Despite early headwinds, Safmarine sailed into bright future
SEVENTY winters ago yesterday, Captain Frank Wilkinson must have been glad when his new command had completed her 22-day maiden voyage from New York and was alongside at Cape Town’s E Berth. The first ship Safmarine owned, Constantia, had arrived at her home port.
She was one of 890 war-built Victory ships that had been designed to be faster and to carry more cargo than the earlier Liberty ships of which 2 710 had been built in 18 US shipyards.
After the war, some Victory ships moved cargoes of steel, railway equipment, machinery, cement and food for the reconstruction of Europe and Japan; numerous shipping lines bought others as stopgaps prior to building replacements for their wartime losses; dozens were put into the US reserve fleet (and pressed into service again during the later Korean and Vietnam wars), while a number were for sale.
To supplement the chartered ships on their US-South Africa service that had been running since June 1946, Safmarine’s management wanted to buy three of those surplus Victory ships.
However, the Americans were reluctant to sell them to the fledgling South African company that was competing on the US-South Africa trade with three US companies – Lykes, Farrell and Robin Lines.
When Safmarine’s managing director, “Bomber” Harris , formerly of the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command, asked prime minister Jan Smuts to intercede on the company’s behalf, the Americans grudgingly released the trio of Victory ships to Safmarine.
After extensive refits that included the removal of the wartime accommodation for 2 500 troops, 12 gun emplacements, and equipment in the military hospital aboard, Constantia, Morgenster and Vergelegen were readied for their maiden voyages to Cape Town in 1947.
Constantia’s maiden voyage had not started well. Recruited by an agency from one of the British seamen’s pools and shipped across the Atlantic to New York in a Cunard liner to join Constantia, the delivery crew members were largely an objectionable lot, preferring dockside taverns to working aboard Constantia when instructed.
Some tried to abscond on the morning of her departure from New York, but were apprehended and returned to the ship!
However, when the freighter steamed past the Manhattan skyline on August 1, 1947, she was fully laden with machinery, car parts and railway lines, some of which had been loaded – while still warm – directly from the Bethlehem Steel plant upriver from New York.
Fog patches shrouded Table Bay on that morning 70 years ago, as Constantia approached the pilot station at dead slow ahead. Through the fog and bearing the pilot came the 50-year-old tug, Eland, a coalfired vessel that eventually would serve more than 60 years in local harbours.
Next came TH Watermeyer, one of Cape Town’s major harbour tugs, to assist the freighter to her berth where the troublesome delivery crew was replaced with a permanent local crew.
Within weeks, the other two Victory ships arrived, although Morgenster broke down off Robben Island and required tug assistance into port.
Although meticulously maintained by Safmarine, the15-knot Victory ships could not compete with the fast modern freighters operated by the company’s rivals. By the late 1960s, Safmarine had replaced all three with fast new ships.
From those three ships grew a company that, in the late 1960s, operated more than 30 South African ships and employed about 1 500 local seafarers and hundreds of people ashore. For various reasons, those halcyon days sadly disappeared.
To return to that level of local ship ownership and employment of seafarers, we shall need strong, decisive leadership, astute management, a favourable political climate and tax systems that are conducive to ship owning.
Tragically, the present government’s ineptitude and business-inhibiting regulations make this a non-starter.