The Colonial Clippers

Theophane made a good try to beat the City of Agra’s time; she made no less than three attempts to enter the Heads on the ebb tide, but each time the wind dropped in the rip and she was drifted back and at last was compelled to wait until the next day and come in on the flood.

Ben Voirlich again made some big runs, her best day’s work being 349 miles and her best week 2100 miles.

Loch Maree had to be careful not to ship heavy water, as she had four valuable Clydesdale stallions on her main deck. Thyatira was in company with the little Berean for three days to the south’ard, parting from her eventually in 40° S., 131° E. Berean arrived in Launceston on 9th August, 87 days out from Prawle Point.

The Big “Illawarra.”

In 1881, Devitt & Moore launched out with a real big ship, the Illawarra, and put her into the Sydney trade. She was not so fine lined as the earlier iron clippers, for the competition of steam and reduced freights were making good carrying capacity a necessity for a money-making ship. Nevertheless Illawarra had a very fair turn of speed, and her average of passages both outward and homeward was under 90 days.

She will be chiefly remembered as a cadet ship under the Brassey scheme; she succeeded the Hesperus, and under Captain Maitland carried premium cadets from 1899 to 1907. In that year Devitt & Moore made a contract to take 100 Warspite boys round the world, and as they did not consider the Illawarra large enough, they sold her to the Norwegians and bought the Port Jackson.

The Norwegians abandoned the old Illawarra in the North Atlantic during March, 1912, when she was on a passage from Leith to Valparaiso, her crew being taken off by the British steamer Bengore Head.

“Orontes.”

The Orontes, Thompson’s new ship, was also more of a deadweight carrier than a clipper. After a plodding life with no very startling adventures, she was run into and sunk on 23rd October, 1903, by the ss. Oceana, when almost in sight of Ostend, whither she was bound from a nitrate port.

The “Loch Torridon.”

When the competition of steam began to cut badly into the Colonial trade, all the Loch three-masters except the Loch Vennachar and Loch Garry, the two finest ships in the fleet, had their yards removed from the mizen mast and were converted into barques, yet they still continued to make fine passages.

Until the eighties 1500 tons was considered a good size for a sailing ship, but the time arrived when it became necessary to have ships which possessed both large carrying capacity and speed, and every designer strove to produce a successful compromise between the two. It was soon found that full-rigged ships of 2000 tons and over were not economical ships to work, and thus it was that the four-mast barque came into being. At first many owners went in for four-mast ships, but it was soon proved that besides being more economical the four-mast barque was just as speedy.

Following the trend of the times Messrs. Aitken & Lilburn commissioned Barclay, Curle & Co. in 1881 to build them two four-mast barques of 2000 tons burden. These were the sister ships Loch Moidart and Loch Torridon; Loch Moidart was launched in September and Loch Torridon in November.

The Loch Moidart was only afloat nine years and was a general trader. On the 26th January, 1890, at 4 in the morning, when bound to Hamburg with nitrate from Pisagua, her look-out suddenly reported a bright light on the port bow. Five minutes later she struck on a sand bank, close to the village of Callantsoog in Northern Holland. A violent gale from the westward was blowing at the time, and only two men, one of whom was the cook, succeeded in gaining the shore alive.

Her sister ship, Loch Torridon, was one of the best known four-mast barques in the British Mercantile Marine, and one of the fastest.

“Loch Torridon is perhaps one of the most graceful and elegant models ever launched from the Glasgow yards,” wrote Sir G. M. White, the Naval Architect to the Admiralty, in 1892.

In 1904 John Arthur Barry, the Australian writer, wrote of her:—“She is exceptionally lofty as to her masts, exceptionally square as to her yards. She carries nothing above a royal, but her royal yards are as long as the topgallant yards of most vessels. Her lower yards are enormous. The vessel is uncommonly well-manned with 20 hands in the foc’s’le, with the usual complement of petty officers, together with three mates and four apprentices aft. Looking forward from the break of the poop, one is struck by the immense amount of clear room on her decks, giving a visitor a sense of spaciousness and freedom in marked contrast to the often lumbered up decks of the average sailer.”

Her royals were 18 feet deep, measured at the bunt; and the depth of her courses was 38 feet measured at the bunt. She also had a spencer gaff on her mizen, measuring 24½ feet. Thus it will be seen that, though she did not carry stunsails, she had plenty of canvas.

Loch Torridon had a poop 36 feet long, a half-deck for apprentices 16 feet long, a midship house 25 feet long, and her topgallant foc’s’le measured 49 feet in length.