ABSTRACT
In Spence and Another v The Union Marine Insurance,31 cotton belonging to various owners were shipped on board the same vessel as the plaintiff’s cargo of 43 bales of cotton. During the course of the voyage, some of the bales were lost, some were damaged, and on some the identification marks were so badly obliterated that they could not be identified as belonging to which of the owners. Only two of the 43 were identified and delivered to the plaintiffs. The bales have become unidentifiable not by reason of a change in specie or character, but by a loss of their identification marks. The confusion only arose because similar cargo belonging to several parties were shipped together; as there was no loss in specie, the matter was treated as a partial loss. The court dealt with the confusion in the following manner: ‘… when goods of different owners become by accident so mixed together as to be indistinguishable, the owners of the goods so mixed become tenants in common of the whole, in the proportion in which they have severally contributed to it’.
