The Great Grain Races

The Michelin Tire Company is signing on with a French shipping company, Neoline, to start shipping tires from its Halifax factory to Europe aboard two newly-designed, but as yet to be built, sail-powered cargo ships.  Really, the return of sail powered ships!

Roughly a third the length of a conventional container ship, these modern-day clipper ships would be used to carry small loads of cargo along a triangle route comprising Canada, Western Europe, and the East Coast of the United States.  If you think these are likely to revolutionize the shipping industry…. well, it would take a fleet of about a thousand of them to replace one modern large container ship.  (Actually, it would require twice that number since the sail-powered ships are only capable of moving at about half the speed of their modern competitors.)

Perhaps I’m cynical, but this reminds me of a certain chemical company—far too litigious for me to actually name—that once donated $5 million to the families of workers who had perished in an explosion at its plant.  The company also spent $20 million to advertise its charitable donation.

Somehow, I really doubt that a tire company is terribly interested in wind power...Or, for that matter, in shipping a minute portion of its vast production on a ship for which the cost of simply loading the cargo will exceed the total cost of shipping on container ships powered by traditional bunker oil. 

What Michelin is doing is kind of like planting a single lonely green tree outside of a coal-fired generator station.  And it’s a Bonsai tree, at that.

Still, the drawings of the new sail-powered cargo ships look cool and if they put a few tourist cabins on them someday, I wouldn’t mind crossing the Atlantic on one.  Though the idea of cargo ships with flapping canvas sails sounds like something from another century, it really hasn’t been that many years since cargo was transported by such ships.

Up until World War II, giant steel-hulled four-masted barques called windjammers—each longer than a football field (or about 350 feet on average)—transported Australian wheat or Chilean nitrates to Europe.  The voyages took months and crossed dangerous waters, but the wind was free and the ships could carry as much as 10 million pounds of cargo at a time, making the enterprise profitable long after most cargo ships were propelled by steam turbines or diesel engines.

Note.  Some of that last paragraph probably needs explanation.  No, that will take too long, so let me sum up.  A barque is a sailing ship with three or more masts in which the foremast and mainmasts are square-rigged (large perpendicular rectangular sails) and the mizzen-mast (the one at the aft of the ship) is fore-and-aft rigged (think triangular sails).  Chilean nitrates are vast deposits of saltpeter caused by the rotting of sea vegetation and bird guano collected across countless eons.  Prized as natural fertilizer, it was shipped all over the world until the invention of artificial nitrates.  “Chilean nitrate” sounds better than “Chilean bird shit”.

Most of the ships were used to haul grain from Australia.  The ships would leave England in September, carrying either ballast or Finnish timber, go down the coast of Africa, then sail ‘round the horn, where the timber would be offloaded at Cape Town.  Next, they would cross the Indian Ocean to arrive in Southern Australia in December, to load up with grain, and then sail back the same route, to arrive back in England by June.

These were long and arduous journeys—both physically and mentally.  Since there was no electric power, there was no refrigeration, which meant the only fresh meat came from pigs living below decks in special pens.  The sailors kept twelve-hour watches, ‘topping the sails’ in the same manner as ships from the days of classic sailing ships.

These large ships left Australia each year at about the same time and the press eagerly reported on the “Grain Races” as each ship tried to set the record for rounding the horn and making it back to England in the shortest possible time.  People bet on which ship would set the year’s record, and a Silver cup was awarded to the company whose ship had the fastest time each year.

There is an excellent book about these ships, The Last Grain Race by Eric Newby.   Newby was eighteen when he signed on to the Moshulu in 1938.  Moshulu (right) was one of the larger grain boats still in operation.  His horrific account of bad food, hellish weather, and a vermin-infested ship reminds the reader of Winston Churchill’s quote about the British Royal Navy.  When asked about the tradition of England’s navy, he answered, “Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.”

As it turned out, Newby was writing about one of the last such voyages.  After World War II started, it was not feasible for the large, slow-moving windjammers to be used for any shipping.  By the time the war was over, most of the vessels had been scrapped or turned into floating grain barges (like the Moshulu).  Eventually, Newby’s old ship was towed to Philadelphia, fitted with fake masts and turned into a restaurant.

A few surviving boats tried to make the grain runs profitable again, but they simply could not compete with newer, more efficient, steam-powered ships.  At the end of the war, there were thousands of surplus cargo ships that were being sold as tramp steamers at bargain prices to the shipping companies.  Meanwhile, the unions had demanded that instead of two watches a day, ships must use a three-watch rotation, requiring more crew than the old grain ships could accommodate.  

The old Pamir continued to make grain trips until 1957, when she was sunk by Hurricane Carrie off the Azores while transporting 8 million pounds of barley to English breweries.  Ironically, the insurance money covering the loss of the old ship yielded the first profit her shipping company had made in years.  With the loss of the Pamir, any hope of reviving the great grain races was gone.

At the height of the grain races, a typical trip lasted 110 days, but in 1933, the Parma managed to finish in just 83 days—a record that still holds to this day.  I wonder if one of those new ships from Neoline will try to beat it with a hold full of Michelin tires.