General clausing Bills of Lading

In the course of several days, we have been discussing the procedure of signing bills of lading. It has been mentioned that the description of the goods, its apparent order and condition should be accurate to 100%. To recap the main line of discussion, if a bill of lading is not accurate then it should not be signed. As simple as that. Instead , a replacing bill of lading with accurate description should be demanded. If such provided, all originals and copies of the previous erroneous bills of lading should be destroyed. However, due to a time limitation, a replacement is not always possible. Therefore, the inaccurate bills of lading should be claused before signing and issuing. Clausing means writing a remark on the bill of lading with actual finding.

The Master should not give way to requests of the charterers or shippers to accept a "letter of indemnity" in return for issuing a clean bill of lading, given that there are doubts as to the apparent order, condition and/or description of the goods. Even if the charterers and/or shippers argue that the letter of credit (and the future of the sales contract) is dependant on the "clean" bill of lading, unhappily, it is their problem. One way or another, at this stage, the Captain is the Buyer's representative acting on his behalf with respect to clausing the goods.

Besides, the Master has no way to check and to know whether clausing bills of lading is of commercial importance or not for this particular deal, but he is obliged to issue correct bills of lading anyway.

The Master should be very carefull with respect to the wording for clausing. (this we will try to analyse in one of our discussions to come). As has been mentioned, clausing must comply with Mate's receipts. If Master can't provide required carriage conditons, say, required degree of moisture and temperature, he should clause bills of ladings. If clausing can't be done on the face side, it is made on the reverse side with appropriate reference on the face side. There must not be contradicting statements. Contradicting statements should be overridden by handwrinting. It is in practice and widely accepted that handwriting overrides typed statements, while typed statements override printed statements. If there is no space on the bill of lading for clausing, an attachment should be used duly signed, dated and stamped "original as per bill of lading". If, due to limited time, the Master has no time to check bills of lading, he may authorise and instruct the ship's agent to issue bills of lading on his / carrier's behalf.