SPINDRIFT

Southland Times, Issue 21361, 6 April 1931, Page 2

SPINDRIFT

SHIPS, SEAS AND SAILOBS A NAUTICAL COLUMN. (By “Barnacle Bill.”) ‘•What shall wo toll you? Tales, marvellous tales Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest, "Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales, And winds and shadows fall towards the West.” —James Elroy Flecker. Many extremely interesting tales have arisen from the sea, from the adventurous craft which cross its broad expanses and from the hardy souls who go down to it in ships. It is the object of “Barnacle Bill” in this column which, will be published from time to time, to present to readers many of these stories and in this respect he will welcome all contributions, particularly from the port of Bluff, possessing a nautical flavour. The first article which appears below, deals with the famous Erikson fleet and how its owner still adheres to sail in these days of modern transport. CAPTAIN GUSTAF ERIKSON. OWNER OF GREATEST SAILING FLEET. SOME FAMOUS BARQUES. In a bedroom high in the Hotel Metropole, Northumberland avenue, London, a little man with keen, pale blue eyes and very tiny feet looked scornfully upon a photograph of a four-masted barque which I had just given him (writes Mr A. J. Villiers, in an interesting article on the Erikson fleet in the Manchester Guardian). She w-as a very good four-masted barque, and it was a very good photograph; I had gone to a great deal of pains to take it, one day in the horse latitudes down below the trades, coming up from the Horn to the line. The ship was wallbwing in idleness, backing and filling; we put out a boat and pulled round her, taking photographs. Her sails hung from their yards in limp idleness; she lay like a derelict in the water, slowly rolling. She did not look her best, to the sailor’s eye of peace and loveliness—a spirit of gentleness, as if she were resting there after the battle with the Horn—that made the photograph pleasing to the eye. At least, I thought so. So have many other people. That photograph has been in Kodak’s main windows on Kingsway for two years now, and still finds buyers. But the little man glanced at it in scorn. He pointed out that the fore lower t’gallants’l was set like a bag; the yards were braced haphazardly; the fore royal yard was down on its lifts with the sail not clewed up; the fores’l looked like the side of a circus tent, and the lower t’gall’nt sheet alee was crying out to be stretched. “I like not such photographs,” he told me, at the same time pushing across a picture of the same ship, slipping along before a five-knot breeze with every stitch nicely set and drawing. She was in ballast, high out of the water and displeasing to the artist’s eye; but the set of her sails and the trim of her yards, I had to admit, were faultless. Biggest Sailing Fleet in the World. The little man was entitled to criticize. He was Gustaf Erikson, the owner of the greatest fleet of sailing ships in the world, and he had come to London on a periodical visit to his agents in Fenchurch street, who look after the chartering of his vessels. Captain Erikson himself lives in the tinv port of Mariehamn, in the Aland Islands—those lovely islands which, in proportion to their population, must be the greatest shipowning area on earth. In Mariehamn he has a tiny office, with one assistant and one typist, from which he manages his twenty ships over the seven seas, in all kinds of outlandish ports from Caleta Buena to Luderitz Bay, Wallaroo and Santa Rosalina... .The photograph was of his best ship, the fourmasted barque Herzogin Cecilie, once the pride of of the German merchant service as training ship for the Norddeutscher Lloyd, and now a cargo carrier for Gustaf Erikson. In addition to the Herzogin Cecilie, he owns other famous sailers —the four-masted barque Clivebank, Lawhill, Pommern, Archibald Russell, Hougomont, Viking, Ponape and Melbourne (nine of them) ; the full-rigged ship Grace Harwar, the barques Penang, Winterhude, Killoran, Lingard, Loch Linnhe Carmen; the barquetines Baltic and Estonoa; the schooners Ostrobotnia and Madara. Nine four-masted barques, a fullrigged ship, sjix barques, two barquentines, two schooners—twenty sailing ships! One scarcely realized so vast a fleet was still in existence.

