Paxette Goes Gothic - Part II

[nikkortorokkor]

The First Church.
Dunedin was originally settled as the capital of a Presbyterian colony. The First Church of Otago opened for business in 1873. As none of the other provinces yet had cathedrals, Dunedin became New Zealand's first city (based upon the rule that a city must have a cathedral).


My first attempt at selective use of DoF with a rangefinder. I'm happy, because it worked out exactly as I'd envisioned. It's kind of fun learning to really use the DoF scale on the lens and imagine the result rather than relying on an SLR's DoF preview button.


Not all Dunedin's past was Gothic. NZ's first Chinese gold miners arrived in the city in the 1860s, bound for the Otago diggings. This spectacular Chinese Scholar's Garden, celebrating the city's Chinese heritage, has just opened.


The Garden was built by a team of craftsmen from Shanghai - Dunedin's sister city. The work is exquisite.


Spring conditions were beautiful for enjoying the garden, but awful for capturing it on film! I used The Gimp to digitally darkroom these images, flattening the contrast. I've lost depth of colour in NZ's spectacular, cobalt sky and the traditional Chinese green pond, but gained detail on the roofs and stonework.

Please excuse the dust & speckles - I won't be going back to the lab that processed these!

[John Parry]

Nice pictures and story Tom.

I nearly joined the New Zealand Shipping Company back in 1968, I mention this because the name "Otago" jumped out at me. The ship of that name is famous among mariners the world over. She had rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and was sailing eastwards when her propeller threw a blade. Her crew hoisted her hatch covers to her masts, and sailed to Australia. And with the remaining blades on her propeller, she was still able to manoevre into harbour (albeit with a lot of vibration). Nice one!

Regards - John

[nikkortorokkor]

Interesting, John.
I know that there have been a number of ships named "Otago" (& "Dunedin too). Do you recall when the crew made their ingenious trip?

[John Parry]

Hi Michael

Now you're putting me on the spot. We're going back 40 years. I was on the Clan McGowan on my first trip to sea, and I read the story in the current copy of the Maritime News, which was compulsory reading on merchant ships at that time. The name stood out, as I said because she was NZSC, and I'd tried to join them but failed a medical (teenage acne - it cleared up as soon as I got out in the sun !). At around the same time, the "Marconi", an Italian flagship passenger liner had something similar happen - only in her case one of her twin propellers actually fell off complete. That was also near Capetown, and I seem to remember she wallowed around for a time, before limping into Capetown. That would be in 1969.

Funny things propellers. Each class of ship sailing under Board of Trade regulations had to have so many spare propellers, in a fixed scale of number of ships carrying spare propellers to the number of ships in the class. So if there were two ships built of a certain class, one of them would have to carry a spare propeller. Made of phosphor-bronze, they were pretty valuable. They were carried on deck with a special housing, and were generally painted the same colour as the deck itself.

How true it was I don't know, but this was told to me as a true story. A Merchant Navy tanker threw two of the blades of her propeller. As it happened, she was in a class of two, and her sister ship carried the spare. The sister ship received a radiotelegram, telling them to prepare the spare propeller to be unloaded at the next port of call, for onward carriage to the drydock where the first ship was waiting. So they unfastened all the bolts holding it down, rigged the nearest derrick, and gave it a tug to crack the paint. And the propeller flew up into the air. On closer examination, it turned out to be a beautifully laminated replica made of marine plywood. Ooops!

The spare propeller had been on board the ship for twenty years. When did the substitution take place? The whole of the crew of the tanker, from the Captain to the deck boy, must have known exactly what was happening, and been paid off accordingly. One of the scrapyards in the Canaries, Singapore, Aden or Shanghai, and all the stevedores, crane operators and everyone else must have known the full story. And yet they all got away with it!

Who says people can't keep a secret?

Regards - John

[Deleted]

John:

Great story!

Wayne

[John Parry]

Thanks Wayne,

Another one involved a 'cargo liner' sailing out for scrap to Shanghai. During the last conflict (WWII), every merchant ship was fitted with De-gaussing Gear, which consisted of massive coils of copper wire laid all the way around the inside of the ship. An electrical current was passed through the coils, which de-activated any passing magnetic mines.

The crew of this particular ship decided on a similar scam to the one I've described, and by dint of a superhuman effort on the part of everybody on board, managed to chop out all the degaussing gear between the ship sailing from Southampton and arriving at Las Palmas, where she was due to take bunkers for the rest of the voyage. The valuable copper was sold for scrap at Las Palmas.

Pretty straightforward. But as the ship sailed from Las Palmas, she received a telegram from the owners; "Prepare degaussing gear for discharge in Capetown en-route Shanghai"...

Suspect that one is the maritime equivalent of an urban myth. The mines were a real and present danger though. Anybody who grew up in post-war Britain was familiar with the spiky round metallic spheres, that de-activated, were used as collecting boxes for donations to the Lifeboat Association (in this country, a totally voluntary and unfunded organisation). As my first voyage on the Clan McGowan was nearing its end, we were sailing calmly through the Bay of Biscay, and I was stood on deck one evening. As I looked over the side, a floating mine bounced its way all the way along the side of the ship. Too late to do anything about it, I've never had my fingers crossed so tightly, but luckily the mine must have been waterlogged. When we arrived in port, I could clearly see the marks made by the horns of the mine on the ship's side.

Makes you realise why so many well-founded ships just 'disappear' annually. Far more than you would think possible!

Regards - John

[mickeyobe]

John,

Your story of the Marconi seems to explain why ships' propellers were also called "screws".

Now a serious question.
Were there not left hand and right hand propellers? And, if so, which ones were stored as emergency spares?

Mickey

[John Parry]

Mickey.

Passenger ships, the larger ones anyway, were twin screw, with left and right handed blades as you mentioned. So for the Marconi to lose one totally unbalanced her.

It didn't really matter which ship the spares were carried on. If it happened that the propeller on the ship carrying the spare should fail, all to the good, but if it happened to a sister vessel at least there was a spare somewhere in the world. I don't know if the spares ruling applied to Italian ships.

The ship I was talking about was a single screw. Didn't matter if it was left or right handed, so long as you knew which it was, because on firing up the engines her stern would kick to port or starboard accordingly. (That's left and right to any nautical Americans !).

Regards - John