Star of India Receives American Ship Trust Award by Justine Ahlstrom
tar of India, the oldest merchant ship sti ll sai lin g, received the American Ship Trust Award on 18 August under sail off Point Loma under the command of 86-year-old Captain Carl Bowman. NMHS President Peter Stanford, in presenting the award, saluted the sh ip 's company for the Star of India's excellent condition , sea-readiness and role as a sai l-training ship in her mainly dockside career. Her active sailing career encompassed a remarkable range of trades, including 21 voyages around Cape Horn and a significant role in shaping the history of the Pacific world through theemigrant trade. She began her life at Ramsey Shipyard in the Isle of Man, between England and Ire land, in 1863. Iron ships were newfangled items then, with the vast majority of vessels still being built of wood. She bore the name Euterpe, after the ancient Greek muse of music. As built, Euterpe was a full-rigged ship (square rigged on all of her three masts) and would remain so until 190 1, when the Alaska Packers Association rigged her down to a bark, her present rig. They would also change her name to Star of India in 1906, in keeping with their company practice for metal vessels. She began her sailing life with two near-disastro us voyages to India. On her
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first trip she suffered a collision and a mutiny . On her second trip out, a cyclone caught Euterpe in the Bay of Bengal, and, with her wooden topmasts cut away , she barely made port. Shortly afterward, her first captain died on board and was buried at sea. After such a hard luck beginning, Euterpe settled down and made four more voyages to India as a cargo ship. In 1871 she was purchased by the Shaw Savi ll Line of London and embarked on a quarter century of hauling emigrants to New Zealand, sometimes also touching in Australia, California and Chile. She made 21 circumnavigations in this service, some of them lasting up to a year. It was rugged voyaging, with the iron ship battling through terrific gales, " labouring and ro lling in a most distressing manner," according to her log. Life aboard was especially hard on the emigrants-cooped up most of the time in her ' tween deck, fed a diet of hardtack and salt junk, subject to mal de mer and a host of other ills, it is astoni shing that their death rate was so low. They were a tough lot, however, drawn from the working classes of England, Ireland and Scotland-and most went on to prosper in New Zealand. As for Euterpe, she was so ld to American owners in 1898 and, in 1902, commenced sailing to the
Bering Sea each spri ng with a load of fishermen, cannery hands, box shooks and tin plate. She returned each fall laded with canned salmon. By 1923 , however, steam ruled the seas and the Alaska Packers laid her up in Oakland, California, where she joined scores of her sister sai ling ships. What saved this particular ship from the knacker 's torch was a determined band of San Diegans , led by reporter Jerry MacMullen. They scraped up $9,000 to buy the Star in 1926, and the following year she was brought to San Diego under tow by the steam schooner Wapama (see pages 14- 15). For the next three decades , however, the Star languished; the Depression and World War II delayed her restoration. She began to ass ume an increasingly tattered aspect, with weepers of rust running down her sides and Irish pennants fluttering gloomily in her rigging. In 1957, Captain Alan Villiers, the famed windjammer skipper and author, came to San Diego on a lecture tour. He took one look at the dilapidated Star and delivered a broadside to the local press, lambasting the citizenry for doing nothing to save the gallant ship. Things got better after that. Slowly, the nickels and dimes trickling in turned to dollars. Skilled workmen along the waterfront
The ship-rigged emigrant packet Euterpe (later the bark Star of India) moored to a buoy at Gravesend on the Thames River in 1874.
Captain Carl Bowman has taken the Star of India out under sail nine times since 1976.
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SEA HISTORY 79 , AUTUMN 1996