Jumping Ship

CHARLES HARRISON (I44398)

Charles was and English sailor who jumped ship at Port Victoria to escape a harsh, drunken captain who had threatened to "get" several of his crew when they got to sea.

Port Victoria is a town on the Spencer Gulf coast of Yorke Peninsula. At the 2006 census, Port Victoria had a population of 345.

Like many other coastal towns on the peninsula, it has a jetty and used to be a thriving port for the export of grain to England. The windjammers carrying the bagged grain called at Falmouth, England or Queenstown, Ireland for orders of where the grain was to be taken. Many of the smaller ports were visited only by coastal ketches and schooners. Port Victoria also had an anchorage offshore for the larger windjammers. These were loaded from the ketches which were in turn loaded at the jetty. The last working sailing ships visited in 1949. As a result, Port Victoria is known as the last of the windjammer ports. This era is illustrated in the Port Victoria Maritime Museum.

Windjammer

A windjammer is a type of large sailing ship with an iron or for the most part steel hull, built to carry cargo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Windjammers were the grandest of merchant sailing ships, with between three and five large masts and square sails, giving them a characteristic profile.

The crew of a windjammer was surprisingly small; they could be operated with as small a crew as 14, and a typical crew could be master, mate, boatswain (bosun), 15 seamen and 5 apprentices. Herzogin Cecilie in 1926 sailed around Cape Horn with "only 19 men aboard, although not from choice." The crew roster of Pamir on her last commercial voyage around Cape Horn in 1949 under the Finnish flag listed a total crew of 33:
Master
4 Officers (1st, 2nd, 3rd Mate and Bosun)
13 Able-Bodied Seamen
5 Ordinary Seamen
5 Deckboys
4 Cook/Assistant Cook/Steward/Assistant Steward
1 Donkeyman (Mechanic)

Owners ran their sailing ships with closest attention to costs. Officers and essential skilled crew, such as sailmakers, were paid still poorly, the captain of Moshulu in 1938 received about $100/month and the average sailmaker about $20/month. "The wages of other crew members were minuscule. A skilled able-bodied seaman (rated as an A.B.) received not more than, and often much less, than sixteen dollars per month." Crews were readily available in spite of abysmal pay because Germany and Scandinavian countries still required sail experience for mariner’s licenses.

Discipline, at the end of the nineteenth century, "especially on American sailing ships, could be brutal, often unnecessarily so." As the end of the windjammer era drew near by the 1930s, "such tactics had pretty much disappeared in the Finnish ships [and] in the ... German ships." However, even the Finnish mates occasionally enforced discipline with their fists while sailing with minimal crews of largely inexperienced youths when "... instant obedience to orders was essential."

Grain race

Grain Race or The Great Grain Race was the informal name for the annual windjammer sailing season generally from South Australia’s grain ports on Spencer Gulf to Lizard Point, Cornwall on the south western most coast of the United Kingdom, or to specific ports. A good, fast passage Australia-to-England via Cape Horn was considered anything under 100 days.

The races

The cargo was grain, usually wheat. The sailing ships which loaded in Spencer Gulf from January to June were, in a broader context, "vivid evidence that South Australia was now inextricably bound into the rapidly developing global network of the wheat trade." The masters of the square-rigged grain carriers engaged in unofficial competition who would sail fastest across the southern ocean, around Cape Horn and up the Atlantic. While the race was informal, it was a source of betting and prestige. The competition gathered so much attention that in 1928 the International Paint Company donated a silver cup for the fastest passage.

The ship with most victories was the four-masted barque Herzogin Cecilie at six times. The fastest ship was Parma in 1933 in 83 days. The grain trade "flourished through the 1930s and reached its peak in 1939." That year thirteen windjammers rode at anchor off Port Victoria. "With the exception of two German ships, all ... flew the flag of the Gustaf Erikson Line and the pale blue Finnish cross."

The last race

The last of the Grain Races was in 1949. Pamir (Captain Verner Björkfelt), fully loaded with 60,000 sacks of Australian barley for distilleries in Scotland, set sail at Port Victoria on 28 May 1949, rounded Cape Horn on 11 July, passed Lizard Point on 2 October and arrived at Falmouth just beyond it in 128 days. Passat (Captain Ivar Hägerstrand), left Port Victoria four days after Pamir, but passed Pamir somewhere in the Roaring Forties of the southern Pacific Ocean on the 6,000 mile run to Cape Horn, and arrived at Queenstown after 110 days. However, it bestowed on Pamir the honor of being the last windjammer with a commercial load to round Cape Horn.

Public perception and reality in retrospect

While the general public thought of the wheat trade as the Grain Race, "there was no compelling economic reason to be first home with a cargo of grain, and the [ship] owners severely discouraged racing by their officers (although they did not mind if their ship arrived ahead of another)." Racing in the gale-force winds of the Roaring Forties and around Cape Horn meant straining ships and losing sails and gear, and it meant the expense of repairing or replacing those damages and losses. "Unlike the hell-bent racing captains of the celebrated tea-clippers of the 1860s ... the captain of a grain ship who lost gear more likely would lose his job."