“The Law of Shipping and Carriage in South Africa”, by B. R. Bamford, S.C., M.P.C., M.A. (Oxon) (Juta & Co., Ltd., Cape Town; Sweet & Maxwell, London).

The first edition of Bamford’s “Law of Shipping in South Africa” was published in 1961 contemporaneously with the bringing into operation of the South African Merchant Shipping Act. In this, the second edition, the author who is a practising Advocate, has decided to broaden the base of his work to embrace rail and road transport, aviation, marine insurance and general average. This book is a source of valuable and interesting information and citation of South African decisions in the field of shipping and transport law. It is stated clearly and concisely and covers a great deal of ground in no more than 320 pages.

It is Mr. Bamford’s explicit thesis “that local sources are sufficient to create an independently viable body of South African shipping law” (p. 4, n. 33); that the “easier course of blindly applying the English law should be eschewed”, in favour of the “riches of Roman Dutch literature produced by jurists at a time when their country was enjoying maritime pre-eminence” and the decisions of the South African Courts in maritime matters.

It must be said, however, that the author’s self denying ordinance against the citation of English or other sources means that indigenous authority has at times to be spread rather thinly. For example, the chapter on marine insurance cites the dozen or so South African cases. This is hardly an adequate corpus juris, supplemented though it be by Roman Dutch texts, and the Insurance Law, 1943. It is not, one hopes, irreverent or chauvinistic to venture the view that a dissertation on South African law of marine insurance which precludes all reference or cross reference to English or American sources is rather like a treatise on Christianity which avoids any mention of the Testaments.

The South African Merchant Shipping Act (1951) is based upon English shipping legislation (with notable stylistic improvements) and reference to the general principles and antecedent decisions upon which the South African shipping law is grounded would have been useful and would have given an additional perspective to the commentary on the interpretation of the Act. On questions of “maritime and shipping law” English law is applied in the Cape Province (Act 8 of 1879) and the principles of English maritime law are persuasive, though not binding, in other provinces of the Union.

Practising lawyers would have welcomed rather fuller treatment of the topic of admiralty jurisdiction than appears in Chapter 24. The Admiralty Jurisdiction Regulation Act, 1972 has not yet been brought into operation and admiralty jurisdiction appears to be that exercised by the English High Court in 1890. There are questions on jurisdiction and the priorities of claimants in