P. & I. insurance of ship’s agents, and of duties as charterer’s nominated agent; it concludes with general observations on the subject of tramp agency.

The author is not, it seems, a lawyer, and is scrupulous to an excessive degree to cite sources for his propositions. Thus, for example, C. F. H. Cufley is cited for the statement that “Since the beginning of recorded history, man has earned currency by the carriage of goods and passengers across a body of water” (pp. 1–2). And the only slightly less elementary proposition that “Demurrage is the payment to owners by charterers for their exceeding the time allotted for loading and discharge” (p. 17) is attributed to a lecture by Professor Birgeles, Professor of Integrated Ocean Transportation and Ports, State University of New York on 25 January 1983. Similarly, a statement “Fiduciary is a relationship of trust” (p. 41) is attributed to an earlier lecture (by another Professor) on 19 September 1982.

Most of the basic propositions on the law of agency are correct. But some of the statements on the doctrine of the undisclosed principal are (not surprisingly) at the very least dubious or misleading, both for American and English law. On this and other matters, specialist help might have been sought. Thus on p. 40 appears the following: “Under American law the relationship [of agency] is not actually contractual in nature but more consensual. In English law, according to Eadie and his interpretation of Edwards, the agency relationship is contractual in that it requires the agent to agree to act on behalf of the principal in return for remuneration.” This is simply misunderstanding of particular parts of the explanations offered by various writers and, insofar as it leads to an assumption that English law knows no gratuitous agency, wrong. On the other hand, as to partly disclosed principals there probably is a difference between American and English law, though (not surprisingly, since the point is specialized) this is not suggested.

The most interesting part of this book, at any rate for me, was that towards the end dealing with the actual operations and practical problems (with some account of their legal implications) experienced by tramp ship agents—information not readily available. This part of the book could with advantage have been longer—perhaps at the expense of some of the more general and well-known information offered earlier.

There are many grammatical and syntactical infelicities, e.g., “The liner service of shipping is actually a common carrier” (p. 3) and “Here commences the operational aspects of agency” (p. 27). Sometimes these produce passages difficult to understand, such as “The natural tendency for technical descriptions and visual analysis of spare parts can become misconstrued through the intermediary” (p. 28). And it is confidence-sapping to find a leading textbook such as Scrutton (19th edn., 1984) cited in a superseded (18th) edition of 1974 (p. 41).

Much of what is wrong, in what is a short text, could have been put right by a ruthless editor in a couple of hours; and the agency propositions could have been checked by a lawyer