OFF TO SEA AGAIN.
Britain’s Oldest Vessel Sails. LONDON, March 27. I The oldest vessel on the British ship- | Pi' r *g register sails again this week to j fetch a cargo from Wales. She is the I Ceres, an 85-ton ketch, built in 1811. j She carried supplies to the Duke of ! Wellington’s troops in the Peninsula, when her armament consisted of two flintlock pistols “to shoot Napoleon and his bodyguard should they be encountered.” The Ceres has been chased by French and American privateers and wrecked three times on the Cornish coast, but invariably was floated off with her original oak timbers undamaged. A tallow light in a horn lantern was the Ceres’ onlv light for seventy years, in which period a bull’s horn was used as a foghorn. The father of her present owner is reputed to have been able to sail the Ceres along the coast in a fog by listening to the bellowing of cattle ashore, realising the situation of farms to which they belonged. An auxiliary motor was fitted to the Ceres in 1911, but the anchor is still weighed by a century-old device.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/TS19340409.2.10
Bibliographic details
Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20275, 9 April 1934, Page 1
Word Count
190OFF TO SEA AGAIN. Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20275, 9 April 1934, Page 1
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