'Sail'

I'm sorting out the 'library' of books that has come up with us to Golspie. It's a pale shadow of the masses of books we had in Maldon and Kilchoan but we still have many of the most precious and interesting. This is one, a book which my father had but which I hadn't realised, or had forgotten,...

....was his father's. From the inscription on the flyleaf, it was given to Ernest Haylett in Beira in February1930 - see earlier post here. - some two weeks after he sailed his model of the 'Hesperus' in Beira harbour. I have no idea who T. B. Ressouf was but he acquired the book in 1928, the year after it was published.

The book is beautifully illustrated to show a range of the great clippers which dominated the oceans in the second half of the 19th century, and one of those included in the book is Hesperus.

Each picture is accompanied by a three or four page history of the ship. This clip from the story of the Hesperus shows that, having been built in 1873, she was bought by Lord Brassey in 1890 to continue trading with Australia, taking both passengers and cargo, but as a cadet training ship, and we know that Ernest was abroad her as a cadet in 1894.

This clipping gives a few details of a voyage to Australia in 1895, when it is very likely that Ernest was aboard. Later - we don't know when - Ernest left the Hesperus to join Lord Brassey's yacht, the Sunbeam - see post here.

Only 1,000 copies of the book were printed, each of the thirty ships having a full-page colour picture. 

This is one of my favourite pictures, of the American-built Flying Cloud under full sail with a following wind.

Ernest didn't keep his models and over the years my family had lost track of them, until the other day, when I was told that it's almost certain that his model of the Hesperus is in a museum in Durban, though they have mis-identified both the ship and the model's builder.

The above picture is in my father's album, and I do wonder whether Ernest took it in Durban before he left the model there.