LONG WAY ROUND

Taranaki Daily News, 14 October 1933, Page 11 (Supplement)

LONG WAY ROUND

CHEAP ROUTE FOR CARGO. AVOIDING CANAL DUES. A very unusual route is to be followed by the British tanker Teakwood, which will bring the next shipment of Russian, motor spirit from the Black Sea to New Zealand. Previous shipments have come via the Suez Canal, but the Teakwood, after passing the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, will steam right through the Mediterranean and out through the Strait of Gibraltar. Proceeding thence down the west coast of Africa, she will make a call at Dakar to replenish her bunkers, and then come on to New Zealand via the Cape of Good Hope, thus avoiding the' Suez Canal route altogether. Although tliis will add many hundreds of miles to the distance travelled, it is said that the saving of Suez Canal dues will more -than recompense the owners of the ship. During the last two or three years many tankers bound from the Persian Gulf to Britain and western European ports have taken the route down the Indian Ocean and round the Cape of Good Hope and have saved money by thus avoiding the Suez Canal. The “economic blizzard” that has swept the world during the last three or four years has affected ships at sea in many ways. Its most serious effect, of course, has been the great reduction in world trade, creating intense competition for the reduced cargoes offering, and rendering idle millions of tons of shipping. Probably its strangest effect, however, has been to cause shipping to save money by taking the “longest way round” in order to avoid the tolls of the two great short-cuts —the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal. Apart from the instances given of ships avoiding the Suez Canal to save money, there is the New ZealandLondon trade, in which, during the last eighteen months or so, the majority of the homeward-bound cargo vessels—steamers and motor-ships alike—have travelled via Cape Horn, instead of through the Panama “Canal. Not for many years have so many ships passed Cape Horn as during the last eighteen months.

In view of the fact, that Suez Canal dues are payable in French gold francs, and Panama Canal dues in American dollars, the adverse exchange rates of British and Scandinavian currencies in terms of francs and dollars have very appreciably increased the costs of traversing those short cuts.