SHIP BURIALS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 161, 10 July 1930, Page 22

SHIP BURIALS.

GRAVEYARDS ROUND THE GULF. REWA'S fate decided. SOME UNUSUAL ENDS. (By SHELLBACK.) So tho old Alice A Leigh has gone to the least dignified en 5. ever a ship met — to make a breakwater at Moturekareka Island! Not for her the quiet grave below, with the long sinuous kelp wrapping gently round her. On Moturekareka Island, the waves will grind her against the rocks, and the rocks will tear her to pieces. When she is at laet reduced to a hideous tangle of rusty iron, old sailormen will shudder to think that this wa<3. once the famous Alice A. Leigh, that raced homeward in 1898 with tlie_ wlieat crop from 'Frisco, in company with t'he Lord Wolseley, Olivebank, Pinmore, Eoutenburn, Elginshire, Loch Torridan, Mermerus, and half a hundred others. Even the Aucklanders who have known her as the Rewa, and to whom her four lofty sticks, and hull with painted ports, have been a familiar sight these seven years past, will not know her when the wind and waves have had their will of her She was a handsome, if not a beautiful ship in her prime. What a pity, then, &> drag her worn-out hull up on a beach where she will be an eyesoie for years, until all memory of her stateliness is lost in contempt for her decay. "Boneyards" of the Gulf. All round the gulf we. have these boneyards, where the ships we used to know and admire are rotting away m plain sight. Ships we sailed in and. ships we_ raced against, ships that were good to be in and ships that were good to be out of, lofty windjammers in which we learnt to sing chanteys and grimy little Reamers, in which we learnt to stoke they are all there, crying for decent burial. Many of them are happily now unrecognisable, and their identity almost forgotten, but in sheltered places they hold together a long time. On Browns Island lie the barque Alexander Ciaig ( € x Kathleen Hilda), the brigantine Defiance, the steamers Young Buugaree and Nile, and the ferries Takapuna, Alexandra and Tainui. Of the Kathleen Hilda only the bottom remains. It driitcd off the island on a hign tide some month* ago, h»t fortunately tor h p mnsr it went ashore at bt. iienerb. instead of drifting in the fairway to up +>,p bottom out of the first vessel that Su'cled u" In spite of her years _ and _ . ■barely covers »e nbs of aMirar dozen or so of old timeis. * . shit) America, the barque lobias, the barquentine Eetriever and the steamei Senator, of which latter it was said that she had more than carried her own weight iri "-old from Sacramento down to Frisco iriAlie boom days. I t | link t ?° T^Jld and lon a are up there, too, but I would n °The C third of the larger " ce ™ eterieS " is on Rangitoto. Round on the north side lie the American barquentine Vernon, the Norwegian barquentine Polly and the Auckland-built barque Northern Chief, while the brigantine Clara Haigraves is sunk at the head of Drunken Bay along with a discarded boiler out of the Clansman. Various ships are • lyinrr alone in other places where they were° stuck just to get them out of the way The brigantine Stanley, my first ship, and the loftiest of her size ever seen in Auckland, is in Home Bay the ketch Scotchman is at the head of Shoal Bay, and a brigantine which I think was tho Heather Bell is in Matiatia Bay.. In the Reclamations. These are doing no useful work at all but several others have been turned into breakwaters and landing stages. The steamer Kurnalpi is somewhere down the coast, the steamer Wainui is at Whangaparaoa, tho Rotomahana at McCallum's Island, the Guy C. Goss in tlie Firthof Thames and the Wellington at Moehau;- The figurehead of the latter vessel, by tho way, a lifelike effigy of the famous duke, stood until recently in a garden in Bassett _ Road, Remuera. It would' make a valuable addition to Commander Clover's collection, at Devon port. The reclaiming of the foreshore swallowed up quite a number of old friends. Under |;hc pavilion in Victoria Park lie the ketch Lucy James and two others, while the railway station rests on the bones of several 'little coasters. One of them was formerly the schooner Saucy Lass, from which the late Captain D. H. McKenzie built up his famous fleet of windjammers. Life was always interesting in her when old "D.H." was in command. One moment he would be dancing o'n his hat and shaking Hades out of everyone; the next, he would be pacing the poop as gentle as a lamb, humming the doleful "Farewell to Locliaber" in Gaclie and promising generous advances when we readied port. In the new western reclamation the steamers Kanieri, Huia and Chelmsford are buried —or, at least, they were supposed to be buried Until the bows of the old Chelmsford bobbed up above the surface again some little time ago. f But earth burial is not the ideal fate of an old ship, though there is Viking tradition a thousand years old in support of it. They arc best off that lie in deep water outside the Great Barrier, the steamer Wanaka, of the Union Co.'s fleet, tho Terranora, former cable steamer, that everyone called the "Terrible Nora," and the Onyx, that took several days- to sink. Several other old hulks whose' day was done have come to their . end- in curious ways. H.M.s. Wolverine was broken up and her timbers built again into scows, several of which, in their turn,' ' have been discarded or broken up. The paddle - steamer Enterprise 11. and the cuttcr Henry were blown up as a carnival spectacle at Devonport. Both were famous in local tradition. The Enterprise ran for many years in the Thames trade, and was fast enough to beat the Wakatere, then newly arrived from England and claimed to be the smartest thing on the coast, while the Henry was never beaten in a regatta race. The powder hulk Cloud, formerly barque-rigged, also went up in smoke and flame when she caught fire lying in the Tamaki with a big store of pxplosives aboard. The Marion and Selwyn Craig are on the bottom of the harbour. The Marion sank just to the eastward of King's wharf and was blown up, but the Selwyn Craig,, which foundered between Chelsea and Northcote, has resisted several attempts to demolish her and pathetically drews attention to herself by seizing and holding anchors. She must ha\ e quite a valuable collection bv now.