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Deep-Sea Sail
By A. J. VILLIERS
Not only the glamor but also the actuality of sailing-ships
are still with us
Saw a four-masted schooner towing out to sea on Saturday
afternoon, from her anchorage in the shadow of the Statute of Liberty. She was
setting her sails as she threaded her way through the in-coming and the
anchored steamers; before she had passed the quarantine station she had dropped
her tug. It was almost a shock to see sails spread from a deep-sea commercial
vessel in New York harbor.
But there are still sailing-ships, square-rigged as well as
fore-and-aft, competing for the sea carriage of the world's goods. Twenty of
them, in this year of grace 1932, are sailing from Australian ports to the
United Kingdom and Europe with cargoes of Antipodean grain. Four of them sail
in the nitrate trade, to Chilean ports. A few carry guano on the Peruvian
coast; until recently an-other still carried passengers in the North Atlantic
trade. Twelve of them, through the summer months, carry firewood from northern
Baltic ports to London and Hull. Four or five others transport logwood from the
West Indies to Marseilles and Le Havre.
How is it that there are still so many sailing-ships? When ten per cent of the world's steamships are laid up for lack of freights, how may sailing-ships find employment? The answer simply is that wind is still the cheapest power available; and while the wind blows there always will be sailing-ships of some kind.
Primitive man, watching the effect of a leaf thrust into a piece of bark borne by a stream, first discovered the power of wind on water-borne objects. His discovery remained un-used, except in the roughest way, for many centuries. Men did not trust the sea. They learned to propel themselves with oars in floating objects, and for a thousand years and more the use of such sails as they had always was subservient to the oars. They did not trust sails, not under-standing them. They used them only when they had fair winds, and then not over-willingly, not wishing to be blown too far. Was there not a danger of being carried away and swept over the world's edge? Development and understanding were slow. It took two thousand years to develop the perfect sailing-ship such vessels as the beautiful American clippers, the Scots-built iron square-riggers, and then, early this century, those magnificent vessels of the German "P" Line, of Hamburg, which represented the climax of development in deep-water sail.
From the Middle Ages onwards until the Nineteenth Century,
there was scant change in the design of ships and little real progress.
Progress and change were always vigorously opposed, particularly by
interested persons. Now and again a freak vessel arose; but ninety-nine per
cent of the ships that floated were cask-like in appearance and sailed like
crates. The sea was not connected with speed (and neither, indeed, was the
land); if a ship floated and was manageable, that was all that was asked of
her. Fat-jowled East India-men and bluff, high-sided men-of-war represented the
best of maritime design. They were inefficient and slow, but staunch and
perfectly seaworthy.
Then some one hit upon the amazing idea that a sharp-lined ship might be both seaworthy and fast an idea which was promptly scoffed at and ridiculed by all those persons who were satisfied with ships as they were. These representing about ninety-nine per cent of the maritime population, the clipper ship might have had a poor chance if it had not been brought to such a pitch of perfection in America while the other nations, sticking to the old ideas, were left standing still. Others soon followed the American idea, when its practicability and amazing performance were known. The sailing-ship now rapidly advanced, almost ship by ship, until it reached the very climax of perfection. First speed, and speed only; then speed coupled with safety in carrying passengers; then speed plus big cargo capacity and great endurance power in standing up to the great winds of the Roaring Forties for 6,000 miles at a stretch, and to beat around the Horn; capacity to hold 4,000 and 5,000 tons of cargo. So came those wonder-ships, the Germans Preussen and Potosi. Five-masted ship and five-masted barque respectively, they carried more than 5,000 tons of cargo each with crews of some two score men, and for many years made long hard voyages out to Chile and back again to Europe, deep-laden both ways, with the speed of average tramp steamers.
But the development was too late. The sailing-ship reached
perfection when it was doomed. Steam, hated, scorned, despised, but steadily
progressing; improved land transport; the Suez Canal - these dealt deadly
blows at the ocean sailing-ship. For many years the die-hards ashore scoffed at
steamers and would not send cargoes in them because they were afraid of
contamination by the engine oil or the heat of the boilers; nor would they book
passages in steamers because they feared the boilers might blow up. (They
sometimes did.) They hated the engine vibration, the thudding of the screw,
the mechanical feeling of it all.
