Sunday, 23 April 2023

Trincomalee and tea

 

Last port of call

Half full of jute from Chalna we were now approaching Trincomalee on the east coast of Ceylon to fill up with tea. This could be exciting.

Outward bound we had been in Colombo for a few weeks, both at anchor waiting a berth and then in port. It had been one of the most enjoyable port visits on the voyage, not least because of the opportunity to meet people ashore especially good-looking girls in the swimming club.

[1]                                                                                                                       

     Now we were to enter one of the largest and safest harbours in the Indian Ocean, Trincomalee on the east coast of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Having been fought over by many European maritime nations because of its strategic location it was now a naval and commercial port run by the navy.

The immaculately dressed naval pilot arrived even wearing white gloves, now a little soiled after climbing the pilot ladder to be greeted by our Captain who, surprisingly was also immaculate. Not an aertex singlet to be seen!

Well, Captain, we are taking you to an anchorage so you can load tea directly from barges. This did not sound too good, no shore leave, well well.

We anchored in a large bay with a sandy beach behind which was a tropical jungle where even with the naked eye you could see monkeys jumping in the trees.

There is a club on the beach, said the pilot, that is available to you to relax whilst you are loading. This sounded a lot better, I thought. Who knows who we will meet.

We anchored in 20 fathoms and laid back on the anchor until it took hold. Right laddie, said Jock, the second mate, we need to find some transits for our position. Transits, what are they, I innocently asked. You stupid Yorkshire boy, they are a simple way to check that we are not dragging the anchor and you will need them as you will be doing the night anchor watch alone! What alone on the bridge! Yes, said Jock and we need both daytime and night-time transits. So patiently he took me through the process.


[2]A transit bearing is when two fixed objects are in line. They will have a transit bearing only when they are in line. So we need to search for such objects now that we are stationery at anchor. They need to be visible day and night to the naked eye and fixed on the chart. We need at least two, better three such transit bearings to fix our position. We also need to keep in mind that the vessel swings with the tide and there can be some variation in the chosen bearings. Only experience will tell you whether it is because of the ship swinging with the tide or that we are dragging our anchor. That will keep you on your toes on the night watch!

So we searched around the coast and found some good transits, church spires with prominent hills, lit buoys with lighthouses, all on the chart.

OK, draw them on the chart and note the bearing and then check with the gyro bearing compass and report back. Dutifully did that and then came the examination! Was there a difference between the bearing on the chart and that you took with the gyro compass. Yes, I replied. OK why is that Jock pressed me for an answer. Luckily, I had spent some time with my correspondence course which normally was incomprehensible to me but on coastal navigation I seemed to grasp it.

The bearing on the chart is a true bearing and the difference with the gyro is the compass error. Good he replied and what if you had used a magnetic compass? It still would be the compass error, I replied made up of variation because the magnetic pole is not at the true north pole and deviation because of the local magnetism of the steel ship. Before he could ask another question, I said, and variation can be found in the compass rose on the chart. Wow, replied Jock, not such a numb skull after all!

[3]


So started a couple of weeks whilst barges came and went and loaded chest after chest of tea whose fragrance pervaded the whole ship. Best of all we were put on night anchor watches and mine was midnight to 06:00 leaving me free in the afternoons. This a dream job, very little to do on night anchor watch, hanging over the wing of the bridge to catch what little wind there was and check the transit bearings from time to time. A little anxious when we swung with the tide as the transit bearings came out of line a little. Were we dragging anchor or was it just the natural catenary of the anchor chain changing position. Apart from that I just dreamed of those girls at the Colombo swimming club. What lucky chap was chatting them up now whilst I was stuck at the other side of the country!

The Chief officer said we would put the motor lifeboat in the water for runs ashore and to teach the apprentices small boat handling. This was going to be fun. Of the four lifeboats we had only one had an engine and this was lowered from its stowed position to the embarkation point on the boat deck and we


scrambled in. Once in the water the chief officer decided a run ashore to the club on the beach would be an excellent introduction to small boat seamanship. You need to know that the lifeboat was like a giant bathtub and handled like one so manoeuvring was not easy but slowly we mastered the basic actions and were rewarded by a beer on the veranda of this club that seemed remarkably deserted except for the hundreds of monkeys racing through the trees.

[4]Some days we tried to water-ski in the harbour on the chutes made to contain water escaping onto the tea barges behind the lifeboat. This was not very successful as soon as we stood up the lifeboat did not have enough power to keep us up and we gently subsided into the water again. A lot of fun anyway.

