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The Colonial Clippers

Chapter 98: “Orient’s” Outward Passages.
By Basil Lubbock
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About This Book

The author provides a detailed chronicle of the fast sailing clippers that served the Britain–Australia routes, dividing coverage between emigrant passenger ships and wool clippers. It combines technical descriptions, sail plans and illustrations with passage records, captains’ logs, ownership and commercial practices, notable races and 24-hour runs, and accounts of accidents, fires and final fates. Anecdotes and measured statistics illuminate everyday life aboard, steerage conditions, and changes in routing and shipbuilding, while lists of best passages and vessel biographies trace the operational history and later careers of many prominent clippers.

Registered tonnage 1033  tons.
Length 184.4 feet.
Beam 31.7   „
Depth 21.1   „

She was built to participate in the gold boom to Melbourne, and was fitted to carry passengers under a poop 61 feet long. However she was not destined to start life on the Australian run, for she had barely been launched before she was taken up by the Government for the transport of troops to the Crimea. At the landing at Alma in September, 1854, she was transport No. 78, carrying the 88th Connaught Rangers. She managed to ride out the gale of the 14th November, 1854, off Balaclava, in which 34 of the Allied ships were wrecked and over 1000 lives lost. And in October, 1855, we find her acting as a hospital ship during the expedition against Kinburn and Odessa. In 1856 she returned to London and was then put on the berth for Adelaide. She sailed from Plymouth under Captain A. Lawrence on the 5th July, 1856, with a full passenger list, and hence forward was a favourite passenger ship in the South Australian trade.

“Orient’s” Outward Passages.

The following table gives her time out for twenty-one voyages under the Orient flag. She generally took about 95 days coming home via the Cape, calling in at Capetown and St. Helena, as it was the custom with ships carrying passengers.