Rich history of shipping revealed in 50-year-old SA journal

PAGING through the bound 12-month editions of a local maritime journal published 50 years ago, I found my nostalgia levels rising. Six Union-Castle reefer ships were due in Cape Town to load fruit; within a few weeks, 20 Royal Interocean Line vessels were on passage to Durban from Asian ports, while DOAL, Ellerman and Swedish Transatlantic ships abounded in the arrival list from Europe.

Union-Castle was advertising three cruises to South America in the chartered Pacific Steam Navigation Company’s Reina del Mar. Since she had gone down the ways at the Harland & Wolff yard at Belfast in 1955, she had undergone several refits, including one from which she emerged as a two-class cruise ship to be operated by the Travel Saving Association in which Union-Castle, Royal Mail Line, Canadian Pacific and the founder Max Wilson had shares.

Another refit modified her to a oneclass cruise ship in Union-Castle livery, and in 1973, Union-Castle bought her. She had followed the Canadian Pacific sister ships Empress of Britain and Empress of England that had also been chartered to Max Wilson’s organisation for South American cruises.

The journal also reported the arrival of Mormacargo, the first of MooreMcCormack’s new class of 25-knot freighters. Since the company had taken over the Robin Line service from the US east coast, initially using war-built ships, it introduced larger and faster ships, culminating in the Mormacargo class.

Deeper into the year’s editions of the journal, I found reference to record passages achieved by Farrell Lines’ ships that progressively reduced the voyage time from New York to Cape Town to just over 11 days, a far cry from 17-day voyages of the old Victory ships. Mormacargo had missed the record because she had encountered a strong south-easter during the latter part of her voyage to Cape Town.

Durban shipyards were increasing their production, turning out trawlers and the Tristan da Cunha vessel Gillian Gaggins, while, from a Japanese yard, South Africa took delivery of its first custom-built bulk carrier, Sugela, later named SA Sugela.

And another bulk carrier also made the headlines in the journal. Then Japan’s largest bulk carrier, Japan Line’s bulker Long Beach Maru loaded a record iron ore cargo of 51 090 tons in Port Elizabeth, then the country’s ore export port. Compare this to the 400 000 tons carried regularly via the Cape by the Vale-class ore carriers! Size was also a discussion point when the “huge” tanker Oregon Getty (90 466 deadweight and 255m long) was the largest vessel to enter Sturrock Drydock for a refit.

South African army Captain JT McGill, the journal reported, had invented the forerunner to the so-called EPIRB, a buoy containing a transponder that is released when a ship sinks. A potential inhibitor to the success of Captain McGill’s invention might have been that a rope would link the buoy to the submerged ship, an improbability if the vessel had sunk in thousands of metres of water.

Perhaps a reader has heard of Captain McGill, once based in Pretoria, and a veteran of Delville Wood. A short report in the December 1965 issue of the journal indicated that Rotterdam would get the first container terminal in Europe.

I also noted that a luxury tour bus was discharged by Clan Ramsay in Cape Town. While this was not uncommon, the bus would fulfil a most unusual role as a mobile cinema to show Union-Castle advertising films to townsfolk across South Africa. Perhaps that accounts for the velskoen-brigade who were among the revellers aboard Reina del Mar during her sorties to the land of the samba.