Far too soon the hatches were battened down and chippy started wedging the hatch covers and the tea exporter gave us all a small tea chest of orange pekoe tea and we left that lovely harbour and started our voyage back over the Indian Ocean to Aden.

The southern tip of Ceylon is renowned fishing grounds, so we needed to keep a good lookout for the small wooden outrigger boats that fished well offshore and were difficult to spot especially at night as not all of them displayed any sort of light.

This area is also known for the concentration of whale sharks especially in February and March and they are slow swimmers so avoiding them is imperative. So visual lookout was a prime job for us junior apprentices.

Once we cleared Ceylon and entered the Indian Ocean, Jock turned to me and with a broad smile and said, now laddie we have 10 days of ocean voyage in relatively calm seas, time for you to start learning Celestial Navigation. I was dreading this as quite apart from the practical work of using a sextant that I felt competent at, the notion of mathematics and trigonometry left me quite numb. I was bottom of the bottom class in my year at school for three years running for maths. All those X’s and Y’s and negative numbers meant nothing to me!

Let us keep it simple and concentrate on the “noon sight” to find latitude and longitude. You do know what latitude and longitude is? You have used them on the chart so what if we do not have any coast, only sea and need to find our position?

So we have the sun, and we know it rises in the east and sets in the west every day. At a precise time every day it reaches its zenith, its highest altitude. This time we will call local noon for wherever we are. Greenwich in the UK is the prime meridian where longitude is zero degrees, and the time zone is called GMT (Greenwich Mean Time).

Now we know the earth rotates 360 degrees in 24 hours, one day. So that means it moves at 360/24= 15 degrees of longitude per hour. How can this help us? With an accurate clock, that’s how and we have two chronometers thanks to [5]John Harrison, a Yorkshireman in 1730. He invented a clock that could keep accurate time even at sea with all the movement of the ship. We have two and we check their accuracy every day against the “Greenwich radio pips” and note any error. They are adjusted to keep Greenwich time wherever we are in the world. Savvy so far?

So we get an accurate chronometer time for the time the sun is at its zenith for our position. We then use our Nories Nautical tables to find the time the sun reached its zenith at Greenwich, the prime meridian (0 degrees). So now we have the times for noon at Greenwich and for our position. The difference between them is converted to longitude at 15 degrees per hour to give us our approximate longitude. It is only approximate because it is difficult to measure the exact altitude for the zenith as the sun moves ever so slowly as it passes through noon. Nevertheless it can be accurate within 15 nautical miles, enough out in the ocean.

So now we need to calculate latitude for the same time. We can do this with our noon sight also. The altitude of the sun at its zenith means it is on our meridian of longitude, due south or north, and it becomes relatively easy to measure its declination. The suns declination is the angular distance of the sun north or south of the equator and we can read its value from our nautical tables for precisely this time. You will remember that the sun wanders north and south in the year because of its tilt axis between the winter solstice when there is the shortest day and the summer solstice when there is the longest day in summer. We need to know the angular distance when the sun is directly overhead, the zenith distance. This is simply 90 degrees minus our observed altitude. Latitude is then a matter of arithmetic.


If the declination and approximate latitude are in the same hemisphere and the latitude is greater than the declination, we add the zenith distance to the declination.  For the same hemisphere if latitude is less than declination, we subtract the declination from the zenith distance. If latitude and declination have different names, we subtract declination from the zenith distance.

OK, I see your eyes are glazing over so enough for now but every noon sight you can calculate our approximate position alongside us.

Go and find our approximate position from the start to be sure what hemisphere we are in and find the declination for today from your pristine new [6]Nories tables. Also find the table for converting time to longitude and the time of meridian passage at Greenwich.

Steaming northwest across the Indian Ocean you also cross a much older traditional trading route between Africa and the Arabian Gulf and we often saw sea-going dhows on passage. A refreshing sight.





References

‘Bossoir_a_gravité.Jpg (960×1280)’. Accessed 9 April 2023. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Bossoir_a_gravit%C3%A9.jpg.

‘Chronometer Watch’. In Wikipedia, 10 August 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chronometer_watch&oldid=1103608912.

‘OLD EDITION Norie’s Nautical Tables’. Accessed 19 April 2023. https://www.imray.com/product/old-edition-nories-nautical-tables/ib0095-1/.

Small crates and tea chests. ‘Small Crates and Tea Chests’. Accessed 8 April 2023. https://farthinglayouts.blogspot.com/2015/04/small-crates-and-tea-chests.html.

