¡-'
-
i.. As the Susanna ghosts along in very light airs, the foredeck hands wave their caps to a passing ship. The Susanna's ordeal with "Cape Stiff" in 1905 was shared by other sailing ships , notably the full rigger British Isles, whose captain , James P. Barker, had bet he would heat the Susanna around the Horn . He did , hut lost three men doing it. Several other ships never made it, lost with all hands.
are ruined, my possessions wet through. Seas coming in amidship cut free the lifeboat and washed away the companionway ." Hermann Piening wrote home to hi s family: "I don ' t know if a hundred days around Cape Hom is a record, but I do not wish to do a second journey Ii ke that." It was a sentiment his crewmates, no doubt, echoed wholeheartedly. But, if they were like our father, I doubt if they would have missed it. It was one of the high points in hi s life, something he could look back on with pride. By the time we were old enough to hear his stories, he was a struggling Australian wheat farmer, bowed down by debts and drought and back-breaki ng work. Often, when his hands were black with grease, his tired, lined face streaked with dirt, and his sweat-stained flannel shirt and dungaree trousers caked with dust and chaff, he looked anything but an heroic figure to us. So, when he talked about his time on the Susanna , I am sure he wasn 't just telling us an adventure story. He was also trying to give us a message.
- 11\ \.-~ --
Memories of World War I were still fresh when we were children, and the fathers of most of our school friends had been soldiers. Some had been decorated . To us, they were brave men who had performed valiant deeds in battle. Our father had been rejected for service as medically unfit because of a shipboard injury. I think that rough, bluff, farmerfatherofours was trying to tell us that he also had done something spec ial-that he had been one of a small band of hardy, resourceful men who, together with a stout ship, had written a page of maritime history. He was saying that, like our war veteran neighbors, there was a time when he, too , had been tried and not found wanting. D Robert Bahnsen lives in Glenalta , South Australia, and has completed a book about his father, Detlef , entitled Tall
Ships and Ten-Horse Teams.
The Susanna' s crew, photographed just before setting sail from Port Talbot near Cardiff, Wales , in June 1905. Detlef Bahnsen , age 16 years, 11 months , stands at far left. The ship's master, Captain Jurgens, is not shown. The youngest hand aboard, 15-year-old Herman Piening came close to drowning in heavy seas that swept the decks in the ship's struggle to round Cape Horn. Piening went on to become a famous master of tall ships in the Cape Horn trade, including the Peki ng , now at South Street Seaport Museum in New York.
SEA HISTORY 58, SUMMER 1991
47