Sail and Steam in
(updated 1 July 2004)
Introduction:
This section of
my site outlines the transition from Sail to Steam in
Consent is
granted for reproduction of individual graphs by teaching institutions and
museums for educational and display purposes with acknowledgement to R.J. Lowe,
The graphs have been compiled in a deliberately basic format both to keep them simple for a non-specialist audience and also to limit the web site costs. Each shows only two variables. In each, Sail is represented in green, Steam in red. All tonnage figures are net which makes for a fairly consistent comparison between Sail and Steam in terms of cargo capacity. In line with widespread contemporary practice, Steam includes motor vessels and Sail includes unpowered barges in all cases.
Shipbuilding in
Traditionally,
shipbuilding in
Small-scale informal European settlement gradually developed during the following decades in association with sealing, whaling and an expanding trade with Māori*, particularly in the north. Further vessels were built and by the 1820’s shipyards had been established though the output was small. Māori, with their long maritime and canoe-building traditions and conducive social structure were involved in maritime activities as seamen, whale ship crew members, providores, in ship-building and as owners.
* For the information of international readers, contemporary general
Difficulties of
international law arose when ships built in
* Sensitive to the legal
technicalities, the owners named the Sir
George Murray after the Private Secretary of State for the Colonies but it availed
them not.
** For an account refer The Treaty of Waitangi, Claudia Orange,
Allen and Unwin and Port Nicholson Press,
*** An image of this flag appears –
erroneously – for New Zealand in the colour chart “National colors worn by
merchant vessels of different countries” at the beginning of the 1893 volume of
the List of Merchant Vessels of the
United States (and possibly some other volumes of around the same date
although the feature had been dropped by 1898). However, some use of this flag
continued as it was used on a South African (Boer) War Medal design. The
present
.
Shipbuilding
since 1840 is represented in the graph below based on Watt’s Index of ships registered in
Some 1,798
sailing ships and 525 powered vessels were built in NZ in the period 1840 to
1950 - small numbers in global terms. Most were small in size by the standards
of larger countries for only 67 of the sailing ships and 50 of the powered
vessels exceeded 100 tons net. However, fairly small wooden ships were what was
most needed to provide local transport in an initially roadless country.
Established Australian and other British shipping was adequate to cover the
trans-Tasman and
The graph shows
that the majority of ships built in
Even though most
construction was small by world standards the local ship-building industry
developed a tradition of skill in wooden shipbuilding that persists to the
present day. Local development of the sailing scow concept from the 1870’s
through to World War I, was recognised as innovative (refer NZ Scows). Locally
built schooners were in demand in the
The most
comprehensive published accounts of New Zealand shipbuilding in the days of
Sail are Cliff Hawkins’ Out of Auckland
(the author, Auckland, 1960) and A
Maritime Heritage (Collins, 1978), which were both widely sold
internationally and are available on the second hand market. Hawkins’ accounts
deal only with
Most NZ-registered ships not built in New Zealand were built in Australia or the United Kingdom although more than 200 North American ships came under New Zealand ownership (refer North America). More than forty Scandinavian and other European-built ships were also locally owned.
Most of the
larger ships owned in
*The
** Captain’s
Log. New Zealand’s Maritime History, Gavin McLean, Hodder Moa Beckett,,
I have not yet
compiled a graph similar to the one above showing tonnage by decade and place
of construction. It would show the bars for later decades larger relative to
earlier decades and feature the
Ship ownership in New Zealand
Local ship
ownership is reflected in the following two graphs based on official statistics
showing ships registered at ten-year intervals from 1870 although at times
significant tonnages of locally owned ships were registered overseas (the
British maritime registration system being world-wide). As far as numbers are
concerned, Sail predominated until around World War I. Many of these ships were
extremely small by any standards. The carrying capacity of many was no larger
than that of one or two modern standard shipping containers but appropriate to
their fulfilment of roles performed today by motor vehicles. Larger ships could
have been and were built but much of the need throughout the 19th
century was for small vessels that could tranship small cargoes more or less
anywhere. Broadly similar ships played similar roles to varying degrees
throughout the 19th century and into the 20th in the
other colonies of Australasia and in
As the following
graph shows, the tonnage of locally-registered steam ships expanded rapidly
during the 1880’s and 1890’s. A particularly significant contributor to the
trend to steam was the Union Steamship Company of
The tonnage of sailing ship registrations peaked in 1884. The declining tonnage of steam ships after World War I reflects both the increasing technological efficiency of the fleet on one hand and the increasingly strong and successful competition of rail transport with coastal shipping on the other. A sharp dip occurred with the transfer of Union Steamship Company ships from New Zealand to British registration during World War I for insurance reasons.*
* The
Ship’s Register. A History of British Ship Status and Registration Procedures
including their adoption in New Zealand, Robert D. Campbell, Ministry of Transport
– Marine Division, Wellington, 1980, p. 55.
Coastal shipping
Although the majority of locally registered ships up to World War I were sailing ships and their total tonnage remained significant into the 1900’s, the greater capacity of steam ships for frequent and regular passages saw Steam activity predominating over Sail in the coastal trades before 1880 even when judged by numbers of ships. (The available statistics do not differentiate between sail and steam before 1880.)
