FAMOUS SHIPS.

Thames Star, Volume LVII, Issue 15887, 27 July 1923, Page 3

FAMOUS SHIPS.

EXISTING RELICS. SOME INTERESTING HISTORY. The anonymous donor of £50,000 has saved the Victory from falling to pieces at her anchorage in Portsmouth harbour. JYhile she still lives the relic-hunters have been busy with her body, and in many parts of the country you will be shown furniture and various objects of wood which have been made from partly defective baulks of timber extracted during repairs. It is seldom that a famous ship disappears utterly when she reaches the breakers’ yard, though no trace remains, I believe (writes 8.D., in the Daily Chronicle, of the collier Endeavour, in which Captain Cook made his famous voyage through the South Seas. Drake’s tiny ship, The Golden Hind, lives on at Oxford in the form of a chair made of timber broken from her when she was chopped up at Deptford. When the Resolute was sent Up to the Arctic to look for Sir. John Franklin, she was frozen in and abandoned by her crew. After years of drift she was. borne south by a melting, floe, and found by an American whaler, which took her in tow. The American Government refitted her and returned her to us. When she was broken up, after lying in the Medway for some years, a suite of furniture was made from her timbers and given to the President of the United States. Several other wooden objects were made from her, and are to be found in inns and private houses in and around Chatham. After the wreck of the Ostrolabe and the Brussole, the two ships sent out by the French to explore the Pacific after the return of Captain Cook, bits of their gear salved from the coral reef on which they were battered to bits were taken back to Paris and built into a memorial column, which was erected to commemorate the expedition. Now and then a Venetian gondolier will show you his most prized possession, a piece of wood, handed down as a heirloom, which was once a part of the Buceataur, the famous two-decker State gondola of the Doge in Venice’s Golden Age.