‘Transit Bearings - Google Search’. Accessed 7 April 2023. https://www.google.com/search?q=transit+bearings&tbm=isch&chips=q:transit+bearing,g_1:navigation:4C6g_BECbgg%3D&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiAzo_835f-AhWWxyoKHWWvDpkQ4lYoAHoECAEQJg&biw=1501&bih=686#imgrc=HEjzrQFdswtcsM.

‘Trincomalee: India’s Call’, 27 April 2017. https://www.vifindia.org/article/2017/april/27/trincomalee-india-s-call.

 


[1] ‘Trincomalee: India’s Call’, 27 April 2017, https://www.vifindia.org/article/2017/april/27/trincomalee-india-s-call.

[2] ‘Transit Bearings - Google Search’, accessed 7 April 2023, https://www.google.com/search?q=transit+bearings&tbm=isch&chips=q:transit+bearing,g_1:navigation:4C6g_BECbgg%3D&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiAzo_835f-AhWWxyoKHWWvDpkQ4lYoAHoECAEQJg&biw=1501&bih=686#imgrc=HEjzrQFdswtcsM.

[3] ‘Small Crates and Tea Chests’, Small Crates and Tea Chests (blog), accessed 8 April 2023, https://farthinglayouts.blogspot.com/2015/04/small-crates-and-tea-chests.html.

[4] ‘Bossoir_a_gravité.Jpg (960×1280)’, accessed 9 April 2023, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Bossoir_a_gravit%C3%A9.jpg.

[5] ‘Chronometer Watch’, in Wikipedia, 10 August 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chronometer_watch&oldid=1103608912.

[6] ‘OLD EDITION Norie’s Nautical Tables’, accessed 19 April 2023, https://www.imray.com/product/old-edition-nories-nautical-tables/ib0095-1/.


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Thursday, 30 March 2023

The Captain's teeth

 

An event in the Indian Ocean

We were heading SE from Aden to the southern tip of Ceylon, right in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

There was a gentle NE’ly swell from the NE monsoon, and we rolled easily in a blue Indian ocean with hardly a cloud in the sky, the sort of day a seafarer dreams of. The flying fish were jumping and there was no traffic and a clear ocean horizon.

I was now a third officer proudly displaying my single gold bar on my epaulets having successfully passed my Second Officers certificate.

So I was the watchkeeping officer on the 8-12 morning watch on the bridge.

I had risen at 07:30, had a quick shower and a breakfast of fish kedgeree with that aromatic flavour of curry with hard boiled eggs and rice. Then, up to the bridge for 07:55 to relieve the chief officer of the watch. Handover was easy, no traffic and the C/O had fixed our position with the stars at dawn, so everything was in order.

Started checking bridge instruments and chart position before winding the two chronometers in the chartroom. The captain would be up shortly after his breakfast for his daily tour.

Uniform etiquette is clear. Full appropriate uniform for eating in the saloon and always in port. Deepsea was a little different, a more relaxed approach, shirt outside your shorts, long socks rolled down, that sort of thing. However Captains could be an exception to even these rules and our short rotund Liverpudlian Captain was likely to turn up in oversize “empire builder” shorts, flipflops and an aertex singlet and so he did.

Good morning third mate, all well was his morning greeting. Everything OK, I replied as he moved to the port wing of the bridge to catch the NE monsoon breeze in order to cool down.

Then it happened!

There was a gasp from the captain, he turned and ran down the portside ladder to his cabin. The only thing I saw was that his face seemed to have changed, sort of collapsed.

He returned to bridge shortly after looking quite normal. “Third Offither, thend for thippy”! What is this, his speech seemed odd. Has he had a stroke I wondered. “Third Offither, thend for thippy”, he repeated. OK, who is thippy? Then it dawned on me that he wanted Chippy, our carpenter. But what for? What could Chippy do for our captain’s speech impediment and why had it happened?

Of course, he had dentures and must have yawned over the side of the ship and his dentures fell into the Indian ocean. Now wearing a reserve set that seemed to affect his speech he wanted Chippy to make some adjustments to his dentures to improve his speech so he could at least communicate with us.

[1]Chippy arrived on the bridge in his usual style. A small muscular man around 50 years of age dressed


in a grubby T-shirt tucked into oversize blue shorts supported by a broad leather belt into which was stuck a hammer, his constant companion. This was topped off with a pair of cut-off wellington boots.

He also had dentures which he rarely wore and as a result his bulbous nose and his chin nearly met! A more Popeye type of person is difficult to imagine.

He came from Newcastle and had a broad Geordie accent slurred by his alcoholism so that he was very difficult to understand.

So here we have the scenario, a Liverpudlian rotund captain with a sibilant lisp and a Geordie carpenter trying to communicate around the problem of the captains dentures. Chippy disappeared to his workshop to reappear with saws, knives and an assortment of rasps and files.

