FIGUREHEADS

Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 133, 2 December 1922, Page 14

FIGUREHEADS

DWINDLING GALLERY OF THE

SEA.

What a tremendous sculpture gallery they would make, could they but be gathered together from the seven seas, the lost figureheads of famous ships! What an array would be there of figures real and allegorical, beautiful .and grotesque—kings, queens, warriors, Amazons, mermaids, Tritons, gods and goddesfies of every sort, maidens in flowing draperies., sailors', peasants,. blackamoors, dragons/, sea serpents and fabled monsters. '

There. might '■ be seen King Edgar on horseback, trampling;.sev,en kings under his horse's hoofs, 'as he appeared at the bow of the Stuart.-first-rater, the Sovereign of the Seasi ' The -fighting Temerairo's Boman warrior,- also, would not be missing, and carveh' admirals, Nelson, Anson, and Blake, from the ships which bore their names. There would be florid naval Ariadnes and Amphitrites, too, rubbing shoulders with the classic presentments of eighteenth-cen-tury royalties. There would be the China clipper, Sir Lancelot's armed knight, hand on sword and visor raised, and Thermopylae's^ hero, Leonidas. There would be the Black Bailer James Baine's bust of that meteoric celebrity of nineteenth-century Liverpool; and Bed Jacket's Indian chieftain; and the likeneßS of Jenny Lind, the "Swedish nightingale," which was borne by the American- clipper Nightingale. A 'beautiful female figure with a' forked bolt in her hand would represent the famous clipper Lightning; and a realistic reptile in green and gold <the Sea Serpent.

But alas, how small a remnant survives out of all that vast carVfin army (writes C. Fox Smith, in the "Daily Chronicle"). A few—a very few—still survey from the bows of old ships, with their blank unseeing gaze, the seas which they have sailed so long. Some are preserved in the Royal Dockyards at Portsmouth and elsewhere.

That of the .Orion—not Nelson's Orion, but a later ship of the samenawe — gazes out upon the traffic passing along Whitehall, from the entrance 'of the Royal United Service Institution. Others linger in shipbreakers' yards, or in gardens of seaside towns and' villages, or in the museums of seaports.

The finest collection/of all is at Tresco Abbey, Isles of Scilly, where among others may be seen that of Friur Tuck, one of the early China clippers, which like many another fine ship met her doom on the merciless fangs of that rocky and perilous coast. In a. garden not far from Holyhead is preserved the beautiful carved reproduction of a Baring family portrait which once adorned the graceful bo-.v of the Baring tea cli'iper, Norman Court, so named after the Hampshire seat of the family.; But most are clean vanished away and forgotten—chopped up, many of them, no doubt, for firewood, as plenty of finer works of art have, been ere now; mote shattered to matchwood on desolate and stormy shores, or sunken deep in the seas of the world, there to gaze out steadily among the swaying weed of the submarine forests, where the blind white fish of the depths swim, to and fro among the bones of lost ships.