Old-Timo Sailing Vessels.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXI, Issue 301, 4 December 1931, Page 5

Old-Timo Sailing Vessels.

Not many persons can now talk of their travels between Australia and New Zealand in the sailing vessels that preceded the steamers (says the Dunedin “Star”), and it may come as news to the oldest of such patriarchs that nearly a hundred years ago the royal mails were carried over the Tasman Sea by a sixteen-ton cutter named the Royal William. For that bit of history we are indebted to A. J. Villiers’s “Vanished Fleets,” published this year and now in the Dunedin Athenaeum Library. Two farmers built that tiny craft on the banks of the Derwent River, Tasmania, in 1833. She was queer-looking, snub-nosed, and square-sterned, and did not look like a good coaster, yet she took the mail for years between Hobart and New Zealand, and it is said of her that she lived through many a gale better than ships of a hundred times her size. She was deep and sharpbottomed, had a big sail for her measurement, and was so soundly built that she sailed for over three-quarters of a century. For some time she voyaged more or less regularly, at one time on the run from Melbourne to Hokitika, and was broken up at Hobart twenty years ago.