Back to the Future

Two years ago, I wrote about the Grain de Sail—a small cargo ship powered exclusively by its sails, that makes two voyages a year bringing 1,500 cases of wine from France to New York, then takes a load of humanitarian supplies to Dominican Republic, then returns to France with a load of cocoa and green coffee.  The ship’s owners maintain that the gentle rocking of the cargo sailboat helps the wine age and produces a superior flavor.  I’ll have to take their word for it since the price for a bottle is a little above my comfort zone.

As much as I like the idea of cargo ships returning to the Age of Sail, I don’t think the Grain de Sail, an 80’ schooner, is likely to be financially competitive against massive container ships.  Thankfully, there are positive signs that even the largest cargo ships may be making limited use of sail in the near future.

Berge Bulk, one of the world’s largest dry bulk shipping companies, has just announced the relaunching of one of its newcastlemax ships, the M/V Berg Olympus, that has been retrofitted with four WindWings.  Yeah, I know that is a lot of jargon, so let me decode it all.

A dry bulk shipping company is one that ships the type of cargo that does not use those metal containers—primarily loose goods.  Think of it this way:  if you had a pile of this kind of cargo in your front yard and wanted to move it to your backyard, you’d use a wheelbarrow (think coal, iron ore, timber, wheat, and barley).  Since Newcastle, Australia shipped massive amounts of wheat and coal to Europe aboard large (or maximum) cargo ships, those types of ships became known as newcastlemax.  

And those WindWings?  Well, the days of wooden masts with miles of ropes and flapping canvas sails started to end in the 19th century because steam-driven ships were faster and didn’t require as many men to crew them.  That doesn’t mean that the days of ships taking advantage of all that free air were over, however:  it just meant that the nature of sails had to change.  Today, many ship designers are using modern, high-tech versions of all that flapping canvas.  

Take those WindWings for example.  These massive, tall steel and composite-glass, rigid rectangular sails can rotate to catch the best angle of the wind.  Controlled by computer, they have adjustable flaps on their leading edges to maximize the amount of thrust the wind can provide the ship.  Ships that use this technology do not rely solely on wind for propulsion, but each sail on the ship cuts down the amount of bunker oil the ship needs to burn.  The Berg Olympus (right), for example, uses four WindWings that together will reduce fuel usage by 20%.

There is an alternative version of those metal and glass sails, called rotor sails, that use large vertical rotating columns to catch the wind.  When the wind flows over the surface of the rotor, it creates a pressure difference between the windward (front) and leeward (back) sides of the rotor. This pressure difference generates a force known as lift.  The rotor is mounted on a vertical axis…. Well, from there it gets technical.  So, just trust me—those massive rotating columns effectively work as sails.

Sails are coming back.

It really hasn’t been that long since there were true square-rigged windjammers carrying trade to Europe.  There even used to be an annual event, called The Great Grain Race, that people followed and even bet massive amounts of money on.  Every year, when the wheat crop was harvested in Australia, it was loaded into large, steel-hulled, square-rigged sailing ships that sailed west, around the Cape of Good Hope, and up the Atlantic to England.  

Since there was little profit to be gained by the shipping companies if the transit time was made shorter, they had little reason to use steamships instead of the venerable windjammers.  The only drawback to using the old-style ships was that it became increasingly difficult to find experienced able-bodied seamen.  While in port, sailors applying for a position were told to climb one of the four tall masts to the top, then imagine having to perform that task at sea with the mast swaying violently in a storm.  Most applicants quickly vanished.

While they certainly weren’t supposed to, the captains of the twenty-odd ships raced to see who could make the crossing in the shortest time.  There was no financial incentive for the captains and crews of these ships to race (actually there was quite the opposite).  The passage was rough and hazardous, with ships routinely losing as much as half their rigging on a single voyage.  Pushing their ships to the maximum meant that such losses could dramatically increase, costing the shipping company large sums of money, resulting in the officers responsible being fired.  Still, the owners of the ships didn’t mind when their vessels won and the results of the races were reported in newspapers around the world.  Sometimes, the amount of money bet on the outcome of the races was more than the value of the cargoes the ships carried.

A normal passage took roughly 100 days, with the fastest time of 83 days set by the Parma in 1933.  While, technically, the grain races stopped in 1949, the races really came to an end with World War II.  As you can imagine, employing a large, slow, steel-hulled sailboat wasn’t practical while there were submarines plying the North Atlantic.  And while a few of the old windjammers were laid up during the war and made a few voyages after the war, the large number of surplus military transport vessels sold to private shipping companies cut shipping rates and made the old sailing windjammers impractical.

The old grain races are fascinating, and there is a great book that describes them in detail.  In 1938, 18-year-old Eric Newby, who was destined to later become a great travel writer, signed on board the Moshulu, a 396 foot four-masted windjammer.  Newby was on board the Moshulu as it left Ireland bound for Australia, where it picked up a load of barley bound for the distilleries in Scotland.  On the return voyage, though, the ship was hit by a tornado, but still managed to win that year’s grain race by making the transit in 91 days, docking at Falmouth just before the start of the war.

Newby went on to write The Last Grain Race in 1956—a book that I heartily recommend.  The Moshulu was…. I’ll bet a dollar that, by now, you’re wondering where the hell that stupid name came from.  The ship was originally part of a German shipping company and named the Kurt.  When World War I started in 1914, the ship sailed to Oregon to avoid British warships, where it was interned for the duration of the war.  When the United States entered the war, the ship was seized by the government and renamed Dreadnought by the First Lady, Edith Wilson.  Since there was already a registered ship with that name, the definition of dreadnought or “one who fears nothing,” was translated into the Seneca language, resulting in Moshulu.  Blame Edith.

During the war, the Moshulu transported wool between the United States and Australia.  After the war, the ship was sold and resold and sold again until World War II effectively ended her sailing career.  For a time, she was a floating grain warehouse, but today, she is a floating restaurant in Philadelphia.  If you have a good eye, you can see Sylvester Stallone run by it in Rocky.  (The first one, not one of the eight or nine sequels.)

There are going to be a lot more ships with sails carrying grain and lumber across the oceans.  They’ll probably look more like the Berg Olympus than the Moshulu, they’ll probably have more solar panels than sails, but that’s okay.  Let me know when we can start betting on the races again.