The adoption of revised International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, 1972, and their incorporation into English law last year1 has aroused considerable comment and has been the subject of several recent books.2 Of these, Mankabady’s, while certainly the longest, cannot be said to be the clearest exposition of the Regulations, nor a lucid explanation of the principles surrounding collision generally.

After a brief introduction, in which historical, commercial and other “background” matters are explained, the author seeks to deal with civil liability for collision under English law in one chapter. Thus fault, causation, damages and limitation are all lumped together and dealt with, with a strict eye to the art of precis. Not surprisingly, discussion of basic concepts is kept to a minimum. At this early stage the book takes on the general characteristics of a source book rather than a textbook. For example, sections of statutes and statutory instruments are cited verbatim with little or no explanatory material. Very little explanation is offered of the basic principles of liability and for the student, for whom the book is principally intended, reference to other sources would seem necessary before a full grasp of the subject can be achieved. Where the major rules are mentioned it is usually with brevity which may mask rather than explain their import.

The remainder of the text is devoted to the Collision Regulations as amended. As is inevitable with new legislative material, all the illustrative cases are based on the former Regulations. Unfortunately, no attempt is made to correlate the old with the new—cases mentioned under rules within the new Regulations sometimes being found to have been decided under different rules in the 1965 Regulations when the law reports are consulted. Again, the text, by and large, takes the form of a case list with certain illustrative cases set out after the verbatim citation of each Rule. Explanation of principles is kept to a minimum, and in certain cases lacks clarity. For instance, the reader is told that in the case of a collision between two or more vessels on the high seas an English court will apply not the common law, but the “general maritime law”, a term which is explained in only the briefest terms and which is not found in any of the recognised works on Collision.3 In view of the definition supplied by Mankabady it clearly does not refer to the now outdated and largely discarded concept of that name so beloved of Lushington, Stowell and others in the last century. There appears to be little authority to support the existence of the “general maritime law”, the only case cited to support it having arisen from a claim under a bill of lading.

As in the discussion of civil law aspects of collision, many of the cases cited in this section are illustrated with sketch maps. Unfortunately the text of the case note does not always correspond exactly with the detail of the sketch maps, hence much of the