This week’s cover shows the famous old-time racing cutter Mohawk, her lee-rail awash. In 1896, the Mohawk won the Royal Yacht Squadron’s Queen’s Cup. Her owner at that time was Major Orr-Ewing.
In the City Docks and in the docks at Portishead and Avonmouth are ample facilities for the handling of general cargoes. Most of the import of bananas from the Caribbean to Great Britain is handled at Avonmouth, where also are up-to-date granaries and oil storage installations. Bristol has been a great port from the earliest days of British seafaring, when nearly all our great mariners came from the West Country. From Bristol the Cabots set sail in 1497 to discover Newfoundland. Bristol was, in fact, the port of the Merchant Venturers, and to-day it still retains its former greatness and is one of the leading ports of the British Isles. Bristol’s principal imports are bananas, oil and grain, apart from general cargoes.
THE BREAKSEA LIGHTSHIP IN THE BRISTOL CHANNEL is the subject of this arresting picture by Charles Pears, ROI. The artist has illustrated a most important event in the life to the men who operate the lightship - relief and provisions being brought on board from a Trinity House tender. The Breaksea lightship is well known to navigators in the Bristol Channel. She has a red hull and carries a ball at her masthead. Her light shows one white flash every fifteen seconds and is visible at a distance of eleven miles. Her fog siren when in operation gives one blast of two and a half seconds every twenty seconds. Her submarine fog bell gives three quick strokes followed by an interval of ten seconds. The lightship’s position is lat. 51° 20’ N, long. 3°18’ W, off the Glamorganshire coast.
Under the leadership of King Xerxes, an immense Persian army, supported by a fleet of unexampled size, invaded Greece in 480 BC. Undaunted by this menace, the allied Greeks met the Persian fleet in the strait between the island of Salamis and the Greek mainland, and totally defeated the invader. The Battle of Salamis was one of the first great naval battles, where the ships of the colossal Persian Empire were defeated by the superior tactics of the much smaller Greek fleet, just as many hundreds of years later our own small British ships defeated the Invincible Armada.
The Sunderland firm of Doxford has long specialized in this class of vessel, and the Peebles was completed in 1930. The is a shelter-decker, with a deadweight tonnage of 9,200 and a draught of 24 ft 8 in, her dimensions being 422 ft 9 in by 54 ft 3 in by 28 ft 8 in.
Ships’ boilers at first were built on the lines of early land steam boilers, but before long improvements were incorporated to make the boilers more suitable for marine purposes.
The carriage of fruit presents special problems to the shipowner, for it is impossible to mix citrous and non-citrous fruit cargoes, because the one will spoil the other. Modern fruit ships are among the fastest cargo ships afloat. This chapter describes the conditions prevailing in the fruit trade to-day, deals with the general design of the fruit ship and gives details of the most interesting vessels employed in the trade.
With the famous sailing ships Erebus and Terror, Captain Sir James Clark Ross, the intrepid explorer and keen scientist, sailed through the pack-ice in search of the supposed Antarctic Continent in 1840-43. Ross was the first man to reach the Antarctic Continent which lay beyond the ice-pack that had turned back so many of the early explorers.