Whilst I was banned from the port wing of the bridge, I could hear everything.

Repeated work on the dentures was followed by a fitting and an attempt to speak.

“Thally thelth thea thhelth on the thea thhore”

This was repeated numerous times and it took some time before I could decipher it.

“Sally sells seashells on the seashore”. A tongues twister we all knew from childhood but being used here to test the status of the Captains speech defect.

Slowly things improved but what if they did not and the captain had the conn, controlling the ship. What would “starboard ten degrees” sound like or even worse “full astern”.

Well, after a couple of hours of work the captain was satisfied and Chippy was dismissed.

The captain came through bridge smiling on his way to his cabin.

“Thank you third offither Douglath!

OK, much better.

 


[1] ‘Popeye - Google Search’, Texas State Historical Association, accessed 27 March 2023, https://www.google.com/search?q=popeye&sxsrf=APwXEddlvRAdJnwHRIvecdfbJUeVVq9-CQ:1679909946717&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjHsoOd6Pv9AhUlYPEDHblNAW4Q_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1542&bih=696&dpr=0.8#imgrc=xuw9h-bcUWpN3M.

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Friday, 3 March 2023

The Doctor's surgery waiting room

In the old days when you were unwell or sick you rang the doctor, and he came to your home. He was called the family doctor and everyone in the family used the same doctor. There was close bond between the family and this single doctor. He might prescribe medication or recommend specialist examination or a trip to the hospital. Medication required a prescription that he wrote out on the spot in handwriting. A trip to the chemist was required to get the medicine or pills.

Today that has all changed. If you feel unwell you must make a journey to the doctor’s surgery unless it is an emergency and then an ambulance will come and take charge.

A doctor’s surgery today is more like a small treatment centre with nurses, laboratories, and a host of specialist doctors. You have your own personal doctor that you choose and who remains your doctor over time.

To see the doctor you must first book online through the national health service. This requires passwords and security checks before you come your doctor’s calendar where you choose a free fifteen-minute slot. Yes, a fifteen-minute slot is the initial planned contact time that can change on circumstances. This is important as the schedule slips throughout the day. It is therefore wise to book a slot early in the day unless you are prepared to wait up until one hour after the planned time and pay extra parking fees for your car. So today, the responsibility is yours to get into the doctor’s surgery at your own costs. After that your national health plan should cover your requirements.

You enter the reception area where a notice informs you that if you already have an appointment, you can go directly and sit outside your doctor’s office. The problem is with reduced seating because of covid this is not as easy as it seems.

Once seated and your mobile is in vibration mode it is time t look around. After all a doctor’s waiting room is a window on humanity.

There is an anxious elderly couple opposite holding hands. Hope they get some good news. Next to me is a young mother with a sick baby who cries and cries and cries. We all smile and make gurgling sounds in an attempt to be friendly and perhaps a little helpful.

Down the waiting room is a worker with his hand covered in a bandage talking to a colleague in a foreign language, possibly Polish.

There is a quite different atmosphere here, it is palpable, people are anxious over concern for their wellbeing.

Suddenly a door opens a nurse shouts a name and waits for a response. No response so the door closes, and we subside into a state of anticipation, what next. The same door opens again, and another name is shouted down the corridor. Here, shouts a young women dressed in very fashionable clothes with a Gucci bag over her shoulder, and she disappears into the room and the door marked “laboratory” closes. What happens in the laboratory, I wonder? Five minutes later I have an answer. A man comes out in shirtsleeves clutching a plaster in his elbow crook. Blood tests is what happens in the laboratory.

It constantly amazes me what is learnt from an analysis of our blood. A few days after a blood test an email arrives with a cryptic comment from the doctor. ”All OK for your age”! This accompanied with a technical sheet with values for undecipherable symbols and the normal expected range for that condition. After a search on the Internet you learn what the symbols mean!

Technology is at the heart of our health system. You can login and check the status of medication and even renew it online. Messages from the doctor are there and expiry dates of current medication.

A trip to the chemists to pick up what the doctor has prescribed only needs you to show you ID foe the chemist to check what is available for you.

So much has changed but the doctor’s surgery remains that place you might fear most, perhaps after the dentist!

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Friday, 10 February 2023

The Red Sea

 We dropped the pilot at Suez and set off down the Gulf of Suez before entering the Red Sea. On each side the coast was of sandy coloured hills and mountains and a blue, blue sky over an azure sea. We finally had left Europe and were now entering the Middle East with the Arabian Peninsula to port and Africa to starboard and India sort of round the corner.

