MESSENGER OF COMMERCE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 452, 20 February 1948, Page 6

MESSENGER OF COMMERCE

A Home Ship and Her Cargoes SiR PATRICK DUFF, K.C.B., K.C.V.O., High Commissioner for the United Kingdom in ‘" New Zealand, recently returned by sea from a visit to Britain. In an address to the Wellington Rotary Club, Sir Patrick described the voyage out, with particular reference to the miscellaneous cargo the ship carried, and where it came from, and pictured the work done in New Zealand to fill the ship with a full cargo for Britain, We give extracts from Sir Patrick’s address.

OT very long ago, from a | N small home in Chelsea near where Sir Joseph Banks used to live and close to the Physick Garden to which he took his collection of New Zealand plants, my wife and I were whisked off in a car to join our ship bound for New Zealand. I have been in many places and sailed from many ports, but never before from the Port of London. As I look back on the scenes of a lifetime, I doubt if anything has ever made a greater impression on me than the sight, partial as it was, of those great armadas of shipping which flock to the world’s greatest port, where, in a normal year, over 30 millions tonnage of vessels arrive and over 30 millions tonnage deart. r Modern Treasure

I remembered what the camels of the Queen of Sheba and the navy of Tarshish brought to King Solomon-gold and silver, ivory and apes and peacocks, spices, horses, mules, linen yarn, timber and precious stones. What was our ship taking to New Zealand? All I could see was a picket boat safely clamped on to saddles on the lower deck, two blood horses, 14 dogs, two crates of pigeons, three canaries, a number of good New Zealand passéngers (representing the gold and precious stones for Solomon) and the more ambiguous gift of a United Kingdom High Commissioner. But what lay below? Truly, the freight in the holds of this single ship in this single voyage outdistanced all the treasure that the navies of Tarshish would carry in years by as much as the span of the world’s oceans outdistance the leisured coastal journey from Tarshish to the ports of Palestine. Stowed in the holds were celanese goods from Nottingham, shoe machinery from Leicester, motor cars galore from Coventry, Birmingham, Luton, Dagenham, china from Staffordshire, cutlery from Sheffield, cotton textiles from Manchester, woollens from Yorkshire, rayons from Manchester and Macclesfield, agricultural implements from Ipswich and Lincoln, basic slag from Belgian steel works, say, in Mons, Charleroi, Liege, Namur or, maybe, from Corby in Northamptonshire or from South Wales; furnishing fabrics

and cotton piece goods from Courtrai, Ghent, Renaix, Roulers; rayon yarn from Lancashire, Arnhem or Breda, in Holland; sheet and plate glass from St. Helens in Lancashire or Charleroi in Belgium; paper from country places in England with crystal-clear streams like Romsey in Hampshire; roofing felt from Belfast, Newport (Mon.), Leeds, Wigan, Glasgow or London; steel hoops from Antwerp; radio parts, printing paper from Rotterdam; matches from Gothenburg; wallboards from Oslo; a miscellany of vacuum cleaners, musical instruments, radios and gramophone parts (as the Secretary of the Board of Trade recently said about the export of pianos, "our motto is ‘peace at home, discord abroad’ "), electrical appliances, paper sacks, wallboards, plywood. Some of the.

foregoing were in vast bulk; others in smaller packages; there was a host of other miscellaneous stuff that I never even got as far as enquiring about. Flying Visitors We did an average run in all weathers of 400 miles each 24 hours, and, within a matter of days, were soon speeding across the spaces of the Caribbean under a burning sun. I thought of Sir Francis Drake in the Golden Hind, tonnage 100 tons, and of all the scenes romantic and terrible which had been played out upon the Spanish Main in the days of old. I noted also, as something not without significance, that about 400 years or sq later, in the Year of Grace 1947, there were few members of the ship’s company, from the Captain downwards, who, in the recent war, in these or other waters, had not had their ship sunk beneath them, or spent days and nights in open boats, an infinitesimal speck upon those endless spaces, beneath that burning sun, speculating whether they would ever be picked up or not.

