The Falls of Clyde

Over 100 years ago, a sailing vessel was born on the banks of the River Clyde. Since then she has survived as an international trading vessel, a sailing oil tanker and a National Historic Landmark. MacKinnon Simpson reveals the life of this amazing ship.

For almost four decades, the Falls of Clyde served the General Petroleum Co. as a floating “gas station” in Ketchican, Alaska. Fishing boats would pull alongside and have their fuel tanks filled from the Falls’ tanks. Courtesy of Hawaii Maritime Center.

It is December 12th in the year 1878 at the Russell & Company shipyard in Port Glasgow, Scotland, on the banks of the River Clyde. Work stops for a time as a graceful new 266-foot, four-masted square-rigger gradually inches down greased planks into the river. Precisely a century before, on December 12, 1778, Captain James Cook’s two expeditionary ships were slowly cruising the coastline of Hawaii, as Cook carefully and laboriously charted the Islands of “Owhyhee” for posterity.

The christening
None of that, of course, was on the minds of the grimy Scottish shipwrights in Port Glasgow as they watched their new wrought-iron creation splash into the Bonnie Clyde. Yet the new ship would eventually become as integral a part of Hawaiian maritime history as Captain Cook himself.

She was christened the Falls of Clyde, after a waterfall of the river on whose banks she took shape. She was the first of nine ships—big, rangy four-masted sailing ships flying more than an acre of canvas—intended for the international trade, an industry then dominated by canny Glasgow ship owners. Known among sailors as a fast, easy-handling ship, she was a rarity even then, when smoky, coal-burning steamers were inexorably taking over the sea.

The lady was a tramp
The Falls of Clyde criss-crossed the oceans between the world’s trading centers—Rangoon, Capetown, Hamburg, Shanghai, Melbourne, Liverpool, Buenos Aires, New York and Bombay—carrying whatever cargo she could rustle up, including lumber, whiskey, cotton, explosives, jute, cement and wheat. In the two decades after her launching in 1878, the Falls of Clyde made seventy voyages under the British flag.

She was lovingly called a “tramp,” with all the vagabond implications of that word. Bob Krauss, one of a small band credited with rescuing the ship in 1963, describes her thusly: “Falls of Clyde is a waterfront woman known in the toughest seaports in the world. She is on intimate terms with fights, drunkenness, cockroaches, hurricanes and prostitutes. All her life she has consorted with rude sailors and stevedores, and she has been married to no less than seventeen sea captains. Many men have fallen in love with her and still do.”

American citizenship
Her second career began right around her twentieth birthday, when she was sold to San Francisco Captain William Matson for $25,000—not a bad return for a ship which originally cost her owners $18,606. The convoluted deal secured Hawaiian registry for the Falls. Since the Islands had been annexed to the United States some six months prior, Hawaiian registry was a back-door to American registry. She arrived at

Honolulu on January 20, 1899, the first ship of her type that ever entered the harbor flying the Hawaiian flag. Honolulu Harbor—and the city created nearby—was the economic center of the Islands, almost from its discovery by a British sea captain around 1793. It was the only natural harbor in the Islands, created when the swift, fresh waters of Nuuanu Stream poured into the ocean and prevented corals from growing. Unlike Hawaiian canoes that could be dragged easily up onto a beach, Western ships needed a sheltered anchorage with deep water.

The early Hawaiians used the Harbor area for fishing and little else, and the land nearby—now downtown Honolulu—was dry and dusty (or wet and muddy, depending on the weather). They much preferred Waikiki, with its rich food supply and wide beaches to launch their canoes. The Westerners needed a harbor, however, and as the trading ships visited more often, the rude huts of a small village sprang up nearby. The village became a town, with ship chandleries and saloons to serve the ships and their occupants, and a huge coral fort to imprison the rowdier ones. The town evolved into a city, all based on the nearby harbor. It was into this harbor that the Falls of Clyde sailed in 1899, the newest (and largest) member of the sugar fleet.