 Colin called us into our messroom. Boyo’s, he said, we are now in the tropics and EVERTHING changes. With day and night-time temperatures around 30 degrees centigrade you need to take care of yourselves.

First you need to take one of these as he held up a large white pill, salt tablets to replace the salt you lose through sweating. Do not forget to take them.

Then he held up a glass of an evil looking liquid. Lime juice to be taken every day to prevent scurvy!

Why all these precautions?

It is only with hindsight that the precautions Colin was describing were put into context. We were embarking on a 1300 nautical leg of our voyage to Aden in tropical seas in a ship from the 1920’s.

A steam reciprocating engine needs a lot of fresh water and the provision of fresh water for the crew was not always of the highest priority. Whilst we had enough to drink, washing in salt water with special soap was not unusual.

There were no refrigerators or freezers on board, no air-conditioning and thus we had to adapt to the natural hot climate in various ways.

Production of ice was crucial to maintain our store of food and not least beer! Once the ice boxes could no longer be kept cool, we were down to tinned food and warm beer. The only solution was to buy locally at every port we visited. This was a challenge for the purser, responsible for catering on the ship.

Keeping clean in the tropics became a challenge for us young apprentices unused to the combination of heat, sweat and physical work in a scorching sun from 6am to 6pm. Regular change of clothing, sometimes twice a day was the norm and this Yorkshiremen often found it difficult to adapt to it! The result, the dreaded “dhobi rash”, a fungal rash especially under underwear and difficult to overcome. Of course, the problem was the tight clothing we use in the west. The solution might lie in the Indian “lungi” worn often by the Indian crew in their off-duty periods. It is nothing more than a length of cotton about waist high that is wrapped around the waist and tucked into the waist band. Nothing underneath makes it cooler and more appropriate to sweaty conditions! Must get one when we get to Aden.

However, there is an art in tying a lungi. Done correctly, it provides a simple and elegant solution to everyday informal dress. Done incorrectly, can result in an embarrassing situation with the lungi around your ankles and you are showing the world your “nether regions” as we say in Yorkshire. With increasing skill, it can also be tucked up under the waistband to provide a sort of shorts version.

Another issue that arose quite quickly was the problem of sleeping in our bunks in such high


temperatures. We had “punkah louvres” in the cabin up under the ceiling that were supposed to deliver a stream of cool air over us. However, these faded yellow Bakelite nozzles were often stuck in one position and the air was neither cool or had sufficient force to make any difference even when we slept naked on the bunk sheets!

So, another solution was required.

Hammocks on deck is the answer, said Colin. Not only is it cooler on deck but you will learn some essential sail making skills. Ah, I thought, now I will get to use the sailmakers palm and needle that Grandpa insisted I needed in my “ditty bag”.

Go to the “cassab” in his store under the fo’csle and ask for 2 metres of no. 2 duck canvas, a skein of thread for all of us and a few metres of rope used for awnings, said Colin, and come back and we get started.

So started my training into the world of round and flat seams, cringles and grommets and rope splicing, proper seaman like activities! We found out soon enough that a wooden stretcher at each end holding the edges of the hammock apart gave us more space although the risk of falling out was increased!

The ship proceeded south with every day the same, blue sky and sea and hot, hot, hot. You soon learnt that the best times of the day were just before sunrise, around 06:00 and at sunset around 18:00. Being on the graveyard watch meant that midnight to 04:00 was fine with a slight breeze and the stars very bright overhead. The problem was the 12:00 to 16:00 watch where the full source of the sun beat down on us. Even with awnings over the bridge wings it was difficult to stay cool. Hanging your arms over the bridge front helped but every so often you had to go into the bridge itself and that was warm!

The midnight to 4 am watch was my favourite. Sometimes called the graveyard watch because everyone on the ship is asleep and you are alone, well with your Glaswegian second mate who seems to spend a lot of time in the chartroom.

Imagine, you are steaming south in the Red Sea, the temperature has cooled off from its burning daytime heights and there is a cooling breeze from the south, right in your face. The only sounds are the thump of the engine and the swish of the waves parted by the bow. Now and again, there is a splash as a flying fish lands on deck or sometimes a larger fish plays in the bow wave.

The purri wallah, the Indian lookout, is out on the leeside bridge wing and you have checked the bridge instrumentation. No ships on radar and none in sight. You move out to the windward bridge wing and hang your arms over the bridge front to catch the breeze. Magic.

Suddenly there is a click from the VHF and a voice says, “British ship heading south, this is the German ship Hansa, vi haf your Captain on board”!

What is this some sort of joke!!

