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On deck looking for'ard migrants and with passengers returning to Britain, she did well until advancing years and economics forced another change. Her engine and boilers were removed in 1882 and she became a simple sailing vessel, carrying coal to the United States and Australia, and wool to Britain. She did not last long. The records are contradictory - one account has it that she was damaged by fire near Cape Horn, but correspondence exists that indicates her owners were swindled by unscrupulous ship chandlers, leaving her with rigging in dangerously poor condition to face the rigours of rounding the cape. Whatever the truth of the matter, she just made it to shelter at Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands, where she was found to be uneconomical to repair. Her insurers sold her to the Falkland Islands Company, who used her as a hulk, a floating warehouse to hold incoming coal and outgoing wool. She was also used as a quarantine ship. However, history had not finished with the Great Britain. Admiral Graf von Spee, commanding the East Asiatic Squadron of the Imperial German Navy, was on his way back to Germany to rejoin the High Seas Fleet to fight Britain's Grand Fleet. After inflicting a crushing defeat on the first British squadron to intercept him at Coronel, Chile, he planned to raid the Falklands and destroy the cable station there. Admiral von Spee arrived on December 8, 1914, just as Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee's battlecruiser squadron had started coaling from the Great Britain. In the running battle that followed, some British ships ran out of coal and resorted to ripping up their teak decks, smashing up their boats and ripping out cabin linings and furniture to fuel the boilers. One German light cruiser escaped. British ships which still had some fuel picked up survivors from the rest and towed their fuel-less consorts back to the Great 32 Professional Skipper September/October 2011 Britain to resume coaling. More ignominy was to come. In 1933 she was towed to nearby Sparrow Cove and scuttled in shallow water. Admirably, the Falkland Islanders, aware of her historic importance, investigated the possibility of preserving her, but the cost was well beyond the means of a small, remote farming community. History again called on her in December 1939. The heavy cruiser HMS Exeter, with near-fatal damage inflicted at the Battle of the River Plate by the panzerschiff Graf Spee, limped into Port Stanley for repairs. Her engineers scavenged iron plating from the derelict hulk to patch their ship for the return to Plymouth. There were two coincidences of names in this area - the defeated and scuttled Graf Spee was named after the unfortunate von Spee who lost his squadron and his life in 1914, and Sturdee's flagship shared the name of the aircraft carrier that was the flagship of the task force that retook the Falklands in 1982, HMS Invincible. The prospect of preserving the Great Britain did not die. In 1970, in a project funded by some large donations, a firm, ironically German, contracted to salvage her and bring her to Bristol. Divers and engineers sealed holes, reinforced the hull and removed masts and the tophamper. She was refloated and positioned over a submersible barge. This was pumped out, lifting her clear of the water, and she was towed to Montevideo, then to Barry Docks, Wales and on to Avonmouth. There she was refloated, towed up the Avon River, under the Clifton Suspension Bridge, another Brunel masterpiece, and finally into her birthplace. Permanently drydocked, she is surrounded by a horizontal Perspex cover, which fills the gap between her and the dock walls. It has water about 50mm deep in it, giving the illusion of a