OCEAN CARRIERS

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 9, 11 July 1933, Page 7

OCEAN CARRIERS

NEW ZEALAND LINES SOME EARLY HISTORY THE PANAMA ISTHMUS (From "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, May 26. In a special number of tho shipping journal, "Fairplay," there arc articles on- tlio two New Zealand linos, Shaw, Savill, and Albion Lino and the New Zealand Shipping1 Company. The writers are well informed concerning the early history of the companies. The contributor of tho Shaw, Savill section is obviously a research student, and provides some interesting quotations from old records. In the records of the Colonial Office, for instance, there is preserved a letter from the company to the Under-Secre-tary of Slate, Colonial Department, written on May. 12,, 1858: "Sir, we have the honour to state that we shall dispatch tho ship Lord Ashley from the terminus of the South . Wales railway at Neyland, Milford Haven, for Auckland, New Zealand, direct, on the 28th inst., and shall be happy to take Government dispatches or ship letters. Wo calculate the ship will make the voyage in about sixty-eight days. We remain, sir, your most obedient servant, Shaw, .Savill, and Company." When the Maori War broke out the company was in a good position to meet the demand for transports. On February 4, 1861, "The Times" printed the following itnder the heading "Troops and War Stores for New Zealand":—" The African, one of Shaw, Savill, and Company's liners, sailed from Gravesend on Thursday for Auckland direct. She has taken : a large quantity of powder and other military stores, as also five officers and sixty men of the Commissariat and Hospital Corps, with their wives and families. Two officers have sailed in the ship to join tho 57th Regiment now: serving in New Zealand. The African is a high-classed vessel, and the military officers from Chatham who superintend the embarkation expressed themselves highly satisfied with the 'arrangements made for the comfort of the troops." BARON DE THIERRY'S VISION. Even before tho country became a British colony* in 1840, ■' a plan for cutting a Panama Canal with the principal object of shortening the voyage to New Zealand had been advanced. It was set out in a letter of September 14, 1835, sent by the "French Pretender," Baron Charles tl^ Thierry, to the British Resident, Jame- Busby:— '-'I am about to cut the isthmus of Darien, and am establishing - a lino of ships from Panama which shall bring the mails from England and the West Indies to New Zealand." In a letter to the missionaries in New Zealand tho Baron described his negotiations with the \ Government of New Granada "for the necessary permission to- cut the isthmus to unite the oceans by a navigable canal." He had concluded a treaty under which New Zealand was to enjoy the property of tho canal for fifty years. "Such a canal," he said, ''brings her within eighty days' sail of England." ' , The Baron's imagination was greater than his resources, but after the establishment of British in New Zealand the possibilities of the Panama route wero discussed from every angle. A Colonial Office minute of June 28, 1858, reads thus:—"lt would, of course, be a great thing for the New Zealanders if- the Panama route could be established^" For a time mails were sent to the isthmus, transported overland, and picked up on the other side by different ships; but this .experiment was not successful, and it was not until 1914 that New Zealand received .the Panama service for which- it had waited so long. ..... ...... i NEW ZEALAND SHIPPING COMPANY. The writer of the article on'the New ! Zealand Shipping Company gives some interesting items regarding the early days t)f .the-company., • He writes:- — "Among the shipping corporations which have grown up during the last sixty years in the service of tho selfgoverning Dominions of the British Empire, none may claim a higher place than the New Zealand Shipping Qompany. Founded in 1873 by merchants of Christchurch, and therefore_ bqrn of1 and in the Dominion of which it bears the name, its fleet originally con-, sisted of sailing ships. It says much, for the vigour of its youth that in the first three years of its existence the company^ ships made no fewer than 150 departures-from the United Kingdom, practically a weekly sailing, each vessel convoying an average not far short of 200 "passengers. In those : days New Zealand —today still under-popu-lated—was sparsely peopled indeed, and the operations of the new service were, closely 'watched by the ' approving eye of the New Zealand Government of that time. .'/But in the days when the greater part of the world's overseas trade was already carried by steamers, tho company could not long confine its resources to sailing ships exclusively, more especially as the tide of emigration from the British Isles to the Southern Seas was gathering, ever-in-creasing strength.. There is evidence of this when, in 1879, the company dispatched its first steamer, the Stad. Harlem, to New Zealand, she carried 600 passengers, only a very few of whom, it is safe to say, held return tickets. This is believed to have been the first passenger steamship dispatched directly to Now Zealand, although already a goodly proportion of the passenger traffic went by the mail steamers to Australia, and thence by transhipment in local vessels, to New Zealand ports. The considerable influx of population during these earlier years had the inevitable result of bringing more and more land under cultivation, with a very large increase in the raising of stock, chiefly sheep, so that the perfection of refrigerating machinery ashore and in ships which occurred in tho early eighties of the last century was hailed by tho New Zealand pastoralists as affording an immediate and lucrative outlet for their surplus pro: ducc. In this trade the New Zealand Shipping Company was not slow to participate; indeed, the company has the distinction of having carried the first cargo of frozen produce from Auckland to the United Kingdom in the s.s. Mataura, in tho year 1882. Her arrival caused a sensation in the markets of tho United Kingdom, and the boon of cheap and sound produce from overseas was not long in finding appreciation among British housewives."