SAIL-CARRIERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 35, 11 February 1935, Page 5

SAIL-CARRIERS.

BACK IN THE NINETIES

LABURNUM'S PREDECESSORS.

MEMORIES OF OLD NAVY SHIPS. (By J.C.) Interest in the departure for Singax pore to-day of the war sloop Lalmrnum centres for many Aucklanders no doubt in the fact, as mentioned in the "Star," that she is the last of the independent commands in the British Navy to burn coal and carry sail. Tbose vanishing sails, there is a magic mana in them, linking the present with the past. Canvas as an auxiliary to mechanical power has saved the fine art of sailhandling from • utter extinction in the mercantile service, especially along the coast. A bit of sail set has a wonderful effect in a small steamship, as I have often experienced. It lifts her bows, eases that jarring thump in a seaway gives her a more shiplike motion, sets her in rhythmic accord with the ocean and the breeze. All that can be given by two or three fore-and-aft sails in a craft of the Laburnum's size. But it is the old square-rigged navy that the "Star's" article about the Laburnum brought to mind, the tallmasted, heavily-sparred ships we used to see in the Waitemata and cruising along the coast in the Nineties, and occasionally in the early part of the present century. They were sailors' ships. Oiie of the first that comes up in memory is H.M.S. Opal, a barquerigged steam corvette with a clipper bow and long, soaring jibboom. What a picture she was leaving Auckland on her last voyage, with her long, home-ward-bound pennant flying and a hundred or more bluejackets perched aloft, manning the yards, right up to the fore and main-royal yards. She was- one < f Auckland's favourite ships, and Commodore Bosanquet, now and again, gave the town a treat with a route

march of his lads through the streets, with the Opal's Drum and Fife Band at their head, piping away at "Xaney Lee." More modern in type was the flagship Nelson, a ship-rigged heavily protected vessel. In the squadron were the Royalist and the Rapid) both barque-rigged. The Royalist was a particularly fine class of ship with good steam power, like her ' famous predecessor on the station, the Calliope. In one's memory is the sight of her under sail in the Hauraki Gulf in 1804, shortly after the wreck of the steamer Wairarapa on the Great Barrier Island. The Eoyalist was making for the island, and with a fair wind, and she had everything set, including her studding sails —a wonderful pile of shining canvas on the blue of the Haurakl. Those stu'ns'ls, how the old school of naval commanders loved them! They seem to have taken the keenest joy in sending their whiskered tars scrambling all over the branches, setting and taking in the wings. We can imagine the equal fervour with which the sailormen loathed them. The last relies of the masted Navy hung on to the stu'ns'ls to the very end.' There were the small gunboats Ringdove and Lizard, which we frequently saw in the Waitemata. They were barqiientme-ri"°-ed, and they had the studding-sail-boom irons at every yard-arm. The Survey Ships. There were such ships as the Torch, a small square-rigged gunboat which, like the others, did most of her long cruising under sail. There were the E«-eria and the Penguin, both barques rig, wooden surveying steamships; they carried out much useful sounding and* chart-making duty in the South Sea Islands and along the coast. The Penguin is a ship Aucklanders should not forget. It was • she who picked up a driftaway raft from the wrecked Elingamite (.in 1902) with the survivors in a terrible plight and came steaming down at full speed for Auckland with them, after the other search vessels had given them up. On the previous clay I had seen her from the s.s. Clansman, and marvelled at her rolling capacity. It was off the North Cape, and the two vessels came close up to each other to speak. The Penguin, with her heavy yards and her other tophamper, rolled amazingly in that sea. Further and further over she went, her bright coppered bottom glistening in the sun, until she seemed determined

to make the ultimate exhibition of her- ! self and bare her keel to the world. We admired her tumbling activities and thanked Heaven we were not in her. The Clansman was quite lively enough for us. There was a sail-and-screw visitor of a different rig, a pretty little craft, the Dart, rigged as a topsail schooner. Sho helped to make history in the Western Pad lie, and some of the crew Kst the numbers of their mess. And one must not forget our own little trainingship the Ainokura, ex H.M.S. Sparrow, I on whose' .square-rigged foremast many a I New Zealand boy learned soil-handling jin Captain Hooper's time. They left j.a," line tradition, all those sajl-carrying I era ft of the olden timet. .'Many foreign countries still believe in sail-training as part of the education of their Navy recruits. They still build some beautiful ships for the special purpose, holding to the healthy faith that it takes all possible forms of experience afloat to make a perfect sailor.