just one year after the San Diego Maritime Museum's iron barque Star ofIndia, which is listed with the World Ship Trust as the oldest active sailing vessel in the world. The Star of India (ex-Euterpe) is identifi ed as an original iron ship by the industrial stamp marks on her frames and beams. The Bayard, aground for all these years with a list to port, still has her lower masts of several tons each, upright without support, indicating she must have considerable strength lefr in her hull. Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands was an emergency port of call for sailing ships in distress. With no facilities for repairing riveted sh ips, those unable to put back to sea were written off and left there to die as storage hulks. 1 h e 1843 passenger steamship SS Great Britain was scuttled and abandoned there in 1937. More than four decades later, a naval architect determined that the hull could be refloated. In 1970, she was raised and towed across the Atlantic to England, where sh e has been restored and operates as a museum ship in Bristol. With the Great Britain's departure from Port Stanley, the 1879 barque Lady Elizabeth becam e the Falklands' most famous resident hulk. Lady Elizabeth was built by Robert Thompson Jr. of Sunderland, England. Her iron hull is 223 feet long and 1,208 gross tons, and she was rigged as a three-masted barque and sailed across the oceans engaged in worldwide trade. In 1913, she limped into Stanley as a Norwegian trader with storm dam ages after losing fo ur crew members off Cape Horn. She was not leaking, but she was badly beaten up and deemed unseaworthy. The Lady Elizabeth stayed in Stanley and was used as a storage faci lity and wareho use in the port for many years . In 1936 she was towed to Whalebone Cove and purposely gro unded by making several holes in her to make her stay put. In 2010, she is still sitting in shallow water at Whalebone C ove with all her lower masts and even the heavy main yard in place. She exhibits damage to her topside railing and bowsprit that occurred almost a hundred years ago. Recent expeditions have surveyed her hull , fo und it intact, and noted that the ship was moving slightly in the swell. I walked her deck last February and found her in the same shape as she was twenty-six years ago, as recorded by two extensive reports on her condition . I was amazed at how much of the ship has survived almost 100 years as an
SEA HISTORY 133 WINTER 2010-11
Thousands ofiron ships were phased out and broken up after 1890. just a few have survived past the mid-twentieth century, only to be deemed inferior structures. The Bayard has lasted a hundred years like this at a distant shore in South Georgia.
abandoned hulk in the harsh environment of the Falkland Islands. I believe that, like SS Great Britain before her, the Lady Elizabeth could be re-floated on her own hull if the holes were patched in a salvage operation and the sand "ballast" pumped out. Imagine how seeing this ship aflo at in Port Stanley would speak to how ship-quality wrought iron can survive this long in South Atlantic waters and a sub-Antarctic climate. Tourists in Stanley would have something unique to inves tigate and not just as an abandoned hulk visible from only a distance today. The Lady Elizabeth is likely the world's
most famous hulk-she even has her own postage stamp. She is easily spotted by tourist ships enterin g Stan ley and is by far the most significanr maritime landmark of the Falklands. Eighteen years before Lady Elizabeth arrived at Stanley, a brand new steel ship on her maiden voyage from Swansea to San Francisco with a cargo of coal sailed into the same harbor after her cargo caught fire. It was the G!engowan, built by Rogers & Co., Port Glasgow, delivered in September of 1895. The G!engowan was a three-masted full-rigged ship of 1,967 gross tons. The
The sorrowful remains of the full-rigged ship Glengowan, a once mighty steel ship from the fast days ofsail that ended her maiden voyage in the Falklands. Younger, stronger, and more solidly built than her iron sisters, little is left of this vessel apart from the rudder post-the one piece ofiron in her huff.
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