The Scottish second mate replies, “I will check and call back”. Purri wallah, call the Captain and ask him to come up on the bridge.

Five minutes later, sorry sahib but the Captain is not there!!

Hell’s teeth, what has happened. Purri wallah, wake up the Chief Officer and ask him to come up on the bridge.

He arrives, take over and a thorough search reveals that indeed we do not have a Captain on board!

Frantic VHF exchanges result in that our Captain is uninjured after 3 hours in the shark invested waters of the Red Sea and the German ship heading south behind us will drop him off in Aden!

But what happened?

It was normal for the captain to visit the bridge around the change of watch at midnight and then spend a few minutes cooling off on his deck below the bridge. An inspection of this area revealed that the chain rail between the lifeboat davits and the permanent shipside rail was not hooked on leaving a gap over the side of the ship. It looks as though on his nightly walk he managed to walk over the side of the ship and survived about 3 hours in the water of the Red Sea! A real mystery!

Another challenge for us Northern Europe folk when working in the tropical sun is how to stop sunburn. Well without suntan protection oils we resorted to coconut oil and steaked our bodies brown! Today we would know better, and it is only in later life did we come to realise the dangers of over exposure to the sun. But, in those carefree days been brown was both healthy and we thought attractive to all the girls that were waiting for us at every port!! Ha Ha.

Once we reached the tropics, we seemed to relax more in our off watch periods. With 12 hours of sun every day and fair weather every day it is not surprising that we spent a lot of time on deck. Whilst the day workers followed a 9 to 5 routine with after dinner activities, watch keepers must snatch what leisure they could. For me on the 12 to 4 watch it meant that leisure came after 4pm until bedtime at 8pm.

One of the first things done was to erect our “swimming pool” on the boat deck abaft number three hatch. Well swimming pool is a posh description. It was a wooden box bolted together and lined with a homemade canvas bag with a drain tube in one corner. Measuring around 3 metres square it was less a swimming pool and more a large social bathtub! Once filled with seawater from the fire hydrant we
could relax in tepid water as we drank our Tennant’s lager. Apprentices, deck, and engine officers, all enjoyed a beer around the pool. On those rare occasions we had an engine breakdown we would lower a rope ladder and swim in the Red Sea! It was important to have someone keeping a lookout for sharks, but I never experienced any problems and the joy of floating in the deep blue of the Red Sea was a lifetime experience for a 16-year-old.

This social life was strictly segregated. White officers did not socialise with white petty officers and not at all with the Indian crew. In a way it was run on naval lines, but it seemed to work in those days.

Soon, we neared the Bab Al Mandep straits that separates Africa from the Arabian Peninsula and Jock, the second mate wanted me to check the bearings as we rounded Perim Island and exited the Red Sea.


So, on the port bridge wing I searched for Balfe Pt. tower on the western end of the island as according to our plan we would change course twice with bearings from the tower.  So this was an important task. Shout out when the tower is abeam bearing 054 degrees and then we will alter course to 161 degrees . Then when we have it at 3 nautical miles distance we will come round to 103 degrees and head out of the Red Sea and enter the Arabian Sea on our way to Aden. What excitement, not only being a part of the navigation team as we rounded Perim Island but new opportunities in Aden. What to expect?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Thursday, 26 January 2023

The rise and decline of Ocean Liners

The focus on the carriage of passengers really took off with the Industrial Revolution at the end of the 1800’s.

Stopford[1] summaries the development such:

“Between 1833 and 1914 every aspect of ship design changed. The hull grew from 176ft. to 901ft and gross tonnage from 137 tons to 45,647 tons. Hull construction switched from wood to iron in the 1850s, from iron to steel in the 1880s, paddle propulsion was replaced in the 1980’s by screws driven by steam engines. Triple expansion steam engines arrived in the 1880s and turbines from 1900. Speed increased from 7 knots per hour in 1833 to 25 knots per hour in 1907, and fuel consumption from around 20 tons a day to 1,000 tons a day.”

So technology supplied the opportunity to build bigger and faster ships but without a demand for their services ocean liners would never have developed as they did.

Two main drivers of demand were instrumental in promoting the rise of the ocean liner.

First emigration, particularly from Europe continued the trend started in the era of the sailing ship and secondly the need to have regular scheduled services for the delivery of mail.


[2]Unlike the sailing ship that carried both cargo and passengers the ocean liner was dedicated to a regular and predictable inter-continental passenger service. The design of an ocean liner had a high freeboard, a deep draft, and a bow to slice through the water and superstructure was limited to housing accommodation for passengers. Limited cargo space for mail and passenger luggage completed the design of the ship.