When coastal shipping is measured in terms of the tonnage of shipping movements, Steam was already predominant over Sail in 1880 by a large margin, reflecting the ability of even steam ships of quite primitive capability by modern standards to out-perform a fleet of sailing ships of similar tonnage.
Steam ship tonnages cleared in the coastal trade expanded to 12.1 million tons by 1914, more than six times the 1880 level. In contrast, Sail coastal clearances had fallen to less than half their 1880 level by 1914 constituting less than two percent of the total.
Further work is
necessary to fully determine to what degree statistical conventions may mask
aspects of analytical interest. The universal contemporary statistical
convention treats the coastwise passages of an overseas ship between two
loading ports as a coastal movement. Thus a ship arriving from Australia at
Bluff, discharging and loading cargo and passengers at Bluff, Dunedin,
Lyttelton, and Wellington and departing for Australia from Wellington is
counted as a Bluff overseas arrival and coastal departure, Dunedin and
Lyttelton coastal arrivals and departures, a Wellington coastal arrival and a
Wellington overseas departure – one overseas arrival, one overseas departure,
three coastal arrivals and three coastal departures, one ship and its tonnage
being added to the aggregate total every time. The regular trans-Tasman steamer
services established in the 1880’s deliberately operated just such schedules in
order to service all the main cities. (The four main cities of
In the 1920’s an
additional alternative statistical series was introduced treating all the
coastal passages in the above example as overseas shipping. The effect on the
figures was considerable but it was too late to reveal anything about Sail
although it is known that sailing ships often discharged imports and migrants
and loaded exports at more than one port. Neither statistical approach is right
or wrong in any absolute sense but there is much to be said for identifying the
coastwise passages of overseas ships as a distinct category for analysis and
comparison. A major argument in the debate over containerisation in the 1970’s
was the cost to the shipping companies of two and three-port loading – it was
not peculiar to Sail or the early days of meat and wool exports by Steam. Reconstructing
the statistics from individual ship records for the period to 1922 is a
significant undertaking but feasible as a co-operative venture over a period as
the numbers are manageable. It would also be useful to be able to differentiate
other categories of coastal shipping, notably the regularly timetabled
Overseas trade
Sail maintained a major role for much longer in the overseas trades. Steam competition was limited compared with the coastal trades until developments in the efficiency of steam engines gave them a sufficient margin over Sail on longer routes, for major developments also occurred in the capacity and efficiency of sailing ships for the long-distance bulk trades right into the 1900’s. The graph below shows that although steam ships competed strongly during the 1880’s in overseas departures, the cross-over point, as measured by the number of ships, occurred in 1893. (Overall, overseas arrivals closely track the trends for departures, for the ships concerned were the same apart from the small numbers shipwrecked or which were delivered from overseas to join the local coastal fleet.)
The average size of steam ships was larger so that steam tonnage already predominated by a margin when the first statistics to differentiate sail and steam were published in 1886.
More detailed analysis shows an important
distinction between passages to the
An important
distinction between the
The following
graph showing the volume of exports from 1870 to 1910 illustrates just how much
trade was picked up by steam ships and, conversely, was not being picked up by
sailing ships. For the first decade shown on the graph, sailing ships carried
more or less all of the major staple agricultural export. During the 1880’s,
steam ships made inroads on that cargo and picked up the new developing staple
exports. During the 1890’s, steam ships took over most of the wool trade. By
1910 they had nearly all of the former staple trade as well as virtually all of
the new. We can divide the graph of exports between Sail and Steam as follows.
Sail is represented by nearly all of the blue (wool) in the leftmost third
tapering away in the middle towards the bottom of the blue area on the right
hand side. All the rest represents the growth of Steam. The graph illustrates
neatly how the Steam expansion was much more a case of leading the new, rather
than fighting for the old.
The sailing ships never really got the chance to break out of the wool trade that had been their staple for the previous 20 years or so. Potentially, that left them plenty of scope because the volume of wool exports more than doubled from the early 1880’s through to 1910 as the graph shows, but they were unable to retain this trade. The sailing ships also lost a valuable source of income with the marked reduction in immigrant numbers during the 1880’s compared with the high levels of assisted immigration in the 1870’s. They had made the outward passage with immigrants in temporary accommodation in the ‘tween-decks in addition to the general cargo in their holds. In the 1880’s there were relatively few passengers available to either Sail or Steam. During the 1890’s, the steam ships took the immigrant trade too.
The use of
sailing ships in the wool trade on a minor scale continued into the 1920’s,
notably through chartering by the farmer-backed company of G. H. Scales*. In
1921 the five-masted barque France,
the second of the name and conventionally acknowledged as the largest sailing
ship ever built, uplifted the largest single wool cargo from New Zealand up to
that date **. A number of photographs in local collections record her departure
from Wellington on 5 September 1921 *** on what was to be the last passage of her
last complete voyage as she was wrecked in New Caledonia the following year.
