A LOST ART.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume VII, Issue 2143, 28 December 1920, Page 15 (Supplement)

A LOST ART.

WAR PERIDOT AND LAKE GRAVITY. NAMING OF BRITISH SHIPS. The naming of ships seems nowadays to be somewhat of a lost art among us, says a writer in the London "Daily Chronicle.'' Take, for instance, those masterpieces of inept nomenclature, the "war"ships, which began quite reasonably with the War Spear, War Sword, and the like, then degenerated into meaningless combinations such as War .Beryl and War Peridot, and have now reached the nadir of futility in the War Fig. War Fig! Could anything be conceived more inane, more meaningless, or more inappropriate? It suggests a dozen questions—as, why Fig at all ? What connection is there between ships and figs, and if Fig be conceded, then why on earth War Fig.' What is a War Fig, aud why is a War Fig different from a Feace Fig. or, for the matter of that, a pre-War Fig? Then there are the.American standard ships, which are in little better case; the Lake Gravity, for example, aud the Lake Frugality, which may quite possibly be followed by the Lake Prohibition or the Lake Sobriety! And there is the new liner, Panhandle State, which will, na doubt, possess equally euphonious sisters. New England Names. Aud yet there can be a very charm in incongruity. There is a kind of magnificent insolence about a stately Oriental or classical pplysyllable flaunted over the seven seas from the counter of an ugly, matter-of-fact, grimy cargocarrier. Nor need one quarrel with those plain, sensible New England names of men and women so often borne by American ships, and especially American sailing ships; those Willie T. This's, and Annie M. Thata which inevitably call before the mind's eye one of those big, austere Yankee schooners, with their almost Puritanical simplicity of line and rig. They seem to belong to little one-man or family shipyards in Maine or Massa-~ 1 chusetts; and they suggest lean, lanternjawed skipper-owners, given to religion, and hj; -fisted Down-East mates, the lineal ii. .cendants of just such seamen as Long Tom Coffin. With us, similar names are seldom found except in the coasting trade; and even there we prefer flights of fancy like Bride of the West, Cornish Belle, and so on. Homeric Titles. True, our big liners are w r ell enough Tiamed —our Olympics and Baltics—our Aquitanias and Empresses, and the rest; to say nothing of the Blue Funnell Line's Homeric titles. But there is, after all, an air of standardising in all these names. They lack the human touch which was present in the old ship names. ! How they sing themselves in the memory, these old names of ships, beginning with the Golden Hind, Jesus of Lubeck, and Mayflower. Names of China clippers, beautiful and brave to hear as the names of beautiful and gaflant things should be: Thermopylae, Ariel, Lothair, Sir Lancelot; names of the big slashing Colonial clippers: Star of Peace, Jerusalem, Thyatira, with others called after Wellington's Peninsular victories: Albuera, Vimiera, and so on. By the way, there is a Vimiera afloat now, but she is probably a later bearer of the same name. The American clippers were no less high-sounding: Champion of the Seas M Romance of the Seas, Flying Cloud, Sen Serpent, and Waterwitch. Shires and Mountains, lie more modern sailing vessels, too, ha>e some fine names, although a shade less ornate. There are the Scottish

"Shires," for example, Kinross-shire, Elginshire, Clackmannanshire; and the "Hills": Marlborough Hill (now in" Russian hands), and her tall sisters; and a group of good English names: Eowena, Harold, Ivanhoe. But perhaps the best choice of all was that of the "Sierras'": Sierra Nevada, Sierra Morena, and the rest; and those names of mountains which were borne with such artistic appropriateness by some fine Liverpool ships, now no more —the Matterhorn and Lyderhorn. The likeness of one of these tall flowers of sail to a far-seen peak of snow makes the idea both an obvious and a particularly happy one. . /' The name and the figurehead, of course, generally went together; aud where this was impossible—as in the ease of a purely geographical name—the figurehead was usually a graceful female figure without any special symbolism. The figurehead of the celebrated Thermopylae was Leonidas the Spartan; that of the equally famous Cutty Sark represented Burns' pretty witch from "Tain o' Shanter," while Sir Lancelot bore the figure of the Knight of the Lake in Hull panoply of glittering armour. » The Old Figureheads. The Romance of the Seas (an early American clipper) had an early navigator gazing out over uncharted seas; the Sea Serpent, a glistening snake in green and gold; and the Nightingale, a bust of Jenny Lind, in whose honour she was christened. A particularly interesting figurehead was that of the Norman Court, a copy of one of the "family portraits at the Barings' Hampshire seat. Needless to say, the beautiful names of fhe.ships sometimes got rather unceremonious treatment from their unlettered crews. A case in point is that of the old ship Antiope, which on her maiden voyage was prophesied a violent and an early end by more than one old salt. How could she bo anything but an unlucky ship, was their reasoning, with such a name as "Anti-hope"? That was in the 'sixties, and the "Antihope" is still afloat, and, what is more, still under the British flag.