RACE UP CHANNEL

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 165, 3 October 1927, Page 12

RACE UP CHANNEL

OLD SAILING DAYS VOYAGE FROM NEW ZEALAND A seaman who saw much service in the speedy sailing ships contemporary with the famous Cutty Sark— Captain Arthur Stanley Gibson, aged 75, of Newtown,. Isle of Wight—recalled many of his adventures to a London “Daily Mail” reporter. For many years until his retirement in 1915 Captain Gibson was superintendent of cargoes for the Union Castle Line at the East India Dock. Captain Gibson is a Yorkshireman. He was born at Hull, where his father was a shipbuilder, and went to sea as a boy of 15 in the full-rigged ship Mermaid, one of the vessels of the Liverpool White Star Line. Later he was apprenticed to Captain Ross, on the ships Merope and Zelandia, run under charter by Shaw, Savill, and Co. between London and the port of Lyttelton, in New Zealand. Later he became mate of the Merope, which he says could hold her own with the Cutty Sark and Thermopylae, although they were looked upon. as the crack boats of their day. Captain Gibson has lost his records of the voyages of the Merope, but to the best of his belief she once sailed from London to New’ Zealand in under 65 days. That was in 1871 or 1872, but Shaw, Savill, and Co. might still have a record of the trip. It was timed from leaving Blaekwall Pier to the arrival at Lyttelton Head, New Zealand. The Merope, according to Captain Gibson, was a fine old clipper, and extraordinarily fast. “I never knew her lose steerage way even in the doldrums, for the flap of her topsails would carry her along,’’ he said. She was a ship of 1,050 tons, and was lost by fire off Land’s End when in command of Captain Tom Bow’ling. To support his claim that the Merope was a serious rival to the Cutty Sark for speed, Captain Gibson tells the following story: “On one of our return trips from New Zealand about the year 1872 we spoke the Cutty Sark a fe\v hours out from Lyttelton. We never saw her again until off Start Point, in the English Channel, W’hen, during the morning watch. I saw the royals and topgallants of another ship above a fog bank about a mile away. Captain Ross immediately recognised her as the Cutty Sark, and when the fog cleared up w*e had an exciting race up channel with her. Both vessels set ail sail, including top-gallant studsails on the fore and main, and ran hard for port. When off Dungeness the Cutty Sark, which had gained a slight advantage, refused the offer of a tug, but our skipper told the tug to follow him to the Downs. On rounding the South Foreland w r e were headed by wind, and we sent down our sails and took the tug which the Cutty Sark had refused. As a result, w'e caught the tide, and were home first. That was how we beat the Cutty Sark.” He afterwards served in the Helen Pembroke, a double-top-gallant sail ship on the Indian service, and after obtaining his master’s certificate served as an officer in the vessels of the New Zealand Shipping Company and the Union Castle Line. •