A CONTRAST. Captain Cook's Endeavour and Captain Crutchley's Ruapehu.

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 62, 9 August 1884, Page 5

A CONTRAST. Captain Cook's Endeavour and Captain Crutchley's Ruapehu.

I wish to draw special attention to the following article. It appeared in the "Daily Telegraph" of the 17th inst., and is by Mr W. Clark Russell (the author of the "Wreck of the Grosvenor," "Jack's Courtship," and other romances of the sea), who has by common consent been pronounced the greatest living literary authority on everything connected with our mercantile marine. Mv Russell's exordium on the speed, spaciousness, and comfort of the Ruapehu, together with his generous tribute to the dexterity and forsight of Captain Crutchley should be most satisfactory to the New Zealand Shipping Company who are begining to reap the reward of their pluck and enterprise. "It is not," begins Mr Russell, "quite 115 years ago since the people aboard the ship Endeavour, commanded by Captain Cook, sighted upon the horizon a faint blue film, >\hich afterwards proved to be a portion of the coast of New Zealand. This was on October G, 17G9. There is not to my fancy a more stirring and graphic page in marine story than that portion of the narrative of the great navigator which relates his discoveiy of New Zealand. The poet's startling fancy is realised: "We were the first who ever burst into that silent sea." The Endeavour was a vessel of 370 tons, about the size of an ordinary sailing coaster of to-day. She must have been pretty deep, for she was victualled for eighteen months, carried eighty -lour seamen, besides a crowd of extra hands, and she mounted twelve guns on carriages and twelve swivels. I like in fancy to stand on her deck and figure her as she swings over the long Pacific swell with the blue line of the New Zealand coast on her lee bow. She will be a perfect tub of a craft to the eye, her length perhaps not more than three times her beam ; her quaint ptern goes sheering up over the water with her name written large under the glittering cabin windows, and her bows will probably be a perfect bed of timbers, w ith a bowsprit steeved at an angle of 45 degrees, forking out from them. Yet she had carried her company of astronomers, navigators, and adventurers many thousands of leagues, and on that 6th of October had fairly brought them to the uttermost parts of the earth. For, say what one will, JNew Zealand sounds further off than any other place in the world, how ever the facts may be as regaad true distances from this country. China seems adjacent, India a mere stone's throw, Australia little more than over the way compared to New Zealand. In the chart of the world it is squeezed up in the righthand corner, and has to be brought round to the other side, as though to save it from falling overboard, as a sailor might say. Anthony Trollope rightly termed it "as of all inhabited lands the most absolutely Antipodean to Greeenvvich." This sense of immense distance visits one when one thinks of it. As Cook, dressed in the stockings and lapels of the naval uniform of that time, stood on his deck eyeing the coast his ship was heading for, some thoughts of the prodigious space of ocean that separated that land from England may have visited him. It had taken him 14 months to penetrate to this point, and he would probably consider the passage a very good one, allowing for the various stoppages he had been forced to make for water, cleaning the ship, and so forth. There are many fancies pleasant to indulge in. One would like Dr. Johnson, who found no happiness equal to being swiftly driven in a postchaise, to have a ride behind the flying Scotchman. One would like Dr Lardner, who doubted that the Atlantic would ever be crossed by steam, to take a trip in the Oregon, And one would like old Captain Cook to know that the verdant mountainous land he sighted on October 6, 150 years ago — which for nearly a century afterwards was only to be reached from this country after a four months' struggle with the calms and gales of three great oceanswas, in the year 1884, to be brought within the compass of a run of a little more than thirty-seven days,

