On the occasion of her only mishap a tropical squall carried away the bobstay, and down came the fore topmast and main topgallant mast. It happened that a Yankee clipper was in company; this vessel beat up to the dismantled Samuel Plimsoll and sent a boat off with the message that she was bound to Australia and would gladly tranship the passengers and carry them on to their destination. This offer, Captain Simpson, who then commanded the Samuel Plimsoll, declined with thanks, so the American went on her way.
It was all day on until the Aberdeen flyer had fresh masts aloft, and then she settled down to make up the lost time. And nobly she did so, one week’s work in the roaring forties totalling 2300 miles, and she eventually arrived at Melbourne, 82 days out. Some days later the Yankee arrived and her captain at once went to the Samuel Plimsoll’s agents and reported speaking her dismasted in the Atlantic, at the same time he commented on her captain’s foolhardiness in not transhipping his passengers.
“Is it Captain Simpson you are referring to?” asked the agent.
“Yes,” returned the Yankee.
“Wall,” said the agent, imitating the American’s leisurely drawl, “I guess you had better speak to him yourself. He’s in the next room.”
In 1899 the famous old ship caught fire in the Thames and had to be scuttled. After being raised and repaired she was sold to Savill of Billiter St., who ran her until 1902 when she was dismasted and so damaged on the passage out to Port Chalmers that they decided not to repair her. She was subsequently towed to Sydney from New Zealand at the end of a 120-fathom hawser, and later taken round to Western Australia where she was converted into a coal hulk.
And here is a description of her as she lies at her moorings in Fremantle harbour:—
From quay to midstream buoy, and from buoy to quay, she is plucked and hauled. Occasionally she feeds a hungry tramp with coal. Abashed and ashamed of her vile uncleanliness she returns to her midstream moorings where most of her time is spent in idleness and neglect. One looks in vain for the long tapering spars and the beautiful tracery of her rigging. Stunted, unsightly derricks have replaced them. The green-painted hull is now transformed into a dull red, a composition red that cries aloud, not of beauty, but of utility. Regularly with each returning ebb and returning flood of the Swan, she swings to her moorings the composition smeared effigy of Samuel Plimsoll, alternately facing towards river and sea. Marine life has made of her plates a habitation and refuge; her bottom is foul with the dense green growth of years. Her costly fittings, solid brass belaying pins and highly burnished, brass-covered rails and spotless decks, where are they? Coal-gritted baskets, whips and tackles are strewn along the decks: they all proclaim her squalid and servile calling.
Amongst these old hulks, however, she is withal the most dignified looking, the graceful lines of her hull lending her an air of distinction at once apparent even to the layman. As coal hulking goes, she is perhaps the most fortunate of her class. Days pass—weeks—perhaps months, all spent in slothful idleness and neglect, whilst her more unfortunate sister hulks scarcely know a day but what they are not coal feeding some important steam-driven interloper.