VIKING’S FUNERAL

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 387, 22 June 1928, Page 9

VIKING’S FUNERAL

OLD HULKS BURNED AT RANGITOTO POLLY ALSO DESTROYED Stripped by mercenary man of everything of value, the Polly, once a stately Norwegian barquentine, which in its time had sailed the “seven seas,” was to-day accorded a Viking’s funeral. . . . Like the Elinor Vernon, which suffered a similar fate yesterday, she was towed to the north-east of Rangitoto and burned. At an early hour the Polly slipped her moorings for the last time. But on this occasion there was no slipping down the stream with canvas slowly billowing to the early morning breeze. She wallowed slowly in the wake of a fussy little tug. A heavy, barnacled old hulk, which had been stripped of all her former glories, and degraded to the status of a coal hulk when she broke her back on a Whaqgarei reef in 1909. Filled with rubbish and saturated with kerosene, the old craft will make easy burning. Yesterday, the wreckers made quick work of her sister hulk, the Elinor Vernon, which, hard and fast on the rocks to the eastward of the Rangitoto beacon, quickly burst into flames when the fatal train was set. The Polly was salvaged at King’s Wharf yesterday, very little being left for the flames except the hull. It is expected that it will take two or three days for the old ships to burn to th© water’s edge.