by Rob Mundle
Our first job at 5.30 in the morning is to wash the pigs and closets out. I always heard that pigs were unclean animals but now I know it for a positive fact and can prove it too. Ah it is a hard life but you need not think that I do not like it for I am enjoying myself very much. Last week I had to go to the wheel and learn to steer . . .
C.E. Ray’s final letter to his mother was written retrospectively, after Cutty Sark had reached her destination of Brisbane, and was full of the challenges faced on the latter part of the voyage:
18th Sept. 94
My Dear Mother,
We have arrived hear all safe and sound having made a passage of 80 days from the Downs to the bay here . . .
Now I suppose you want to know how I am. Well I am all right and getting a muscle on me like a horse and you will be glad to hear that I have not had a day’s illness of any kind since I have been aboard the ship. Not even a headache. Now I must tell you something about the Passage out . . . About the Line [Equator] we got 3 or 4 days doldrums. Then came heavy squalls, I used to get wet every day then, I’ll go to the wheel with nothing on but pants and shirt and then a heavy squall would come and drown me but I’d have to stop the 2 hours wet or no wet. Then it began to get colder and colder till we got round the Corner [the Cape of Good Hope] then we [had] 3 weeks very bad weather during which time we never had a dry deck. Then was the time to wish you had never come to sea (if there are any boys in Hastings who want to come to sea, show them this and tell them from me to stop in a good home when they got one) hanging on to the lee wheel at night was the worst with the seas (not the little sprays you see at Hastings) washing over continually. One time we were lashed on the Poop for a day and 2 nights when daylight came the 2nd day she looked a perfect wreck on deck, The cabin was washed out, our cuddy door was burst open (we saw this in the night, but no one dare go on the main deck to shut it) all the lower bunks were washed out. Mine being a top one did not suffer much, but all the things in my chest were more or less wet.
The next Sunday the skipper’s son got washed into the lee scuppers and broke his arm. He is going to have the splints off next week, the doctor says he is very lucky to have it set right at sea. Soon after this our for t’gallant and royal mast [carried] away, the royal yard went overboard, the t’gallant was hanging in the rigging, the upper topsail yard was broke in two about 18 feet from the yard arm. I was up aloft all that night with the men clearing the wreck, and I was jolly glad when day dawned and the wind lulled a bit. There was no hot coffee that morning for the galley had been washed out. For a week after this we were rigging a jury mast and yards setting up back stays etc. there is a lot of work in this although it does not sound much. Soon after this we got into the straits and fine weather . . . the river pilot ashore this morning he told us that we would most likely lay here till Christmas as the shearers are on strike and that reminds me please save a piece of plum duff for me. I must knock off now so expect a long letter next mail from,
Your loving
Sailor boy
C. E. Ray
P.S. . . . Please excuse all mistakes in spelling, and bad writing.
By 1895, Cutty Sark had run her race: she was no longer a profitable venture for her owners, so she was sold to a Portuguese firm for £2100 and renamed Ferreira. However, the great ship would not die. By 1922, she was the last fully operational clipper ship anywhere in the world.
That year she was bought by a retired ship’s captain, Wilfred Dowman, and finally in 1956 she made her last ever journey to Greenwich, on the banks of the River Thames in London. Despite a devastating fire in 2007, in what is nothing short of a fitting tribute to this remarkable vessel – and clipper ships in general – today Cutty Sark stands restored to all her glory, the only complete clipper that exists for all the world to see.
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Fewer than one hundred true clipper ships were built from the time Rainbow was launched in New York in 1845 until the last of the breed hit the water less than thirty years later. Today only three are known to exist in any form, all of which were built using composite construction (featuring a wooden hull on an iron frame).
