SCHOONER GOES DOWN

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 120, 16 November 1929, Page 8

SCHOONER GOES DOWN

AN OLD FULL-RIGGER

KNOWN THE WORLD OVER

(From "The Post's" Representstive.) VANCOUVER, 16th October. When Captain Ozanne, his wife, son, and daughter, and his crew of thirteen Samoans, took to the lifeboats early on Sunday, morning 100 \ mije» south of Vancouver, after desperate efforts to keep his 57-year-old Bchooner afloat, he saw the last of a ship that falls astern, of none other in the voyage of romance and adventure. The Bretagne, flying the tricolour of France in and out of.her home port of Tahiti, is kilown in Singapore, Zanzibar, the La Plata, the Gulf of Aden, th« Ivory Coast, The Cape, The Horn, Auckland, and Sydney, with scores of way ports. Latterly she carried copra to 'Frisco, and backJpaded lumber from the Pacific North-west. She had a mil. lion feet from British Columbia aboard, when she was abandoned after a heavy list. • Built in Harrington, England, and christened the "Ada Iredale," she was a full-rigged ship—a pretty lady who could break out all canvas before half a gale, and step to the tune of a -lpg clicking off sixteen knots. To all tho novelists and historians of the wind ship, her name was-a household wprd. Many of them depicted the sibilant swish of black water as she slid along over long, rolling ground swells under a soft tropical sky, by reef and palm, clipping through the sky-blue combers to South. Sea ports,'where the "nigger" fights the shark single-handed and a Kanaka crew "makes whoopee" above stifling wafts of a copper cargo. v Her skipper owned her, his son was nrst mate, his wife and daughter travelled regularly pn her, Tho family migrated to Tahiti from Normanby a. quarter of a century ago. Regular ports of call were Papeete, the Marquesas, Apia, Suva, Fanning Island, Washing ton Is and, and the Gilberts. Between the islands she carried "contract labourers." A little over a year ago she carried 200 of them to the Solomons. Jlany times she bucked'tho typhoons of the China sea. On one occasion only was she bested. Throueh . a day and night of howling gales her ; .officers never left the deck. U mid- : might, the. mizzen and spanker, each . double-reefed, went by the board. But the old English builders Worked well. The Bretagne weathered the gale with no, further loss. : Ozanne formerly commanded The Writer, a three-masted South Sea schooner, which went ashore- with a Kanaka crew on the west coast of Vancouver Island, in 1926. ' Seeing Ur drifting on the rocks in heavy Beat the Lightship signalled the crew not to attempt to get ashore in boats. But the skill acquired in handling outrieeer canoes through heavy breakers on their native coral beaches stood the Kanakas well; and they landed without loss.