Emigration

The emigration that had started in the 1700’s accelerated in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. As the graph[3] of US immigration statistics shows that immigrants more than tripled between 1850 and the start of the Second World War reaching 15 million new citizens before declining until the end of ocean liners in 1952.

In Australia the influx of convict immigrants continued until the late 1800’s after which many free settlers arrived driven from their homes in the UK by the Scottish [4]clearances and the potato famine in Ireland.

Similarly Norwegian citizens fled from their country predominantly to the USA. [5]Between 1820 and 1925 as many as 860,000 Norwegians emigrated to the U.S. The driving forces for this mass migration were mixed from lack of farming land to an economic recession.[6]


The shipowners

Shipowners from the era of sail continued after the advent of steam. Samuel Cunard was the first shipowner to establish a transatlantic service with the paddle steamers Britannia. He received the contract to deliver mail thus enabling him to designate his ship RMS Britannia[7] (Royal Mail Ship). His fleet grew to be the predominate ocean liner fleet in the world and even today he operates one transatlantic service every year with the cruise ship Queen Victoria.[8]


Another English shipping company started life with a scheduled service to Australia from the UK. The White Star Line had many financial issues and it changed hands many times[9] until finally it commenced a transatlantic service competing with Cunard. It was the White Star Line that operated the fateful ship Titanic.

It did not take long before most of the European maritime nations started their own transatlantic liner service and later the USA started a service.



The Orient Line was another British liner company that operated to Australia from the UK with mail

and passenger services. [10]An association with the Peninsular and Orient line that operated between the UK and Spain and Portugal resulted in a merger in 1966. The emergence of a mail and liner service to Australia continued until the early 1970’s when the S.S. Canberra[11] was transferred to cruise activities.

 

 

 

A prize for the fastest average speed on the crossing spurred nations to compete for this covetous award, the Blue Riband, and between 1898 and 1952 no less than 18 ships won the prize. Six nations had the honour of winning the prize with their own liner service and between this period the average speed rose from 22.29 to 34.51 knots.[12]


The last ship to hold the Blue Riband was the S.S. United States and in 1952 she averaged 34.51 knots taking 3 days 10 hours and 40 minutes on the eastbound voyage. With a capacity of just under 2000 passengers[13] she accommodated first class passengers at a starting price of $350 and tourist class passengers at $295 for the voyage[14]. Built to American military standards to double as a troop carrier her design was to provide comfort at speed. The use of aluminium in the superstructure significantly reduced her overall weight.[15]

Many of the ocean liners were built to double as troop carriers and [16] during the Second World War Cunard’s Queen Mary was one of them.

The second World War also accelerated the building of large aircraft and that produced the first long
distance airline operations. Once again it was technology, this time in terms of aircraft development that brought about the demise of ocean liner services.

The arrival of the first jet engine commercial aircraft in 1949, the DE Haviland Comet with a capacity of 44 passengers, and its first commercial flight from London to Johannesburg in 1952 was the signal event marking the decline in liner transport of passengers[17].

In 1958 the first commercial transatlantic flight between London and New York took place operated by BOAC with its Comet aircraft. The eastbound flight took 6 hours and 11 minutes whilst the westbound flight took 10 hours and 22 minutes carrying 31 passengers with a refuelling stop at Gander in Newfoundland.[18]

There followed a rapid rise in aircraft development and commercial airline operations to the extent by the early 1960’s 95% of transatlantic passenger transport was by airlines.[19]

References


[1] Stopford, Martin, Maritime Economics.

[2] ‘RMS Queen Elizabeth’.

[3] ‘U.s. Immigration by Year Graph - Google Search’.

[4] ‘Australia’s Immigration History’.

[5] ‘Norwegian Immigration to the US - English (General Studies) - NDLA’.

[6] ‘Nordic Immigrants’.

[7] ‘Britannia’.

[8] ‘Cruise Ships’.

[9] ‘White Star Line’.

[10] ‘P&O’.

[11] ‘S.s. Canberra - Google Search’.

[12] ‘Great Ocean Liners | Blue Riband’.

[13] ‘1986.016.0002 SS United States’.

[14] Grace, ‘SS UNITED STATES – 1952 – Five Nights at Sea – from New York to Europe – First Class Fares $350 and Up…’.

[15] ‘SS United States’.

[16] ‘Cunard Ship Troop Carriers - Google Search’.

[17] Editors, ‘First Commercial Jet Makes Test Flight’.

[18] Cross, ‘10/04/1958’.

[19] ‘Ocean Liner’.


