Picturesque Names

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 805, 28 October 1929, Page 10

Picturesque Names

SHELL COMPANY’S TANKERS ARE NAMED AFTER SH ELLS BUSINESS ROMANCE A shell, delicately contrived by Dame Nature in a soft tvrra-cotta hue, and worked in a maze of fragile spines and flutings that taper toward sharp ends where the warmer colour merges gradually into white, lies softly ensconsed in the felt base of an oak and glass cabinet in the saloon of the oil tanker Spondilus, which lay at Western Wharf yesterday morning. It is a specimen of the beautiful spondilus shell.

Ship names—their origins are a continuous source of speculation among landlubbers. To them, many a vessel is named without rhyme or reason, but shipowners always work on a definite principle in choosing boat titles. There are ship names aud ship names. Some are picturesque, some are outwardly mundane, but. all are tinged with a touch of that romance which still clings to the sea, despite the incursions of modern commerce, casting its shadow of. materialism over the seven seas that have been sung by poets and feared by men since time immemorial. Reviewing all the lines of vessels which call at the port of Auckland, perhaps the most picturesque and appealing names are to be found on the Shell Oil Company's tankers. Nature and her resources are ever employed by man in widely varying capacities, but it is doubtful if any

section of her huge garner of treasures has been more prettily turned to account than the shell community when the company which bears that name decided to christen so many of its oil-carrying ships with shell-names. |By this means, the company has given a refreshingly beautiful touch to one of the most prosaic of today’s sea traffickings. And in the saloon of each of these shell-named vessels is a little cabinet containing a specimen shell of the type after which it is named. MANY TANKERS VISIT AUCKLAND The Shell fleet of tankers consists of 249 vessels. Over half of these are called after different shells and in many saloons are to be found specimens rare and beautiful. Numbers of shellnamed tankers have berthed at Western Wharf since the bulk oil business was introduced to Xew Zealand, and those who have followed Auckland’s marine activities will find familiar such names as Ampullaria, Petricola. Oliva, Phorus, Buccinum, Murex, Ranella, Pleiodon, Pinna, Paua, Scopas, Physa, Scalaria, Volsella and Hermes. All of these and many others have at different times pumped out their oil or motor spirit cargoes through pipe-lines into the company’s tanks at Freeman's Bay.

To Aucklanders the l^est-known of the fleet is the Paua, which is engaged exclusively in * New Zealand coastal work. . She is named after the Xew Zealand paua shell. A quaint story in shells led to the formation of the Shell Company. About 40 years ago a London dealer named Marcus Samuel took his cliilddren down to the sands of Margate on a public holiday. The children collected shells from the beach and when they returned home fixed them to the tops of several small boxes, as children do today. Their father saw the value of these as trinket-boxes and accordingly encouraged his children in their hobby, thereby creating a profitable side-line. In fact, he developed the trinket-box business to such an extent that he was able to invest in oil. He turned his money over astutely in various ways and finally died leaving sufficient wealth for his sons, Marcus (afterward Viscount Bearsted") and Samuel, to trade in a big way with the Far East, and it was this trading that led the lirothers to see the possibilities of oil in that region. And so the foundation of the mighty Shell organisation was laid in a modest fashion, and it is not surprising that the Samuel brothers used the name “Shell” as the title of a company that came into being through the sale of shell trinket-boxes.