Sailing Ship Hulks and Coal Hulks
Writing of the fate of the clipper ships, William L. Carothers said, "Clippers functioned well as barges; their fine ends made for little resistance when under tow ... The ultimate degradation awaited a barge. There was no way up, only down-- down to the category of coal hulks ... Having strong solid bottoms ... they could handle the great weight of bulk coal which filled their holds. It was a grimy, untidy, unglamorous end for any vessel which had seen the glory days."
The famed clipper Red Jacket ended her days as a coaling hulk in the Cape Verde Islands.
"One by one these old Champions of the Seas disappeared. The Young America was last seen lying off Gibraltar as a coal hulk; and that superb old greyhound of the ocean, the Flying Cloud suffered a similar ignominious ending. She was not even spared the humiliation of concealing her tragic end from the eyes of her former envious rivals, but was condemned to end her days as a New Haven scow towed up the Sound with a load of brick and concrete behind a stuck up parvenu tug. Ever and anon as if to emphasize her newly acquired importance, the tug would bury the old-time square-rigged beauty in a cloud of filthy smoke. Imagine the feelings of an ex-Cape Horner under such conditions! There should have been a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Old Clippers. Everybody who knows anything about ships, knows that they have feelings just the same as anybody else."
— Henry Collins Brown, (1919), The Clipper Ships of Old New York, Valentine's Manual of Old New York, Issue 3, p. 94-95
When lumber schooner Johanna Smith, "one of only two Pacific Coast steam schooners to be powered by steam turbines," was hulked in 1928, she was moored off Long Beach, California and used as a gambling ship, until a fire of unknown cause finished her off.
One vessel rescued from this ignominious end was the barque Polly Woodside, now a museum ship in Melbourne, Australia. Another is the James Craig rescued from Recherche Bay in Tasmania, now restored and regularly sailing from Sydney, Australia.
Read more about this topic: Hulk (ship)
Famous quotes containing the words sailing, ship and/or coal:
“O western orb sailing the heaven,
Now I know what you must have meant as a month since I walked,
As I walked in silence the transparent shadowy night,”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
“In those days, the blag slag, the waste of the coal pits, had only begun to cover the side of our hill. Not enough to mar the countryside nor blacken the beauty of our village. For the colliery had only begun to poke its skinny black fingers between the green.”
—Philip Dunne (1908–1992)