Once or twice on our journey new passengers, possessing neither ticket nor passport, alighted on our decks. One little land bird, a quail, grew fat for three or four days among the horses’ forage, and then departed near the Azores without the formality of a mess bill. For two days in the Caribbean two dear little grey and white land birds the size of thrushes flitted about the decks and spent the night together under the moon in one of the lifeboats. Another, a tiny finch, appeared from nowhere. It was so tired that it allowed itself to be caught. It would fly in and out of the galley; the cook said that it had a dab at everything on the menu; and then one day in the Windward Passage, having thumbed a lift of several hundred miles, it made off to the islands lying blue and dim about the Passage, and was seen no more. And one of our own pigeons, fellow-passengers from London, seized by some uncontrollable urge, squeezed its way out of the wicker basket, left its companions and started straight back down the ship’s wake for

home. We never saw it again. Did it know that, from the point at which it left us, five or six thousand miles of sea lay before it? Poor little homesick thing. It was a bad example-especially for a High Commissioner of Great Britain. I must not think of it. I must forget about it. I must think of Lot’s wife. But O-I wonder-did it get home? We put into Kingston Harbour, Jamaica. We took on board huge consignments of fruit juices, and fruit pulp, of ginger and mixed peel and coffee and pimento (Solomon’s spices weren’t in it), and rum, which poor old Solomon, for all his wisdom-or was it because of his wisdom?-had to do without. And on we went, through the Panama Canal, one of the wonders of the world; one of the most portentous feats of the genius and organisation of the United States of America, whose creation has altered the geography and economy of a great part of our universe, and for whose existence in the recent war very insufficient gratitude has been paid by those who are ignorant of what that vital lifeline meant to the free world. I wonder what happens to all the heterogeneous stuff, 12,500 tons or more of it, valued at a modest estimate, at over one million pounds sterling, which our ship. discharges in Auckland, Wellington, Lyttelton and . Port Chalmers to be dispersed all over New Zealand? I wonder what jolly crowds on what racecourses will cheer the offspring of our bloodstock? I wonder in what homes all those little dogs and their descendants will bark? I wonder in what backblocks all those cars will

serve the needs of transport and communication; what pastures will turn green after some old truck with a manurespreader breathing white magic in the form of our basic slag has passed over the phosphate-hungry land. Cargo in Return Let us hear those engines thumping and hurrying again on your return journey. You will be loaded down to your marks. Your 522,632 cubic feet of refrigerator space will be carrying 210,000 carcasses of mutton or lamb, 41,000 crates of cheese, 40,000 boxes of butter. Your general cargo space will be carrying bales of wool and dumps of sheep-skins and casks of pelts and sacks of hides. It’s no mean job to get ail this stuff on board and safely stowed away. The sale of all these products has represented over one _ million pounds in New Zealand’s pocket in New Zealand currency. And there are 3000 bags of gift food parcels measuring 200 tons. Think of all the towns and smiling hamlets and green pastures and valleys in New Zealand which have combined to send their yield into the holds of the ship-210,000 carcasses in her hold! Think of the solitude of shepherds high in the folded hills,

and of the lean sheep dogs flickering along the fringe of green hillsides in New Zealand as they gather in the mobs of sheep. Think of the dusty lanes in the backblocks and of the drover plodding patiently behind the reeking mob; or the truck drivers; or those whose office it must be, in the service of their fellows, to gather in the red grim harvest at the Works at last. I know a Works where the average day’s kill at the height of the season is 12,000 lambs a day. Down in the Hold Think of the men whose business it is to stow, layer upon layer, as they are slung by fifties into the deep hatches of the ship, thousands of iron-hard frozen carcasses. They are slippery and wobbly to stand upon, howéver much you bind your legs in sacking; and you cut yourself to ribbons on the jagged knuckle ends if you fall on them. Apart from the weight of them and the temperature of the hatch, there is an art

in stowing all these carcasses, the same as there is an art in building dry stone walls in the Cotswolds. Think of the men and women and children in remote milking sheds at dawn and of the milk in the clanging clattering cans jolting in from valley and pasture to the co-operative dairy. I remember being introduced one day in Blenheim to a lady called Faith. She was a Jersey cow. Her owner told me that Faith produces 940 pounds of butterfat a year, the equivalent of 1000 pounds of butter a year. In other words, for one whole week in each year Faith provides 8000 people in Britain wi... their week’s ration of two ounces of butter per person per week. A wonderful example of Faith and good works going hand in hand. A Reminder And what kind hands in what kind homes spread about from one end of New Zealand to the other have put up the contents of those 3000 bags of food parcels which, to the lucky recipients at the other end of your journey, will mean not only a happy little alleviation of their dull and tenuous fare. They mean far, far more than that, They are, each and every parcel, a reminder that dear friends are thinking of them from far across the sea.