HER LAST VOYAGE.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20279, 13 April 1934, Page 5

HER LAST VOYAGE.

The Old Island Steamer Tofua. TO BE BROKEN UP. (Special to the “Star.”) AUCKLAND, April 13. Bound for Japan to be broken tip, the old Island steamer Tofua steamed out of the Waitemata Harbour yesterday for the last time. For the best part of a quarter of a century Auckland has been the Tofua s home port, and a small crowd gathered on the wharf to bid her farewell, knowing that within a few weeks she would be broken up lor scrap iron in Japan. It was hardly a cheerful farewell. There were one or two men on the wharf who had travelled by the old Tofua in her troopship days during the war, and they spoke of farewells when her decks had been lined with khakiclad figures, and when there had been tears and laughter and music all intermingled as the vessel left the wharf. Two of the Tofua’s former officers, in port on another steamer, came down to have a last look at their old ship, and told of farewells from tropic islands in the South Pacific; of dusky native figures squatting on hatches and singing plaintive island melodies, or sleeping peacefully on mats; of the heavy adours of bananas and copra; and of surf breaking on coral reefs fringed with coconut palms. Nor did the Tofua herself look particularly cheerful. Her period of enforced idleness in Hobson Bay had accentuated the marks of age. Patches of rust stained the once gleaming white of her paintwork. Her brass was dull and her paint blistered, and even the funnel, recently painted black in place of the old, familiar red of the Union Steam Ship Company, presented a gloomy appearance.