Ships That Made History

Hokitika Guardian, 30 June 1921, Page 3

Ships That Made History

(I,y Idx .Smith, the Woman Poet i)i the Sea). ■ 'Tills hook” (to quote its author’s closing words) "is an attempt to preserve in written form what the fading minion i> fast forgetting—the glorious history of the sailing ship.” And what stirring reading that history makes, with its yarns of the ships and men who, albeit their heyday was little more than half a century ago, seem, as Mr Lubbock justly observes, to hav# more kinship with the times of Drake and the Elizabethans than With tlie seafaring of the present day! Wonderful ships and wonderful men —ships like the big American and Can-adian-built soft-wood clippers Lightning, James Baines, and Red Jacket, which sailed out of Liverpool with emigrants to the land of the Southern ■C ross in the days of the Australian gold rush of the ’fifties, whose logs contain such entries as “distance run (in 2-1 hours) 344 miles” and "ship going 21 knots with main skv-sail set”—the latter entry having been the subject of endless nautical controversy for many yours. Wonderful ships commanded by such daring and skilled seamen as the famous Bully Forbes, of the Marco Polo, whose name is still a household word wherever sailor folk come together. “As long as square rig flourished,” says Mr Lubbock, “Forbes was the sailor’s hero, and of no man are there so many yarns current in nautical circles.” He is the original of the story. “Hell or Melbourne," though it lias been told of Bully Martin and other skippers The yarn goes that on one of bis outward passages, liis passengers, scared by the way in which lie was carrying on, sent a deputation to him, begging him to shorten, mil, and to his curt refusal lie added that it was a case ot "Hell or Melbourne.” * * * * * Then came the days of the wool clippers, those beautiful ships with beautiful names. A sea lon, Thvatira, Maid of Judah, of the Aberdeen White Star Line (not to be confounded with the Liverpool White Star ships), the wonderful Torrens, “one of the most successful ships ever built, besides being one of the fastest,” whose whole career reads like a romance, and the splendid Sobraon, the largest composite ship ever built, whose hull, after 45 years afloat, was as sound as a hell; the South Australian clipper barques which, t„ quote Mr Lubbock, “took a dive on leaving the tropics, came up to hreali - nt the Cape, and did not reapo-n again till off Cape Borda,” and “wh-u running down the easting were more like half-tide rocks than merchant vessels, being swept from end to end by every roaring sea; and even in only a fresh breeze their decks were hidden by ,1 curtain of spray.”

Last come the big iron wool clippers, which up to the close of the century gallantly maintained the unequal contest with the invasion of steam, racing out to the Australian ports with passengers and general cargo and home with wool.

Among 11 lose were such celebrated ships as those of the laicli '•Line, the Loch Etive having at one period of her career Mr Joseph Conrad as her second mate.

There is the solid stuff of romance in th(> life stories oi these 1 anions ships, perhaps among the most glorious fabrics ever created by the mind and hand of man—now, alas, only surviving in some few rare instances, mostly for-cign-owned and with greatly diminished sail-plan, or as grimy and neglected hulks ministering in foreign harbours to the needs of their triumphant rivals.