OLD SAILING SHIPS

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 529, 5 December 1928, Page 8

OLD SAILING SHIPS

FOUR MEET IN THAMES LAST SURVIVORS OF DAYS OF SAIL A few weeks ago, for the first time for many years, writes the “London Observer,” there were within the docks of London no fewer than four sailing ships, two of them launched more than 50 years ago. In Millwall Docks were the three-masted barque Oaklands and the wooden four-masted barquentine Yxpila; the Lingard was in East India Dock, and the famous Loch Linnhe, three-masted barque, was in the West India Dock. Only 10 days or so before the four-masted barquentine Mozart, nearly 2,000 tons gross, was in South West India Dock, and only about a month before that the barque Virgo, launched as the Endymion in 1869, was making down the Lower Hope, every stitch of canvas set. Of these survivors of the great sailing fleets, the Oaklands and the Loch Linnhe are of more than passing interest. The Oaklands whs built in Dundee by Gourlay Brothers in 1876, and her sailing qualities have by no means disappeared, even after half a century of wandering up and down the oceans of the world. Last year she made a passage of no more than five and a-half days from London to Wyburg, in England, and in 1926 she sailed from the Thames to Haparanda, at the northern limit of the Baltic, in seven days. The Loch Linnhe is one of the fleet of more than a dozen sailing ships belonging to Captain Gustaf Erikson, of Mariehamn, the largest fleet of windships now under one house-flag. It came from the yard of J. and G. Thomson, of Glasgow, and left the ways in 1876, a fine vesesl 1,300 tons, which made some good passages in her earlier time; in 1885 she went out from London to Auckland, N.Z., in 96 days. The Lingard is under 1,000 tons, and started her career in 1893. She. too, is now owned in Finland. Youngest of the four is the Yxpila, for she was launched only eight years ago, being built abroad. She is an ugly, square-sterned, grey-hulled vessel with auxiliary power and of purely utilitarian value. During the summer and early autumn these vesesls are all engaged in carrying “firewood” from Baltic ports to London. The term does not imply wood for burning in the domestic grate, but covers all manner of short ends of boards, battens, and deals —lengths such as have to be loaded and discharged by hand, as no machinery is of any use for dealing with such stumpy pieces. Huge piles of these short ends are stacked up on the quay for transfer to carts and wagons. It is these "firewood" snips (and an occasional barque with timber for Surrey Docks) which form now the sole link between London and the palmy days of sail, when Blackwall frigates and the racers of the tea fleet made picturesque tne reaches of the lower Thames.