I was interested in this little man who holds so stubbornly to sail. “I will never be a steamship owner,” he told me. “I shall keen my sailing ships while I live; I may be compelled to part with some of them, but I shall hold to all I can.” It is a worrying time to own any ships, with world freights depressed and shipping generally still in the deeps of a depression that has lasted ten years. It is a particularly worrying time to own deep water sailing ships. Of the Erikson fleet five ships are sailing out to Australia in ballast in the hopes of getting wheat to bring home along the time-honoured road that leads around the Horn; five others are bound to African ports with timber from South Finland at very poor rates of freight. These will also go on to Australia, when the timber is discharged, in hope of getting grain. A few trade in the North Sea, carrying splitwood during the summer months. Others are laid up. How the Ships Are Kept Going. I asked Captain Erikson how he managed to keep them going. “By not having them insured,” he replied. “Not one of my ships is insured,” he said. ‘‘l carry all the risk myself. If I had to pay the insurance rates which underwriters ask for sailing ships I would have to send them all to the breakup yards to-morrow. Underwriters are afraid of sailing ships, but they need not be. I look after my own ships myself; I have been a ship master for years, and an owner since 1913; I have been cabin boy, steward, cook, ordinary seaman, A. 8., bos'n, mate, and master. I went to sea when I was ten. I am 58 now, and the sea has been my interest all these years. When my ships come to European ports I order them to Mariehamn if they have to lay up, and then I examine them closely and personally. I climb into the rigging myself and examine the state of the yards. I see what requires replacing; I look at the state of their bottoms, and in the holds. I look at the pea soup the cook makes and see that it is right; I see how the captain cuts the sails and how the sailmaker has sewn them. (I have been sailmaker, too). I accept the whole responsibility for the upkeep of my ships myself, and for their seaworthiness; I ask only that the masters should take them safely from port to port and keep them clear of rust, And I have not lost one, except the first I owned; nor have I ever failed to deliver a cargo.. A Light That Failed. There is a story to that first loss. Captain Erikson's firat venture in pwnsahp

was the big ex-German four-masted barque Reno Rickners, which he bought and renamed Aland, in honour of his native islands. She was lost on the New Caledonia coast on her first voyage, and he has never renamed a ship of his since. When he has bought them they have kept their names, or gone back to the original names by which they were first known. There is an old sea superstition that it is unlucky to change a ship’s name, and after that experience with the Rene Rickners, renamed Aland, Captain Erikson bowed to it. Not that there was anything superstitious about the loss of that fine four-master. She was bound from Callao to Noumea to load ore in 1914; while she was at sea the war broke out, and when she came to where her master expected to make his landfall she sailed right high and dry on to a reef at the very foot of a lighthouse. The lighthouse was in blackness because of the war, and no one in the barque had the slightest idea the war was on. I asked Captain Erikson about the state of the negotiations regarding the sale of the Herzogin Cecilie to the Sea Lion Society of which something has been mentioned in the London Press from time to time. He told me that the ship was not yet sold. He was asking £22,000 for her. She has, he told me, three suits of sails, each of which cost £3,000. So she has £9,000 worth of sails in her alone. She would be a fine ship for the society, but £22,000 is a lot of money to pay for any sailing ship in these bad times, particularly a ship built in 1902, which has spent four years—the four war year—laid up on the west coast. Passengers and Apprentices. The captain mentioned that he received so many requests for passages in his ships that he intended to fit his two best vessels, Herzogin Cecilie and Viking, to carry ten or twelve passengers permanently. Apprentice berths are available in most of his ships to any nationality. In one of his ships in which I sailed we had apprentices of five different nations. Captain Erikson has one weakness, I discovered—pea soup 1 But it must be good pea soup—not “with the peas hard like stones and the salt pork not boiled enough.” Whenever any of his ships come to Mariehamn to lay up the captains have strict orders to let him know whenever pea soup is on the menu. And if it is not well done with the peas not hard like stones, heaven help the cook! “What are the prospects for keeping your ships?” I asked. “Things will get better.” the captain replied. “If they do not, then not only sailing ships will suffer. The steamers will go as well. But it is very worrying. I keep my ships on the move, from port to port, country to country, often sailing scores of thousand of miles in ballast, always hunting for cargoes—guano on the West Coast, grain in Australia, lumber in Oregon, coal in the Bristol Channel. I live in hopes that the cargoes they get will pay for their wanderings in ballast, but I find as the years pass the ballast voyages grow and both the cargoes and the freights steadily decrease. When I go my ships will go; but they will not go before.”