‘Expeditious’, however, it did not prove to be—at any rate on its first voyage. For when twenty miles from the Humber, the axis of the paddles broke; and instead of reaching London in thirty hours, as the passengers had expected, the Kingston found its way back to Hull some forty-eight hours after its triumphant start.
These early steam packets were somewhat different from the ocean liners of our own day. Compare the portrait of the Rockingham on page [295] with that of the Bayardo on page [299]. Launched in 1910 from Earle’s Shipbuilding Yard, at a cost of £67,000, the latter was for its short life the ‘Queen of the Wilson Line.’
The fate of the Diana and the Bayardo illustrates the dangers of the Humber. The latter vessel left Gothenburg on a Friday evening in January, 1912, with a cargo worth £30,000 and a small number of passengers. On the Saturday evening she was making her way up the Humber in a dense fog when she ran hard aground on a sandbank almost opposite the dock which was her destination. By the following evening her back was broken, and the ‘Queen of the Wilson Line’ was a hopeless wreck.
The ‘Southampton.’
The ‘Bayardo.’
Ships Old and New.
