Schooners and square-riggers survived well into the 20th Century

Posted in Historical articles, History, Sea, Ships, Trade, Transport, Travel on Wednesday, 5 June 2013

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This edited article about seafaring originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 280 published on 27 May 1967.

SV Lawhill, picture, image, illustration

The Lawhill

Considering many great steamship lines have been operating since the mid-19th century, and that British tramps for years were doing most of the carrying trade of the world, it is extraordinary how long the deep-sea sailing-ship fought back, and fought back successfully, too.

She had certain advantages and was well suited to trades where delivery dates did not matter. In the Australian trade, the ocean winds suited her, for she could make every voyage a circumnavigation and always have a good chance of favouring winds.

She could do the same thing across the South Pacific – all 6,000 miles of it – by sailing to Chilean ports before the West winds of the Roaring Forties and back again to Australia in warmer latitudes with the SE trade winds. On the North Atlantic, she could go west the simple ‘Columbus’ way and back with the Westerlies of far north, for the currents suited her also this way.

In the Caribbean, the South Seas, the northern Indian Ocean, smaller sailers still had useful work to do until quite recently. In America, big coastwise schooners were developed to move cargoes of coal – four, five, and even six-masters. They were economical to operate, with a crew of one man to each mast, plus a large steam donkey-engine for the heavy hauling. But road haulage, diesel freight trains three miles long, and towed barges, put them out of business finally, though a few were still sailing between the wars.

The culmination of the schooner effort was the huge seven-master Thomas W. Lawson, which could carry 11,000 tons and was 395 feet long. She was perhaps too big and awkward to handle in narrow waters. At any rate, she was lost after a brief life, being wrecked in the Isles of Scilly.

Big schooners and barquentines thrived for a long time in Pacific trade winds, especially on the lumber haul from the west coast of North America to Australia. They were a familiar part of the Antipodean waterfront scene in my youth, but I always preferred the more adventurous appearance of the square-riggers.

The square-riggers lasted longer. They were the best ocean-going carriers. They had immense endurance and could keep the seas for six months at a time. The manner of setting their sails on yards across the masts was more efficient under most conditions than the big sails set abaft the masts of schooners, on gaffs and booms. True, they needed considerable crews, but these were cut down rigorously as the years passed, and a few – very few – labour-saving devices were employed. Things like capstans and brace-winches were all hand-operated. Square-riggers had another great advantage. They appealed to youth and could, to a large extent, be manned by eager, red-blooded boys indentured to the owners as ‘apprentices’ and often paid a pittance or nothing at all. Such boys, 14 to 19 years old, served British sailing-ships by the thousand and served them magnificently. They went on serving the Finns, in smaller numbers, until 1950.

France fostered big sailing-ships as an essential part of her merchant service until the First World War. Government bounties supported their building and voyaging: but a policy change in Paris put an end to them in 1920. New England and Nova Scotia operated wooden ships. Germany developed several lines of very large, expertly-handled sailing-ships, like the Flying ‘P’ Ships of the House of Laeisz in Hamburg, Vinnens in Bremerhaven, Rickmers in Bremen. Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Italy built up fleets of older square-riggers as British lines gave them up in the first decade of this century. Portugal bought some of the loveliest clippers and kept them going. These nations could operate such ships more economically because they acquired these ships cheaply, and therefore their financing costs were low.

Only the Germans and the French still built Cape Horners in any numbers, in the 20th century, and they produced some of the most wonderful and impressive big square-riggers ever built. The French France, a huge five-masted barque, caught my admiring eyes when she passed up the River Yarra at Melbourne in, I think, 1918. The Hamburg five-masted barque Potosi and the five-masted ship Preussen could claim in many ways to be the most successful, economic, and efficient sailing-ships ever built, the very quintessence of all the thousands of years of man’s fight with the sea, using sails. The First World War really finished them, not because they were taken in prize from Germany (for Mr. Laeisz bought some back and got them going again), but because of the production of synthetic nitrates, and the opening of the Panama Canal. The Panama route was of no use to heavy square-rigged ships designed to storm around the Horn. It had too much light winds and calm. Both Suez and Panama canals merely lengthened the voyages of any sailing-ships which tried to use them, and charged large dues and towboat fees as well.

The affluent society really had no use for big working sailing-ships. But in the depression things were different. In the depression after the First World War, a Swedish-Finn shipmaster named Gustaf Erikson, who lived in a tiny port called Mariehamn, in the Aland Islands, at the mouth of the Gulf of Bothnia, built up the last fleet of working sailing-ships in the world.

I first learned about Erikson when stranded out of a British four-masted barque in France, in 1920. The ports were full of laid-up sailing-ships with nowhere to go and no work they could afford to do.