Apart from Cutty Sark, the rusted iron skeleton of the 176-foot Ambassador – with not a hull plank nor any other piece of timber to be seen – lies on an isolated beach near the Straits of Magellan in southern Chile. And in late 2013, after a fourteen-year campaign, a group of dedicated South Australian sailors and ship lovers, with the support of the Duke of Edinburgh, saved the near-derelict clipper City of Adelaide from certain death. Through an impressive community effort, the weather-beaten hulk that was once a grand clipper was recovered from an existence among weeds and bushes in a back corner of a shipyard in Irvine, on the banks of Scotland’s Firth of Clyde, and transported by ship halfway around the world to the city from which she took her name – Adelaide.
Unlike Cutty Sark, City of Adelaide was built primarily as a passenger ship. She offered fourteen luxurious first-class cabins, could accommodate thirty passengers in second class and up to 300 in steerage class, and carried up to 1500 tons of cargo. For the passage to Adelaide, this usually comprised products needed to support the young colony’s population of 150,000, then wool and locally mined copper were shipped back to England.
Between 1864 and 1887, City of Adelaide made twenty-three return voyages between London and Adelaide. The majority of migrants who departed England were English, Scottish, Irish, German and Scandinavian – probably between 6000 and 7000 in all. Historians who have studied Australian migration trends have since calculated that more than 250,000 Australians can today trace their family heritage to that one ship. This figure yet again confirms that many millions of Australians have the name of at least one clipper ship somewhere on a branch of their family tree.
Fortunately, researchers have been able to locate many diaries and letters written by passengers who were aboard City of Adelaide on her early voyages, documents that again provide valuable detail of life on board.
On City of Adelaide’s maiden voyage, Sarah Ann Bray, aged twenty, travelling with her parents and sister, made notes in her diary relating to some of the social activities she and other first-class passengers enjoyed:
We danced [on deck] for a short time in the evening but were obliged to go down on account of the rain. We tried a quadrille in the saloon but there was scarcely room enough, and some of the people objected to the noise.
Frederick Edelstein, on a business trip to Adelaide in 1867, noted: ‘Smoking and drinking is the most fashionable way of spending Sundays.’
In 1871, Scotsman Melville Miller provided from-the-heart detail of the experience he and his wife Sarah shared after deciding to migrate to South Australia:
My wife and I having mutually agreed to leave our native country and to try our luck in the antipodes – with heavy heart we took farewell of my dear mother, brothers and sisters and little nephews, on Saturday morning.
My dear old home, too, with all my favourite haunts around it seemed to me to be more beautiful than ever on that memorable morning, but leave it I must, never perhaps again to look upon the scene of so many happy memories.
[We arrived in London] where we found the ship City of Adelaide lying there . . . the bustle and excitement going on, in and about her, being very clear evidence of which was the outbound ship amongst the hundreds that towered their stalwart masts up in the air.
Having with difficulty and considerable risk got Sarah and myself on board, and having made our way over spars, cables and endless confusion of ropes, etc. – we reached our saloon, and next our cabin, in which we were to spend the greater part of the next three months. We went on the saloon deck, from where we could see the remainder of the cargo put in the hold and the hatches closed.
Both Melville and Sarah suffered from seasickness in the early stages of the voyage, but before long Melville was writing graphic accounts of what he observed when standing on the ship’s deck at the height of a mid-ocean storm:
Plenty of
wind today, rain and hail likewise, an out and out nasty squally day. Sails all reefed except foresail, fore lower topsail, and ripper topsail. Main, mizzen lower and upper topsail, only sails in all instead of somewhere about 30 which we nearly always carry. To give an idea of the power of the wind, with this small amount of sail, we are going over 12 knots – just plunging through it, hurling great waves back with her mighty weight, as if she were a rock. Tons of water came on board today, rushing over the deck about a foot deep. There is now never less than half a foot at all times. The bulwarks have again been smashed in today by the rude waves . . . Very early in the morning it blew very fierce, the waves striking her sides seemed as if a solid mass of two or three ton weight were thrown against her making her tremble from stem to stern.