Bibliography

‘1986.016.0002 SS United States’. Accessed 21 January 2023.

Australian National Maritime Museum. ‘Australia’s Immigration History’. Accessed 9 January 2023. 

Batalova, Jeanne Batalova Cecilia Esterline and Jeanne. ‘Frequently Requested Statistics on Immigrants and Immigration in the United States’. migrationpolicy.org, 15 March 2022.

‘Britannia’. Accessed 12 January 2023.

CruiseMiss Cruise Blog. ‘Cruise Ships’, 21 November 2022.


‘Cunard Ship Troop Carriers - Google Search’. Accessed 13 January 2023.

Editors, History com. ‘First Commercial Jet Makes Test Flight’. HISTORY. Accessed 17 January 2023.

———. ‘U.S. Immigration Before 1965’. HISTORY. Accessed 6 January 2023.

Grace, Michael. ‘SS UNITED STATES – 1952 – Five Nights at Sea – from New York to Europe – First Class Fares $350 and Up…’. Cruising The Past (blog). Accessed 17 January 2023.

great-ocean-liners. ‘Great Ocean Liners | Shipping Lines’. Accessed 26 December 2022.

‘History & Fleet’. Accessed 6 January 2023.

‘Immigrants to U.S. by Country of Origin’. Accessed 6 January 2023.


‘Immigration History of Australia’. In Wikipedia, 22 September 2022.

Britannica Kids. ‘Immigration to Australia’. Accessed 9 January 2023.

‘Immigration to the United States’. In Wikipedia, 1 January 2023.

‘Liner Transatlantic Crossing Times, 1833 – 1952 | The Geography of Transport Systems’, 8 November 2017

‘List of Ocean Liners’. In Wikipedia, 2 November 2022

Magazine, Smithsonian, and Daryl Austin. ‘The History of the World’s First Cruise Ship Built Solely for Luxurious Travel’. Smithsonian Magazine. Accessed 11 March 2022.

‘Nordic Immigrants: Why the Norwegians Left | Immigrant Alexandria’. Accessed 6 January 2023.

ndla.no. ‘Norwegian Immigration to the US - English (General Studies) - NDLA’. Accessed 6 January 2023.

‘Ocean Liner’. In Wikipedia, 26 December 2022.


‘Ocean Liner’. In Wikipedia, 6 January 2023.

‘Ocean Liner’. In Wikipedia, 6 January 2023.

‘Orient Steam Navigation Company’. In Wikipedia, 20 November 2022.

‘Oslofjord, Bergensfjord, Sagafjord - Norwegian America Line’. Accessed 26 December 2022.

‘P&O’. In Wikipedia, 4 January 2023.

‘Passengers Ss America 1952 - Google Search’. Accessed 17 January 2023.

Plumer, Brad. ‘This Is an Incredible Visualization of the World’s Shipping Routes’. Vox, 25 April 2016.

‘P&O Timeline’. Accessed 18 January 2023.

‘RMS Queen Elizabeth’. In Wikipedia. By Queen Elizabeth in Cherbourg 1966.jpg: Roland Godefroyderivative work: User:G-13114 - Queen Elizabeth in Cherbourg 1966.jpg, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19493288, 8 January 2023.

SCHEONG. ‘Queens of the Sea: The Golden Age of Ocean Liners’. Throughout History (blog), 9 December 2009.

Science and Technology 5. ‘De Havilland Comet 4C’. National Museums Scotland. Accessed 17 January 2023.

‘Ship - Passenger Liners in the 20th Century | Britannica’. Accessed 26 December 2022.

‘SS Canberra’. In Wikipedia, 17 January 2023.

‘S.s. Canberra - Google Search’. Accessed 18 January 2023.

‘SS United States’. In Wikipedia, 5 January 2023.

Stopford, Martin. Maritime Economics. page 29-30. Accessed 5 May 2022.

Teace, Author Emma Le. ‘Ocean Liners, They Still Exist: Here’s Everything You Need to Know’. Emma Cruises (blog), 2 November 2020.

‘Ten Pound Poms’. In Wikipedia, 23 December 2022.

‘Timeline of Largest Passenger Ships’. In Wikipedia, 13 December 2022. 

‘U.S. Immigrant Population and Share over Time, 185.. | Migrationpolicy.Org’. Accessed 10 January 2023.

‘U.s. Immigration by Year Graph - Google Search’. Accessed 26 December 2022.

‘Victory Ship’. In Wikipedia, 24 November 2022.

‘White Star Line’. In Wikipedia, 25 December 2022.

Why Did Ocean Liners Disappear? | HISTORY, 2021.
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