The Colonial Clippers

by Basil Lubbock

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Genres: History, Nautical

433 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1924

About the author

Alfred Basil Lubbock MC (9 September 1876 – 3 September 1944 at Monks Orchard, Seaford) was a British historian, sailor and soldier. He was a prolific writer on the last generation of commercial sailing vessels in the Age of Sail. He was an early (1911) member of the Society for Nautical Research, served on its council (1921–1924) and contributed to its journal, The Mariner's Mirror.

Reviews

[Igenlode Wordsmith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a good deal more interesting than one might expect, given that it is a compilation of just about everything the author could find about every sailing ship over a period of forty or fifty years that traded regularly with New Zealand and (chiefly) Australia! As well as a wealth of technical detail the book is full of anecdotes, from the spontaneous combustion properties of Australian wool, to the tragedy of the captain who had a breakdown after his ship rammed and sank a vessel under the command of one of his personal friends, killing both the other captain and his wife, who "was seen praying on her knees aft" as the ship went down...

"This book is an attempt to preserve in written form what the fading memory is fast forgetting--the Glorious History of the Sailing Ship." I can imagine its proving very useful as a resource for historical fiction, with its wealth of facts and figures and forgotten oddities, such as the fashion for 'perforated sails', supposed to make use of the wind more efficiently. However, I have to admit that after a couple of hundred pages it did start to become a bit repetitious, which is why it took me so many years to get round to finishing -- so many that I no longer remember why I started, and my main motivation was my desire to finally clear this volume off my unfinished list... exactly six years, by a strange coincidence, after I had originally begun it!

"The next book of this series" was to cover the subject of the "frigate-built Blackwallers", apparently ...

[Trudy Pomerantz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first book that I have read as a result of my genealogical research. Many of my forebears emigrated to Australia in the 1870's and 80's. As I was finding this out and going down a rabbit trail on which ships they crossed from Britain in, I learned of this book. I am surprised to be able to say that I found it interesting enough to read from beginning to end. Although there was a lot of technical detail which was way beyond my understanding never having been on any kind of sailing boats, he interspersed these details with short vignettes on some of the sailors that worked the ships and descriptions of what it was like to travel on them. It gave me a feel for what it meant to be ready to travel on the ocean, how frightening it must have been when caught in a storm, and the many tragedies when ships simply went missing and nothing more was seen or heard from them.