During her long career sailing between the Mother Country and the colonies, City of Adelaide suffered only two incidents of note.
In 1874, when sailing at night near Adelaide in Gulf St Vincent, a severe storm howled in and drove the big ship ashore on Kirkaldy Beach, less than 10 nautical miles south of the entrance to Adelaide’s Torrens River. All passengers were transferred safely to shore the following morning, then, to lighten ship, the cargo plus many spars and yards were offloaded onto barges. A week later, when the tide was at its highest for some time, City of Adelaide was towed off the beach virtually undamaged.
The other incident is of more historic interest. On 31 October 1877, City of Adelaide departed Port Augusta, at the northern end of South Australia’s Spencer Gulf, with a cargo of copper destined for London. When only 200 nautical miles into the voyage, and while rounding Kangaroo Island in heavy conditions, a powerful wave thundered into the ship’s stern and smashed her rudder.
In what was a superb display of seamanship, the commander, Captain Edward D. Alston, regained control of his vessel, then, by dragging chains over both sides of the deck at the stern and carefully trimming the sails, he managed to safely navigate his way through reef-strewn waters, around the notorious Cape Jervis and into the waters of Gulf St Vincent. Seven days later he had his ship anchored off the shoreline west of Adelaide.
Workers at a local shipyard then set about making a new rudder using strong and durable Australian grey ironbark timber. In 2005, 138 years after the event, scientists confirmed that the rudder built in Adelaide was still fitted to the ship.
By the late 1880s, City of Adelaide no longer had a future as a migrant ship. Between 1887 and 1893, she was used as a collier and timber carrier in England and across the North Atlantic. In 1893, her rig was removed and she became a hospital ship in England for the next thirty years.
By 1948, having been renamed HMS Carrick, she was destined to be broken up, but instead became a floating clubhouse for the Royal Navy Reserve in Scotland. She sank at a dock in Glasgow in 1991 and this led to her being hauled out and all but forgotten at the dockyard in Irvine.
The plan now being developed by the group that has saved her is to partially restore one side of the interior to its original style, so that the public can appreciate the life experienced below deck during the voyage of more than 12,000 nautical miles she regularly sailed from London to Port Adelaide.
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While the period of the sweetly proportioned clippers overlapped the transition to rattling steam engines, there was to be a design grand finale for sail-powered commercial vessels: the era of the windjammers. They were as majestic as they were magnificent – vessels that, at 300-plus feet in overall length, were twice as long as the average clipper ship. The masts on the largest windjammers speared more than 200 feet into the sky – the height of a twenty-storey building – and the yards carrying the largest square sails were 100 feet long. Most windjammers could cram on thirty-five sails across four masts in ideal conditions, the total area being around 45,000 square feet – half the area of a soccer field.
But those dimensions were trifling when compared with the largest and most astounding windjammer of all: the 439-foot Preussen, launched in Germany in 1902. She was one of only a few five-masted windjammers and the only one square-rigged on all masts. There were forty-seven sails in her wardrobe, their combined sail area being an astonishing 73,260 square feet.
In a sense, the windjammers were considerably larger versions of the clipper ships, and they were at their most efficient on long-haul routes where trade winds prevailed for the majority of the time. Regardless, many old tars who sailed both clippers and windjammers said that the larger ships could not deliver the same speed and level of excitement as a clipper being pushed hard downwind.
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Initially, the advent of steamships on the run to Australia was slow. In 1852 the clipper-style auxiliary steamer Chusan, which was rigged as a barque, became the first ship of her type to sail into Sydney on a regular basis: the start of a scheduled two-monthly mail run from Singapore on a contract negotiated with the colonial government by the ship’s owners, the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company.
However, because the ship was so costly to run, this service could only exist through government subsidies. It was also a slow procedure: the mail had to be shipped from England to Egypt then transported across land by rail, camel or horse to the Red Sea, then shipped to Hong Kong then Singapore, where it was finally put aboard Chusan. After that the passage from Singapore to Sydney took another fifty-five days to complete.
