PIONEER SHIP

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 March 1941, Page 8

PIONEER SHIP

STORY OF THE EDWIN FOX BUILT FOR “JOHN COMPANY.” EARLY VOYAGES TO NEW ZEALAND. <By N.J.8.) “Lying hard up against the shore in the calm waters of the little bushfringed bay a few hundred feet distant from the wharf at Picton (N.Z.) is a scarred and battered hulk that arouses the curiosity of many visitors to that picturesque port. This ancient relic of the past (launched 82 years ago as the Edwin Fox), was once a fine, sturdy ship that brought many settlers to Australia and New Zealand. She is still picturesque in her decrepitude, and like a discarded thoroughbred she bears unmistakable signs of the days that are gone. Her wide, elliptical stern, with big windows, speaks of her age; and the tarnished remains of the elaborate, gilded scrollwork which festoons her transom, tells an onlooker that an artist of no mean merit helped to fashion her. Her hull rises high out of the water, and the great six-inch squared planking with which she is built (teak wood is said to be everlasting), is as sound today as when she was first launched. Intricately carved on one of her cabin thwaitship beams is her official number ‘4673,’ and, in an exquisitely-de-signed wreath of oak leaves are the flags of her signal number ‘J.D.M.N.’ And, if these painted flags could speak, what a tale they could tell! Of long voyagings. fortunate and unfortunate, of gales and hurricanes and sudden squalls; of escapes from strandings, from collisions, from typhoons, and from a hundred other sea perils great and small. The long, long story of the Edwin Fox tells us that she experienced all these things when going about her lawful occasions. Of her contemporaries, nothing today remains but a few fading memories. She sailed in the lordly company of East Indiameri (John Company ships) and, in the days of her youth saw the ‘pillar of smoke’ rising above the searim, that heralded the coming of the young giant (steam) that was soon to chase her and her kind off the Seven Seas. Last of those little ships of her period that helped to build a mighty Empire, the Edwin Fox is now the only vessel of her type extant, in all the world.” Thus wrote “Lee Fore Brace” in his fine contribution of March 30, 19.35, to the columns of the “Christchurch Times.” To those many “Times-Age” readers who must also have been greatly intrigued at seeing this relic of pioneer-day shipping in the course of excursion and other visits to Picton, the above-chosen prelude to what is* to follow concerning the Edwin Fox, must seem a fine sample of wordportraiture, indeed. It was not until Easter of 1918, during the military-memorable visit to Picton of Trentham Camp’s then invincible tug-of-war team (36th Engineers N.Z.E.F.), that the writer, in their genial company, had his first close-up view of the Edwin Fox and, in addition, found in Mr Petrie, the local freezing-works engineer, one who not only was ipso facto this old ship’s guardian, but one of its original, first voyage to New Zealand passengers, as well

Fortified by his reminiscences of the first voyage, and all available backfile shipping information of the said period, the present writer essayed what he then believed a fairly presentable historic survey of the gallant old vessel. It might here be mentioned that the Edwin Fox’s first New Zealand port of call in 1873 was Lyttelton, and that of her 1875 voyage Port Nicholson.

The Edwin Fox was built at Sulkeali. Bengal, in 1853,. to the order of the Honourable East India Company, and was the very last of all the many hundreds of fine ships built for that great concern. Originally a full-rigged ship of 836 tons, she was stoutly built of teak and regardless of expense. Her first owner, using her only to convey a cargo of tea from Colombo to London, had no trouble whatever in selling her for the then record sum of £30,000 to Mr Duncan Dunbar, worldfamous owner of the gallant Cutty Sark, and who soon not only received back every penny of the said purchase money, but £B,OOO besides, as the result of the Crimea War outbreak and the Homeland Government’s need of the Edwin Fox and other vessels to convey troops and ammunition to those parts. Of 23 chartered vessels lying in the roadstead in front of Sebastopol during the devastating gale of November 13. 1854 (the year of Masterion’s bii’th as an area of Wairarapa Small Farm settlement) the Edwin Fox was the only one to survive, without shipwreck, that dread climatic ordeal.

Between the years 1854 and 1858, the Edwin Fox. under the Dunbar house flag, ran three further East India voyages, only again being chartered, this lime, to convey convicts (not troops) to West Australia, her log book recording. however, that the said passengers —'political’ nuisances, mostly—were almost one and all of them passengers of really ’superior’ class! Leaving Plymouth on August 1.3. 1858. and arriving at Fremantle 89 days later, the Edwin Fox at the latter port was loaded down to the Plimsoll marl: with hardwood timbers for India, when, once again, she was under Imperial Government charter to convey British troops and ammunition to help quell the Indian Mutiny which had just broken out. This over, and a big shipment of goods ready for the Homeland, the Indian Government chartered the Edwin Fox to rush to the succour of the starving inhabitants of Bangkok and other places in that region. Her holds full of rice, each trip found the Edwin Fox well on time with her mission of mercy, so much so that her captain was later decorated for the part played by the Edwin Fox, of which he was at all times inordinately proud. This was in 1861. A year later, in 1862, the owner of the Edwin Fox. the famous Duncan Dunbar, died, so after completing her East India character, the ship found new owners in the Messrs Gellatley, shipping company of London, for the next few years, during which she made a further five voyages to Australia with cargo and passengers, principally bound for the new Victorian goldfields, which in this way. as in New Zealand under like circumstances, helped to populate both with that sprinkling of a rare adventurous race of individuals giving fresh impetus to the settlements on both sides of the Tasman Sea. Under later charier to the famous Shaw Savill and Albion shipping company, the Edwin Fox was engaged (year 1873) to bring out real emigrants to New Zealand, some of whose descendants (and not a few in Wairarapn, at that) will be celebrating her

centenary of construction in the same year as that of the Grey town settlement, 1953! For 32 years the Edwin Fox, wrote “Lee Fore Brace,” had plied her leisurely way over the five oceans bringing cargoes and passengers to Australia and New Zealand when, in the year 1885, the possibilities of the frozen meat trade discovered still a new use for her. Her holds filled with the latest in refrigerating machinery in the Homeland, the Edwin Fox was later found anchored as a hulk outside the Port Chalmers freezing-works; the introduction of such machinery in such works taking place gradually. We next find the Edwin Fox doing similar advance refrigeration duties at Gisborne and the Bluff; and from the latter (stripped of her refrigerators) she then was towed to Picton to act as coalhulk and, loading-stage for the Marlborough freezing-works lighters. In this useful if somewhat menial capacity this once-proud monarch of the ocean has for all time ended her days of wandering the Seven Seas. Trippers to Picton next Easter Monday may return to the Wairarapa better informed, the writer hopes, than he was at the first time he saw the historic ship, the Edwin Fox, in the early ’nineties, or thereabouts.