Esso Gettysburg HAER No. CA-354 Page 5 The participation of U.S.-registered vessels in all sectors of overseas shipping was declining rapidly during the 1950's, as ships built during World War II aged and the cost of replacing them in U.S. yards and manning them with American sailors remained significantly higher than procurement and hiring abroad.8 American owners who remain-ed in the foreign oil trade, most notably entrepreneur Daniel K. Ludwig and his company, National Bulk Carriers, in-creasingly turned to building, hiring, and registering abroad to remain competitive. 9 Coastal trade, however, was closed to foreign-built and foreign-registered tonnage, so a demand remained for American-built tankers to connect America’s oil wells to its refineries and to carry its refinery products to home markets. The Esso Gettysburg and its sister vessels (Esso Washington, Esso Jamestown, and Esso Lexington) were designed to serve this market. At 37,800 deadweight tons (dwt), these ships were an advancement in scale and power over the company’s previous tanker order, the 27,330-dwt Esso Newark–class. Although numerous press accounts described the Esso Gettysburg as “the biggest and fastest oil tanker under the American flag,” Esso Shipping was already planning a 49,500-dwt class of tankers even as the ship entered service. 10 The increasing size of Esso’s ships reflects growth in the oil market and the economies of scale that carriers increa-singly exploited by operating fewer large ships in place of many small ones, but it was a mere shadow of the true “race for gigantism” that was then underway in transoceanic oil shipping. Dramatic increases in petroleum demand and production through the entire second half of the twentieth century, coupled with political developments in the Mid-dle East, propelled the construction of immense tankers to carry oil across the world’s oceans. To put Esso’s fleet in context, the largest tanker in the world at the time of the Esso Gettysburg’s launch, the 1956-built Universe Leader, was over 85,500 dwt, and its owner, Daniel Ludwig, was already planning the first tanker of more than 100,000 dwt (the Universe Apollo, delivered in early 1959). 11 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- W. Hidy, History of Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), vol. 1, Pioneering in Big Business, 1882–1911 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1955). See also Ships of the Esso Fleet in World War II. 8 The percent of U.S. waterborne foreign trade carried in American bottoms declined from 68 percent in 1945 to 43 percent in 1950 and 11 percent in 1960. In the late 1950s, ships cost about twice as much to build in American yards as they did in foreign yards, and American shipboard wages were three to four times as great as foreign wag-es. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1965 (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1965), 598; John M. Will, “By Ship - The Salt of the Sea Not Withstanding,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 345 (Jan. 1963), 84. 9 Steven Spear, “Tankers,” in A Half Century of Maritime Technology, 1943 - 1993, ed. Henry Benford (Jersey City, N.J.: Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, 1993), 263 - 64. 10 “Large oil tanker passes sea trials,”

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