But the steamer marched steadily on. Always new people are growing up, to take the places of those who are prejudiced. The steamer, last century, found supporters of its own just as the airplane has in this. Rail-roads across the continent killed the American clippers; it was of little use to boast of passages to 'Frisco in eighty days when the train could get you there in six. One by one all the better trades passed from the sailing-ship, and nation after nation gave them up. America was slow, and the development of her merchant marine suffered accordingly. When sail was supreme, America's own ships carried nearly ninety per cent of American goods. By 1870 the figure had dropped to 35.6 per cent. By 1910 it was a mere 8.7. Other nations had passed America with the development of their steamers; Americans turned more and more towards the land.
Then came the War, of course, which altered that.
Great Britain steadily gave up sailing-ships, from the middle 'Nineties
onwards. Although the last was lost as recently as 1929 (when the four-masted
barque Garthpool was wrecked on the Cape Verde Islands while outward bound to
Australia to load wheat), by 1921 there were few British sailing-ships in
commission. There probably would have been none, if it had not been for the
War.
The big British sailing-ship lines were bankrupted, or changed to steam. Germans, Norwegians, Italians and Finns bought their ships. The Germans used them for training personnel for their steamships, and found them profitable trade in the carriage of heavy bulk cargoes from awkward, outlandish ports such as nitrates from waterless Chilean ports and nickel ore from New Caledonia. The Italians rigged them down into barques, cut the royal yards from such masts as they allowed to remain square, gave them names four yards long and ran them on nothing until they were fit to run no longer. The Finns and the Norwegians formed small one-ship companies and made a successful business of sail-owning. Often their small companies included some British capital. They carried small crews in the ships and paid scant wages; but they kept the old names and did not cut the ships down.
It was France which dealt the sailing-ships of other nations their fatal blow. When others had stopped building sailing-ships for deep-sea trade, the French suddenly decided to build a great fleet of them. At St. Nazaire principally, though also at other centres, they set about the production of of a mighty armada of barques, four-masted barques and full-rigged ships that was destined to drive other sailing-ships all but off the ocean. The Government subsidized the building, and continued to subsidize the ships when they put to sea. By act of Parliament they were paid a bounty according to the number of miles they sailed; they immediately made every endeavor, on their voyages, to cover as many miles as possible. A French sailing-ship, bound from South Wales to Portland, Oregon, with a cargo of coal, would clear for Hobart in Tasmania first. She would sail ostensibly for "Hobart for orders," although every other sailing-ship clearing the Welsh port at the same time knew where to go and required no "orders." Hobart, in the far south of Tasmania, was the farthest point at which the French ships could touch unless they felt like calling at the Bay of Whales. It was, for years, not at all uncommon to see twelve of them make Hobart in a week, though nations except those which should have been most interested, Great Britain and the United States.
Apart from these training-ships (there are now forty-two
sail-training ships in the world, and none is either British or American), sail
has fared poorly. That four-masted schooner which I chanced to see is one of
the last of her class. Times are bad for schooners now, and ports are full of
them. There is a port in Maine where twenty lie, and you may have your choice
for $5,000. The bigger the schooner the cheaper she is. In Boston, in San
Francisco Bay, in Puget Sound, along the Maine coast, the schooners and the
barquentines lie, hopelessly tied up, waiting for something to be done with
them. A few on the West Coast have been bought into the Hollywood Navy, and
have been blown up or sunk to form a sequence for a comic film. No, the
schooners have fared even worse than the square-rigged ships, and they would
have fared badly if it had not been for the Finns.
At least, for one Finn. And he really is a Swede. His name is Gustaf Erikson, and he lives in Mariehamn in the Åland Islands - those beautiful Baltic islands which are under the Finnish flag but are Swedish in everything else. This Gustaf Erikson is a sailing-ship master himself. He began his career before the War, with one ship which was lost on her first voyage. Steadily he built up this is no story of a ship-owner waxing fat through the War, breaking up in the lean times afterwards. Gustaf Erikson made nothing out of the War; he laid the foundation of his fortunes afterwards, when in 1919 the amazingly fortunate four-masted barque Lawhill earned $150,000 profit for him on one cargo out of Buenos Aires. The Lawhill was built in 1892, and a man who sailed in her in 1903 told me he put a chipping-hammer through one of her plates then. Yet she is still afloat, still in commission, still a wonderful earning power in the Erikson fleet.
With that $150,000 Captain Erik-son built up his fleet. He
acquired other square-riggers from the Finnish ports where their owners,
seeing the continued shipping slump, soon tired of them. He bought from the
British, the Norwegians, the Germans, big sailing-ship after big sailing-ship.
No other owner on earth was following such a policy. They all thought that he
was mad.
But he was not mad. He knew what he was doing; and today he
owns almost all the big sailing-ships (apart from the training-ships) in the
world. And he makes them pay.
