On April 14, 1912, an old, storm-beaten, odd-looking, three-masted sailing ship—the oldest vessel afloat—set out from Lancaster, England, and dropping away from Glasson dock, veteran of all piers, seized the wind in her teeth and sped away on a voyage across the western ocean. At different times in her career the old barkentine Success, for such is her name, had been a full-rigged merchantman, a convict transport ship, and a despised prison hulk, but just what she is to-day can be ascertained by all who care to go down to the harbor at Oakland, Cal., and devote an hour or so to an inspection of the age-old craft which has just arrived here.
High of stern—almost a galleon in lines—bluffy, "apple-bowed," with an out-of-date figurehead sprawling beneath a skyward bowsprit, she sailed, alone of her kind, an anachronism, a curiosity, a craft as out of place among modern hulls, her foremast hands declared, "as an alligator ashore."
And that was why she sailed uninsured, for Lloyd’s—that gamest of all maritime-insurance companies, in whose rooms a gamble will be taken even upon a ship whose skipper "cracks on sail into the Day of Judgment"—had refused her as a risk.
She had been denied British clearance, too, and her only papers were a board-of-health certificate, countersigned by the American consul in her port of departure.
Before her company was filled, a score of captains had thrown up their sea-calloused hands in holy horror when offered the master’s billet aboard her, and two crews had deserted before her forefoot could bruise the ocean swells. And even now the old craft is short-manned.
The date first set for the sailing of the Success from the port on the River Lune saw the Titanic clear South[Pg 65]ampton upon her memorable and tragic maiden voyage. The old barkentine, however, was delayed by an inability to fill her crew.
"If I hadn’t known the sort of stuff that the old girl was built of, I’d have been as skeptical of her chances as the rest," Captain D. H. Smith, her owner, admits. "As vessels go nowadays, she isn’t any giant. She is only one hundred and thirty-five feet over all, with a beam of twenty-nine feet, and registered at five hundred and eighty-nine tons. And then consider her age and history.
"She was built of teak throughout—what they used to call ‘black ship’—and that’s why I have such faith in her, even though she was battered up some in her early youth by the Indian Ocean pirates, and after she fell from caste was moored for so many years as a prison hulk.
"But she made the thousands of miles between Australia and England under her own sail, and then I determined to bring her to the United States."
The Success, all sail set to catch the last of the easterly winds she had counted on to carry her across the north Atlantic in forty-six days, left Lancaster with fair weather. She was provisioned for fifty days and carried eighteen thousand gallons of water.