Tbis wonderful passage ha 3 been made by a steamship named the Ruapehu. The news is of necessity a littlo stale to those who are interested in such things, but the temptation to say a few words on a remarkable marine oxploit is too great to suffer one to neglect the topic merely because in these swift times news grows old very fast. I will give lator on a few particulars of the run — the swiftest known as a piece of sustained steaming. It is the contrast established by the first voj'age of the Ruapehu, it is the difference that has been worked out by years so few that they easily fall within a quarter of a century, which came home to me when I read how a steamer bearing the rugged and ungraceful name of a high New Zealand mountain had sailed from the other side of the Avorld, had navigated half the length of the vast Pacific, had achieved the passage of the Horn, and measured the mighty surfaces of the two Atlantic Oceans in a month and a very few days. For much as steam has done to accustom us to despatch, it has not yet made voyagos of this kind so familiar as to possess no power of exciting wonder and admiration. In truth our mind:* turn to the Atlantic Avhen we think of the marvels of the propeller. That is the sea which has been used as the marine racecourse. The noble and fruitful dependencies whose shores arc washed by the Southern and Pacific Oceans we know aro regularly visited by fleets of fine steamers ; but numbers of sailing ships are still employed in the passenger trafh'c between this country and Australia and Now Zealand, and that is no doubt a reason "why those colonies are always thought of as being immensely distant, Avhen, as I have before said, places pretty nearly as remoto seem comparatively close, and why the traditions of the four months' passago avo sustained in respect of them, when the month or five weeks' voyage formerly occupied by the clipper passenger vessels trading between English and North American ports is clean forgotten. There aro many exceedingly fine sailing ships now regularly making the voyage to Australia and New Zealand. It seems scarcely fair to select one of them for the contrast I want to draw, for some of them make the run in less time than the shapely little Aberdeen clippers used to employ, and furnish some striking examples of remarkable sailing qualities. Let me go back, then, to a period when iron sides, narrow beam, double top-gallant yards, and many other matters of a like kind, were either not known or not appreciated. One need not transport oneself far. A man docs not requiro to be very old to remember the time when, if ho wanted to go to Australia or Now Zealand, he had to prepare his mind for a hundred and twenty days of sea. Those memories linger, they are perpetuated indeed by many annual sufferers, and that is why the distance to those colonies seems quite measureless. There was a deal of the old stage-coach life about those voyages. It is but twenty years ago, say, and yet a contemplative man might well feel that tho bustle and business of embarkation at the docks at Gravesend or at Plymouth was but half-over, •whilst his will remained unmade. Everything was very comfortable — to first-class passengers, I mean— a3 far as the accommodation A\ent. But then tho accommodation was small. The smoking-room was in front of the cuddy, as the saloon was called, and consisted simply of the shelter of the break of the poop, so that when the ship was braced sharp up in high latitudes it could never be said that this refuge of the smokers was not a\ ell ventilated and cool. There was not often a bathroom, unless it were over the head whore the forecastle pump stood. I do not remember any libraries, ladies' boudoirs, lavatories, and so forth. When you had lunched or dined, if you did not care to go on deck, you withdrew to your berth, and got into your bunk or cot, and amused yourself by watching the green water washing over your scuttle. But then there was plenty to eat, the drink was tolerable, the stewards were plentiful and obliging, the captain was nearly always what the ladies Avould call a nice man, Avith a bronzed face, and a trick of Avatchingtheskylight. Thechief mate Avas commonly pensive and reserved. \s ith a very high castle indeed, built, poor fellow, uuon the basis of the captain's certificate he had held for many years ; Avhilst, of the grimy faces that Avould pop out of the forescuttle to the tune of the bosuns pipe, there Avas no need for you to know anything at all Everything, indeed, was fairly tolerable but the voyage. That would often become a hardship the moment the tug let go ; for a sh'ong Avesterly Avind might rise, a\ ith black nights and horrible Channel seas, and keep the lordly fabric beating and ratching and clawing along her watery road the Avhole way to the Atlantic if she hadn't to call at Plymouth. Then, after a succession of head Avinds, it is consistent Avith truth to figure a dead calm in the Bay of Biscay, the ship dipping her old-fashioned channels into it to the shear-pole^, the courses cleAved up, and the topsails filling the air overhead Avith sounds like a thunderstorm, most of the passengers who had recovered from sea-sickness dreadfully ill again, and the abominable motion caused by tho huge folds of Avater, making even the seasoned skipper feel as if he had got a bilious attack. All this while the vessel is motionless as far as progress is concerned, and all the irritable people talk in a loud voice of how many days out the ship now is, " and our latitude to-day only forty-six, sir ! Forty-six, sir, by heaven !" "The north-east trades AA'Ould raise the spirits again ; but then they Avere ahvays folloAved by the doldrums, where the fierce vertical heat of the equatorial zone replaced the Biscay an swell as an agent of suffering and made one crave for Cape latitudes, even for Nova Zembla or the Horn ; for anything, in short, but deck seams full of pitch, bubbling like hot Avax, the stifling atmosphere of the cuddy Avhich the windsails only mocked, and a berth which in five minutes drove a man in the lightest attiro to be soaked on deck by the dew which fell in showers from one didn't know Avhere. The Avhole voyage Avas— as it still must bo where canvas is concerned — a procession of stoppages and slow sneaking 3 ; swift rushings before the wind and stormy and giddy driftings with the fore and misson yards aback. Thote Avho loved the sea did not find such voyaging tedious. Boforc the high shores of the Antipodean land had hove in sight old Ocean had exhibited a hundred glorious, tender, or dreadful pictures of flaming sunset, of moonlit calm, of black and bellowing tempest ; and then for the inA r alid, the seeker after health, the prolonged passage gave him all the medicine he needed. But to those who Avere impatient to get to Australia or the further colony, or were anxious to obtain a sight of the English Channel coast, these voyages, or passages rather, of ninety-five, and a hundred, and a hundred and twenty or thirty days were things formidable to contemplate, and distressing to endure. For think of two months and a half or three months to the Cape; and then, after all that time had been spent in running through the trades and tumbling about in calms, and fighting with stripped spars and head to the sea ; having to peer over the bow at some thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean stretching into the visionary east to be struggled through and encountered with all its variety of foul weather and favouring breezes and

