The opium clippers / by Basil Lubbock.

  • Lubbock, Basil, 1876-1944.
Date:
1933
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The opium clippers / by Basil Lubbock. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Captain Ivellett had saved his ship by superb seamanship. As soon as one of her cables parted, he slipped the other, ran through the Cap-sing-moon Passage during the worst of the storm and finally brought up under the lee of Lintin by means of a boat’s anchor and two of the Starling's broadside guns fast to the cable. She was lucky to be able to ride it out, for no vessel that went ashore came off again, being broken up in a few hours through the fury of the storm, so that every shore and islet was lined with wreckage. The superstition about the captain’s wife being always signalled out for destruction was borne out in this typhoon. The merchant¬ man Prince George broke adrift and was soon ground to match- wood on one ot the many small islands off Hongkong. Her whole crew was saved except the captain’s wife, who was drowned when the vessel struck. On July 26 another typhoon swept over the Hongkong Anchor¬ age, but this one was not so severe; at the same time both the shipping and the people ashore were more experienced in how to deal with such a cataclvsm of Nature. •t “ Ardaseer ” Twice Dismasted. With the exception of the Ardaseer, which was twice dis¬ masted, none of the regular clippers from Bombay and Calcutta came to grief in 1841 in spite of it being a year of typhoons. Whilst bound out to Lintin from Bombay with the first season’s Malwa, Ardaseer was first of all dismasted in the Cararnatta Passage, losing her foremast from the deck up over the side along with the iibboom. She put back to Sourabaya on this occasion, where it was found that both hull and cargo had escaped injury. She was refitted and completed the voyage without further incident. On her second voyage to China in 1841 she left Singapore on November 2. At 2 o’clock on the morning of November 16, the barometer gave warning that something was coming, by a sudden drop. Immediately every preparation was made to resist the battering that was evidently in store for the little barque. By daylight it was blowing a typhoon with the sea rising in pyramids, that made a clean breach over the Ardaseer. The clipper was almost on her beam ends; and, as an old sailor used to say,