“JANE” IS BUILT OF GOOD OLD ENGLISH OAK.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17830, 26 April 1926, Page 7

“JANE” IS BUILT OF GOOD OLD ENGLISH OAK.

WORLD’S OLDEST VESSEL STANDS OUT TO SEA. (Special to the “ Star.”) LONDON, March 10. The Jane, the oldest vessel in the world still in commission, has just changed hands. She is a 40-ton ketch, built in Runcorn in 1800, but after 126 years of seafaring she. has found another willing purchaser. Her earliest history is obscure, the name of her makers is not shown on her register, but for a long period she was employed bv a shipping firm at Bridgewater Afterwards she passed into the family" of Captain L. P. Smart, .of Uphill, near Weston-super-Mare, in whose hands she remained nearly fifty Now the Jane has once more been sold to a Bristol firm and in her old

age she ig being used as a lighter, plying her trade up and down the Avon. The Jane has known war and peace, legitimate trading and, perhaps, in the years shortly after her first commie- ’ sion, the thrills of smuggling. Jane was young when the Peninsula War was taking place, and no doubt she bucketed her way up the Bristol Channel, which has always been her home, in company" with frigates-of-the-iine and heavily laden transports. Jane was still young when the Crimean War was raging, and she regained her youth again when the war of 1914 sent its call . to every type of shipping. She was chartered by the Goveriv ment and used throughout the long l years of the Great War, plying up and down the Channel, unafraid of submarines and mines. There is no one, though, who knows Jane so well as Captain Smart, her late owner-skipper. “ Jane stood the sea,” he said, “ because she was well built and built of good old English oak at that. Six years ago, when I put a new lining into her I found that her frame was as solid as the day she was built. ! There were not two bad timbers in her. Not many ships built to day- will last as long as Jane.”