PORT TO PORT. WELLINGTON TO LYTTELTON.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXI, Issue 24, 30 January 1911, Page 3

PORT TO PORT. WELLINGTON TO LYTTELTON.

MEMORIES OF MANY TRIPS. (By Eareye). ■ Once upon a time the Wellington and Lyttelton Heads were very far apart, but a Maori knocks them together amazingly nowadays. Once it was a trip, with terrors, and now it is just a slip between one wharf and the other. It seems hardly worth while going to bed. The nap and poker players scarcely get leisure to settle " down properly to business. With the flashing turbine it is a. case of " Our berth is but a sleep and a forgetting." The steamers go like express trains. They glide out of Wellington at the tick of 8 p.m., and it takes very bad weather to hold them up on the run down. It is a wonderful change in twenty years, though two decades back th© ferry service had its comforts. SPEEDING UP. However, twenty years ago New Zea,landers were not in such a hurry a3 they are to-day. The Royal mail waa important then, and express trains were a matter of concern to some people, but the mails and the trains had their place, which was not first in the people's thoughts. Language may havo been used when a steamer was an hour or two late in departing or arriving, but nobody made any great fuss, and no deputations interviewed the Premier about it. Life was not quite so complicated then ; people were not so "nervy" ; they were far more impassive, more Turkish than now. One steamer, with an English mail, missing the train at Auckland creates far more of a pother to-day than twenty misses would have done twenty years, ago. So when the old Omapere or Brunner was sixteen hours o>i the tramp up from Lyttelton, and one had been waiting two or three hours on the wharf here to meet a friend, one put the blame on the broadbacked sea, and had no particular spite against the steamer. THE SEA WAS ROUGHER. Was not the sea a rougher customer twenty years ago than now? Ask any person who voyaged then, and the answers will be all alike. The sea was a butcher, for ever cutting up chops. An average trip was fifteen hours (frequently longer), though the Takapuna, the Rotomahana or Mararoa sometimes pleasant!)- surprised the sea-sick with a twelve-hour sprint. The usual thing between the two ports was a twelve-knot gait for the better steamers, and ten for the others. The latter-day raoer6 have clipped the meals out, which very few travellers regard as a grievance. In the old times the fifteen hours often j gave passengers an opening for two | meals, but sometimes only a very small minority closed in. The ventilation was not so good as now. The femell of the oil from th^e lamp's — before the days of electric installations — and other smells, working- with the wicked sea, kept the tables clear and made the stewards smile inwardly. Some seedy passengers firmly believed that the boats knew the breakfast gong, and served rolls with the coffee, and added pitch, for which the passenger presently supplied the toss. OFFICERS AS COMFORTERS. ' On these longer trips far more people were sick than ever one sees now. The "rail was seldom without the adornment of a few pale or yellow faces. And how those extra hours did . drag. The captain aud the officers had to walk about to soothe the afiliet-ed and tell them that it would be all over in a few hours. They also kindly offered advice as to moving about and generally toiled strenuously to comfort the sutferers. The writer was.a boy then, and he well remembers how the pallid ones would creep to the patent log every now and then to see how many knots remained to be unravelled. There is no time now for deck games between the two ports, buj> a few hours were available in the past, and the rope rings were thrown by persons who wished to keep thoughts of fat pork and pea-soup out of their dizzy heads. Some of those games had sad interruptions. Cards, of course, were popular, just as they are to-day. How the owners of weak stomachs envied the hardened travellers who were able to puff black pipes over the cards in a cosy room ! The "steamer smell" has been pretty well abolished from the present vessels. Some tender noses may yet have qualms, but it is mostly imagination now, based on old memories. The smell was a reality years ago. Generally one had no' switch to flash an electric light, and the cabins were stuffy. Even with all the modern improvements that rob the ocean of the old horrors, many ladies are tremulous. One sees a hundred of them by the rail when the whistle goes for the cast-off, and a few minutes later they have mostly vanished, to reappear in Lyttelton Harbour. NOT SO MANY SEA-BIRDS. One vivid memory of the old times is about the sea-birds, the gulls and albatrosses that escorted the steamers prettily. Always a flock of gulls followed a. boat out of Lyttelton, and the albatrosses joined the procession a little iater. Hour after hour they wheeled around, with their keen eyes agog icr the waste from the cook's galley. A few gulls still pursue the steamers, and occasionally an albatross" hovers around, but it is nothing like the old chase. Perhaps the explanation lies in the speeding up of the ferry steamers and the consequent elimination cf the meals which once furnished an overflow for the birds. Moreover, there is more traffic on the sea to engage their attention. The ferry steamer is now only a minor item in the birds' programme. A LONG LIST. Many Wellington citizens have fond memories of steamers which they will never see again. No absolutely regular service — though it was a good one — existed between Wellington and Lyttelton fifteen to twenty years baqk. Sometimes a steamer had a turn just between the two ports, but it was often a case of having Lyttelton picked up as a point in a longer voyage. The Taknpuna ran ,once a week from Lyttelton to Onehunga via Wellington and New Plymouth, and so on. The old Rotorua and the Penguin (wrecked) did much steaming between Wellington and Lyttelton. Old travellers- on the ferry route can recall a long line of steamers, including the Rotomahana, Mararoa, Flora, Corinna, Hauroto, Talune, Wakatipu, Rotorua, Penguin, Brunner, Omapere, Wairarapa (wrecked), Monowai, Westralia, Tasmania (wrecked), Elingamite (v/recked). All sorts of traditions and superstitions were associated with various steamers ; this one would roll, the other would pitch. As the voyage was longer, and the "steamer smell" was. stronger then, prospective passengers pondered much about the different boats, and endowed them with all manner of peculiarities and eccentricities. Families compared notes ; a trip was a much more momentous enterprise then than now. but it was mostly iu'e thecry. It pleased the intending haveilers, and did not hurt the steamers-