A WOODEN HEROINE

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 4156, 1 May 1934, Page 2

A WOODEN HEROINE

RECORD-BREAKING SEA WITCH On March 25 1849, the American clipper Sea Witcn rounded Sandy Hook to complete the run from China to New York in 75 days and her voyage round the globe in 195 sailing days. During the voyage she had made three records —69 days from New York to Valparaiso, a distance of 10,568 miles; 50 days from Callao to China, 10.417 miles; and the home run, which to this day has never been equalled by any ship under sail. There is general agreement that the most beautiful sailing craft of all time were built during some twenty years commencing in the ’forties. The clipper as a class was developed in America because only through lleetness could she hope to compete with the subsidies and monopolies enjoyed by older maritime nations. The Sea Witch, launched in 1846, was the first really successful hollow-bowed ship, lowering on her second voyage the record but recently established by the Rainbow, a transitional type. RECORDS THAT STILL SURVIVE. Though many larger ships were designed and built specifically to beat her, none succeeded in doing so, and by 1850 she had achieved a series of records that still survive. She was the first vessel to round the Horn from New York to California in less than one hundred days. Twice she broke the record from Canton to New York. Her brief but glorious career of barely a decade was brought to a tragic close with a cargo of coolies on March 26, 1856, off the coast of Cuba. That decade was the hcyder of American sail. A scale model of this graceful greyhound of the sea is exhibited in the City of New York Museum in Fifth avenue. She was 192 ft long over all, with 34ft beam, 19ft hold, and 900 ton burthen.

Mr Alexander Laing has woven around this wooden heroine a romance which should rank for all time with ‘ Moby Dick ’ among the great epics of the sea. His work is a remarkable historical gallery of the zenith of an era — the era of the sailing ship, which took five thousand years to perfect, but was eclipsed in a generation by the juggernaut of steam. THE SEA-UNICORN’S TUSK. The central figure of this stirring narrative, Roger Murray, represents the type, though not perhaps the portrait, of Captain Robert Waterman. A striking character is Murray. Ashore, a fop, the idol of ringleted, becrinoiined ladies; afloat, the relentless, ruthless tyrant, driving his ship ahead with sail that other men would fear to unfurl, tireless himself and dragging the last ounce from his crew —a man whom men could only love or hate. Thus are we introduced to him ashore through the ev’es of Cornelius Prescott, his employer, who stopped amazed at the sight of a tall young man whose ship, by all calculations, should still be many days’ sail from home. His shoes were gleaming in the sunlight;, a shift stud flashed blue fire; but these were minor splendours —for, in a radiant circle about his extended right hand, there blazed the many : jewelled knob of a curious cane, spinning over negligent knuckles. As the cane paused and swung to the other hand for a reversal of direction, Mr Prescott saw that it was fashioned from that rarity of rarities —ghostly white tusk of a sea unicorn.

HOW SHE WAS BUILT. Such was the hero for whom Prescott was building his heroine of the sea. That was the way of her beginning; first they made for her a straight bed upon which to lie restless, fretful for the sea. Across pilebeads, deep-driven in the slip, big timbers were laid—like ties for the lordiest of railroads. Solid oak blocks, requiring a man at each corner for the lifting, were placed in a line down the middle of these groundways, trued here and there with thinner slabs to bring all their upper surfaces into a single plane. Such was her surly couch. In the paintwork of the clipper there was a special significance. Her black hull wore but a narrow gold striping where on every other ship afloat would be seen gun ports—real or imitation — chequered in white. Pirates still infested eastern seas, and, in being the first trading vessel to scorn the pretence of being armed, the Sea Witch made declaration of faith in her own fleetness to elude pursuit. NOT A DRY SHIP.

Across the seas, half her crew pressed and unruly, the newly-launched vessel forged. In the green southern ocean, house-high and at a gallop, followed the giant swells, with samite crests of foam. For whole days together they bad com© like this; and the deck below for as long a while had been a seething welter; the Sea Witch was not a dry ship. Rather, she seemed like one of the pelagic fishes that at times followed her, content to spend all their lives on the surface or just barely below it. Old bauds, out of puffy-cheeked vessels, betrayed continual uneasiness over her habit of nonchalantly settling into a tremendous wave, while 10,000 wavering tons of water sought to smash her for ever from sight. A ship, to their way of thinking, should have lift to her bows, and a stem modelled to keep the seas more than a few scant inches from her taffrail when running free.