SAILING SHIPS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21716, 3 February 1934, Page 1 (Supplement)

SAILING SHIPS

BY W. R. WKBB

A COMPARISON

That are untouched by softness, all that line Drawn ringing hard to stand the test of brine. That art of masts, gnil-crowded, fit to break. Yet stayed to strength and backstayed into rake. W hen John Masefiekl penned the above lines he had before his observant and prophetic mind's eye a type of vessel far removed from the steeTdecked, auxiliary-engined Magdalene Vinnen which, for want of a better word, a modern world calls a " windjammer." To a sailor of the sail there is something almost distasteful about the labour-saving contraptions with which her decks are cluttered. Her patent brace winches, patent halliards, her one-piece masts and steel travellers have removed so much of danger from the tasks of the men who handle them that one feels there is something lacking and that one is standing not on the deck of a sailing ship but on something half way between sail and steam. No need here for Reuben Ranzo to rouse- tho yards aloft, no need for the doleful pulley-hauley cries of the watch on the braces, no need for Sally Brown or Santa Anno to break out the stubborn anchor. To one who has been accustomed to the atmosphere of the " windjammer " of an earlier date there is something; strangely disappointing in the newness of it all. And the crews who man these modern craft—how sharply they contrast with the type engendered by the exigencies of ser ice in tho days that are gone! When the poet wrote of The life demanded by that art, the keen Eye-puckered, hard-case seamen, silent, lean. he spoke of a time when a man did with his hands most of those thino-s that are now relegated to the foundry and the machine shop. Gone are the stunsail booms, the lanyard rigging, tho wooden three-piece masts, the white decks, the teakwood deck houses and the gloomy fo'c's'le. Gone, too, are the hard-case experts who occupied the narrow bunks and toiled and starved and endured the buffetings inseperable from their calling. They belong to an era which has definitely passed, they have been elbowed aside by the onmarch of progress, yet one cannot regard their passing with anything but regret. Continual Battle Names like Marco Polo, Flying Cloud, Lightning, Thermopylae, Red Jacket, Sovereign of the Seas, pregnant with the poetry of the ocean, havo become but a memory, and the art of the men who manned them is a lost one. As Masefield says of them, They are grander things than all the art of towns. Their tests are tempests and the sea that drowns. And he was right. Life for them was one continual battle with the elements. The hardships they endured, the everpresent dangers to which they were exposed, their complete isolation for long periods, made the seamen of those .lavs a race apart from the land dwellers. When ashore they seldom strayed far from the waterfront and, in most cases, wild carousals served to banish for a time memories of the miseries through which they had just passed. But tney had no illusions. Tho sea had claimed them, body and soul, as she will if you drink deeply of her beauty, her mystery, her power; they knew that, despite their most fervent resolutions to free themselves from her thraldom, they would, sooner or later, creep back to her heaving bosom. In those days neither ships nor men were spared in the endeavour to make record passages. This applied particularly to the England-Australia trade, and keen rivalry existed between various shipping firms. The master, whatever his faults, who could outsail his competitors, was always sure to find his services in demand, and the names of some of these never-sleeping, harddriving skippers became famous in all the ports of the world. Some of them practically lived on the poop, taking what rest they allowed themselves with ono eye shirt. This vigilance on the part of the " old man " kept officers and crew on the jump, and a man who was not up to his job was in for a sorry time. Severe Test of Endurance

In an endeavour to obtain the full benefit of tho prevailing westerlies these Australian traders sought the high latitudes of the Southern Ocean, where both ships and men were put to a severe test of endurance as. day after day, they ran before the greybeards for which that part of the world is renowned, decks always flooded, gale following on gaje shrieking through tiie rigging, men wet through and frozen to the marrow. Judged by modern standards one wonders that men could be found to endure these things and come back for a second dose. Can ono blame them for indulging in the excesses that made their name a byword in the seaports at which they touched? The sailor afloat, in British vessels at least, was a tradesman in the true sense of tho word. Iron and steel, steam and oil, have long since pushed his palm-and-needle work, his fid and spike, into the background, and into his shoes there has stepped a generation of paint cleaners and chipping-hammer wieldors, the majority of whom do not realise how truly pleasant are the places in which their lines are cast. Barefooted Round the Horn I was shipmates once with an old fellow of seventy, an Irishman with a broken nose and many battle scars. He never wore seaboots —out of sheer dogged bravado, I believe—and would watch the rest of us carefully greasing our Hamburgs preparatory to the passage of the Horn. We were concerned as to how he would fare, and a member of the opposite watch offered the loan of his own when circumstances would permit. The old fellow rejected the offer with scorn and said he had been round the Horn a dozen times barefooted and one more attempt would do him no harm. He stuck it out, too, and nearly brought tears to the eyes of the " old man," a canny Scot, for in the slopchest thero remained one pair of seaboots waiting for a purchaser. I met the old fellow a few years later outside Wells Street Sailors' Home, and parted with one of the only two shillings I had in the world to buy him a drop of something to keep tho fires alight in his tough old body. Thero were many like him in those days. Thoy wore as sinewy and as supple as the ships in which they sailed. But they have disappeared over the horizon now, those hard-bitten seamen, together with their Marco Polos, their Lightnings, tlieir Flying Clouds. They murk our paßsace aa a race of men: Earth will not. see Bitch shipß as those nuain.