A Pioneer Ship That Never Arrived

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 70, 23 March 1940, Page 2 (Supplement)

A Pioneer Ship That Never Arrived

By James Cowan

Young New Zealanders who saw the barque Penang in Auckland Harbour and at New Plymouth recently beheld in her one of the last survivors of the sailing ship fleets that carried on most of the world's sea business. It is a wonder that she has so far avoided the fate of most vessels that use the winds instead of mechanical power. We have to thank the shipowner of that bravo little nation Finland that this ocean tramp, with masts and sails instead of engines and propellers, still holds her own and pays her way around the globe. She is one of the last ties with the ancient highly skilled science of handling vessels under canvas. But she is of the modern class of sailing ships. The beautiful old ship in the picture on this page, the Cospatrick, -represented the age of sail at the height of its fame, a period which we may set down as from the year IHSO to 1575, the age of wood and iron construction, and the age of noble architecture in the mercantile marine. That period was also tho era of the great bursts of speed developed in the China tea trade and the trade to the Australian gold diggings and wool ports. This ship was not one of the famous racing tea-clippers. She was a steady-going passenger ship, an East Indiaman, a troojiship and an emigrant ship which in her time carried thousands of British people to tho new lands of promise round the curve of the world. The Cospatrick's fame is tragic; it is tho saddest story in the history of New Zealand's maritime traffic. She was bound from London to Auckland in 1574 when she caught tire and was burned with tho loss of very nearly the whole of her passengers and crew, numbering in all 473 people. Our picture, showing her on one of her early voyages in the Southern Ocean, is from a woodengraving in the "Illustrated London News." Here you see a comfortable - looking higli - sided ship, with plenty of freeboard; she has the old fashioned make believe painted ports, imitating the broadside gun-ports of warships. Nothing higher than topsails is set on her lofty masts here but we may imagine the picture she made when she could carry "all possible sail," to quote a term often now used in tho old log-books, when every bit of canvas was hoisted and trimmed to favourable winds. The Cospatrick was built in the Fifties of last century. She was not oak, but of a more solid and enduring timber still, teak from the East Indies. Of that material 6he was built at iloulmain, the port of Kipling's old romantic

pagoda "looking lazy at the sea." Slit; was a. full-rigged ship of 1220 tons, carrying a crew of from 40 to 50 men. Alter her troopcarrying service, the Shaw Savill Company, of London, bought her for use in the emigrant trade to New Zealand, and she had made one round voyage before tills fatal embarkation of hundreds of questing souls for Auckland. They were mostly of the agricultural labourer class from the Midland and Eastern counties of England, good and promising population for a farming country. The passenger list showed that there were 177 men, 125 women, oS boys, 53 girls and Ifl babies; and there were also four saloon passengers. Every one of these was lost. A sympathetic word-picture of this good old British sailing ship is drawn in a novel of the last generation of sea-writers, "Act of God," by Robert Elliott. It is a book very little known; at any rate I have not found anyone who has ever read or even heard of it, though I account it one of the greatest sea-stories ever written; all the greater because it is so obviously founded on fact. The "Young Pretender," the ship so excellently described in ''Act of God," witli her people and the final dreadful end, fs the Cospatriek to the life. Kobert Elliott introduced her to his reado'rs in a

passage that might have come from Conrad or Mascficld, or that grand old writer, Clark Russell— though not quite so prodigal us he:— " . . . . This old full-rigged ship, with her cambered bulwarks and square-stern windows, and elegant skids with their Imlustered stanchion.-, with her tapering single mizzen-topsail and snowy kite of the main-skysail kissing the. white clouds in one patch of colour, -with spars shaped for love of form as well as, for utility— why, she was a veritable seaqueen, a daughter of sky and ocean. Every plank, every bolt, every cloth of her gale-loved panoply bore the impress of tho human hand guiding the shaping hand, to make her both tit and comely. No machine but that of a weaver's loom and the jenny of a rope-walk had aught tb claim of her creation and investiture. . . . Something akin to the old East Indiaman—beloved of Cooke, the marine'painter, and Clarkson StansficM—and somewhat foreshadowing the more modern Colonial clipper of composite build." English, Irish. Scottish, the emigrants fill that ship Cospatriek with a busy life as of a little town. There are the pleasures of old-timo sea life. But there are also conditions that make for tragedy. Tho Cospatrickr's owners, Shaw Savill, had skimped expense and neglected the first duty of the ship owner, adequate provision for saving life. There were not nearly

enough boats; and niost of those that were in the davits or on the skids were unseaworthy. The most inflammable of material was used in the iLimsy partitions iu tlie cabin space, and there was no provision for fire-fighting. There was little supervision of shipping and emigration in those days. Ships crowded with passengers, like this one, put to sea on long voyages, trusting to Providence, apparently if anything went wrong and when disaster occurred tlio .world of shipping recorded it as an "Act of Crod," favourite "phrase in marine documents. It was a comfortable way of shuffling off responsibility. The Ship on Fire. Thero was no trouble aboard tlie Cospatrick until she was well down in the South Atlantic Ocean and was preparing to steer eastward beforo strong westerly winds. Then fire broke out, the most dreaded occurrence in the old-time wooden ships. "This was at midnight" on November 17, 1874. Jt began in tlie boatswain's locker, which contained tar, paint, oils and oakum; there was kerosene oil and there were 70 tons of coal close by. Moreover, there was '10 tons oi" spirits aboard for Auckland merchants. Tlio crew, with the frightened passengers doing their best to help, worked furiously lighting the flame's. Hut the rotten hose burst and there were only buckets left to throw water on the flames. The great amount of timber below decks was soon ablaze; and the sails, hanging loose in the light breeze, next caught fire. (Continued on back page.)