HER LAST VOYAGE

Evening Star, Issue 22572, 13 February 1937, Page 30

HER LAST VOYAGE

THE ANCIENT CERES USED BEFORE WATERLOO Believed to be the oldest ship in the world in service, the 125-year-old ketch Ceres, of Bade, was abandoned m a sinking condition in the Bristol Channel recently. , , , For 85 years she had been owned by the same family—the Pethencks. of Bude. „ . Built at Salcome, Devon, five years before the Battle of Waterloo, she carried provisions and fruit during the Napoleonic wars, dodging the shots fired at her by enemy craft. A century later, patched and caulked, but still the same seaworthy and reliable little servant, the ketch was again showing her usefulness by acting as a munitions carrier in the tar greater war. This time she escaped not shot, but torpedoes. The ketch has often been skippered by Captain Alfred Petherick, a business man, who. born and bred within a stone’s throw of the swell that thunders * on Bude beach, liked nothing better than to break away from shore interests for a week now; and again to take the Ceres round the treacherous North Cornish coast to Wales. THOUSANDS OF TRIPS. This was no landlubber’s job, hut “ Captain Ned ” is as good a navigator as any on the Cornish seaboard. Skilled though he is, however, he relied more on mechanical aids to navigation than did his, grandfather, Captain R. W. Petherick. This ancient manner, bom in an age when men were taught to rely on their own senses and instincts, used nothing hut landmarks and a lead-to-line to guide his vessel round the coast. He and his mate Ben made some thousands of trips up and down the Bristol Channel in the Ceres, and it was when a fog blotted out their view of the shore that these two worthies showed their seamanship. Sounding the bull’s horn, which served the ship as her fog signal, and hfinKinsj to Her must tHo Horn lontom which 'for 70 years was the vessel’s illumination, Captain Petherick would take the Ceres as close to the rocks as he could without striking them. Then—this is almost incredible, but nevertheless is still recounted by Bude’s oldest inhabitants—he would steer his craft safely round the coast to harbour, guided only by the lowing of cows on the shore. During a lifetime spent on the same stretch of sea he had taught himself the sounds made by the different herds; and it is said that he knew the cows belonging to every farm on the seaboard from Bude to Appledore.