But even in depressions the world’s work must go on, at least in some measure. There is plenty of ocean carrying still to be done. The problem is to run ships economically enough to do it. This was just what Captain Erikson could do.

In all France, I found only one Cape Horner that was still in commission. She was the Erikson (ex-Scots) old jute carrier Lawhill – a big ship, rather clumsy in some ways at least in appearance, and heavy to work, by the looks of her.

She needed crew. I joined. The pay was 30 shillings a month. Her crew were all boys, the officers youths, the master an ‘old man’ aged perhaps 30. Average age aboard was 17, average monthly pay about £1. Just turned 17, I was an able-seaman. Most of her 15- and 16-year-olds were boys about to make their first deep-sea voyage.

I found the Lawhill fascinating, though the total crew was only 20, of whom half a dozen were AB’s. There was a pleasant spirit aboard. The officers were friendly with the crew, most of whom they knew by their Christian names. The captain was a grand fellow who lived aboard the ship in port as well as at sea and looked after her. The food was excellent. The cook, to my astonishment, really seemed to try to prepare appetising dishes, and plenty of them. The boys, though so young, had sea experience at an even earlier age, serving in small Baltic barquentines, galleasses and schooners – a tough school, where lessons learned are permanent.

We went out in ballast to Australia. The big ship sailed and handled splendidly, and that captain (his name was de Cloux) drove her on that 15,000-mile run like a big yacht, storming down the Trades, fighting across the Doldrums belt at the Line, driving her before the gales of the great Southern Ocean. We sighted icebergs down there: we survived gales; we had a serious accident which took three days to put right, when some gear parted.

Those boys were magnificent. I never forgot the Lawhill.

I learned, too, by yarning with the captain – I was the only foreigner, and they all wanted to improve their English – something about the operations of owner Erikson. He bought the Lawhill for a few thousand pounds. He paid no insurance, preferring to use good masters and good crews and carry the risks himself. So his overheads were small. He lived in a wooden house in Mariehamn, one room of which was his office. He was his own marine superintendent. He looked after his ships with the utmost economy, but never in a niggardly way.

The Finnish idea of economy was to waste nothing. When, for instance, another owner bought a lovely ship named the Thomasina MacLellan, he called her just Thomasina, to save in the cable charges, though it is doubtful that any of his ships received more than two or three cables a year. As for crews, Erikson put his faith in boys, and he trained his own officers – or rather, he allowed the sea to train them in his ships. He soon had 20 such ships, many of them fine vessels, and not all old.

Years later, I met that captain of the Lawhill again. I had some capital through the success of a book or two, which had been best-sellers in America and Germany. Captain de Cloux said there was a splendid big four-masted barque, the Parma, lying for sale in Hamburg. The year was 1930. Nobody wanted to buy Cape Horn ships, not even Gustaf Erikson, just then. We had a good look at this Parma. She was one of the Flying ‘Ps’, built in Scotland. She was a fine big ship, able to carry more than 5,000 tons, and in splendid order. The owners asked ¬£3,000.

We bought her. Barring accidents of the sea, how could we go wrong? We changed her German flag to the Finnish, manned her with half a dozen veterans aged 19 or so from the Erikson ships, and filled out our crew of 20 with cadets at a small premium. We ‘fixed’ the ship through a friend on the Baltic Exchanges in London to sail to South Australia in ballast (empty) and bring back a full cargo of Spencer Gulf wheat in bags, nearly 70,000 of them.

Captain de Cloux took command. We sailed – out to Spencer Gulf, round the Cape of Good Hope, in 70-odd days. No accidents, no ‘adventures’. We loaded, and sailed home again to Falmouth for ‘orders’. There were some 20 other big sailers in the same business.

There was an unofficial ‘race’. We made a good passage of 103 days to Falmouth: no one did better, though the Pamir had the same time to Queenstown (renamed Cobh) in Ireland. We discharged the grain, drydocked at Copenhagen, spent a month or so in Mariehamn maintaining the ship, sailed again. Again the world-circling round with one cargo only: again the Grain Race: again no one made a better passage – indeed, we had a clipper run of 83 days and beat the lot.

So it went for several years – outwards in ballast, homewards with grain. Carefully looking after everything ourselves, with confidence in our boy-crews and young officers, the Parma paid for herself in the first two voyages: and so, indeed, it went until she had to be sold for breaking up.

Gustaf Erikson died. There were no good ships left to buy anywhere. In 1950, the last unspoiled, engineless Cape Horners raced home with their grain, to be laid in Barry Dock, in South Wales. Though two went out again a year or two later, they were auxiliaries then, with big diesel engines as well as their sails. One blew over in a hurricane and the other was then laid up.

It was the end of the story.

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