Stamp Story, No. 22 ONE-SHIP NAVY

Press, Volume C, Issue 29513, 13 May 1961, Page 8

Stamp Story, No. 22 ONE-SHIP NAVY

IBU

KEN ANTHONY)

THIS is the only stamp design that has ever portrayed an entire navy. The ship is the gunboat Lark —and when the stamp was first issued in 1909 she was the only warship owned by Liberia, the Negro republic set up on the west coast of Africa some 120 years ago by emancipated slaves from America. Previously a British ship, the Lark was acquired by the Liberian Government not for any warlike purpose, but mainly as a means of collecting taxes. Since many of the inhabitants of the Liberian coast at that time were smugglers or cannibals (or both), tax-

gathering was no easy task. So it says much for the effect of the Lark’s presence that within five years of her arrival the Liberian revenue had doubled. The main difficulty encountered by the authorities lay in resisting the numerous applications to "borrow” the ship for use in settling inter-tribal wars. Later, the ship was renamed President Daniel E. Howard, after the then president of Liberia—certainly a more impressive name. But in the First World War the ship came to an untimely end. During her career the Lark had been an insigniacant vessel of only 770 tonsi displacement—yet lier lost made her famous. , s s Her sinking by a ’llerman’ U-boat so aroused Liberian resentment that the inciaeht was largely responsible for bringing the country into the war on the side of the Allies. This event, too, was re-