Wreck of dreams
A forlorn wreck in Pelorus Sound provides plenty of fodder for fertile imaginations – and why not? It carries a colourful history.
A forlorn wreck at the head of Pelorus Sound contains a fascinating history.
Every kid loves a shipwreck to explore – I know, because I was a kid once. One of my favourite childhood memories is of letting my imagination run wild aboard a twisted old hulk in Pelorus Sound. I knew nothing of her history – to me she was a Cape Horn windjammer, a buccaneer flagship or even a wrecked treasure ship, depending on which book I’d been reading at the time.
It has only been recently, sailing into St Omer Bay from foreign waters aboard our own piratical black gaff ketch, that my wife Barbara and I have taken the time to delve into her history, whilst using the grand old hulk as the backdrop for a contemporary book to stir the imagination of a current generation of kids.
It didn’t take much digging before some unexpected facts turned up. Such as the fact that these very deck planks supported Barbara’s great-uncle Albert, (A.W Westrupp) when, at the tender age of 13 years, he sailed to New Zealand’s sub-Antarctic islands in 1912.
Or that one of my greatest sailing heroes, Frank Worsley of the ill-fated Shackleton voyage, sailed her from Sydney to Wellington as First Mate, and spent 1905 (during her recommissioning) as her commander, despite only holding the rank of sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval reserve.
With her mid-section missing, her steel ribs rusting away and her hardwood planking stripped away in large chain-sawn rectangles, there is little now to show that she began life as HMS Sparrow, a 165-foot steam-powered, barquentine-rigged Redbreast class gunship in an 1889 British naval dockyard.
The last of the nine built (all in the same year), she was rapidly doomed to become a victim of technological redundancy and the ravages of tropical waters. Most of her sisters were condemned within two decades, by which time the Royal
Navy was pouring its money into gigantic steel, Dreadnought-class, turbine-driven monsters.
The tropical waters in which she found herself sailing were off the African coast, where she was deployed to stem the final vestiges of the Congo slave trade. She saw action while stationed in the Gambia River, dealing to a rebel tribe which was resisting the instigation of a ‘chieftaincy system’ of indirect rule in the Gambia protectorate.
Despite her six 25-pound quick-firing guns, two three-pounders and two machine guns mounted above decks, it was her marines who were involved in the only significant military action of her naval career during a brief excursion ashore in 1892 (her other claim to fame was in 1896, when her crew formed a team to play in Kenya’s first-ever cricket match).
By 1905 she was 16 years old and already deteriorating rapidly – clearly redundant as far as the Royal Navy was concerned. Meanwhile the NZ government was casting around for an affordable vessel to train up a backlog of young hopefuls yearning for a life at sea. At a mere £820, HMS Sparrow fitted the bill, with sufficient below-decks volume to cram large numbers of youngsters aboard (up to sixty 12-14 year olds).
With her coal-fired, triple-expansion 1,200hp steam engine
(single screw of course), as well as a manageable three-masted barquentine rig, she was ideal to train the boys in both steam and sail. The yetto-be-famous Frank Worsley had already been commanding an island-trading brigantine, and this brief command was to be another step in his meteoric rise.
The Royal Navy was no doubt relieved to have such a white elephant off its books, but the NZ Government had quite a different role in mind for the old girl. First up of course would be a name change, and despite a proposal to rename her after the recently-retired PM (Seddon), the name chosen was much more apt. A ‘te amokura’ is a red-tailed globe-trotting, tropical frigatebird with a tail of red streamers – perfect for a Red-breast class ship with a bevy of bird-named sisters.
Amokura was no longer to be a navy vessel, despite her role as a training ship for both merchant navy and Royal Navy cadets. During her re-commissioning by the NZ Marine Department in Wellington during 1906, she was stripped of her guns and fitted out with accommodations below
swearing, and you got it across the backside before you knew where you were. For worse misbehaviour it was six of the best while lying face down on your hammock bed on the quarterdeck, and by golly that hurt. But the worst punishment was for being caught smoking in the spud locker – being sent aloft to stand on the truck of the mainmast for half an hour in only a flannel shirt, regardless of the weather!” [From Lincoln Martinson’s oral history].
The training paid off though, and most cadets accepted the discipline as a part of being straightened out for adulthood. In the subsequent decades, most of New Zealand’s merchant ships were commanded by former
Amokura cadets, and it became a mark of distinction to be a member of the Amokura Old Boys Association.
The dozen years between 1907 and 1919 were without doubt this vessel’s golden years, fulfilling a considerably more purposeful existence than during her first decade largely on stand-by off the African coast. But in 1919 her survey showed rapid hull deterioration, and her last intake of cadets was to be trained aboard largely within Wellington Harbour. Like all her sisterships, it appears the composite form of construction was not a recipe for longevity.
The ‘carbon-iron’ frames were most likely reacting to the tannic acid of the oak planking (teak being too
expensive in this later era of wooden shipbuilding). The copper sheathing may well have created an electrolytic reaction as well. In post-war New Zealand the government had nowhere near the necessary funding for major repairs. Sadly, in 1922 she was decommissioned to be laid up in Wellington harbour as a floating coal hulk for three decades.
Curiously, it was during this phase of her life that the old ship became a floating home for Captain Martin with his wife and three red-haired daughters. The girls all had vivid memories of how hard it was to keep their white petticoats free of coal dust while climbing down onto the launch which took them to school.
Motueka’s former harbour-master Rob Williams was a Wellington youngster with a lust for the sea during the 1940s. He would wander Wellington’s Queen’s Wharf, eyeing up the scows which were later to become his livelihood. His memories of this once proud ship were of a weed-streamered, rust-pocked wooden hulk, her cut-down masts surviving as mere derrick supports.
The ultimate insult to her dignity must have been the idiosyncratic large shed which had been planted crudely on her foredeck. Rob’s strongest memory is of watching her being hauled out at the Evans Bay patent slip, and gagging at the smell of its metre-long fleece of marine growth as it was peeled away by slip-workers.
“In those days the slipway location wasn’t called Greta Point,” he comments. “That came later when the new publican named the hotel after his wife, Greta. The name seems to have stuck!”
Rob’s father was a seaman before him, and his precious photo album has survived, with its treasured collection of tiny black and white snapshots. Among them is a snap of Amokura’s final bid for freedom, taken from the deck of the scow Echo, when the gallant old hulk parted her tow-cable in mid Cook Strait.
This photo is probably the sole remaining record of her final voyage, neatly captioned with the date – 11/3/53. She had been sold for scrap and was under tow to her final resting place in Kenepuru Sound. Rob suggests that the tug fussing nearby in the lower photo is probably the Peranos’ Tuatea. Clearly the tow was resumed in due course, as by the time of my first childhood visit a decade later, she was a permanent fixture in St Omer Bay.
Like a stranded whale, she lies at the mid-tide zone at the south end of the silt-sand beach, her entire mid-section stripped away to leave her aft section listing drunkenly to port. For’ard is still every kid’s dream – a foredeck surviving in its entirety, nosed into the trees which droop over the steeply rising hillside.
She has become part of the local ecosystem now, as many generations of mussels and crabs will testify. But to countless kids (young and old) she still surely rides the Southern Ocean rollers, her hold laden with treasure as the albatrosses soar overhead. BNZ