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I use to find a few of these old pre war clipper ship envelopes with the interesting cancellations showing the routes.
These were all discontinued as the war started and new/surplus aircraft started the airtravel during the postwar yearsAttachment 129547Attachment 129548Attachment 129549Attachment 129550
Ah! Pan Am Clippers.A friend did a lot of flying in first class on Pan Am to Japan and they gave him a couple of china plates containing scenes of their early planes that he passed on to me. They included these:
https://www.milsurps.com/images/impo..._nc_cat1-1.jpgI tracked down the rest of the six plates as well.
"the Martin M-130 "China Clipper" lands in Hong Kong Harbor"
https://www.milsurps.com/images/impo..._nc_cat1-1.jpg
"The Lockheed Constellation passes the Golden Gate"
Bob
Did not the Constellation suffer from un-porting accidents in a book I have I'm sure it was this plane it caused allot of deaths.
The pilot who inadvertently lead to its discovery did so by accident by not having one, its in his book Fate Is The Hunter By Earnest K Gann.
I was expecting something that sailed out of Foochow with a million pounds of tea loaded by hand in less than a day. ;(
The Cutty Sark was always a favourite of mine.
When I was in Scotland, we were entertained by that year's Burns Champion Cantor, who recited The Cutty Sark for us. He also defined what a cutty sark is: it is a short, cut-off skirt, like a miniskirt. It's your fun fact of the day!
Bob
She was a tea clipper I think and was being restored as she was an attraction for tourists, when they had a fire which I think she was destroyed that truly is a sad thing.
I built the Constitution as U S wind jammer for my Uncle as a model years ago OMG the rigging drove me up the wall as I was only a teenager as I had her under full sail and not furled sails.
Sadly he knocked it off his china cabinet one day and it was to far gone to salvage so looked like it had been at the bikini atoll I never said anything to him as he was always pretty kind to me.
Cutty Sark was repaired.
The great rival of "Cutty Sark" was "Thermopylae". a ship so elegantly engineered that she was said be "able to "ghost" along at a steady five knots in a breeze that would not blow out a candle on deck"
The opposite of that was the "Marco Polo", described as being "square as a brick, fore and aft", but a ship that could be driven through gales that would dis-mast or destroy lesser vessels.
The biggest problem with these "high-performance" Clippers was a need for a steady supply of extremely skilled seamen. Steam, whilst hugely inefficient at first, eventually killed off the Clippers, once coaling ports were established on the trade routes. Many once-noble sailing ships ended their days as coal shuttles. The Triple-expansion steam engine was a marvel ot 19th Century engineering..
Kiwi readers may be familiar with the TS "Earnslaw,which plies Lake Wakatipu at Queenstown. She has a perfectly functional triple expansion engine, chugging away since 1912..
If you haven't read it yet, I recommend Joshua Slocum's autobiography "Sailing alone around the world", set right in the tail end of this transition. An old sailing master out of work decided to fix up a boat and become a fisherman. Quickly found out that he wasn't any good at it, and kept on sailing. Such was the first singlehanded circumnavigation of the globe. I'll let the internet tell you how he ended his otherwise exemplary life in shame.Quote:
Originally Posted by Bruce_in_Oz
Good read.
Two other books worth a look are (The history of) The American Sailing Navy and
The Search for Speed under sail 1700-1855
Both of these are by Chapelle.
Thermopylae was based in Victoria, BC at the end of her commercial life; hauling rice from the Orient with a reduced rig. A great pity the Portuguese sank her in 1907(?), but perhaps she was too lightly built to endure as well as some others?Quote:
Originally Posted by Bruce_in_Oz
I might also then suggest "Six Frigates", the story of the origins of the US navy.Quote:
Originally Posted by limpetmine
Other than the fabulous account of how our Navy was built, including the political context and forces of the time...I found Thomas Jefferson a peculiar fellow in the buildup to 1812. Not to get too political and violate any of our rules, but I found it hard to swallow that the man who authored the Declaration of Independence would/could resort to the confiscation of all liberty of commerce abroad has his first reaction to the crisis. The contradiction being what it was lead me on a reading streak of original sources - the man really was a living paradox! As a lesser known example, his vision of the simplistic agrarian utopia for America sharply contradicted with his desire to obtain every scientific and industrial novelty which modern technology could produce. His anti-liberty actions when in a crisis being his first instinct arguably laid the foundation of today's version of the party he founded. Happy to discuss objectively in our other forum here. My only point here being that corruption, power, and everything else that plagues modern politics from any side is not new at all. Read the book. It all existed in plain(er?) sight even then - lest we forget.
You're getting closer to the nubs there ssgross; have a look at the history of central banking in the USA if you want to see where the power issues really lie. As Franklin noted, the revolution wasn't caused by stamps and tea, but by the taking away of the 13 colonies power to produce their own paper money and the depression that followed. Of course the Lords and Commons in London were in turn merely following their orders from what is euphemistically called "The City of London" in taking those powers away, and they've been following orders closely ever since. ;)
Jefferson was certainly a very clever man, but sadly "enlightenment" does nothing to change human nature, though it does seem to foster a persistent delusion to the contrary. Just ask Sally. :D
"The Last Grain Race" is Eric Newby's account of his voyage before the mast on the four-masted barque Moshulu with a cargo of grain from Australia to Scotland in 1938. It can be compared with Dana's Two Years Before The Mast. These were the last carrying-trade routes on which sailing ships could still hope to make a profit (and only then if overheads were cut to the bone).