This he manages principally because of these factors:
(1) He keeps the ships at hunting for cargoes; he does not
lay them up in ports waiting for cargoes to come and hunt for them.
(2) He carries his own insurance risks, and allows for
insurance out of his own balance-sheet.
(3) His crews are paid very little; many of them are boys
who pay a premium for apprenticeship, which is returned to them as wages. The
supply of boys willing to do this is inexhaustible.
(4) There is little depreciation, simply because he bought the ships at their lowest value (in most cases) and the capital invested in them can not greatly exceed their fair scrap value.
(5) There is no overhead. Captain Erikson is his own office.
(6) The ships are run in the most economical manner
possible, consistent with proper safety.
(7) Finland, like Great Britain, is off the gold standard.
These are the important factors which permit Captain Erikson to run his sailing-ships without the use of red ink in his balance-sheet. It is a one-man show. No one else is interested. He has bought ships to add to the Line out of the profits his existing ships made; he did not borrow from banks. In years when there were no profits, he bought no ships. In 1929 he had eight ships in the Australian grain trade, and four others profitably employed. He then acquired the four-masted barques Melbourne, Viking, and Ponape. The next was a bad year; he bought no ships. Last year was good. He had twelve ships in the Australian grain trade. Their average freight for carrying wheat from Australia to England was $30,000 each. They spent $25,000 each to earn that freight. He bought the beautiful German four-masted barque Pamir, and sent her off to Australia to join the others.
In this year of grace 1932, twenty big sailing-ships are
racing round Cape Horn with Australian grain, bound to Falmouth for orders.
Fourteen of them are Captain Erikson's. Fourteen big sailing-ships! Ten of
them are four-masted barques. It is a shock to most landsmen (and a good many
sailors besides) to realize that there are as many as ten four-masted barques
still in commission.
But these are all old ships. The youngest of them, the newly
acquired Pamir, is twenty-six years old. Most of them are over forty and have
sailed a hard road all their lives. Very soon some of them will have to be
scrapped. Captain Erikson is over sixty; he has one son, who does not follow
the same traditions. What will happen to the Line - to sailing-ships when he
goes?
I should guess that ten years represent the maximum of life
before the surviving sailing-ships - probably much less. Only the Australian
grain trade now supports those which sail the deep water; if grain prices do
not improve, the Australians will not be able to afford chartering even
sailing-ships. They make one voyage annually, going out in ballast with sand
and stones. There is nothing else to take. Australia has enough sand and
stones of its own; but the ships must be ballasted to stand up against the winds.
The logwood business is declining; buyers ask such small lots now that it is increasingly difficult to scrape together sufficient for a full cargo. Steamers can take the small lots, and move on somewhere else to fill the rest of their holds with something else. But the sailing-ship can not afford to be towed around from loading port to loading port. She must load in one port, and sail with her cargo to another. Guano is a drug in the market, for the same reason that Chilean nitrate is a too easy manufacture of the artificial product, together with a general buying disinclination throughout the world. The Russians have all but smashed the Finnish and Swedish firewood business with England. No matter how low the Finns and Swedes may come with their prices, the Russians from Archangel and the Kara Sea will always go lower.
So the firewood barques lie at anchorage in Mariehamn now,
in increasing numbers. The logwood barques are laid up in Danish and French
ports. The "P" Line of nitrate flyers is being heavily cut down, with
the loss of the ship Pinnas and the sale of the four-masted barques Parma and
Pamir. Only four four-masted barques remain; unless the general German outlook
improves, these will also go. The surviving Atlantic packet, the last of the
square-rigged passenger carriers, lies derelict and forlorn beside a New
Bedford wharf. Coriolanus is her name, and she is fifty-six years old. Famous
as a record holder between the United Kingdom and Calcutta, now she lies a
battered and broken wreck. Her fore topmast is gone, and her main top gallant
mast is broken off short. Irish pennants hang untidily from such of her running
rigging as is left; the wheel has been forced from its hub and the figure-head
has been prized off with an axe. For ten years she has transported Cape Verde
Islanders from Praia to the United States, but that trade is stopped. Sixteen
months ago she came into New Bedford to go bankrupt. Her sails are used by a
local coal merchant for protecting pavements while he delivers coal.
Such few schooners as there are are coasting. There are odd cargoes of coal for them to shift, and granite down from Maine. Even in fishing vessels, sails have been supplanted very largely by engines; the new fishing craft out of Gloucester have stumpy masts, big engine units and electric light.
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