Edinburgh, Feb. 5.
Lioyd's Register is interesting reading to all connected with shipping, and an odd volume for the year 1889 provides some good "copy" for a writer in the "Glasgow Herald." The name on its lettered binding is that of a Clydesdale firm of sailmakers who had a special reputation in their time for cutting the fore and after sails of some ai the best-known of tht China tea clippers, while their neighbours and near rivals were reputed to excel in shaping the courses and square canvas. The year book is one of the last to contain the relics of many fine ships on the eve of their dissolution.
We find here venerable barques built of teak at Moulmein in the fifties, frigate-built Blackwallers, and many of the famed composite-built tea- clippers of the sixties, still figuring in the active list. The peerless Sir Lancelot had passed into the hands of a Parsee merchant, and was sailing out her last yews in the Bay of Bengal. But the old Cutty Sark was sailing under her original house flag and piling up great records in the Colonial trade out from London with general cargo and home with wood and tallow. That shorn and bedevilled little vessel, the last survivor of a miraculous brood, may still be met creeping up the London river as the Ferriera, of Lisbon. Smith's City Line of full-rigged little iron ships of about 1,000 tons register, and dating from the sixties, were still Glasgow's pride. The Loch Line ships had just touched their zenith with their last pair, the Loch Broom and the Loch Carton. One has almost forgotten the Allans as sailing ship owners, but in the year of this Lloyd's volume, 1889, the Allan Line included a considerable sailing fleet. A long me of iron clippers built by Robert Steele in the eighties, scarcely one of them without a name to be proud of, and their nearest rivals, Barclay-Curle's ships, carried the Glasgow coat-of-arms, the crossed mainsail yard, in every sea. But another year or two saw the last of this old story. The general adoption of the triple-expansion engine knocked the bottom out of the economy of sail.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.