PART IV.—THE NEW ZEALAND TRADE.
The age of dear tradition has gone by
And steam has killed romance upon the sea,
The newer age requires the newer men,
And dying hard in corners of the world,
The old hands pass forgotten to their graves.
The old Colonial clipper is no more,
Denied the wool freights homeward, she must seek
For nitre on the South Pacific slope.
She need not go to China ports for tea,
She need not haunt the Hooghly for the jute,
Nor beat the Gulf of Martaban for rice,
Her time has come and she must pass away;
Yet still she holds the passage of the Horn,
And when the waterway of Panama
Makes islands of the two Americas,
She’ll hold the bleak old headland for her own,
And round its pitch she’ll fade away and die.—
John Anderson, in Nautical Magazine.