The
* A
Venture into Shipping. A Success Story. Geo. H. Scales Ltd. 1912-1972, T.G. Coveny, Whitcombe and Tombs, 1972., Rocking the Boat?: A History of Scales
Corporation Limited, Gavin McLean, Hazard Press,
**
The Last of the Windjammers, Basil
Lubbock, Brown Son & Ferguson Ltd, Glasgow, 1929, Vol. II, p. 313.
*** one of which became the basis for a
sketch published in Wellington Harbour: A
Heritage of Tara, Donald R. Nielson, A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1970, p. 84,
which was reproduced on a series of
table mats 50 or more years after the event, though few who dined off
them knew what they signified.
****
Jackson’s
account of the transition from Sail to Steam in the Sydney wool trade* appears likely to
broadly fit the New Zealand pattern, though with some possible differences in
timing which I have yet to fully explore (with the scale of its industry,
Sydney may well have led the way for all the Australasian colonies; the steam
ship route to Europe from Sydney was also shorter than that from NZ and the
sailing ship route longer). He demonstrated that the proportion of wool cargoes
carried from Sydney by steam ships leapt from two percent in the 1874-75 season
to 25 percent in 1879-80 and 53 percent in 1884-85.** The percentage then remained
at around that level for more than a decade during which the volumes carried by
both Sail and Steam increased considerably. The Steam percentage did not exceed
90 percent until after 1900.
* R.V. Jackson, The Decline of the Wool
Clippers, The Great Circle, October
1980, pp 87-98. For a detailed comprehensive account of the transition from
Sail to Steam in the Australian and New Zealand trades, refer Frank Broeze,
Distance tamed: steam navigation to Australia and New Zealand from its
beginnings to the outbreak of the Great War, Journal of Transport History, Third Series, 10 (1), March 1989, pp
1-21.
** Work in progress may show that the
percentage was not as high at this time in the
Quite specific
as well as general factors influenced the particular timing of the transition
from Sail to Steam in
*Sail to
At the same
time, sentimental attachment by a single influential individual played a role
in keeping Sail in the trade. Walter Savill, founding partner in 1858 of the
company that bore his name, never welcomed the transition to steam. Not all of
the Shaw Savill sailing ships were transferred to the new company and the terms
of the amalgamation permitted the old company to continue in parallel with the
new, provided its operations did not conflict. Savill kept going those of the
remaining sailing ships that he could, chartered and purchased others and even
had two more built. They all flew his old house flag, the 1834
* Sail to
The trans-Tasman trade
Most overseas shipping
to and from
The following
graphs show clearances other than those to the
The pattern of the graphs broadly follows that of the earlier graphs for total clearances as the majority of ships and much of the tonnage was in the trans-Tasman trade, a pattern that persisted until into the early 20th century when trade with Australia fell to low levels that did not revive until the 1960’s when a different economic relationship developed.
The NZ statistics indicate that the transition from Sail to Steam in terms of tonnage had already occurred on the trans-Tasman run by 1886. They cannot indicate the actual date for they do not make the sail/steam distinction until 1886.
Fortuitously,
most of the Australian colonies introduced the sail/steam statistical
distinction some ten years earlier. It is therefore possible to examine the
transition in trans-Tasman shipping from the other end of the route. I am still
assembling the complete record as seven separately – and differently – compiled
series of statistics are involved, which are not all available locally for all
years. However, almost all the shipping links were with
The Victorian
statistics show that Steam was already predominant in shipping between
Symbolising the transition from Sail to Steam
As far as the
prestigious
The event was
the occasion on 14 February 1895 when in lat. 46° 15’ S., long. 68° 16’ E., the
New Zealand Shipping Company’s full-rigged ship Turakina sailed past the steamer Ruapehu which was logging 14 knots and above under both steam and
auxiliary sail. The occasion is commemorated in a painting “When Sail beat
Steam” by marine artist Frank H. Mason, R.B.A. that was prominently displayed
in the company’s
In the prosaic sense, the remarkable feature represented in the painting is the improbability of any two ships meeting at all given the vastness of the ocean and the small number of ships on the route. It isn’t so very remarkable that the Turakina overtook the Ruapehu for the sailing conditions were optimum for a ship of her type. Mason’s painting shows the Turakina with a strong breeze or near-gale on the port quarter under all sail except the mizzen topgallant and royal which were furled, a practice followed to ease the steering of a full-rigged ship in a strong following sea. Quite a few other sailing ships afloat at the time might well have accomplished the same faced with similar competition in similar conditions.
Of course, it wasn’t such mundane considerations that caught the imagination of artist and observers alike but the sentimental “last fling of a dying breed” construction that they put upon the image – a similar sentiment to that underlying a whole genre of lone Scottish Highland stag images of similar (?and older) vintage. The economic realities were well-understood by the contemporary observers. They did not expect to ever again hear of such an occasion. They could afford the painting. They could no longer afford the ship. The company sold her in 1899. Norwegian owners reduced her to barque rig and ran her for a few more years. By 1914 she had been scrapped.
Not to let a
good story go begging for lack of reinforcement, painter Charles Dixon also
recreated the scene in 1927 from a different angle of vision. The resulting
painting was hung in the company’s
Jeremy Lowe
April 2004
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