China Pacific SA v Food Corpn of India (The Winson): HL 1982

A cargo of wheat was loaded in the US for delivery to Bombay. The ship was stranded on a reef in the South China Sea. Salvors entered into a salvage agreement with the shipowners and cargo owners on Lloyds open form. In performance of that contract the salvors lightened the vessel by offloading part of the cargo into barges and carrying it to Manila as a place of safety. There the salvors arranged for it to be stored under cover, in part on a vessel in the harbour and in part in a bonded warehouse ashore. The salvors sought to recover the costs of such storage from the cargo owners, being the stevedoring and charter costs of arranging storage on the vessel in the harbour, and the warehouse charges they had to pay for the warehousing ashore. The storage was both reasonable and necessary for the preservation of the cargo and to prevent its deterioration. The claim had succeeded before Lloyd J, but overturned at the Court of Appeal.
Held: The decision was re-instated. The case turned on the application of ‘well known and basic principles of the common law of salvage, of bailment and of lien.’ The bailee was left in possession of the goods after the termination of the contract under which the bailment had originally been made, and in the absence of any contrary instructions from the cargo-owner, the warehousing of the goods was necessary for their preservation.
Lord Diplock noted that the case had been argued throughout on the basis that the salvage contract had come to an end at the time the cargo arrived in Manila, whilst leaving open whether that assumption was correct. The salvors were entitled to recover the storage costs from cargo owners because as bailees they: ‘the bailment which up to the conclusion of the salvage services had been a bailment for valuable consideration became a gratuitous bailment; and so long as that relationship of bailor and bailee continued to subsist the salvors, under the ordinary principles of the law of bailment too well known and too well-established to call for any citation of authority, ‘owed a duty of care to the cargo owner to take such measures to preserve the salved wheat from deterioration by exposure to the elements as a man of ordinary prudence would take for the preservation of his own property . . and if he fulfils that duty he has, in my view, a correlative right to charge the owner of the goods with the expenses reasonably incurred in doing so.’
and ‘It is, of course, true that in English law a mere stranger cannot compel an owner of goods to pay for a benefit bestowed upon him against his will; but this latter principle does not apply where there is a pre-existing legal relationship between the owner of the goods and the bestower of the benefit, such as that of bailor and bailee, which imposes upon the bestower of the benefit a legal duty of care in respect of the preservation of the goods that is owed by him to their owner.’
Lord Simon of Glaisdale, concurring, thought that to confine agency of necessity to cases where the issue was the bailee’s authority to bind the bailor to contracts with third parties was ‘justified by the fact that the law of bailment will often resolve any issue between alleged principal and agent of necessity, as it has done here.’
Diplock, Keith, Roskill and Brandon LL
[1982] AC 939
England and Wales
Cited by:
CitedPetroleo Brasileiro Sa v Ene Kos 1 Ltd (‘The MT Kos’) SC 2-May-2012
The MT Kos had been chartered by the appellants. The respondents failed to make payments, and notice was given to withdraw the vessel. The contract said that such a notice was without prejudice to any claim. At the time, the vessel was laden. The . .

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Updated: 22 August 2021; Ref: scu.462940