: Mike Robbins
: On the Rim of the Sea A Journey in Books
: BookBaby
: 9780997881547
: 1
: CHF 4.50
:
: Geschichte
: English
: 307
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
How will the world see the 20th century a hundred years from now? For many, it was like living right on the edge of a turbulent ocean that threatened to engulf them; and sometimes it did. In this thoughtful book, Mike Robbins looks at the century just past through those who lived it, and the books they left behind. What was it like to crew the last great sailing ships? How did it feel to be an ordinary man-or a Chinese labourer-on the Western Front? How did a popular Jewish writer react to the rise of fascism? Who wrote detective novels in the 1930s, and who read them? And how has it all looked from the saddle of a bike? Come and stand on the edge of the ocean.

The Last Days of Sail


 

On March 17 1894,Scientific American had its usual varied diet for the curious and intelligent. There was a report on a cablecar service over the Tennessee River in Knoxville. Figurines in Oriental dress had been unearthed in Mexico’s Oaxaca state. The number of immigrants landing in New York had been down in 1893 (the largest group was Italian, at nearly 70,000).

Tucked away in an inside page, however, was a story that was bigger than it seemed. The Arthur Sewell& Co. yard at Bath, Maine, had launched theDirigo – the first steel sailing ship to be built in the USA. The article reported that she was 330ft overall, of 45ft beam, and was to carry 4,500 dwt in cargo. “The vessel is rigged as a four-masted ship … and will spread about 13,000 yards of canvas,” theScientific American reported. “In the early spring she will be fitted for sea and will load at pier 19, East River, New York, for San Francisco, Cal.”

Westward round the Horn, then, against the prevailing wind; a baptism of fire. But this was an important ship. Eugene Chamberlain, the USA’s Commissioner of Navigation, clearly thought so. Patricia M. Higgins, in herHidden History of Midcoast Maine, quotes him as saying that theDirigo’s construction represented “the beginning of a new industry in this country. The ship of the future is to be of steel, and the introduction of that material is necessary to the maintenance of, for foreign trade, a fleet of large sailing vessels.”

But neither theScientific American nor, probably, Chamberlain fully grasped that the iron or steel-hulled sailing ship, or windjammer, was not a new era for sail. It was its brilliant apotheosis.

The windjammer’s time was brief. Today we celebrate them as “tall ships”, and those still at sea are usually training vessels. In their heyday, they were hard ships on which to work. Usually four-masted barques with steel hulls, their era started sometime in the late 19th century. They are not to be confused with the clippers, which were smaller but carried far bigger crews, enabling them to be driven hard in poor weather, and were therefore much faster; their time was already really over when theDirigo was launched. The windjammer’s purpose was not to fly to Tilbury with the first of the year’s tea. It was to carry non-perishable bulk cargo such as coal, grain and nitrates at lower cost than the new steamships, by using the prevailing winds, and taking as long as they needed on the journey. When the windjammer era began, this made sense; steamers still needed frequent stops for water and bunkering, and were often quite slow.

By the 1920s, much had changed – and in time the motorship appeared, cleaner, more economical and easier to run. The windjammers fought harder and harder to compete; costs were slashed, crews were small – sometimes almost too