Earnslaw is 75 next week

Press, 21 February 1987, Page 22

Earnslaw is 75 next week

Seventy-five years* ago next, Tuesday — February 24, 1912 — the largest ship built In New Zealand to that date slipped quietly into the waters of Lake Wakatipu at Kingston; and a legend was born. There was no fuss, no special ceremony, but the launching of the steamer Earnslaw marked the' beginning of a remarkable career in New Zealand nautical history, a career which has comfortably spanned the technologies which took humans from steam propulsion to the space, age.

Today, on the basis of her antiquity alone, she is a national treasure, a floating museum of steam technology. Entrepreneurs in other parts of the world are building steamship replicas to meet the demand for novelty and nostalgia. But the Earnslaw is an original, with most of her parts working as well or better than they did the day she was launched.

At the beginning of the century three steamships served Queenstown and the scattered communities on the shores of Lake Wakatipu. But the Antrim, the Ben Lomond, and the Mountaineer were getting on in years and there was growing dissatisfaction around the lake about their lack of comfort and unreliability. In 1902, the New Zealand Railways Department took over the Wakatipu Shipping Company and a year later the Minister of Railways, Sir James Ward, announced that a new steamer, capable of carrying 1000 passengers and sailing at up to 18 knots, would be built “in the near

future." That turned but to be seven years away. The new steamer was to be built to a .design by a Dunedin naval architect and marine surveyor, Mr H. Mcßae, 160 ft long, 24ft in Width, with a draught not to exceed 6ft 61n. Interior finish- . tog called tor. kauri panelling and seating upholstered to rich moquette or Utrecht velvet stuffed with curled hair. The floor was to.be covered to the . best inlaid linoleum, with Brusseis carpet to the centre of the saloon. Two locomotive'type boilers were constructed to power two sets of triple-expansion, jet-con-densing engines. The same engines and boilers drive the Earnslaw today. Construction took about a year, and after a trial bolting of the hull, the shipbuilders dismantled the new steamer, plate by plate, and transported all the parts 300 kilometres, to Kingston by rail. There, on the shores of Lake Wakatipu, the bits were reassembled like a giant jigsaw. The job took just under three mouths to complete. If, tor the people living on the shores of the lake, the Earnslaw represented the dawn of a new era to lake transport, the steam age was already in decline. Oilfired ships were sailing the high seas, and even on Wakatipu, internal combustion engines had made their debut to several launches. \ ' Remarkably, the “Lady of the lake” has sailed serenely on and is now one of the oldest Coalburning steam passenger ships still in service anywhere. ' y