SHAP. VII] MERCHANT SHIPPING 1203
Seamen Act, 1908, of the Parliament of New Zealand. That
Act provides that in the case of seamen engaged in New
Zealand or engaged abroad but employed in New Zealand,
the seamen while so employed shall be paid and may recover
the current rate of wages for the time being ruling in New
Zealand. It also provides (subsection 2) that the superin-
tendent of the port, at which a ship loads or discharges
cargo carried coastwise, shall notify the master of the ship
of the provisions of the section, and the superintendent is
empowered to have the ship’s articles endorsed so as to show
clearly the amount of wages payable. By the next sub-
section the Collector of Customs is authorized to detain the
final clearance of the ship until he is satisfied that the crew
has been paid the current rate of wages ruling in New
Zealand, or any difference between the agreed rate of such
wages and the New Zealand rate of wages. The company
held that they were only obliged to pay the rate of wages
provided for in the articles, and the questions submitted to
the Court were whether s. 75 of the Shipping and Seamen
Act, 1908, applied to the company’s ships while in New
Zealand ports, and while at sea between New Zealand ports ;
whether the Superintendent of Mercantile Marine had the
right to endorse the articles of the company’s ships as pro-
vided in subsection 2 of s. 75 of the Act, and whether seamen
employed on the company’s ships could sue in New Zealand
for the current rate of wages ruling in New Zealand, not-
withstanding that a different rate of wages was fixed by the
ship’s articles.
Though the opinions of the Court were somewhat divergent,
it was decided by the Court that it was open to the seamen
to claim the payment of the extra wages which represented
the difference between the rates enforced by the Arbitration
Court in the Commonwealth and the rates prevailing in the
coastal trade of New Zealand, and that the refusal of a
clearance was a legitimate means of enforcing the right of the
sailors to those wages. The Court held that the provisions
of the Shipping Act were invalid so far as they purported
to confer upon seamen the right to sue for all their wages, as
