SHIP FIGUREHEADS.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 114, 15 May 1926, Page 21

SHIP FIGUREHEADS.

A VANISHED ARTCRAFT. (By J.C.) The other day, when an old-time sailor and I were discussing ships and men of the past, the talk turned to ship figureheads as we used to see them—the beautiful carvings that once gave the finishing touch to a shapely vessel. What scope there was for the artist in wood in designing a bow decoration for a ship that bore, say, the name of Mermaid or Sea Serpent, Venus or Diana or famous Cutty Sark. What memories of the artists' skill are quickened by the names and stories in Sir Henry Brett's "White Wings". My old friend's seafaring recollections went back quite seventy years. An unending procession of ships he could recall, the loveliest creations that ever sailed the oceans. The figures they wore beneath their spearing bowsprits fitted their names and were a matter of pride to their crews. I recalled such figureheads as that of the Helen Denny, whose bows were adorned with a graceful lady in white, the presentment of the builder's wife, after whom the fine ship was named. That beautiful figure, too, the New Zealand Shipping Company's ship Waitangi wore. The list of those we used to see in Auckland Harbour waa endless, and of varying degrees of artistry. Others, of which one had heard from that veteran of the tea clippers, the late Captain Tom Bowling, who delighted to recall such items of sailing ship furnishings. Bowling once told mc of the most artistic figurehead he had ever Been; it w.as that of the American ship Panama, lying at Hongkong in 1858. It was a full-length figure of a beautiful nude woman, pure white, with outstretched arms. In Captain Clark's book, "The Clipper Ship Era," this is mentioned; Clark says it was "perhaps the most beautiful figurehead ever carried by a ship." A full-rigged ship called the Australia, which came into Wellington Harbour some years ago, bore a figure that obviously was intended to represent a Maori or South Sea Island girl, a wellshaped brown figure, a handsome face and flowing black tresses. Probably the artist imagined that Maori girls grew in Australia. It might have been more fitting had the usual order been reversed and the ship renamed Hinemoa to match the figurehead. It certainly deserved a famous Maori name. Uncle Sam. But there were others! During the Great War, when all sorts of queer oldtimers were hauled out of the world's Rotten Rows and rerigged for sea, I saw, among other craft, an American barquentine called, say, the Hiram P. Higgina (I have forgotten the actual name), lying at the Queen's wharf, Wellington. She was an ordinary specimen of the stout old traders turned out from the Maine shipbuilding yards. But the thing that was out of the ordinary about her was her figurehead. Most of those Maine-built vessels contented themselves with a small fiddlehead design, or none at all. But the Hiram P. Higgine bore with Yankee pride an effigy of (I suppose) her original owner. It was a figure in a black-tarred stovepipe hat, a frock coat, a high collar and .stock of antique fashion, and a face well calculated to send the waves parting with affright before it—a good, typical New England business face, I should imagine! The effigy seemed to have been chopped out in the builder's yard by the man who adzed the keelson. The effect of general woodenness was fascinating; it drew mc again and again down to the wharf to look at it. I always regret that I never thought of asking some of the crew what they thought of Hiram! Captain Campion's Elk-head. We yarned of those ancient and men-o'-war figureheads were mentioned. My friend could remember the time "when it was quite the thing for warships to display elaborate figureheads. H.M.B. Driver we had both heard of; she was the first steam vessel to visit New Zealand waters—that was in 1846. Her figurehead attracted great attention -in the Waitemata and Port Nicholson; it .was a carving of*an old Engilsh mail-coach driver, with his many-caped greatcoat, his whip and all. "Ah," said my old sailor, "but I can tell you something I'll warrant you've never seen, or perhaps heard of, in the figurehead line. You know, as I've told you, back in 1859 and 1860 I served for 18 months in H.M.S. Elk. She was a brig, a small vessel of 400 tons or so. I joined her in Auckland. In my time she was commanded by Captain Campion, 'and the pride of his heart was the brig's figurehead. It was an elk's head, not a wooden one but the real thing, the animal's head, skin and all, just as they stuff them and stick them up in a hall. It could stand the weather, too, but the commander always unshipped it when he went to sea, and had a fiddlehead put in its place. The elk-head he took into his cabin before we weighed anchor. So we had two figureheads, a harbour one and a. deep-sea one. "You should have seen the way the skipper went round the ship's bows in one of the boats, making' sure that his -precious deer-head* was all right. He'd pull round to see that the yards were squared nicely, and everything in its place, but he gave most of his attention to the old elk. He'd be specially particular about in on Sunday mornings, because we'd be sure to have a lot of visitors in the afternoon. I wonder if any old Aucklanders remember it. - "After an Island cruise we were in Sydney; it was early in 1860, i think. Imagine the horror of the captain when he pulled round the ship, as usual, and found that some , scoundrels had hung' a bunch of carrots just under the elk's nose! They were from another ship, of course; our own fellows thought almost as much of the old fellow as the captain' himeslf did. There was a fight or two on shore over those carrot* before we left!,* ~