While off watch, sailors on the Falls enjoy poker in the crew quarters. Fancy-decorated bunks give homey flavor to this working ship. The fellow on the right is pumpman Emil Dorsch. Courtesy of Hawaii Maritime Center.

Please pass the sugar
Captain Matson (see sidebar) intended to employ the Falls of Clyde in the Hawaiian sugar trade, specifically servicing the plantations of the Big Island, bringing needed goods and machinery from the West Coast to Hilo, and returning with burlap sacks full of raw sugar on its way to the California refineries and then to the markets of the US.

While the British had sailed her with a crew of about 25, Captain Matson realized he could pull the yardarms and square sails down off the fourth (rear) mast and replace them with a fore-and-aft sail, thereby reducing the number of sailors he needed. Once he effected this change, the Falls usually sailed with about twelve crew members, an enormous savings in operating costs, even in those days of paltry salaries. About $15,000 was spent to modify the Falls of Clyde sail plan, add a deck house and chart house, and rearrange the after-quarter for passengers. From 1899 to 1907, the Falls made over sixty voyages between these ports. Sailing time averaged seventeen days.

In those days, the tall green stalks of sugar cane then blanketed much of the Islands. Never one to miss an economic opportunity, Captain Matson realized that Hawaii’s coal-fired sugar mills would operate much more efficiently on oil. He invested in a hundred-mile pipeline from California’s inland oil fields to the port of Gaviota, near Santa Barbara, and he converted several of his ships—including the Falls of Clyde—to sail-powered oil tankers.

When the Falls was fully loaded with 750,000 gallons of oil, her decks were awash. The rectangular shape next to the gunnel to the men’s right is an expansion hatch for one of the ten oil tanks. Jobs in those days were risky. The sailor on the left, Frank Dorr, quit the dangers of the sea to become a painter. Ironically, he was killed in 1920 in a fall from a scaffold inside Crystal Palace Market in San Francisco. Courtesy of Hawaii Maritime Center.

Mixing oil and molasses
A maritime rarity when she was built, the Falls of Clyde became even more of a rarity in 1907 when she was converted to a sailing oil tanker to begin her third career. Her sturdy wrought-iron hull was almost 3/4 inches thick, fastened together with thousands of hand-hammered 7/8-inch rivets. Her insides were gutted and ten large tanks were constructed along both sides and the bottom, giving her a capacity of 756,000 gallons of oil. Heavy-duty pumps and a second steam boiler to operate them were installed. She was “sold” to the Associated Oil Company, in which Captain Matson had a large interest. She sailed between Gaviota and Honolulu Harbor, where she discharged at Oahu Railway’s Pier 16. Molasses was often loaded into her tanks for the run back to California. She continued to carry a few passengers and small amounts of cargo “tweendecks.”

By 1920—her 42nd year—the Falls of Clyde was an anachronism, and seemingly not long for the world. Her duties in Hawaii were over for the time being. In 1920 she was sold by Associated Oil to G.W. McNear and made two charter trips carrying oil from Galveston, Texas to Denmark; one to Buenos Aires and another to Panama. Then it was time for a new career—number four.

The Falls usually carried a few passengers to help ends meet. These four kids are accompanying their parents on their way to Hilo from San Francisco in 1904. The little girl perched on the windlass is Jessie Cameron (Matthias), who died recently in Honolulu at over 100 years old. The boy at right is Jack Guard, part of a Hawaii maritime family who still owns the largest stevedoring firm in the Islands. In addition to running the company business, his grandson, Tim, is chairman of the Hawaii Maritime Center board of trustees. Courtesy of Hawaii Maritime Center.

Floating filling station
G.W. McNear sold the Falls of Clyde to General Petroleum on March 3, 1921, and she was sailed to San Pedro, California, where all her rigging except her lower masts was removed. Now essentially a hull with no motive power, she was towed to Ketchikan, Alaska, where she served as a floating fuel depot for the offshore fishing fleet and as a home for several company managers and their families. By 1958, her 80th year, she was no longer needed by General Petroleum and again faced an uncertain future.

