ABSTRACT
MacKinnon LJ: The rights and obligations of the parties to a time charterparty must depend on its written terms, for there is no special law applicable to this form of contract as such. A time charterparty is, in fact, a misleading document, because the real nature of what is undertaken by the shipowner is disguised by the use of language dating from a century or more ago, which was appropriate to a contract of a diff erent character then in use. At that time a time charterparty (now known as a demise charterparty) was an agreement under which possession of the ship was handed by the shipowner to the charterer for the latter to put his servants and crew in her and sail her for his own benefi t . . . The modern form of time charterparty is, in essence, one by which the shipowner agrees with the time charterer that during a certain named period he will render services by his servants and crew to carry the goods which are put on board his ship by the time charterer. But certain phrases which survive in the printed form now used are only pertinent to the older form of demise charterparty. Such phrases, in the charterparty now before the court, are: ‘the owners agree to let’, and ‘the charterers agree to hire’ the steamer. There was no ‘letting’ or ‘hiring’ of this steamer. Then it is in terms provided that at the end of the period the vessel shall be ‘redelivered’ by the time charterers to the shipowners. ‘Redelivery’ is only a pertinent expression if there has been any delivery or handing over of the ship by the shipowner to the charterer. There never had been any such delivery here. The ship at all times was in the possession of the shipowners and they simply undertook to do services with their crew in carrying the goods of the charterers. As I ventured to suggest quite early in the argument, between the old and the modern form of contract there is all the diff erence between the contract which a man makes when he hires a boat in which to row himself about and the contract he makes with a boatman that he shall take him for a row . . .
