OLD CLIPPER SHIP.

Shannon News, 29 March 1927, Page 4

OLD CLIPPER SHIP.

SAILS ON LAST VOYAGE.

One of the few survivors of the famous old clipper ships that raced from London to Australia in the sixties has mailed from Vancouver for the South Seas on her last voyage as a deep-sei carrier.

The vessel is the French barquentine Bougainville, whose strangely assorted crew includes a number of Tahitiau savages and two venturesome American girls. She will end her days as a floating grain warehouse at Fiji. The two young women on board, Miss Viola Cooper and Miss Jean Schoer, have figured prominently in New York fociety.. They wished to voyage to Fiji in the "windjammer," 'and as no passengers are carried Miss Cooper signed on as stewardess, while Miss Schoou \i travelling as master mariner. Sixty-tlu-eo years ago the Bougainville slipped-out of the Thames on her maiden voyage to Australia, with brass and paintwork spotless and her white sails bulging. She was then the Kirnalaya owned by the ShaW-Savill Company. , She did valiant duty as a passenger liner, and many citizens cf the Antipodes to-day first landed from her gang-planks. Her record time from London to New Zealand was 90 days, so she was never in th? first rank of crack sailing liners, but she made a name on account of her excellent sea-going qualities, and was popular among colonisrs who preferred safety and comfcrt to haste.'

The Kimalaya became the Star or' Peru when she changed hands in 1896, and for the last 30 years has been bucking ice barriers and Arctic gales in the Behring Sea under the house flag of the Alaska Packers of San Francisco. The staunch old ship; however, at last became obsolete, and this year the Star of Peru was sold to a French firm and renamed the Bougainville.