A private owner purchased her and towed her to Seattle, intent upon turning her into a museum ship—not an inexpensive or easy task. For the next five years, she was offered to city after city—Seattle, San Pedro, Long Beach, Philadelphia and Honolulu—but these efforts were unsuccessful. As a bankruptcy court prepared to sell her to a Canadian logging company to be scuttled as a breakwater at Vancouver, BC, a few Honolulu citizens sprang into action. The morning paper led a campaign to “Save the Falls of Clyde,”and the people of Hawaii responded by raising over $35,000 in the weeks before she was to be sunk.

Ernest (“Shorty”) Alderman (left) was a pumpman on the Falls, as well as a fine amateur photographer. He shot hundreds of images of life aboard, around 1917. Alderman’s own caption on this picture reads: “The Falls of Clyde is on the port tack as we sight a ship.” Courtesy of Hawaii Maritime Center.

A place in history
A US Navy fleet tug towed the Falls of Clyde from Seattle on her last trip home to Honolulu. In time, she would be restored, using the combined skills of shipwrights, riggers, iron workers and welders—most of them volunteers. She has been selected now as a National Historic Landmark—the highest designation available—and is the flagship of the Hawaii Maritime Center at Pier 7 in Honolulu Harbor. The shouts of the mates and men aloft have given way to the shouts of Hawaii schoolchildren, learning about the Falls and their Islands history. Her distinctions are many, including that of being the last four-masted full-rigged ship afloat and the last sail-powered oil tanker.

Rising and falling slowly at her mooring, her anchor and bollard lines stretching taut and then slackening, the old ship rides well in the water—as she has for 122 years.

Pioneering oil jobber & C-store man?
Captain William Matson
William Matson was born in 1849 in a Swedish seacoast town and ran off to sea at the age of twelve. According to his daughter, he had not a single day’s schooling in his life. At 18, Matson “came round the Horn” to California and soon worked his way up to the captaincy of a scow schooner (barge) in San Francisco Bay.

At age 33 he became one-quarter owner—for $5,000—of the new three-masted schooner, Emma Claudia, and brought her to Hilo on her first voyage. Matson saw opportunity on the Big Island and began to focus his service there. Westbound to Hawaii, he would bring goods of all descriptions. Eastbound to California, he would take sugar, molasses, fruits, vegetables and hides.

“My father used to do everything. He bought the horses, he bought needles, thread, mules, dress materials...a floating store.” -daughter Lurline Matson

Every voyage was a partnership—with different partners holding shares, generally in eighths—and then splitting the profits. Matson expanded in this way, buying more ships and chartering others. His fleet was still all wind-driven sailing ships, though in 1889 he was quoted: “I was wondering whether I’d ever be able to run a steamship between the islands and San Francisco.”

In 1901, Matson acquired his first steamship, the Enterprise. At that time, most steamers burned coal to fire the boilers. Matson immediately converted the Enterprise to the first oil burner in the Pacific, because oil was cheaper. It cost $2.10 in oil for the same energy provided by $7.00 worth of coal. Oil was also cleaner, more space efficient, and demanded less manpower.

Matson recognized the potential of oil. He convinced Hawaii’s plantation and sugar mill owners to switch from coal and bagasse (sugar cane waste) to oil. Then he converted some of his sailing fleet, including the Falls of Clyde, into tankers to carry the oil to the Islands. Matson said, “If you use fuel in large quantities, you must control the source.” He invested heavily in California oil fields and built a “couldn’t be done” 112-mile pipeline from the Coalinga oil fields to Monterey.

In April 1910, Matson formed the Honolulu Oil Company in San Francisco and told investors: “You’ll either go broke or get rich.” Castle and Cooke invested $l40,000. Fifty years later, the company was receiving $400,000 in annual dividends, and finally liquidated its shares (at government behest) for over $23 million.

William Matson suffered a severe stroke in 1916 and died in October 1917, just a few days shy of his 67th birthday. The shipping company he founded is still serving all Hawaii today.

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