Regardless of their shortcomings, the large auxiliary steamers appeared destined to claim a significant slice of the clipper ships’ trade in Australia – until a horrendous maritime tragedy intervened.
In 1859, the 236-foot-long auxiliary steamer Royal Charter – which was reported to be carrying £500,000 worth of gold specie in its vault – was on the verge of reaching Liverpool from Melbourne after a very fast passage of fifty-eight days. But within 40 nautical miles of her destination, a heinous, hurricane-force storm swept down the Irish Sea from the north-north-east and crossed the ship’s course. Conditions turned from benign to brutal in minutes.
Despite heroic efforts by the captain and crew, Royal Charter’s steam engine was not powerful enough to provide any forward momentum. Her anchors were released in the hope they would hold, but the cables parted; then, in a desperate bid to reduce windage, the masts were cut away and sent crashing over the side. This compounded the problem as the rigging attached to the masts tangled around her propeller. Royal Charter then lay at the mercy of the weather and was driven ashore onto the rocky coast of North Wales, where she was smashed apart by the raging seas. The final death toll will never be known, but it is safe to assume that more than 450 lives were lost. Only twenty-seven men, passengers and crew, are believed to have survived the maelstrom, which, by the time it abated, had claimed some 200 vessels of all shapes and sizes along the coast and on the Irish Sea.
While the magnitude of the storm contributed greatly to Royal Charter’s shipwreck, her engine had done nothing to prevent the ship from being driven by wind and waves onto the rocks. This horrific tragedy confirmed that an efficient form of steam propulsion was still a long way off.
It was another twenty-nine years after Chusan first sailed into Sydney that it became apparent the end of the magnificent clipper era was nigh.
This signal came with the launch of SS Aberdeen in England in 1881 and, soon afterwards, the launch of SS Australasian. A newspaper article at the time reported that these two ships were fitted with revolutionary new engines ‘of triple expansion type’, which provided 2700 horsepower, and consumed considerably less coal than existing steam engines. The report added: ‘The Australasian is intended to attain a speed of about 12 knots at sea, which will enable her cargo to be landed in Australia much faster than ordinary cargo boats.’
When the arrival of these ground-breaking vessels was coupled with the increasing use of the Suez Canal, there was no longer a future for the clippers on what was their last bastion: the route to Australia.
Still, this magnificent, history-making breed would forever hold one clear advanta
ge over the ‘steam kettles’. A clipper ship charging downwind under full sail, with everything from skysail to stunsails, spanker to flying jib, all looking buxom and near breaking point, her hull boldly pushing aside a mighty white bow wave and sending spray flying high, was a thrilling and endearing sight that could never be matched by a steamer.
Glossary
AbaftTowards the stern of a ship; ‘abaft the beam’ means aft of abeam
AbeamA point 90 degrees out from anywhere along the centreline of a ship
AnchorBower, the biggest anchor; stream, the next largest anchor; kedge, a smaller anchor for special purposes, usually stored below decks
Anchor stocksThe heavy timber crossbar at the top of the anchor
AthwartshipsDirectly across the ship, from side to side
Back-windingWind coming in from the front, or wrong, side of a sail or sails
Baffling windsAn erratic wind that frequently changes direction
BallastAny heavy material (like gravel, iron, lead, sand, stones) placed in the hold of a ship to provide stability
Beam endsThe sides of a ship. ‘On her beam ends’ is used to describe the rolling effect of very rough seas on the ship; the ship is almost on her side and possibly about to capsize
Beat, toSailing upwind
BelayTo secure a rope
Belaying pinsWooden pins found around the mast at deck level, or at the side of a ship which are used to secure a rope
Bend / Unbend sailsTo attach or remove sails from their yards
Best bower The starboard of the two anchors carried at the bow of the ship. That on the port side was known as the smaller bower, even though the two were identical in weight