“Berean” as an Ice Carrier.
Mr. T. B. Walker died in 1894, and all his ships were sold two years later.
Berean went to the Norwegians and was employed for the next 14 years carrying ice from Norway to the Thames. Captain Wyrill took over the Eden Holme and some of his old hands went with him. He was hauling into the London Dock after his first voyage to Tasmania in the Eden Holme, when the poor little Berean under her new flag was hauling out; and the change for the worse in the old ship was so marked that one of her old crew remarked to Captain Wyrill with tears in his eyes:—“There she is, sir, but she looks very different from what she was when we had her.” Nevertheless, though uncared for, the Berean still continued to make good regular passages, and was a constant visitor to the Regent’s Canal Dock. But in 1910 she was run into by a foreign steamer below Gravesend, when inward bound from Langesund, and was towed ashore in a sinking condition. This was the end of her active career, for she was now condemned, and after being patched up went to Falmouth as a hulk. I saw her there not many years before the war, and the marks of the thoroughbred were still plain to be seen.
Loss of the “Corinth.”
The Corinth, Walker’s only other composite ship, was lost by spontaneous combustion.
In the year 1890 she sailed from Launceston, in the wake of the Berean, with a cargo of wool and skins, under command of Captain Littler. When she was a week out and about 300 miles S.E. of New Zealand, signs of fire in the hold were discovered early on a Sunday morning. Prompt measures to fight the fire were at once taken, everything was battened down, holes were cut in the deck, through which the hose was led and the wool bales were soused with water; nevertheless the fire gained rapidly and at 10 o’clock the same night the ship had to be abandoned. The crew got safely away in two boats and headed for the New Zealand coast, but with little hope of making the land against the stormy weather of the prevailing westerly winds.
After they had been five days and nights adrift, the smoke of a steamer was sighted about sundown; then darkness set in. The provisions had become soaked in salt water but the shipwrecked crew had managed to keep a few rockets dry, and these were sent up one after the other in the hope of attracting the attention of the steamer. At last only one rocket remained, and after some discussion as to whether to risk it or keep it for a future occasion, it also was fired and was seen from the bridge of the approaching vessel. However, she showed no signs of having seen it in the way of an answering rocket or flare, so one can imagine the relief of the shipwrecked crew when her masthead and later her side lights were seen, steering end on for the boats. The steamer proved to be the Fifeshire, homeward bound from New Zealand, and she took the Corinth castaways right on to London.
A description of Walker’s iron barques will be found at the end of [Part III.]
The Little “Ethel.”
Perhaps the most familiar ship to old City men was the little Ethel, which under the command of Captain A. Ross ran for years with the utmost regularity between London and Tasmania, and when in the Thames always moored at Hayes Wharf, London Bridge. She was a composite barque of 556 tons and was built in 1866 by Pile, of Sunderland, and owned by Fenwick & Co., of London.