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:
"the Martin M-130 "China Clipper" lands in Hong Kong Harbor"
"The Lockheed Constellation passes the Golden Gate"
I tracked down the rest of the six plates as well.
Bob
"It is said, 'Go not to the elves for counsel for they will say both no and yes.' "
Frodo Baggins to Gildor Inglorion, The Fellowship of the Ring
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. ;(
“There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes.”
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
"It is said, 'Go not to the elves for counsel for they will say both no and yes.' "
Frodo Baggins to Gildor Inglorion, The Fellowship of the Ring
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.
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..
Steam, whilst hugely inefficient at first, eventually killed off the Clippers
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.
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Originally Posted by Bruce_in_Oz
