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Old Salt Recalls
"The Ballast"
By ERIC SPARKE.
If the United Nations Organisation wished to find
a truly international site on which to erect its offices,
then it might choose to build on the Stockton foreshore
area known as "the ballast."
THIS POLYGLOT piece of land,
formed from the ballast of
hundreds of sailing ships, stretches
from Stockton punt approaches to
the slipyards opposite Clyde-street.
It is an area that belongs properly
to the world rather than it a sub-
urb.
You can put your foot on a
Chinese prickle there and stub
your toe. on a rock from Callao.
The area is used by amateur golf-
ers now, and it is interesting to
speculate that in one hit they can
drive their golf-balls from the soil
of Tacoma, Washington, to a
"green" of Cape Town grass.
This ballast area is well remem-
bered by the old salts of the sail-
ing ship days. Mr. T. E. Ellwell, a
retired sailor living on the Isle of
Man, recently referred to it in a
letter to a Stockton friend.
He described the ballast as "a
classic example of cosmopolitan
country."
Mr. Ellwell said a sailing ship
had to have ballast when it travel-
led without cargo. Just as an empty
sack would not stand upright, so a
sailing ship with empty holds would
roll over and rest bottom up.
She had no constant weight be-
low, like the engines of a steamer,
and her masts and yards exerted a
great leverage when not counter-
balanced with something below
decks.
Rich in Fossils
The ballast from Cape Town,
much of which was dumped at
Stockton, was rich in fossils, he
said. It included fossilised shark's
teeth.
Vegetables had been grown on
the ballast in sailing ships' holds
- "without doubt, the strangest of
kitchen gardens" - and mushrooms
flourished. Sometimes, a glance
down the open afterhatch, showed
the captain's hens scratching on
the ballast in approved farmyard
manner and absorbing South Afri-
can grit for shell-forming in the
middle of the Great Australian
Bight.
Sailing a ship in ballast was
apparently a difficult task. The
helmsman had an anxious time be-
cause so little of the rudder was
under water. To improve the posi-
tion, the captain might decide to
have, say, 40 buckets of ballast
taken from a forward hold and
dumped aft.
Even this small amount could
have a surprising result, because
the weight of a bucket of ballast
transferred from one end of the
ship to the other was doubled in
effect. It was just as likely that
half of the transferred ballast
would have to be returned the next
day.
Mr. Ellwvell said that, although
some captains were over-careful,
many ships had been lost between
the Caple of Good Hope and Aus-
tralia in ballast that would have
been in little danger if fully loaded.
Mr. Ellwell first came to New-
castle from Liverpool in 1897, when
he was 14. He sailed on the four-
masted barque Glenogil, on which
he served his apprenticeship. When
he was 18 he had his second mate's
square-rig ticket.
When he reached Newcastle, after
81 days at sea, to load coal for
'Frisco, the city was celebrating its
centenary, and "there was a huge
arch built of coal spanning its main
street."
There were, he said, windjam-
mers galore, at the Dyke and on
the Carrington side, at Stockton
discharging ballast, and at the Fare-
well and other buoys in the
river.
Worked Ferry Passage
The ferry was "run by a man
named Boyce," who used to start
the engines, come up to collect the
fares and then steer. If he saw a
sailor like Mr. Ellwell, he took no
fare, but got him to work his pas-
sage as helmsman.
The Seamen's Institute was then
close to the Stockton landing of
the ferry and, according to Mr. Ell-
well, the Chaplain (Mr. W. Jones)
was "a jovial lad" who went from
shp to ship in a rowing boat.
But Mr. Ellwell's most vivid re-
collection of Newcastle is not a
pleasant one. On his second voyage
from South Shields to Cape Town
with coal, thence to Newcastle in
ballast, he reached a port plagued
with mosquitoes. About 2 o'clock
one morning, the mosquitoes pester-
ed him so much that he ran down
the gangway naked and plunged
into one of the pools the tide used
to leave in the ballast.
Unfortunately, he had not notic-
ed that the mosquitoes hovered in
"a foot-deep layer" over these pools.
He was in a fever the next day,
bitten from head to toe. His eyes
were black and swollen.
"The ballast on which I took my
plunge is an area of international
earth," Mr. Ellwell said, "but the
mosquitoes were definitely Austra-
lian."
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