head winds before the ship reached her destination ! ' This for the outward journey. The homeward run was much the same — tardier, perhaps, and usually fullor of disagreeable weather, becauso there was the terrible climate of the Horn to pass through with its gigantic icebergs trooping up trom the frozen South, and its easterly hurricanes blinding with snow and spray to heave you to and Reep you so for hours which sometimes ran into days, Naturally, when a man who remembers all this hears of a steamer making the passage from New Zealand to Plymouth in a little more than a month his first thought is of the amazing contrast the circumstance establishes, and above all how very few yeai's have been needed to achieve that comparison between, let me say, 18G4 and 1884. The exact time occupied by the Ruapehu in steaming from Lyttelton, New Zealand, round the Horn to Plymouth was thirty-seven days twenty hours and forty minutes. Her commander, who has achieved the high distinction, in an age, too, of extraordinary competition in that way, of having performed not only the fastest passage from the Antipodes on record, but the fastost continuous run under steam, having regard to the enormous distance measured, is Captain W. Cains CrutchJey, to whose dexterity and foresight as a seaman the swiftness of this remarkable passago is owing, as I understand that the north-east trades were, blowing so stormily that the passage M r as only saved by the captain hauling well over to the African coast. It is noteworthy that the run was made iwith scarcely any help from sailpower. For a week before rounding the Horn the Ruapehu encountered a succession of easterly gales, and I am assured that the vessel had not one day's good wind from Lyttelton to Plymouth. Indeed, I notice in the abstract from the log that the first start was inauspicious, as I read, " Prevented from getting south by strong southwesterly gale, which filled up the decks, and began to break things." This was on April 7, and the state of the sea is entered as "tremendous." Yet, spile of all this, the mean hourly &peed of the ship from JSoav Zealand home was a good 12^ knots, and in the space 37 days 20 hours and 40 minutes folio taa versed a distance of 11,880 miles ! She is, for a steamer — my old seafaring prejudices in favour of tacks and sheets will, I trust, be forgiven mo— as pretty a modol as there good be seen afloat. She has a cutwater, figurehead, and bowsprit, is barqne- rigged, and presents to the eye the suggestion of speed and sea-worthiness, which she confirms by her behaviour. And assuredly she is a luxurious substitute — I mean as respects net accommodation, for I know nothing about the living aboard — for even the most comfortable of the old sailing liners which swung lazily into the river out of the Blackwall Docks, and arrived at the end of the world after long lapse of time like later Endeavours, astounded by their own achievements, Bath-rooms and bars, boudoir?, state-rooms, lavatories, and the like, all contribute to make life at sea pleasant, and in such matters the Ruapehu is very handsomely and abundantly found ; but it is the shortness of the time she has occupied in conveying her passengers from iSfew Zealand to this country which constitutes the special interest one take? in this vessel. The sumptuousness of cabins has ceased to impi'ess ; but we continue to hoar or read with admiration and wonder of feats of speed which bring the fabric of a ship, opposed as it is by winds and seas, into close rivalry with the smooth-sliding locomotive. Hitherto our amazement has been limited to Atlantic passages ; but the measureless Pacific may now claim our attention under this head. Nor as Englishmen can we withhold our larger admiration for the later triumph. It is immensely convenient indeed that we should be able to land at New York in less than seven days ; but an element of national importance enters into the closer linking of our most distant dependencies to the mother country by increased swiftness in our communication with them ; and a.stonishing as have been the conquests of steam over the sullen and capricious deep, there has been, I will dare to say, no accomplishment of this kind of greater interest to us imperially, or of greater significance as marking the potentiality of the marine engine in the very -widest uses to which it can be put, than the achievement of the steamer whose passage has brought the remote colonies of Australia, Van Dicmen's Land, and New Zealand, with their brave, loyal, and industiious populations, within less than thirty-eight days' reach of us.