SHIPS THAT HAVE PASSED

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 16, 9 April 1927, Page 17

SHIPS THAT HAVE PASSED

Peer, with fascinated eyes, through the lenses of time, to trace the story of the ship. Back through the ages, when the ancient Britons, just stepping into the first pages of their island story, w r ere framing rude coracles of willow canes and skins, the hundredoared galleys of their future Roman masters were driving through the seas, and the pirates of the Mediterranean were swooping along the shores, killing and looting as they went. For full a thousand years the oar-propelled galley was supreme. Its power was man-power, strained to the last ounce under the whip of its “engineer,” a soldier or a pirate, or the galley master of some rich merchant, who sent his craft voyaging to Ophir, to return with cargoes “of ivory, of apes and peacocks, sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.” Trade brought the need for greater power than could be developed even by tier upon tier of rowers. The great grain ships of Rome, which brought wheat from Africa, became equipped with sails, as did the ships of Venice and Genoa, while t?' 3 ■things of the North, who so frequently ravaged the coasts of Britain, used both oars and sail. The wool ships of Flanders a*e said to have been the first to eive the lead for the ship of many sails. They needed large, dry holds, for their cargoes, and when they decked then vessels the carack came about. That was the end of the galley. Larger vessels were built, and the threemasted rig was introduced. With them came opportunities for such seamen as Columbus, who sailed < ver the edge of the known world to America (his largest ship, the Santa Maria, was only 90 feet in length); Vasco de Gama, who rounded 1" 3 ( ape of Good Hope; and Magellan, who found the tail of a hemisphere, and sailed through the straits to which he gave his name into the hitherto unknown Pacific. Look back, and you may see the great Spanish galleon—torn apieces by the terrier-ships manned by the descendants of those old coraclebuilders of Britain —and the ship, with high poop and forecastle, until by quick stages there came the heavilycanvased, many - gunned, semiwarships of the East India Company—and the privateers of Dampier, Rogers, Anson, and others who were making roadways through the green seas* for the remarkable shipping development of the nineteenth century. The ships of the East India Company were no speedsters; they waxed

From Galley to Floating Palace. Ships that were... And Ships that Are. . . A Fascinating History. . .

'itten for THE SUN by Francis Yev lazy in their prosperity. But. there was another nation of sailormen awakening, men of the same blood as the Briton. America was coming into trade, and the skill of the Yankee shipbuilder fashioned sharper bows and hulls which narrowed below water, while they heightened masts, and crossed them with more and larger yards, to carry greater areas of sail. The Ann McKim, built at Baltimore in 1532, was a distinct improvement on the conventional ship of the day, but the first real “clipper” was the famous Rainbow, launched in 1845. Soon after this, competition was clamouring for more speed, thus giving stimulus to shipbuilders to build faster craft. Smart ships were wanted

for the China tea trade (and the opium trade), and for the transport if immigrants to Australia and to California, in both of which countries gold was the magnet. Wonderful ships were turned out, both by British and American builders, and they were manned by men who, as sailors, never knew superiors in any stage of maritime history. There was the Nightingale, built at Maine, New Hampshire, which sailed the seas for 42 years, frequently averaging 16 knots; the British Chal lenger; the famous Cutty Sark and the Red Jacket; the Marco Polo (Liverpool to Melbourne in 6S days); and that wonder, the Blackball clipper, Lightning, which once put up a day’s run of 436 miles, reeling off on occasions 18£ knots. There are very few steamers even to-day that can equal the feat of that w*inged beauty. • Cutty Sark, Red Jacket, Lightning, Flying Cloud (63 days, Gravesend to Melbourne!), Sovereign of the Seas, James Baines —what fliers! And there were, too, the grand China tea clippers—Chrysolite, Lord Macauley, Titania, Lord of the Isles, Wild Deer, Golden Spur, Ariel, Spindrift, and the

incomparable Thermopylae, greyhound of all the seas. We shall never see their like again! Came the steamboat, and the deathknell of the picturesque sailer that has now, alas! vanished almost entirely from the wide seas. Only a little more than a century back the first steam-propelled vessel crossed the ocean—the paddle-wheeled Savannah, which made her way from America to England, partly un*der steam and partly under sail. In IS3S the new era really began, when the Sirius, another “paddler,” crossed from Cork to New York in IS days, followed into port only 12 hours later by the Great Western, a paddle-steamer of 1321 tons gross. There came the stern screw, and the size and speed of steamships increased, so that in a short ladder of years machine-propelled monsters of 50,000 tons crossed the Atlantic in five days. Generally speaking, however, the old-time sailing clippers were faster travellers than most of the steamships of to-day—when they had the wind in their favour. But that, of course, could not be always. And. apart from their being undependable in regard to time, the vastly increased trade of the world called for very large v~ Sailing ships of great tonnage could not be handled. To-day we are in a new era of oc can travel. The coal-driven steamship is being supplanted by oil-burners, and the newest development of the oilburner is the motor ship. “The automobile has dived off the dock and come up in mid-channel as the motor ship,” as an American writer picturesquely phrased it. It has been a swift evolution, for the first motorship, the Vulcanus, was built only in 1910, and it was not until the Aorangi proved that a large internal combustion engined passenger ship could be a success that the new type began to come into real favour. The Asturias, a 22,000-ton liner of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, is the lttest motor-ship to be commissioned. Doubtless similar ships of up to 50,000 tons will follow. And so we have progressed from the galley to the automobile of the sea. The ghosts of tired slaves bend over stilled oars; the sails of galleon and deep-sea ships are furled forever on Their yards; the denizens of the stokehold become fewer, and the clank of shovel on coal, down where the furnaces roar, may, too, soon become a thing of the past. The old-time sailor passes from our midst, and in his place stands that man of magic, the engineer, whose genius never rests.