[2025] UKUT 289 (AAC)

"There is, however, in this case a contention of a more general nature, which is that the delay which resulted from the defective boilers did not in any legal sense cause the diversion of the vessel. It is said that the relation of cause and effect cannot be postulated here between the unseaworthiness and the restraints of princes or the delay. As to such a contention it may be said at once that all the judges below have rejected it ... If a man is too late to catch a train, because his car broke down on the way to the station, we should all naturally say, that he lost the train because of the car breaking down. We recognise that the two things or events are causally connected. Causation is a mental concept, generally based on inference or induction from uniformity of sequence as between two events that there is a causal connection between them ... The common law however is not concerned with philosophic speculation, but is only concerned with ordinary everyday life and thoughts and expressions, and would not hesitate to think and say that, because it caused the delay, unseaworthiness caused the Admiralty order diverting the vessel. I think the common law would be right in picking out unseaworthiness from the whole complex of circumstances as the dominant cause."